To me, New Year's Day is the mark of a new start and ever-present hope that I will conquer some great new habit or routine. I love 'em for that reason. Mondays are often the same kind of thing for me.
This year, I enjoyed our family time over Christmas and New Years and didn't get too serious about "making new plans", although I had a few in mind - namely, be diligent about getting back into shape by exercising, and the yearly "I must be better at house cleaning" thing. LOL This year, I was waiting until the 5th, when the kids would be back in school and I could have the entire house to myself, everything quiet again, to sit and plan and think and think and plan.
Well, two days before school began, our youngest (7yo) came down with a whacking cold. It ended up that he spent the entire first week at home still, trying to recouperate, drinking NeoCitran and coughing his poor head off. So much for my time alone.
Then the second week came, and the other three kids were getting the virus. I had one girl home for four mornings, but she went in the afternoons so as not to miss important classes. That meant three trips to the school and back each day. Not very restful, even if she did sleep all morning and the house was relatively quiet for that bit of time. I find I get scattered in the head when I'm in and out of the house all day like that.
Finally, yesterday everyone was back to school, my husband was busy for most of the day (although he and our partner popped in briefly as we needed to clarify stuff on an estimate), and I had a nice, quiet chunk of time to "do my thing."
It was lovely.
I got on the treadmill for the first time and walked my 30 minutes. Then I sat and had some breakfast and began making notes of all the stuff I'd thought about while on the treadmill. Then I went into my office, did up a very rough Control Journal (which for me is a miracle in itself, I usually have to fancy it up with clip art and print it out nicely from MS Publisher or something LOL), and popped it into a duotang.
I've decided to adjust my morning routine and leave out some of the daily stuff that FlyLady recommends, like the Swish and Swip and the myriad of Hot Spots and stuff like that. Instead, I've divided my weekly home blessing needs into 5 day's worth of jobs and I'm going to concentrate on one thing a day. For instance, Mondays are for Budget, Banking, and Bills. Tuesdays I'll make up meal and grocery plans and do some baking, as well as pop some water into my three plants. Wednesday, I'll just binge and clean all three bathrooms. That kind of thing.
I also have time each day set aside to tackle bigger projects, and I've listed them in order of importance and urgency so as to get the emergency stuff done first. And I realized that I need to delegate tasks, as well, so supposedly over morning coffee, I choose which tasks for that day to delegate to someone else. :D I'm not the only person in this household, after all!
So we'll see how it goes. I'm still using my timer, but most of my chunks of time are now 30 minutes long instead of 15. I think I'm a big enough girl to handle 30 minutes now, I've had plenty of practice with bite-sized pieces. :D 30 minutes is only a slightly larger bite. LOL
I'm feeling very "put together" at the moment. We've got our budget done, and I've got the Quicken program set up to track our progress. I have a daily/weekly plan that is easily tweaked and feeling usable. I've got easily-reached goals for fitness, and, for once in my life, the actual desire to do it! That might have been because I looked at pictures taken of me on my birthday and thought, "Col, it's TIME." LOL
Wish me luck. ;)
