Connection – Month-End

I’m wrapping up the ninth month of my year-long Foundations project. This month’s focus was connection, or improving the most important relationships in life.

The keystone habit for this month was avoiding phones and devices while spending time with friends and family. While there are many different habits that can have an impact on your relationships, simply being more present and attentive is certainly at the top of the list.

For those interested in my previous months’ efforts, you can read more here:

• Fitness: Start, End, Books.
• Productivity: Start, End, Books.
• Money: Start, End, Books.
• Food: Start, End, Books.
• Reading: Start, End and Books.
• Outreach: Start, End, Books.
• Sleep: Start, End, Books.
• Reflection: Start, End, Books.
• Connection: Start, Books.

Lessons on the Value of Connection

From the usual perspective of this project, this month was difficult. I got quite sick for almost an entire week, after which I had a one-week vacation planned. As a result, I read fewer books for my Foundations project this month than almost any other month.

Still, from the perspective of this month’s focus, my illness was actually opportune. Being sick put me in temporary isolation from my family as I tried to avoid spreading it to them before our planned trip. This simultaneously made me more dependent on my wife and more appreciative of how much she had to shoulder looking after the kids alone. 

It doesn’t take much to shatter one’s illusions of total self-sufficiency, and I was grateful for the opportunity to reflect on how much I depend on the close relationships I have.

Getting sick was followed by our family vacation, which gave me a chance to take a week off of work (and reading) in order to spend time with my wife, kids, parents and in-laws, and I felt grateful for the chance to shift away from thinking about work and to focus entirely on the people in my life.

Connection and Connectivity

The keystone habit of not having my phone nearby during family hours was deceptively hard. The habit to check the news, weather or just look at something when there’s a blank moment is so impulsive you often don’t realize you’re doing it until you’re already distracted. Keeping the phone out of arm’s reach is key, and I’m embarrassed to admit that this wasn’t my habit until now.

Still, if I do have my phone with me (such as when heading out of the house), I can still fall into the same trap of giving it a “quick look” during those normal lulls in conversations or activities, so some work on this will likely be ongoing.

My work on this particular habit over the month also made me realize that being present in interactions with loved ones isn’t a binary yes/no. It’s an entire spectrum of attentiveness, from simply being in the same room to listening empathetically and without an agenda. In some ways, it reminds me a bit of mindfulness practices, which have a similar spectrum ranging from being absorbed in some stream of thought all the way to being completely engaged in the present moment.

It’s also this work that has made me realize that I’m not as far along the attentiveness spectrum as I could be. While avoiding devices when spending time with family is a good start, I could do a lot more to really listen and be present. Still, it’s good to sense the space for potential improvement rather than believe you’ve already got it all figured out.

Updates on Previous Foundations

Most of the foundations I’ve worked on so far have been maintaining fairly steady—productivity, money, reading and reflection.

Being sick for a week meant my first week off exercising since the project began. Vacation eating was definitely more indulgent than my usual diet at home, but I managed to run nearly every day while away and even went surfing a few times—which I haven’t done in almost a decade. My sleep was unusually good this month, although the circumstances were not typical.

It’s still too early to predict the long-term shape of any of these foundations, but the overall pattern for each seems to be that there has been a large boost in knowledge from doing all the reading, and the basic keystone habit for each has been sticking, more or less. However, many of the auxiliary behaviors start to slip once they’re no longer my central focus for the month.


I mention this because I think it pretty accurately describes how most improvement works long-term: a mix of stable improvements due to increased skill and knowledge; a brief, temporary improvement due to focus; followed by a more subtle increase of the overall baseline.

Occasionally you can experience really radical changes, but I think those tend to occur when there’s a dramatic shift in priorities that accompanies the efforts. Still, getting +1 to your overall habits in an area is an improvement worth striving for, so I think it’s important to set expectations right, especially for people who are likely to see anything other than perfect adherence as failure.

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That’s it for this month. Next month’s foundation is focus. I’ll share some of my preliminary updates in next week’s post!

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