Keep your socks on folks, because it’s Fat Writer Running business time!

The most important things in my life are my wife, my friends, and my neurotic dog monsters but after those things there are three big priorities that fight each other for my time and attention. Starting this week I’m throwing these three priorities – I’m going to call them dragons because dragons are pretty damn cool, you guys – into a cage match where they will have to work out their differences and improve the equilibrium of my life. And! The very best part is that I’m going to blog about this and tweet about it and stuff – as long as I don’t get caught in the middle of the rumble.

So, you might be wondering, what are these Triple Dragons, Erik? Are they cake? Is cake involved? I like cake. No, my friends, cake is not involved.

My Triple Dragons are Miles, Hours, and Words or more specifically, miles I run, hours I bill, and words I write. These three create a kind of sandwich with things I’m passionate about on one side and things I need to do to not lose my house in the middle. Ideally, there would be proportion in my sandwich but that’s not always possible and lately it’s kind of seemed like one piece of bread has been alright, the other has been wafer thin, and the middle of the sandwich has been made out of lava and bees and workahol. That, my friends, is not a tasty sandwich. Thus, the Triple Dragon August Challenge.

I’m a data nerd, you guys. I dream data sets and metrics and my barbaric yawp far too often comes in the form of a pivot table. I struggle with my addiction to quantifiable measurements (and my tendency to redefine my targets midway through) but for this challenge I think it will be a helpful structure. My ultimate goal is complete parity. Every mile run = an hour billed = 1000 words written. This might not be realistic or smart but that’s never stopped me before!

Starting out, here are my numbers from last week:

Miles: 14

Hours*: 25

Words (in thousands): 8

 

To make this work, my intention is not squeeze more time out of the day but to shift priorities. I want to increase my miles a mile or two a week (that’s my half-marathon training), pull back some work hours, and really increase my writing output. I’d like to get 16/16/16 by the end of August, a goal that I think is both super ambitious and absolutely arbitrary. I’ll be posting about my progress here and on the Twitter. If you’re not following me, look up @erikgrove. I might even tweet out some bonus otter photos!

 

*Yes, I bill a lot fewer hours than the average person works per week. This is a privilege I have worked hard for and do not take for granted. If you have ever been a contractor or consultant you know that billed hours <> hours worked and that there are times of feast and famine. I also spent about 10 years of my life side lining every other important thing in service to my career and I was savvy and lucky enough to get where I’m at now. It could go away tomorrow. Don’t @ me.