Start-IncreasingPushback

Words: 498

Time to read: ~3 minutes

Intro

If you look back over some of the posts that I wrote in October this year, you may have realised that there was a motif going on.

I used a homebrew pushup tracker as a data source for a couple of blog posts. A group of friends and I were attempting to “push out” (excuse the pun) 3,000 pushups over the month.

Spoilers: We didn’t reach the target. 

Try Again

I’m okay with failure. If you learn from your failures, then I don’t even consider them as failures. This scenario didn’t fall into this case, though. The only reasons that I could think that I didn’t reach the target are:

1. I started after nearly a week into the month had passed, and
2. I tried to do too much, too fast, in as little rounds as possible per day.

So, with these lessons under my belt, I decided to try again.

Smarter

I figured that it was simple enough to fix my first mistake, I’d start on the first day of the month this time.

The second mistake was something that I figured would also be simple. Rather than attempting to do as many as I could in as little rounds as possible, I’d do ten sets a day and that was it. If I focus more on the process than the goal, I figured that it would get me over the line eventually.

Challenge 01

If I do a set every half hour, I’d have the ten completed in 5 hours. I mean, hey, we’re in lockdown. I have 5 hours to spare.

But I didn’t.

Work, meetings, calls, focus and flow all sapped the time away from me.

So I tried again.

I’ve started getting up early in the mornings do to research and blog posts (like this one for example), so I’d try and get them done then.

Ten sets every 5 minutes should have me completed in just under an hour; more than enough time to spare.

Challenge 02

Pushups are hard! Even when I’m not trying to rep out as many as I can, they still take a toll on the body. Soon a five-minute break is not enough, and I’m taking longer and longer rests.

Fine, if that’s the way we’re going to do this, then I’m going to go with the flow.

Scripting

Seeing as I needed a little extra rest each round, I decided to create a PowerShell script that would help calculate that rest for me.

https://github.com/shaneis/RandomScripts/blob/master/Start-IncreasingBackoff.ps1

Using the Script

For once, I’ve added comment based help to my script so I can run

Get-Help -Name Start-IncreasingBackup -Examples

and get examples of what the script does!

Now, I can run this script and get a timer that will let me know when to start my activities and that will give me more and more rest each time!

Now to see what else I can use this for!