Tag Archives: short stories

One Year of 30-Day Lifestyle Experiments

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In the heat of a narrow but exciting Kickstarter success followed by all the things that come with starting a small business, I neglected to do a proper recap of my year-long series of 30 day lifestyle experiments.  Now that life has returned to a manageable pace, I’ve decided to return to the blogosphere and continue the project that I started over a year ago.

Back in July 2011 I had been talking with some friends about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch as well as This Guy in New York City who went an entire year without producing any trash at all.  Both topics are at the extremes of environmental sustainability so it got me to thinking, “How reasonable would it be for a yuppie in Boston to go just 30 days without producing any trash?”   It was certainly a challenging experiment and I ended up with a small amount of trash at the end (filled a 1 quart ziplock bag) but it taught me to live with minimal impact to the landfill.  Many of the behaviors I picked up during this lifestyle experiment I still continue with more than a year later (French press coffee instead of drip or D&D styrofoam cups, worm composting food scraps, stainless steel travel mug, and others).

Throughout the course of my first experiment, my family and friends suggested other “lifestyle experiments” that I thought would be interesting to try out.   So I decided that I’d keep going until I didn’t feel like doing it anymore.  As a result, I’ve spent the past 12 months trying new things, meeting new people, and learning a lot about myself in the process.  I can definitively say that each experiment has resulted in new behaviors that have crept their way into my daily life and I’m a better person a year later because of it.  I’m not sure if 30 days is the magic number or not, but from my experience it seems to be just long enough to make an impact.

Courtesy of Google Analytics, I spent some time going through my most popular blog posts from each 30 day lifestyle experiment.  I was shocked to see that my most popular month of blogging (by several hundred views) was my short story reviews on my train commute to work.  I attribute this to all of those high school students looking to get away with not having to actually read the story.  I would say shame on you but I did the same thing in high school so there you have it.  A close runner-up was my new exercise each day, it was also the most fun so I’m glad that people enjoyed reading about it.

I had a great time going through my old blog posts so I’ve included a summary of the most popular posts from each month here, check them out:

I found that these experiments have improved my lifestyle in many ways so I plan to continue.  However, for 2013 I’ll be focusing my lifestyle experiments on a new-ish topic that I’ve become very interested in: The Sharing Economy (i.e. cohousing, carsharing, community supported agriculture, bartering, and more).  I’ve been carsharing with Zipcar since the company started 5 years ago and it has been great, but the sharing topic has exploded since then and there is so much to learn, do, and write about.

As for the writing of the blog, I plan to deemphasize the “daily” aspect as compared to last year.  Writing each and every day about my exercises, meditations, dreams, meals, readings etc got to be a little overwhelming at times so I’ll plan to write at least once/week to keep track of my experiences.  I do have a full time job and I just started a company on the side so scaling back the rate of blog posting will help to improve the quality of the posts as well as keep my sanity in check.  I’ll also be tweeting about my experiences as often as possible.  So Like My Facebook Page for the weekly-ish blog updates and Follow Me on Twitter if you want to keep up with my experiments in real-time.

April 2011 – Short Story Reviews on my Train Commute

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Since I moved into Boston and decided to rely 100% on public transit to commute to work, I’ve poured through dozens of books traveling to and from work.  I typically rotate between a classic, an adventure novel, and a business-esque book.  I can usually get in about 45 minutes to an hour of reading every day when you count in waiting for and riding on the trains.  Thinking back on it, I never would have read so many books if I were driving to and from work instead of taking the train.  Who has the time to drive an hour to work, spend 8-10 hours working, drive an hour home, eat, read books, AND have a life?  I’m not sure it’s possible so I definitely feel fortunate to be able to take the train to work every day.  Despite the shortcomings and frustrations associated with the MBTA, it still beats the hell out of when I used to drive to work, often stuck in Boston traffic for two hours per day.  That amounts to ten hours per week and 520 hours per year (equivalent of ~21 full days per year, ugh).

I’ve read a lot of diverse books but through talking with an old roommate of mine (double major in Economics and Classics) I realized that I’ve totally avoided the realm of short stories albeit unintentionally.  So I decided that this month’s 30 day life experiment would be to read and review one short story each day on my commute to work.  This should be a good way to put 20 new short stories in my repertoire.

To kick off this month’s experiment, I headed to the Boston Public Library.  I talked to a few different librarians and they were super stoked on my concept.  They printed off a list of popular short stories for me plus adding a few of their personal favorites not on that list.  The list was entitled, “The 50 Best Short Stories of All Time”.  I feel like with a title like that I can’t lose.  The stories were binned into various themes such as: Sad and Shocking, Pop Culture Classics, Modern Writers, Twist Endings, etc.  I plan to not repeat any authors as a way to get a diverse experience, then after this month is over I can go back and selectively pursue authors that I liked.

Over the past two years I’ve kept track of my books through a few different virtual bookshelves online.  I used Virtual Bookshelf for a while which integrated well with Facebook but then they went out of business so I switched to Goodreads.com.  I’ve been using Goodreads for about a year, writing short reviews on most of the books I finish.  There are a few other popular virtual bookshelves that I plan to investigate throughout thsi month such as Shelfari by Amazon, Delicious Library, Library Thing, and a few others.


As with all of my life experiments thus far, I’ll be keeping a Twitter List of users associated with short stories and literature in general.  Join the conversation HERE.