2016 Goal #2: Master Good Habits

On Tuesday I discussed goal #1 for 2016, which is to get organized with my bullet journal… it’s a work in progress… but that’s sort of the concept of the bullet journal… work at it until you find what works best for you… so I’ll have to post an update in a while once I’ve had more time to work through the kinks.

I had so many ideas for goals or things I want to accomplish, it was sort of overwhelming when I was brainstorming… but it is silly to try and get everything done at once, so I needed to pare down.  So, for goal #2 for 2016, I decided that I would start with a few specific habits to work on in January, and then each month I will add more based on the successes of the previous month.  Mastering these habits will help me have a good basis for completing other goals.

I’ve already shown you my habit tracker from my bullet journal on Tuesday, but I didn’t go in to any details about what habits were actually being tracked… so I’ll do that now.

Here is my January habit tracker in my bullet journal that I posted on Tuesday:

January Habit Tracker

And here is an updated close-up from yesterday:

January Habit Tracker Close-Up

I have selected 7 habits for January that are mostly attached to bigger goals, but are smaller tasks that I can work on…

1. Morning Routine (5:30am)

Last summer, I put together a morning routine or schedule in an attempt to get myself organized.  Unfortunately, I didn’t have any way to record how often I was doing it, and zero accountability, and I totally let it fall to the side.  So, with the help of my bullet journal, I’m going to try get up at 5:30am every morning and do the morning routine every morning.  Well, not Saturday and Sunday… those are my sleep in days.  So far, I haven’t done a full morning routine, but I did partial routines some mornings… Or I did get up at 5:30am, but I didn’t do a part of the routine… I have indicated that with a half filled box.

2. Exercise / Fitness

I have lots of things I would like to do in terms of fitness and health… some similar to last year… but the first step is to get in the habit of exercising 4-5 days a week.  I was thinking that I might put in the type of exercise on my habit tracker (you can see the Y for yoga and the R for a run), but I have decided that it doesn’t work… the habit tracker is just for saying if I did it or not… I’ve been using the mapmyrun app on my phone to record my runs, but now I’m just putting in all my exercise in there so I can see the whole story in one place…

3. @ Work Before 9am

This is sort of part of my morning routine… and also similar to what I tried doing last year to help increase my productivity at work… but with the help of my bullet journal, I want to get to work before 9am every day.  This week was almost perfect for this, except that Monday and Tuesday I actually had morning appointments, so I missed some work for those.  To show that I don’t consider that a failure, but not really a pass, I half filled in the boxes for Monday and Tuesday.

4. Blog Post

I am really trying to get in to a Tuesday/Thursday blog posting schedule.  So I set up this “habit” to track when I post here on the blog.  I obviously missed the Thursday post this week… so here it is on Friday… So I’ll mark this down in my bullet journal and attempt to do better.

5. Reading

I really like reading… but I have gotten away from it in recent years.  If I have spare time, I’ll often pick up my phone or my iPad and check Instagram or Facebook, or play a game.  Over the holidays, I did some reading.  I tried reading two difference books (borrowed from the library) but ran out of time and had to return them before I finished (one was the Marie Kondo book that inspired my recent clothing declutter)…  But I loved the reading that I did do, so one of my goals for the year is to read 12 books.  And actually finish them.  I’m not worried about any topic choices, I just want to get back in to it…  And to make this goal happen, I want to make an effort to read a little bit every day.  Any day that I read, I’ll mark it down on the habit tracker.  Since coloured boxes are so much prettier than angry X’s, I’m hoping that this will get my reading kick started.

6. Budget Review

In my December budget review, I mentioned that I’m going to be doing my budget reporting on the blog slightly differently, but that doesn’t mean that I’m abandoning my regular budgeting.  I like to check my budget status at least once a week (in my Sunday plan), but we could probably benefit from doing it more often…  So, I’ve decided to keep track of how often we review our budget and then I’ll be able to correlate that to how well we do at sticking to it… Should be interesting anyway.

7. Evening Routine (10:30pm)

The last habit in my January habit tracker is my evening routine… If I’m going to be getting up at 5:30am and following my morning routine, then I need to help myself out by getting to bed at a reasonable time and making sure that I don’t make things harder on myself by leaving things for the morning when I can get them done the night before.  Just like my morning routine, I put together an evening to-do list in the summer, but didn’t really follow it.  I’m going to get in to the habit of doing this starting this month.  Oh, and also try to get it all done and get to bed by 10:30pm every night.  (You can see I haven’t been very successful thus-far, but working on it…)

So there you have it.  My 7 habits that I’m working on and tracking in January.  In February I will review these habits and hopefully add another on… Until then, wish me luck and lots of motivation!

Do you have habits you are working on for 2016?  Are you using a habit tracker to help keep yourself accountable?