Testing the system
After refinding my direction last week, this week was all about maintaining the rhythm and staying consistent in training and work. This week, I met challenges – creative fatigue and external factors influenced my week, and proved how fragile my systems still are.
This week showed that consistency isn’t built by momentum alone, but depends on the systems behind it.
Week 43 metrics
Training
Workouts: 4 | Cycling: 5 hrs
Recovery
Avg sleep: 8.5 hrs | Sleep score: 84
Work
HG work: 24.5 hrs | Other work: 15 hrs
This log reflects how I’ve worked with the Hagen Growth philosophy in practice over the past week
What I worked on
This week’s focus wasn’t much different from the last – the main goal is still consistency. I’m in a transitional period until mid-December, when I finish my current job. Until then, my aim is to rebuild the foundation that once kept me grounded: the structure of my days, my habits, and my creative rhythm.
Hagen Growth and training are the two priorities that matter most at this stage – not as side projects, but as systems that will carry me into the next phase once this job ends.
Hagen Growth and work
For a long time, conveying ideas about personal growth and living a better life has been something I’ve loved. It’s the reason Hagen Growth exists. Among all the practical tasks that come with maintaining a platform like this, writing has always been the part that feels like play rather than work.
When I first took my current job, the one I’ve now resigned from, it was under the agreement that my main task would be creating blog content. That never happened. Instead, I spent over a year in operational and technical work that didn’t fit me. What made it draining wasn’t just the workload, but the mismatch between how I naturally think and what the work required. It was detail-heavy, reactive, and disconnected from creativity. Over time, that constant misalignment left me mentally flat. When I was off, I didn’t want to write, and for the first time in years, I stopped being creative altogether.
Leaving that cycle has been like removing a weight. The clarity that came with deciding to step away – and knowing there’s an end point soon – has released energy I didn’t realize I’d lost. I’ve started writing again, not because I forced it, but because I finally had space for it.
Last week, I published my first new piece on Hagen Growth in over a year. This week, I expanded the creative work and spent most of my hours drafting the first version of my philosophy – a document that will define both the foundation of Hagen Growth and my own principles for living. Writing it has felt like piecing myself back together.
What went well
Last week, I noticed an old pattern of procrastinating when a task felt difficult. The distractions were often productive. Layout tweaks or plan refinements are my go to distractions, but they still delay the real work. This week, I managed to eliminate that. Every hour I planned was used for its intended purpose. That’s a real step forward.
Another positive was how natural it felt to expand on ideas again, despite the long break. Writing last week’s log helped reopen that channel, and this week I could sustain deeper creative work for longer stretches. I once read that the best work happens when tasks sit slightly beyond our current capability. That’s exactly how this felt – challenging but rewarding.
Finally, I maintained consistency: published the log, sent the newsletter, and wrote as scheduled. It’s the second week in a row that I’ve delivered what I planned. Rhythm is slowly returning.
What could have been better
This week, I worked 39.5 hours, about 7.5 fewer than last week. Yet, I felt far more drained by the end of it. There are two main reasons for that.
First, I filled nearly all of those hours with deep creative work. Between drafting the philosophy and writing technical text for my job, every task required full concentration. In the past, my workload naturally balanced between creative, visual, and administrative tasks. This week, I underestimated how demanding it is to write at this intensity for several days in a row. Creative work doesn’t just take time – it takes energy.
Second, I neglected breaks. When I’m deeply focused, I can lose track of time and skip breaks in my work hours. It feels productive in the moment but comes at a cost – by the end of the day, I’m drained in a way that’s hard to recover from.
Next week, I want to approach my schedule differently. I’ll structure my hours by mixing task types and testing Pomodoro variations to find a rhythm that sustains performance and longevity.
Training
Like my work with Hagen Growth, the focus this week was again on consistency. Last week, I reduced my overall training volume, and that decision paid off – energy levels were noticeably higher, and training started to feel enjoyable again.
This week, I built on that foundation. I added a few more hours on the bike as my body felt ready, while keeping gym sessions at roughly the same intensity and volume. The only deviation was one missed workout. Since Sunday evening, storms had been passing through, and on Monday afternoon a tree fell onto the power lines near where I live. The entire area lost power, including my gym, which had to close early.
That single event – and how I handled it – became the week’s key test. It revealed how fragile my current system still is when something unexpected happens. It also showed how much my mindset toward perfectionism has evolved.
What went well
Performance improved this week. I felt lighter, lifted heavier, and had better performance on the bike. The combination of lower overall volume and renewed energy clearly works. But the real win wasn’t physical – it was in how I handled the disruption.
My first instinct when the gym closed was to compensate – to fit the missed session into another day, even if it meant training twice in one. A year ago, I would have done that automatically, driven by the idea that missing a session meant falling behind. This time, I stopped and questioned it. Given the stress from my surroundings and my already high workload, doubling up on one day would only have accumulated stress without any real benefit.
Choosing not to compensate was a small but important decision. It showed that I can separate discipline from rigidity. True consistency isn’t about forcing every plan to happen – it’s about preserving momentum by respecting what is. That single choice likely prevented another week of accumulated fatigue and reinforced the kind of flexibility that sustains progress over time.
What could have been better
Despite the positives, this week exposed a weakness in my system. My schedule still assumes perfect conditions – five gym sessions and two long bike rides every week – with no built-in buffer for unexpected events. When one piece fails, the entire structure suffers.
The issue is the lack of adaptability in my volume. I’ve created a framework that works well in stability but leaves no flexibility when things change. Until I can improve my external environment – power reliability, weather, equipment, external stressors – I need to design flexibility into my structure instead of treating it as a backup plan.
The second lesson is that the environment I live in plays a larger role than I’ve admitted. Spending time in a space that’s loud, crowded, or unpredictable adds background stress that compounds over time and leaves me at half capacity before I’ve even started working. When the external drains internal energy, even simple things feel heavier, and I have less capacity for progress. That’s not sustainable.
Going forward, I want to design around both these factors: flexibility and environment. The system needs to support consistency, not demand constant adjustment. For now, that means reducing friction wherever I can, building routines that bend without breaking, and creating conditions that help me perform at full intensity instead of fighting against it.
Reflection of the week – Consistency requires the right system but…
This week was about maintaining consistency and slowly scaling up. Last week, I realized that changing too much changes nothing – and while that’s true, an equally important factor is systems. Often, a system can’t be judged until it’s tested.
When I went into this week, I had a good plan. I knew what to work on and when. I had planned everything regarding my workouts, and the only thing left was to get it done. But the week didn’t play out the way I hoped. That gap between plan and reality is where systems are tested. It’s easy to design a schedule that works in theory, but only friction reveals whether it can hold in real life.
I missed a workout due to external factors that I didn’t have space to recover from in my system, and I feel drained at the end of the week – to the point that writing this log feels like a huge task. Both are consequences of how I structured the week. Over time, this wouldn’t be sustainable, and this week proved that true consistency doesn’t just require systems, but the right systems.
While that sounds obvious, it’s far harder to apply in real life. On paper, a system can look flawless, but when you design it, it’s difficult to account for the unpredictable events of next week, how the tasks will actually feel, and how you’ll feel doing it. But if you can’t plan perfectly, how do you create the right system?
By testing, observing, and adjusting. From this week, I draw the conclusion that no system is universally right or wrong – it depends on how well it fits your current situation: your energy, environment, and priorities. Creating a system is an iterative process where improvements slowly are added. We can follow general guidelines, but we can’t copy and paste another person’s system and expect it to fit our own life, not even your own from the past. It might be close, but it still needs adjustment.
This week, I learned that I need to find the friction points in my life that drain me, create more variation in my tasks to maintain creative energy, and allow for more flexibility. Next week’s system won’t be perfect either, but it’ll be closer. True consistency requires the right system, but creating the right system requires consistency.
That’s the paradox – systems build consistency, but only consistent testing can build the right systems.
Week 43 summarized
Week 43 continued last week’s theme of consistency and I followed through. Every deliverable was met, except for one missed workout.
It was also a week that exposed weaknesses in my system and how I plan. I learned that I need to give myself more flexibility and distribute my workload more evenly across tasks that draw on different types of energy. The week presented its challenges, but I came through and learned how to handle them better next time.
Next week’s focus
Next week will again focus on maintaining consistency – but also on refining my systems to better handle the setbacks I faced this week another time. The main challenge will be fatigue if I don’t recover fully before it starts.
- System refinement – Make simple changes to this week’s structure and test how it influences cognitive fatigue.
- Training – Five gym sessions and five hours on the bike. Maintain high intensity and quality, adjusting only if needed.
- Hagen Growth – Publish the weekly log and send out the newsletter. Begin editing the Philosophy document, but pull forward admin tasks from later weeks to balance the type of effort.
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