Scott H Young

Having now reached the end of the sixth month of my year-long Foundations project, I’d like to share some reflections on this month’s focus: outreach.

In doing the reading for this month, I found myself impressed by the numerous associations between having strong and broad social ties and living well. Being connected isn’t just good for your career or happiness—it matters for your health too. The association between isolation and mortality is in the same ballpark as smoking a pack of cigarettes every day.

It was also while doing this reading that I realized my foundation here is weaker than I thought. I feel like I have fairly good close connections with my family and best friends. I’m also not terrible at meeting people or engaging in low-stakes small talk and socializing. However, I’m bad at managing the periphery of my social world—there are people I consider “good friends” who I see only once or twice a year.

Going through the reading, I also felt my initial focus for the month, emphasizing activities that allowed me to meet new people, was somewhat misplaced. Instead, I think my real weak point is one layer inward—all those people I sort of know, but don’t make enough effort to sustain a casual friendship.

At this point, it would be easy to trot out various excuses: I have good friends, so who needs acquaintances? (Except the two serve different purposes, and both are necessary for thriving.) I’m too busy as a parent with small kids to “hang out” as much as I used to. (Except that’s true of literally everything; if something matters to us, we make time for it.) I don’t like one-sided efforts to sustain weaker ties, and I’d prefer things to be spontaneous. (Except nothing else in life is like this—all good habits require some amount of effort and systems in place.)

Despite these obstacles, I’d like to be better with outreach than I am currently. This month was a good start but, given that the work here takes place over years, it’s hardly finished.

What I Did This Month

To start, I was pretty good about keeping my once-weekly commitment to participating in some kind of activity with new people. I went to a couple language meet ups and met some people at a birthday party.

The push to do some research to find activities was helpful. In the past couple years, I feel like I often missed opportunities to socialize not only out of busyness, but also because I hadn’t kept opportunities on my radar, so I didn’t have any potential activities to try during weeks when I was relatively free.

I also made efforts to spend some time with some old friends. I don’t expect to go back to pre-kids levels of socializing, but here too the once-per-week threshold seems like a doable minimum.

Finally, I decided to make following up with friends and colleagues at regular intervals a more structured habit. Creating a list of people I know with recurring reminders to contact them and putting it in my productivity system nudges me to reach out to people. I’m also putting birthdays and other events in the same list so I can keep track of those too, now that I no longer use social media.

The month wasn’t perfect. As I write this, it is December. (I write these updates three months in advance to give my team and myself lead time in preparing the course.) My family and my in-laws visited, which meant this wasn’t the ideal month to focus on outreach. But that hiccup aside, I’m confident that I’ll be able to sustain the roughly once-per-week habit in the coming months.

Plans for Ongoing Outreach

With a weekly habit, one month really isn’t long enough to make something routine. So I’m going to need to consciously monitor and make an effort here for at least another few months.

Given my assessment of my weak point here, I’m also modifying the keystone habit I’m going to try to sustain: Instead of focusing on meeting new people, I’m going to try to split my efforts evenly between trying activities with new people and sustaining existing friendships with people I don’t interact with automatically. 

One step I have not taken, but feel might be important, is joining or belonging to a more formal organization or group. Putnam’s Bowling Alone really sold me on the idea that there’s a benefit to belonging to something beyond an informal circle of friends. I suspect this is something I’ll revisit in the last foundation: service.

Updates to Previous Foundations

Of course, my goal with this project isn’t simply to focus on one habit for a month and then move on, but to sustain my commitments from all the previous months. Here are some updates for the previous five foundations:

1. Fitness. Still going strong. My running speed has improved, with my 10 km time getting down to 52 minutes. That’s a major improvement over a few months ago when it was a challenge to run that distance in under an hour, and an even bigger improvement from before this project began when I hadn’t run for more than 30 minutes in almost a decade.
2. Productivity. The system I reworked during the month is still holding, although I still struggle with keeping up with household chores. Still, the amount of things that slip my mind has dropped considerably, which means the system is doing its job even if I still don’t have time to do everything I’d like.
3. Money. Also solid. My term life insurance policy was approved, so I can finally check that box after applying for it months ago. I also started the process of setting up educational savings funds for my kids. Since it’s December when I write this, I plan to do a bigger annual review in January as well.
4. Food. There was some predictable backsliding here during the holiday season. I was fine with this, but it will be important to get back to my defaults next month. I’m now about 15 lbs. lighter than my weight at the start of my project, which is probably close to my ideal weight, so at this point I’m trying to avoid both over- and under-eating, especially as I’ve been exercising more.
5. Reading. With eight books read this month, I’m mostly back to my normal reading routine. This month was a little lighter than usual, but the holidays cut into work-related reading. Still, I fully expect to be on track to read 100+ books for this project by its end.

That’s it for this month. Next week, I’ll share an update for the next foundation: sleep.