2020 – De-frumping Goals

I had started this “postpartum” fitness plan post back in May or June of 2018 when I was thinking it was time to get fit after having my baby in March 2018… I never posted it… And I never finished it… Let’s just take a quick read at what I was going to say…

It’s official… I can no longer use the excuse of being pregnant for my extra weight… And now that I’ve waited the appropriate 6 weeks (okay, it’s more than that… but whatever…), I can get started on getting back in shape…

Of course, as with every new project, this starts with a spread in my bullet journal.  For my initial spread, I took to pinterest for ideas and found this one:

I believe I actually did make myself a version of that in my bullet journal at the time… I’ll have to dig back in to that book…

But that was over a year ago… almost 2 years ago now… And I never did “get back in shape”…

“But round is a shape…” Yes, yes, I can always find excuses for being overweight and sluggish, but I want to be healthy, and my current weight is not healthy for me. So, as I mentioned before, one of my themes for 2020 was to “de-frump.”

I left this theme purposely vague because I wanted to allow this goal to change over time, and also to give myself some leeway when making the goals to cover a lot of different aspects of my “frumpiness”… And with the current worldwide COVID-19 pandemic adding anxiety and throwing curve balls at everyone’s regular routines, giving myself some leeway is probably the best thing… Ultimately, though, the goal is to get fit and healthy…

So, after all this discussion… Let’s get down to the nitty-gritty. At the beginning of April, I thought it would be a great time to start my new goal… I started writing this post then, but got sidetracked by life, and am now just coming back to this post to finish it… Anyway… I’m going to try and make these goals cumulative, so I’ll start with one or two habits or goals each week, then add on to them the next week. I’m going to start simple to get myself started with some easy successes.

April De-Frump Goals:

Week #1: (April 1 to 5) Go to bed by 10:30pm on weeknights & brush my hair every morning.
The better sleep I get, the more energy I’ll have and the better I’ll be able to tackle other aspects of my life. And I know brushing your hair every morning sounds like a given, but honestly, my hair is so straight that I don’t often *need* to brush it, and normally when I get out of the shower I just throw the wet hair in to a messy bun and forget about it. I think that putting a it of effort in to my hair will make me feel better about myself and my appearance, even if I’m not actually seeing anyone really…

Week #2: (April 6 to 12) Get up at 5:30am on weekdays & take my vitamins every morning.
If I want to have any time to myself before the little monster wakes up, then I’ll need to get up before him… He typically wakes up around 7am, sometimes we can push it to 7:30am, so a 5:30am wake up time will give me some time to be productive, either on stuff around the house, my personal goals, my blog, or to get some work done. Also, I have totally fallen off the wagon of taking my vitamins… After years of being good (especially while pregnant and breast feeding), I’m not even sure why I got out of the habit… But it’s time to get back in to it.

Week #3: (April 13 to 19) Go for 2-3 runs & drink 8 cups of water a day.
I’m going to try getting back in to running in the mornings. Since I am not “single parenting” my mornings anymore, I can totally get up early (hence the 5:30am wake up goal) and get out of the house before anyone else gets up. I think that getting some early morning exercise will help my mental health along with my physical health, and will probably help me be better focused when I sit down to work. And I’m *pretty sure* that I am drinking the required 8 cups of water (mostly in tea form) a day, but I haven’t been tracking it for a while, so I want to get back in to that too…

Week #4: (April 20 to 26) Wash my face and apply moisturizer every morning.
This is another one that might sound like an obvious one to most people, and I do wash my face most mornings, but I rarely put moisturize on my face… And I’m not getting any younger, my skin could use all the help it can get to keep from getting too wrinkly as I get older, and my moisturizer has sunscreen built in, so as we approach summer, it will help keep my paleness from getting lobster red sunburns.

Week #5: (April 27 to 30) Don’t eat anything after 9pm.
I’ve heard that not eating after a certain point in the evening can be very good for your health. I believe this is probably true for multiple reasons, but for me, the big one would be that I never eat anything healthy late in the evenings. I have heard 8pm to be the magic time, but honestly, the little monster’s bedtime often bleeds close to 8pm these days, and I typically need/want to have a bit of a snack after he’s gone to bed so I can actually pay attention and enjoy whatever it is I am eating… So I’ve picked 9pm for my time. If I’m still doing the 10:30pm bedtime, it still gives me an hour and a half between my last food and bedtime. That should be good enough to mostly digest the food…

Of course, setting goals means a new spread in my bullet journal:

Of course, now that it is midway through April, probably best to show you an updated version of the page:

These goals have been created with the assumption that we will be remaining in this current social distancing lock-down until at least the end of April, which I’m pretty sure is pretty safe to say based on all the news I’ve seen.

What do you think of my goals? Too simple? Too complicated?

Daffodil Photo by Anthony Young on Unsplash

Advertisement

January Personal Goals Review

Here we are, over a month in to 2018 already!  How are you doing with your new year’s resolutions or goals?  I am going to try and post a monthly review for accountability on my personal goals.  It may not be the most exciting read, but it’ll help me keep up with my goals, and also give me a better idea of what I need to work on each month…  Of course, I am already quite late in getting this first review out since we are now pretty much half way through February… Oh well…

Let’s get right down to it…

January 2018 Bullet Journal Set-up

It has been a while since I did an updated show and tell of my bullet journal.  I still use it daily, and have made some adjustments throughout the months, but rather than going through all of the various iterations, I will just show how I have set everything up for January.

I don’t normally have a title or intro page for my months, but I figured the start of a new year deserved something special.  I got inspiration from Pinterest (so I cannot take full credit for my designs).  I also added a washi tape border so that I could flip easily to the beginning of the new year.  I am very happy with how it turned out, so I may continue doing something like this in the future… We will see…

February’s Monthly Challenge Results

Before I get in to my challenge results, Melinda over at PurpleSlobInRecovery has nominated me for 2 blogging awards in the last little while… I had thought that I was sort of done with awards after my Sunshine Blogger Award, but it was so thoughtful of Melinda to nominate me twice, so I’ll do a bit of a response at the end of this post.  Anyway…

January’s Monthly Challenge (my Mins Game) was a little heavy on the time commitment, so I want to do something a little easier for February.  As I mentioned before, I really thought that the 7-minute workout challenge would be a simple one to complete.  But without the motivation and desire to do the exercises, it just didn’t happen… So I changed it up and decided to give myself an even easier challenge for the second half of February: read and relax, every day.

So, how did I do?

My Realistic Expectations for February

February was a good month… Other than “failing” at my original focus and monthly challenge.  But, I also did a bit of soul searching and adjusting of my expectations of myself.

I used to read this blog called “A Slob Comes Clean” and one thing that she always expressed was that when things started getting crazy around the house, she would return to the basics (or survival mode, as she puts it), the one thing that was the key to keeping things from tumbling down in to the depth of clutter and mess for her was to run her dishwasher every night.  And that idea stuck with me since then.

Partway through February, when I missed a few blog posts and was feeling overwhelmed, I decided I should enact my own type of survival mode.  I decided to not attempt to create any new habits or take on any new projects, but just try my best to keep up with the ones that I was already struggling with, or even let go of some of them until I felt better in control.

So, what did my survival mode look like?  What did I do?

2016 in Review: My Bullet Journal

This post was supposed to go up yesterday… but, well, it didn’t… Here it is a day late… 

2016 was the year I started my bullet journal.  Okay, if we get technical, I experimented with it briefly during the holidays in 2015 so that I would have a better idea of what I liked for the start of 2016, but really it was started in earnest in 2016.

For my first two goals of 2016 I was basically wanting to start using a bullet journal in earnest to organize my life and to also create good habits.  So, while these “goals” were only #1 and #2 on my list of goals, and #1 was really vague and not “SMART”, goal #2 actually consisted of various goals that grew and changed over the year.

Goal #1 – Bullet Journaling

To review this goal for a specific pass/fail type result would be very difficult because, as I mentioned already, it was not a “SMART” goal, so I had no definition of the end result.  However, I have indeed stuck with my bullet journaling and can definitely say that I feel it has helped me stay organized and focused, as much as is possible with a scatterbrain like myself.  (Ooh, shiny!)

I reviewed my bullet journal set up, back in September, and honestly it hasn’t changed much, and I don’t foresee any major changes in the near future because it is working for me.  I don’t think that “using my bullet journal” will be a goal for 2017, but it will be what helps me keep with my goals and I am definitely not going to stop, so I figured I’d give it another review for the end of the year…

Habit Tracker Update

As I mentioned last week, Goal #2 of my goals for 2016 is really a collection of smaller goals.  They have evolved through out the year as my priorities change, or as I decide I want to work more on one thing or the other.

The Original Goal had 7 items on the habit tracker, but some were combinations of things.  My first check-in was back in February where I had increased the number to 8, but still had the combined items (morning & evening routines), and then I did another update in March where I split up a bunch of the items and had a total of 12 habits to track.  I skipped April because we were away on our honeymoon for most of it…

Then when I got my new bullet journal, I did another habit tracker.  I split up some of the combined habits, and got rid of a couple, so I still has 12 habits to track.  I did an update in June where I reduced the number of habits to 10.  But I haven’t done an update since…

I haven’t really changed my habit tracker up much since then, I am just plugging along, working on making these things routine.  So let’s quickly review how I have done, and where I need to re-focus my efforts to make some improvements.

Habit Tracker Check-In – June 2016

For goal #2 of my 2016 goals, I wanted to work on some basic good habits that would help keep me healthy and on track…  Or help me improve myself  (you know, a “better me” as my blog name would indicate).

Last check-in (in March), I had 12 habits that I was working on for March… Let’s just say that they didn’t really go as well as I had hoped…

And since I started the month of April while I was on my honeymoon, I didn’t even make a habit tracker for April.  But I did start my new bullet journal with a habit tracker for May, so let’s go over how that went…

For May I again had 12 habits that I was working on, but they were slightly different from the ones in March.  Most are pretty self explanatory, but I’ll go over them anyway…

My New Bullet Journal

I hinted a couple posts ago that I might be starting a new bullet journal sometime in the near future, but it turns out that my old notebook was pretty much out of pages.  Setting up my monthly layouts for May just would not fit in the remaining pages… So, I used a few of those pages to plan out my new bullet journal and started fresh with my brand new Leuchtturm1917 for the month of May.

I promised that I would share my new bullet journal when I got going on it, so here it is… My new bullet journal!

The first thing I did was start a pen test page in the back so that I could check on how things write in the new book.  I was disappointed to find out that even in this new book some of my pens still ghost and soak through.  I also did go and buy myself a couple new pens… (even though I said I would wait until I win the biggest loser competition with my husband before doing that…)

March Habit Tracker Check-In

I’m going to continue with my monthly check-in on my habit tracker in my bullet journal (see last month’s post), as that is where I am keeping track of the various smaller goals (in the form of my giant Goal #2) that I’m working on…

How did I do in February?

I started the month with 8 habits to work on… and then part way through I added a 9th.