Re-Designing My Days

One of my goals for 2013 is to keep it simple. I've been inspired by zenhabits lately, and one post in particular struck a chord. It espouses the virtues of doing more by doing less. After a weekend spent in a semi-mindless state surfing the Web and watching re-runs of Law & Order: SVU it was clear that this was advice I needed to take...stat. Sure, those things help me unwind temporarily, but they're not helping me live the kind of life I really want to. When I found another post on a similar topic during my nightly blog reading tonight, I knew the time had come to make some changes.

Starting now I'm going to carefully curate the tasks I allow to fill up my days. Out go the mindless distractions that don't add value. In go the tasks that align with my values, goals, and priorities.

Starting today I am going to do less: TV watching, Pinterest surfing, Facebook checking, shopping.

And I am going to do more: sleeping, exercising, cooking, organizing, de-cluttering, hanging out with friends, reading, and volunteering. 

I know these sounds like New Year's resolutions type things but I am going to make my goals more specific than that. Here's the current plan:

1. This week I will not be on Pinterest, Facebook, or the few other social media sites I normally check at all. 
2. The following week I will limit my time on these sites to 15 minutes after breakfast in the morning, just to catch up on what's going on in the lives of friends I don't see every day. The need to get up and go to work with help me enforce the time boundary. I'm deleting the bookmarks for these sites from my work computer so I'm not tempted to check them from there.
3. I'm limiting my TV watching to the morning and evening news, one hour of DVR'd TV per night, and of course Downton Abbey on Sunday nights. That's the only show I really look forward to watching anyway. The rest of the time it's just on for distraction. 

What to do with all that time I'm no longer wasting?

1. Work out 3x this week. 
2. Tuesday night is going to be cooking night. I picked 3 recipes from Pinterest that I've been dying to try and I am actually going to cook them instead of pinning new ones. What a novel concept! 
3. I've gathered all the "stuff" around my home that doesn't have a place onto the dining room table. I'm going to go through it all and either find a home for it or put it in the Goodwill bag. Hoping to have the whole pile cleared off by Friday night.  

If I have time left over, I'm going to go to bed earlier, read, or write posts here. It's still cold and dark early in the Northeast so giving my body a little extra shut-eye isn't a bad idea.

Seeing all this spelled out I'm actually excited for the rest of this week. I've done this kind of thing before and it always feels so good. Clearly it hasn't stuck, but that doesn't mean I'm going to stop trying!

Are there any tasks or habits that you want to eliminate from your day? Things you want to do more of to achieve your personal goals?

New Year, New Goals

I can't believe it's been more than 6 months since I last posted on this blog. Yikes! I've been trying to focus on living life and I guess that meant spending less time writing about it. But I do love blogging so I definitely want to pick it up again. I've been busy organizing and updating my apartment so there are plenty of new things to share!

Before I can do that I need to have a little photo shoot, and considering it's dark outside now is not the best time to do that. So instead I'll do what many of my fellow bloggers did at the start of the month and share my goals for 2013.

1. Keep it simple.

I spent much of my holiday vacation purging things from my home and do not plan to bring new things in unless I absolutely need them. This forces me to use what I have, and as it turns out I have pretty much everything I need. I am also trying to de-clutter my calendar. One of my favorite lessons from The Happiness Project is that you can control what you do, but you can't control what you like to do.  I'm giving myself permission to beg off any activity that doesn't excite me. These days I'm very content putzing around my house organizing things, having quiet dinners with a small group of friends, or hanging out casually at someone's house watching a movie or just chatting. Saying no to other things has made life feel calmer and more peaceful.

2. Keep it clean.

This goal applies to both my home and my diet.

Home: I am lucky enough to have someone who comes and cleans my place every 2 weeks, but I am trying to be better about putting things away as I use them. De-cluttering and organizing helps because everything has a home to go to at the end of the day (well, almost everything!). I'm cleaning up the products I bring into my home, too: I've stopped using any chemical based cleaning or bath products and I've switched almost entirely from plastic to glass for food storage. I've recently made friends with a woman who does research on endocrine disruptors so I'm hoping to learn more from her and make my environment as natural as I can.

Diet: A few years ago I started removing processed food from my diet, and the work continues. This year I'm focused on cooking more from scratch, trying new things, and eating mindfully. Energy bars were a crutch for me in the past so I'm going cold turkey on those, switching to things like oranges as a snack instead. I don't go crazy with clean eating, but read labels and try to eat as clean as I can. My body feels so much better when I do that it's not a sacrifice at all.

3. Make it beautiful. 

Part of the reason I started this blog was to share my efforts to make my home beautiful. In 2013 I'll share my latest efforts on the home front as well as attempts to make myself beautiful through clothes and makeup, ways to make food beautiful (we eat with our eyes, right?), and how to find the beauty in everyday life. Photography is my favorite art form so I may occasionally share images I find beautiful, and even play around with my own camera to improve the pictures I take.

4. Have fun. 

I haven't shared much from my personal life on the blog in the past but this year I'm going to try to change that. I'm a fairly private person, but live in an area that has so many fun things to do. I love reading about other people's adventures but it's time to start having - and writing about - my own!

That's it. Four goals, very doable. I used to set rigid, quantitative goals every January but these days I'm much more relaxed. It's a nice place to be. Here's to a simple, clean, beautiful, and fun year!