When 2011 rolled around, I made some "quiet" resolutions. I did not want to announce them on my blog or facebook in fear of failure or lack of motivation. After listening to Seth Godin's new audio book "Poke the Box", I have decided to throw that fear in the closet, shut the door and forget it's there. So here I am letting a few people in on my few resolutions and accomplishments so far in twenty-eleven:
#1 Read More - I got caught in a rut of just reading magazines and facebook posts. I was getting no true value out it so I decided I would read more starting with blogs and moving to books. I found a RSS feed software called NewsFire to help me organize the blogs I want to follow. I have meticulous picked some blogs that I have great interested and since have "unsubscribe" to those who don't really excite me. I follow a variety of people and topics - leadership, inspiration, Seth Godin, mommy blogs about real world parenting, and friends as well. I have found such great material following this glimpses of other people worlds. Such as: TED conferences, Seth's new book, other books for my "to-read" list. I look forward to reading them and it's great to have a tool that puts them in one place and doesn't junk up my inbox.
# 2 Make the time to exercise - As every mom knows if hard to find the time to do it all especially exercise. You work all day at your job then come home and spend the remaining daylight hours with your family. And when the kids are tucked into bed, you have a couple hours to catch on the stuff that you put off. I decided to take those hours and devote one to exercise. By no means am I hard core. I have no desire to lose an obscene amount of weight - I just want to feel good & be healthy. I just needed to start somewhere. So I reclaimed the basement as my workout area. I use my laptop to play my workout DVD's. I started with some cheesy aerobic stuff then my brother in law gave me the P90X series. I've been doing that since January. Again, I'm not total devote to the actual workout. Six days straight sometimes just doesn't work out for me. But the series gets me motivated, it's hard, it has variety and I'm still doing.
#3 Get a handle on dinners - This one took me awhile to get my hands around. I guess since I'm so organized at work, I tried not to be that at home - weird I know. Well, it clearly wasn't working. James and I were both frustrated with the lack of meal prep or fore thought. We never had the right ingredients for anything and alot of our meal ended up being - grilled chicken, veggie, rice. That gets old after awhile. Therefore, I began to organize this particular situation. I started a binder with pre-printed grocery list (all you have to do is circle the item on the list - I have a template if you need one). On the grocery list it has a meal section to write in what you plan to have on what day - fabulous! The binder also house our tax receipts, any other important need-to-keep receipts and a stash of birthday cards- a little one stop shop if you will.
After I created the binder, I went through this huge recipe binder that we have been keeping for years. I separated the recipes in 3 categories - favorites, want to try, and toss. Now my recipe book has all of my favorite recipes. I took the "want to try" pile and placed it in my day-to-day binder. This way when I sit down on the weekend to plan the week and grocery shopping, I have a stack of recipes to choose from. And my methodology is if we cook it and it sucks then we throw the recipe out. But if we cook it and it's great it goes in the main recipe book in the back. I do the week's grocery shopping on Friday night or Saturday therefore we have everything we need for the week (no small trips to the store). And James knows what's on the menu for that night in case I'm not home in time to start prepping the meal. We are on week 4 of this and it's working out beautifully. We have had some awesome, stress-free meals. I'm so glad I used my strength of organization to get this one aspect of life in order. Crazy that it took so long to do.
So there I am - exposed. The best part about these resolutions/goals is that I am still motivated to keep them going. I like the planning and organizing I have done so far. It works for me. I still may not have an amazing Cindy Crawford body but dinner will be excellent. Obviously, I'm not stopping at these three items. There will be more to come.
No comments:
Post a Comment