The Manliness of Home Management

Among other things , I recently developed a crippling video game addiction . It's amazing how fixated a person can be on a world that doesn't really exist. I speak in past tense about it because Thursday the wii Disc drive burnt up and ended all that. It wasnt a total waste though ; I've learned to handle frustration better due to getting beat up, shot up, and knocked off of ledges regularly.

Sadly, this is not the first time I've had to learn important life skills from a game. Some of the tools and inspiration for finally becoming an organized person and running my home came from a game.

 30, broke and living with my parents,  I was working at a day labor place with a bunch of junkies, trying not to get stabbed or catch TB .Due to my life situation and the events that landed me there, I decided I wanted to learn how to start managing my life and my money better. Unfortunately, saving for an apartment deposit and pay off medical debts while making minimum wage left me with little actual money to manage, and little free time to manage because I had to get up at 4 AM to sign the sheet early and be near the top of the list for the limited work that was available. I had an old app on my phone called trade nations, where you build and run a little village . I decided I could at least practice running a pretend village while collection agencies and a temp service were running my real life. So running my town and managing my resources became a 10 minute part of my morning routine. In the game it was way easier to make friends, create wealth, and manage your money than in real life.  I used the app as a lab/ playground to practice those skills in a non stressful , high-return-on-effort setting. I practiced keeping a $1000 cash Dave Ramsey type emergency fund in my bank account, a habit I wanted to have in real life .When I got a real job again, all that practice paid off and it did become a real habit.

What got drilled into my head from playing that game was that making small steady deposits daily was the key to success. I heard that from Jim Collins before , but never tried it out. And even though my first attempt was on a freemium phone app, I finally was able to experience it myself. I eventually deleted the app and moved on to managing my real life again, which is way more frustrating and complicated of course. But it's also real and the rewards are much better. 

I'm still grateful for that experience . I really doubt that games are the BEST way to learn life skills, but at least they are A way to learn. Especially for those of us who are too stubborn to learn from parents or teachers. 

Well, I am still alive. I haven't posted in while , and I thought I was done with this little project. If at some point in reading the previous posts you thought "that seems like too much" , you were right. It was too much for me too. One sure sign that a person lacks maturity is trying to do way too much and thinking that that will be sustainable. So after burning myself completely out, I just gave up and said "F it". 

I did realize however that It's not like I stopped managing my home and life . You always manage your home and life. Not taking out the trash or making a budget is just a different style of managing life. 

What brought me out of the funk and back onto track was a little strange. For lack of a better description, I had a spiritual experience in Hobby lobby. I typically despise hobby lobby, but go with the woman and feign interest because I want to make sure I get laid that particular day. But that day as I wandered the endless aisles of overpriced Chinese made interior decorating items I was headed towards a moment of clarity. At some point I looked up from my phone and saw I was surrounded with rows of baskets. Weaved, distressed, pink , burlap, wicker ect. I thought " if I had this many baskets, I could separate all of the chaos I live in into neat little boxes of chaos and organize it." Since turning chaos into order is kind of a fascination for me, the baskets suddenly seemed less cheaply made and overpriced. Maybe a Chinese wicker basket could be a powerful tool for fighting disorder and chaos ....

I realize some may dig disorder and chaos. And if that's your thing then cool, roll around in it and enjoy it. I just can't anymore. Like many others, I have a need for order and structure, and Living without it had me feeling defeated as soon as I would wake up to face the day. When the dishes are piled up too high to fill up the coffee pot in the morning AND you have no clean laundry , going back to bed sounds better than seizing the day.

So after the whole Hobby Lobby thing , I felt energized to be all about this stuff again. It was time to kick chaos in the face and stop letting it suck the good stuff out of my life! So without the option of quitting , it's time to try again.... But smarter this time (hopefully )

Also, I don't dictate this anymore . Blogger has an app, so it no longer matters that the only thing I can type on is an iPhone .

We recently started working out as a family. Why? Because we have no time, no money, and we hardly see each other. The times we did see each other we kept getting fatter and fatter. We realized we had to do something.

So somehow I came up with this idea to kill 4 birds with one stone. How's that for efficient? 

We started this journey with our apartments free gym. The only problem there was that only one of us could work out at a time because we had a toddler. So by the time one of us got done, it was time for one of us to leave for work. Add in 7 days a week, needing to cook, do hygiene, and keep our apartment from looking like an episode of Hoarders and... well that sucks.

The only solution that I could come up with was for all of us to work out together. Sometimes including the toddler ... and the cat.

So I found a bunch of exercises that we could do together in the comfort of our apartment. I found these exercises mainly from my wife's pinterest. Unfortunately "How to Look like a Victoria's Secret Model" was not something I took seriously... until the next day and I couldn't move.

This lead me to what my wife like to call my "Nerding out phase." This includes obsessing, compulsive internet searching, pod cast listening, weighing the pros and cons of each school of thought, until realizing that we just needed to exercise. (Fitness for Dummies was the best overall book I read on the subject)

We finally found something that worked for us. This included an upper body work 2x a week. Family biking expeditions 2x a week and something we dubbed "cardio clean up" which is basically house cleaning to the tune of dub step for 45 minutes 2x a week.


The point was to find something healthy to do together as a family. And the cool thing is, it works way better than the gym ever did.

Plus I get to watch my toddler exercising/tormenting the cat which I wouldn't see in any gym.


How can we as men encourage our family to live a healthy life?  If you have an idea or something you've done with your family drop a comment in the comment box.