Monday Musings - New Year, New Me

 

The new year is a traditional time to reinvent yourself.  To make the promises that (if you're lucky) change you for the better.  In reality, these promises end up broken within a few weeks, if they even last that long.  I used to make resolutions every year, and failing at them within a few days.  Then I tried doing a 101 in 1,001.  Those lasted a bit longer, but the list was so unwieldy that the 1,001 days would be over and I'd have checked off maybe 10 things from the list.  Mostly because I'd forgotten about it before the end.  I've tried just setting goals (exercise 3x a week, clear my email nightly, etc), but I ended up giving up on those soon too.  My habit tracker only helped so much - there was shame seeing "exercise" not shaded in for months on end, but that didn't seem to push me into what I needed to do instead.

I think the biggest problems I've had is setting long term, repeating goals.  I'll say that I want to exercise 3 times a week, or call my mom once a month, or take my meds every day.  And the daily ones, I manage at about 75% accuracy.  The weekly ones... maybe 50%.  The monthly... about 5%.  It seems like if it's something that I don't have on a daily calendar, or something that I can't keep up as a habit, I forget to do it.  Or say, "I'll do it tomorrow."  I have a bad habit of procrastinating.  (Which is part of why the blog hasn't been updated in 3 months.)  It pushes things off until tomorrow becomes next week, becomes next month, becomes next year, becomes never.  And then I feel bad because I didn't do it.  

The worst for these are my open ended goals.  Get the house completely clean - well, that can never happen with the family living here.  Lose 100 pounds - eventually, that may happen, but not in a time frame I can see.  Go through my closets for Goodwill - well, great, but then I have to find time to actually BRING them to Goodwill.  I end up cascading one thing into another into another and then feel overwhelmed and get nothing done.

This year, I'm putting one big thing at the top of my list - Self Care.  That can take the form of taking a bubble bath, spending a day reading, congratulating myself for getting one thing off of my To Do list when depression is weighing heavily on me.  It also means forgiving myself when I stumble.  Whenever I berate myself for not being (in my mind) good enough because I didn't do XYZ, it feeds into the depression and just keeps looping.  I am trying to change that.

I have a few things that I think will help me be more successful this year.  The first is that I've lost 40 pounds in the last 3 months.  I knew what the numbers said, but I didn't recognize how I'd changed until I did a 10 year challenge on Facebook.  I put up a picture from 2011 and 2021, expecting to see more wrinkles, a fuller face, those kinds of changes.  Instead, I saw that my face had slimmed down a LOT.  I looked older but I also looked better.  It was a good shock.  I haven't really noticed the change in clothing because I wear leggings and baggy shirts more often than not.  But I did put on a pair of jeans the other day and had to hold them up.  So mentally, I'm feeling like I'm headed in the right direction with my weight loss.  And that makes me feel as though I'm successful in at least one thing.  

The second is that, for the most part, I was able to keep up with my Bullet Journal as well as my Today I... Yes, I have some months with missing moods tracked, or holes in the habit tracker.  But there are more days filled in than not.  Just the act of putting everything down makes me feel better.  It was one of my goals from last year and it's one that I've managed to be pretty successful with.  I also set up a large part of my 2022 Bullet Journal before the end of 2021 so I'm able to hit the ground running.  Last year, I had a separate planner and Bullet Journal and it was hard to keep up with both.  So I'm adding the planner into the BuJo.  I'll be posting more about that on Wednesday.

So I'm hoping for a new me this year.  A better me.  A happier me.  It may be early in the year, but so far, I am feeling positive that it will happen.

Me, a few days ago.  I'm liking who I am.

 

Working Wednesday - October's BuJo

 

I had meant to post this last week but as I mentioned in yesterday's post I had trouble getting anything written because of my depression.  But that post seems to have opened the floodgates and I'm back to being ready to post again.

I set up my October BuJo the weekend before last.  Some of it is a standard I've found that works well for me, some was just general experimentation, and some were things I found on Pintrest.  Without further ado, here are the pictures of my October layouts.

I'm finding that I like my Month in Review page at the beginning of the month.  This way I can keep track of what I'm doing more of each month.  I change up how they are written each month because nothing has really jumped out at me as a layout to use every time.  I used monthly stickers for October from the Peter Pauper collection and a dual writing orange/black pen from Mr. Pen.  The boxes were a stencil with a set of the five boxes together.  I just added the second column.  (I can't remember which stencils these are - I've gotten so many since I started.   This will be the case for any of my stencils.)

My "What I've..." lists are another staple of my monthly lay out..  Like the Month in Review, the layout itself changes from month to month.  I'm not sure how happy I am with this one - I was thinking of just writing things any which way and it would look like a mind map.  In reality, I have difficulty with that.  I also realized that I should have had my Played be a bit bigger this month, what with TN Game Days and all.  I'm a little behind in writing down what I've read.  That should be in the next day or so.

This is a design I cribbed from someone on Pintrest.   I liked the idea of a mood web for Halloween.  I free-hand drew the web, only using a straight edge for the lines.  The colors for the moods are fairly standard for me.  I always include the name of the color so I don't forget which of the many shades I have I'm using for which particular mood.  I did use a stencil for the boxes for the colors though.

This is my monthly habit tracker and, honestly it's the one thing that doesn't seem to change from month to month.  I think I've finally hit on a layout that works really well for me.  I just use a straight edge to make the boxes and freehand write the rest.  What I like about my tracker is that along with including my "Did I?" habits, I'm also able to include my sleep, energy and stress levels for each day along with the number of steps I took according to my step tracker.  I use the color of my mood for that day to color in what I've done each day, and I like the look of the stacked bar graph for my sleep/energy/stress.  I had tried a line graph but that didn't work as well for me.  The only problems are when I have the same numbers for more than one benchmark.  Then I just kind of shade one color into the next.

My last page of my monthly layout is a calendar for the month.  It's not an in-depth calendar but more a colorful view of what is coming up in the month.  It also gives me a chance to use some of the Peter Pauper Teacher/Student/Parent stickers I have to keep track of things.  I have a more detailed monthly calendar in my actual planner, but this is good for a quick look.

In the next month or two, I need to start setting up my 2022 BuJo.  I'm thinking of doing away with a planner and BuJo and instead have it all just in my BuJo.  I can keep a yearly, monthly and weekly calendar in the front and other things like my weight tracker, my cleaning schedule, the books I want to read,  behind it.   So look for those in the upcoming month.

Working Wednesday - September BuJo Layout

 

I'm sorry that I missed posting yesterday.  It was... one of those days.  I'm planning on typing up my week's worth of posts over the weekend in the hopes that maybe, just MAYBE, I'll be able to have a full week's worth of posts the way I'd like.

Anyway, I am here today and I'm ready to show off the September BuJo spread that I've been working on.  I got a new set of dual-tip pens that I used to do some of the writing.  Next year, I'm thinking of making my BuJo more of a planner and less of an "everything" journal, partly because I want to use more of the stickers that I've got.   As I make more decisions and do more creation, I'll be sure to post it here!

          

This is my "Month in Review" pages.  I decided to change up the raw number pages because I've found that I've been giving myself a lot of room for numbers and end up not needing them.  I used a stencil that had the tags for a a pie chart.  The tags with the circles seemed to be perfect for what I wanted.  My "What I've..." is standard for most of the months already.

I was trying to think of something that said "September" for my September Mood Tracker and saw a leaf tracker someone else had used.  I hand drew this one and used the same colors that I'd been using for my moods as months past.  I'm really hoping that I will end up with an interesting, happy looking leaf by the end of the month.

I started using this layout a couple of months ago for my habit tracking.  It's not too difficult to draw - straight edges do most of the work.  And the bottom gives me the room to keep track of my sleep, energy and stress levels, along with the number of steps I've taken each day.  Over all, it helps keep me on track for the month, and able to count things up more easily for my raw numbers at the end of the month.

I decided to make a month calendar this time around.  I don't usually do so - I have my regular planner and that gives me more room to write things in.  But this one, I figured I'd just color code for things that I had upcoming without any information.  We've got Rich and my Anniversary and Pete's birthday this month, plus several doctor's appointments and some days where school is closed.  It will make things much easier to look at in the long run.

This picture isn't from my BuJo but from my planner.  I use a Clever Fox planner to keep me up to date each week.  I've found the note section a good place to use many of my stickers.  Usually I'll use one like a writing prompt and write down things that relate to it.  This week, I decided that I was going to go all stickers.  So I'm trying to make this week about getting off my ass, not failing and knowing that the only limits that I have are the ones  that I impose on myself.  And so far, so good.

          

I rarely post pictures at the end of the month for how things look once they've been colored in, so I thought I'd share a picture for near the end of the August's mood and habit trackers.  As you can see, I had a difficult time keeping on top of things near the beginning and the middle of the month, partly because of the sick that plagued me in the middle of the month.  But I've had several days that were fairly productive.  And I decided that making a stacked bar graph for my sleep/stress/energy was easier than a line graph.  It's easier to see some of it without crossing lines or having two meeting at the same level.  I'm proud enough of it to keep using this month too.

So that's my layout for September, along with a look at my end of August.  Let me know if any of my layouts inspire you.  I get my inspiration from others, so I'm hoping I can do the same for all of you!

Working Wednesday - August BuJo Set Up

 

This month has been so incredibly busy for me that I haven't had as much of a chance to be creative as I'd like.  I have done a little role-playing, as well as a few pages in my Bullet Journal here and there, but my mental energies have been going to so many other things right now.  I was hoping that I'd have something interesting to share today, but sadly it's just my usual August BuJo pages and a few others that I worked on tonight.

I couldn't get as creative, mentally, this month.  I tried to figure out something that would tie into school starting, but until this moment, nothing came to mind (Pencils.  I could have used colored pencils as my mood tracker.)  But, on the good side, I was able to use some of my newer stencils.  I may also be adding more of the multitude of stickers I have as well (note to self: that might work for next week's Working Wednesday....)  Still, for all that it wasn't as creative as I would otherwise have liked, it's a fairly solid set of layouts, so here we go.

             

These are my Month in Review scoring blocks.  I've liked having a one or two page spread where I can see at a glance how much I've read, watch, lost weight, walked.... Since I have every month with a flag on it, it makes it easier for me to compare one month to the next or to pull everything together at the end of the year.  I used an orange Frixion Marker Pen for the stenciled words, and Sharpie Medium Point Pen (I love them because they don't bleed through like most of my other marker pens do.)  

           

These are my "What I've..." boxes.  It gives me a place to write down the books, movies, TV shows and games that make an appearance through the month.  I've learned through the months of doing this that my Reading list has a tendency to be longer than any of my others.  So "Watched" and "Played" are together on one page and "Read" is by itself.  I again used the Sharpie for the outlines, but used my light blue Frixion Erasable Pen for the stencils and the flags.

             

This is my August Mood Tracker (on the left) and my habit/sleep/stress/energy/step trackers (on the right).  I also had a bit of room on the left hand page, so I decided to put a little calendar there so I can more easily keep track of what day of the week is what without having to count backward.  The little gold colored box is the day the kids go back to school.  Not that I'm excited for the day or anything....  For the left hand page, I used my newer stencils for all of it. (Actually, everything stenciled - including the flagged boxes above, were from my newer stencils. )  I used the Sharpie pen for the outlines, and my green Frixion for the days of the week and the hand writing.  The colors for the moods are a set of double sided colored pencils that I got.... who remembers where.  I had to start writing the name of the color along with the mood because by the end of the month, I'd forget what exact color I chose.  This works so much better.

The right was done with a straight edge and my navy blue Frixion pen.  I was going to try stenciling but they didn't line up the way I wanted, so I just straight-edged through the dots.  My sleep line is pink, stress light blue and energy purple.

                    

These final pages were ones I did tonight while watching a Webinar.  On the left, it was just a bunch of doodles.  I was trying to find a lettering style that I could write without having to use a stencil and that would look kinda need.  I'm not too pleased, but that's because I didn't really have a vision.  The right is the list of things I need to pick up during tax free weekend this upcoming weekend.  I still need to go through all my other school supplies to see what I don't need to duplicate, but at least I have everything in one place now!

And that's it, my BuJo layouts for the last few days.  Feel free to steal wholly if you like, or riff off of them or whatever.  I just do them to keep me on track.  You need to do you.

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Working Wednesday - The Latest in my BuJo

 I love my Bullet Journal.  I'm always trying to think of new ideas of things to put in it, always searching the web for new ideas.  So here's a look at a few of the latest pages that I created.  Please feel free to ask any questions about them that might catch your fancy.

One of the things I decided I needed to write out were the plans I had for different days of blogging.  If I have a plan for a different thing to write Monday through Friday, I'm hoping it will make it easier to actually keep up with a schedule.  It will also be a good thing to look back at in the future, especially if I make changes to the blog over the years.

Along with coming up with my blog writing themes, I also wanted to try to get focused with other parts of my life.  I also have a plans for cleaning a different room each day, rather than trying to focus on one room a week, or just catching wherever I could.  And since I'm trying to exercise every day - even if it's only 15 minutes of yoga - I'm trying to write those down as well.  It also gave me a bit of a chance to use some of the stickers that I'd purchased to help keep me motivated.

One of the big suggestions that I've seen are bucket list type things relating to an upcoming age.  Since I have about 2 1/2 years until I turn 50, I'm going to come up with 50 things to do before I turn 50.  I haven't come up with all 50 things yet - you'll see a lot of blanks on the page.  But even if I add just a little each week, I should have my list together and be able to work through my list.

I have a tendency to forget things that I'm looking forward to coming out.  I miss when books are being released, when movies are coming out, when TV shows are going to start back up.  So I thought that making a spread for the rest of the year will give me a place to mark them down and to check out as each month is coming up.  At the moment, I've got mostly books and movies.  I've gotten away from a lot of TV watching (I've become a big binger), but I am anxiously awaiting Leverage: Redemption next month.  Leverage is one of my favorite shows so I can't wait to see what happens here!

Trying to Find my Balance

 I'd really thought I was going to get back to blogging regularly back in February.  Then school happened and life happened and I didn't quite get back to it.  But now school is out for the year here in Nashville, I have my own computer and (hopefully) I'll have a bit more time to post on my journal.  After all, today is the first day of the month.  I might as well try to make some changes.  I even entered all the books I've read since February into GoodReads and posted my first review in about 8 years on Views from the Reader Side.  I've got my BuJo set up for the next month, I'm getting some things organized around the house and I'm actually feeling pretty good about it all.  I'm feeling good about a lot because a lot of things are seeming to be ok.

I've started joining a few events on Eventbright that is working toward both making me healthier and more creative.  I've got a couple regular journaling events, a couple of regular yoga events, and a few book clubs that I haven't had a chance to join in yet but I have signed up for.   I'm getting a head on the reading because even if something happens and I can't keep up with it, I'll still have read some awesome books.

Speaking of reading, I'm also participating in the Nashville Pubic Library Summer Reading Program.  I've already made the first goal of 600 minutes reading (though I haven't logged them all yet).  I'm hoping to put reviews up for all the books that I read on Goodreads, mirrored to Views from the Reader Side.  If any of my readers are also participating in a reading program, I'd love to hear what you are reading as well.  Either here or on VftRS.  Books are always good.

I also found an older... I don't like to use the word "game" because it's not really a game.  It's more a way to help bolster people anonymously.  It's called Kind Words and I check it out a couple times a day.  You can post your own 7 line thing that you want to talk about - good, bad, curious about the others that are in the world as well.  And then you can browse through letters others have left to give them kind words of support, encouragement, and just general goodness.  (And sometimes you may even have advice to give!)  The only problem I have with it is that there are times I get replies from people and I want to write back so badly and it's not set up for that.  It's still all pretty cool and it helps when I'm having a rough day.  

With that, I will close this post for now.  But, because I'm actually pretty proud of it, I'm going to share my June Layouts in my Bullet Journal.  I promise this will be in separate blog posts for those who have no interest in it later.  

My June in Review data page.  I fill this out at the end of the month to cover the numbers and give me a place to look at the month over all.

This gives me a place to write down the books I read, the TV shows and movies that I watch and the games that I play - whether they be board, computer or console.

This is my tracker for the month.  I haven't figured out a tracking system that I like yet, so I'm still messing with this.d

I'm trying to get back into FlyLady, so I put all my routines down in writing.  This way, hopefully I'll be able to keep on top of things a bit better.

This page breaks down my home by zones and what needs to be done in each of them monthly.  Like with the daily and weekly above, I'm hoping this will keep me on track.

Getting into February

I'm one month in to my BuJo.  While I used it for note jotting, making some master lists, things like that.  But when it came to keeping track of the things that I wanted to keep track of... not so much.  I did do my look back at January, so that was something.  I did find that I wasn't watching as many things but I did read a fair amount.  I didn't keep up with my step numbers - in part because my Garmin died partway through the month and I was waiting for my new one to arrive.  I should have started keeping track from that point forward, but I didn't and today is a new day and as good a place to start as any.  I also didn't keep track of my weight like I'd wanted, or how many times I missed my meds. Still, it gives me a place to start for February.

My January in Review pages

I've got a decent start for February already.  I spent some time last night making up all the pages I wanted to keep for habit tracking and the like.  I got a bunch of new stencils that helped with some of the designs I wanted to do.  I've marked today with what I've done so far, which is a step in the right direction.  I'm hoping to get myself back on track with a lot of things, including moving forward with my 101 in 1001.  I'll admit that I haven't really looked at it the way I should.  I still need to work out a schedule for myself to figure out what and how I want to focus things.

February in Review

Habits and Notes

At a Glance

So this is what I'm ready for in February.  Between my BuJo and my Clever Fox Planner, I hope I'll be able to stay on track a little more for the next month and beyond.