Okay, it’s nearly 2am and I am still awake. My half-baked strategy of “putting it out into the universe” that I need to get to sleep earlier and “seeing what happens” has not succeeded as wildly as one would have imagined it to. It’s time to buckle down and break out the tools: I’m grabbing my pens and a straightedge to draw a little chart to track my progress, partly to give me a visual on my efforts and mostly because I still get an odd nerdy-girl satisfaction from sketching out grid patterns on small pieces of paper. The chart will be tucked away neatly into the pocket notebook that I use to write down stuff that I would otherwise forget.
Such as “go to bed earlier,” apparently.
I haven’t found the link yet, but sometime in the past year I read a blog post where the author had suggested starting one new goal every month rather than attempting them all at one time. If I recall the gist of it — or at least how I have put it into practice — it was a way to tackle a laundry list of goals and move away from the all-or-nothing, set-up-to-fail scenario that often occurs when we take on the overwhelming task of creating a whole slew of new habits at one time (the writer was specifically thinking of all those doomed New Year’s resolution lists). So instead, you focus on one habit to change or one goal to reach for thirty days, with the idea that it will become a regular part of your routine by the end of the month. By then, you’re ready to start the next goal to focus on. If done well, you’ll have created twelve new habits and/or reached twelve new goals by the end of the year.
All of this to say, this is not the goal I thought I would tackle this month but it’s certainly as good as any. Bring on the grid!
Update: After recalling that I had read the post referenced above via a link from Lifehacker, I immediately found what I was thinking of: 12 Habits in 2006 from John Richardson’s site, Success Begins Today.
Post a Comment