March 30th – April 28th 2009
I define balance as the ability to keep my time and energy aligned with my priorities in life. Items like my career, my relationship with my husband, my care of my household, my health, and so forth are all issues I feel are very important to me. Sometimes I do really well in one area, but usually at the cost of another. My goal is to learn to balance all my priorities in a more even and consistent approach.
In the last year or so, I identified that I was spending too much time and energy on items that did not align with my priorities. Activities like television, internet games, or other items that truly were not what I would categorize as ‘important’ to me. I decided to adjust my energy spent into better directions. Some of my 30 day challenges will be to change one particular habit, while my current challenges are more to fix a number of smaller habits at once.
My last balance challenge went very well. I tried to focus on my health through daily meditation and yoga, I addressed my career goals in a number of ways, and I tackled small items that helped me to accomplish minor improvements in my general habits. In order to accomplish my challenge last month, I had to implement a number of changes in my daily schedule (such as waking 7 days a week at 5 am with no snooze, doing a lot of prep work for the next day, ect). If I was going to keep to a busy daily schedule, I was going to have to lay out my entire day in detail.
Balance II is a continuation of last month. The habits I laid out went well, but are far from solidified. I took about a week and a half break from the prior challenge to gather my motivation and energy, lay out my goals, and put Balance II into place.
This challenge, I am going to work on the following issues:
- Wake at 4:30 AM (5:30 am on the weekends)
- Exercise 30 mins a day, rotating between yoga, weights, and cardio
- Continue improving my minor health habits, like daily supplements, meal planning, ect
- Meditate 20 mins a day
- Improve my time spent daily on the household care
- Continue improving on my habits for planning of the next day (packing lunches, ect), and my daily cooking habits
- 30 mins a day spent one on one with each cat through clicker training (they got left behind last month)
- Daily work on my website, either through writing or development of the tech side
- Bed on time in the evenings, so that I don’t wear down like I did in the last challenge
I have a very busy schedule again this month, but I wouldn’t call it any worse then prior. I have a very complex checklist I have created to help me keep track of my day and what needs to be done. My husband is also on board with my activities, and tries to help me as much as possible.
My ultimate goal is NOT to maintain this level of a schedule 100% going forward. I do these ‘extreme’ challenges more to shock my system into a new habit. If I can maintain at this level for 30 days, I can easily go forward at a level say 70-80% of the challenge version with very little effort. Plus, I am always curious as to how much I can accomplish. Even the progress I have made in 2009 surprises me, and now that I know what I can do, I cannot help but to keep pushing the limits.
