I enjoy numbers in a casual way. My Garmin watch tells me that I average 9,761 steps every day and that my resting heart rate is 55 (I do know this heart rate is not completely accurate because it is using my watch and not an actual heart rate monitor.) I wear a CPAP at night, and first thing in the morning, I check the app, go through the numbers of how long I wore it (usually just over four hours), what my average CPAP pressure was (8.6), and how many times I took it off through the night (2). If a publishing company has a product with a number on the spine, like the numbers on physical Criterion Collection DVDs, the books from Grindhouse Press, or pretty much every record label, I want to collect them all. Of course I also like to look at the amount of views this site gets every day and every month. I sometimes check the various numbers many times throughout the day. All of these numbers are fun to look at, but the weird thing about my constant monitoring is that I do not think about improvement, that there is not elation for when I am doing better, nor is there sadness, shame, or guilt that comes from not doing as good as I should be doing.

When I go through the numbers, I do two things. The first is that I look at the numbers that are good and ignore those that are not so good. My V02 Max on my Garmin watch says my fitness is in the bottom 15% of my age group. I am always chasing my CPAP to make sure that I stay slightly above the 70% compliance that is needed for the insurance company not to take the machine back. I look at the sheer amount of Criterion Collection releases and know I’ll never be close to getting them all. My social media numbers are good, but I do not do much to grow the numbers. I also do not do much to improve on any of these things. 

Most of my casualness is due to a general lack of focus on details. I do not spend a great deal of my life looking at the details. Like a smooth rock that water has been rushing over for decades, my outlook has become one where things will get done and they will look good enough, but if you look closely at the details, you can see severe flaws. For example, I clean the kitchen. From the doorway, the countertops shine and the smell is one that you associate with a clean kitchen, but if you lift the toaster or look in the corners, you can see crumbs and dirt that I did not clean. My casualness toward details can be a blessing but mostly it is a hindrance. The blessing is that I do not obsess about social media, about follower and like counts. I only produce and publish things I like, so I cannot be disappointed when others are not interested. My downfall is that I get too wrapped up in the idea that nobody is really paying attention, so I miss deadlines, take extra days off, and I do too many things with a shortcut. 

The thought that I have been dwelling on, the idea about this that has been stuck in my head and has made me write this, is that in most cases, attention to detail only takes another minute or two. There is not a great amount of time loss because I take a few extra steps to make sure that things are finished properly. This is easier to think about than it is to put into action. Sure I can say to myself, “I’m going to always take an extra minute to look at the details in everything I do,” but sounds overwhelming, and it is easy to quit when I am overwhelmed. Instead I can pick one thing in my life that I will purposefully slow down to make sure that I accomplish it with detail in hopes that this habit will change into a bigger habit. The goal is to eventually see those numbers, and the ones that I so casually ignore will start to get better.