I always have the best of intentions...

...yet some how they just don't always work out. Sigh, I'm so bad to start something and then stop only to begin again MONTHS later. God has been showing me lately that I really need to work on my follow through on things that I begin. In a lot of ways it's tied in to my patience struggles. I get impatient with the lack of results, with how long something takes, or any number of other things and I quit or give up or move on, pick the phrase you like but it equates to the same thing. Also, I get busy and side-tracked and then leave projects to sit and sit and sit. Anyway, I'm trying to learn to have more discipline in my daily life, which leads me to my one and only true goal for the year: practice more self-discipline! I have many different areas that I want to be more self-disciplined in, so it's definitely a broad and far-reaching goal. I'm trying to just work on it in babysteps by building good habits over time, to hopefully keep the stress of feeling like I have to do it all (and do it NOW) to a minimum. I love to play at being organized though it doesn't usually last very long, so we'll see how it goes.

If you're interested, here's my plan:

First, I put the areas of my life into general categories. For me this is spiritual, physical(exercise), meal planning, homemaking, homeschooling, kids (as in what we need to work on for them, like schedules) and personal (hobbies, "me time").

Then I sat down and made (or found online) lists of what I wanted to accomplish in these areas. Anything was fair game and I'm adding to the lists as I come up with more. For the most part I'm trying to stick to things that lend themselves to building good habits. I have a separate list for "to do"s that are one time things.

Each Sunday I sit down and pick out a few habits to work on for the week. lol, I say each, but really it's just been last Sunday and today, but this is my plan for the future as well. Today I looked over my list from last week and some I did well on while some I completely missed. I pretty much kept all the same habits from last week, though, because I didn't feel like I was one hundred percent nailing any of them. But you know what, that's OKAY! I didn't make this my list of what I wanted done in a certain timeframe, I just move on as I finish each one. I saw improvements in a lot of my little habits this week and to me that's what matters.

To borrow a phrase from the FlyLady, Marla Cilley, "Progress, not Perfection!".