Week in Review - Exercise and Other Endeavors

On Sundays nights, I’m going to start posting about what my own personal time management, organization and life balance projects look like and how I approach them. This provides a great motivation tool for me and also gives you a glimpse into how I put my own principles into practice.

So last week, I posted about my new exercise goal... and as it happened, last week turned out to be a mega heat wave here in Seattle! We had a literally record-breaking high of 103 one day, and several other days nearly that bad, and it is still far hotter than normal. Here in Seattle, few people have air conditioning since it rarely gets very hot here. Suffice it to say, exercising was a challenge. I managed twice instead of three times—not perfect, but not bad. I would have gotten in three times despite the heat if the drum and dance circle I went to on Saturday had had normal attendance. I’d planned to dance myself to exhaustion there, but since there were only two other drummers there for most of the event, I drummed instead because I was afraid if I didn’t it would be harder on the other two drummers to keep rhythms going on their own.

I’m exercising again tonight though and, even if it stays hot, this week I will hit my goal. I’m a bit more into the groove of it now. One important thing about making effective progress on goals is forgiving yourself when you are not perfect, and continuing to work on your goal afterwards. Also, I am choosing to give myself credit for making progress; I had two more exercise sessions for myself this week than I’ve had for many weeks prior. That’s an improvement even if I didn’t quite get where I wanted to just yet. Next week, I’ll do even better.

My other organizational endeavor right now is to go through and reorganize my closet... from a time management perspective, that means finding time to do it!  Two things need to happen there: first, I need to get rid of some clothes that I don’t wear; and second, I need to create an organizational system that is easier to maintain. The next step is to schedule some time for myself to focus on this project. Normally I schedule time blocks for myself when I review my calendar on Sundays, but Google Calendar seems to be misbehaving at the moment—hmmph. So, I’ve jotted down a list of some things I want to set aside time for using my own time management planning tools, including the closet re-org project. I’ll use my notes tomorrow morning and review my calendar over coffee before heading out to work.