New Week - New Goal

Okay, last week went great!  My goal was to exercise for 5 minutes Monday - Friday and I did it!  There were a couple days that I didn't want to do it, but I just told myself, "It's only for 5 MINUTES, JUST DO IT!!"  And then I did it.

I've been pondering what goal to do next this whole past week and have had a hard time deciding.  I've changed my mind every other day about what is the most important thing to work on.  It's hard because my list of "self improvements" is just sooo long (:

 But I ultimately decided I would work on getting my sleep schedule in order.  The ultimate goal is to get up at 5 am and go to bed between 9 & 10 pm every night, every day of the week.  It's such a hard one because I love having quiet time to veg at night, but  my days go so much better when I am up early (especially with getting homeschooling done) and I feel like I get so much more accomplished.  I also really need to work on always getting a full 8 hours every night.  I probably wouldn't be so desperate for that quiet time at night if I weren't so grumpy and tired during the day.

So my baby steps towards this goal, are to make sure every night this week I am  in bed by midnight and up at 8 am.  That seems easy enough.  Then I will slowly work the goal up 15 minutes at a time each week.

Since this will be week four and I now have 4 things that I'm working on, I'm going to make the baby steps to my other goals even smaller, so that it doesn't feel like too much.  I'll...

 1) keep listening to my audio thing at night

2) I've been drinking 3 cups of water a day.  I'm now just going to fill my water bottle to the top which is just under 4 cups of water.

3) Exercise 6 minutes a day.  Originally I was going to add more than a minute, but decided to keep it small because the sleeping goal is going to be a hard one for me.  I have such a hard time making myself go to bed at night.


While I work on this new goal I'm going to read an article every day around lunch time about the benefits of  getting a good nights sleep.  Just trying to motivate myself and remember why it's important.  My reward each morning for getting up at 8 is going to be a nice glass of pulpy orange juice in a special fancy glass that I someone just gave to me (:  Also I'm going to find some motivation quotes about getting up early and make it my alarm clock on my phone, so that I wake up to good reasons why I should get out of bed.

One thing the Zen Habits guy talks about on his blog is having simple rewards for accomplishing your goals, and triggers (a trigger is the thing you do right before your goal that reminds you to do it.)

For instance, my trigger for drinking my water each day was that I would get it out of the fridge and start drinking it with my breakfast.  The reward for drinking all my water was that I could then have my can of soda (:  Now the trigger for drinking my water is to get it when I exercise.

My trigger for exercise is to do it first thing when I get out of bed in the morning (after the bathroom and prayers of course).  My reward for exercising is I am not allowed to check fb until I exercise first.

So now my schedule will go like this :  Up at 8.  Change and enjoy PULPY OJ (:  Exercise 6 minutes and get water out to start drinking.  In bed at midnight (and listen to audio book).

That's it.  Are you still doing baby steps Mel?  Or have you decided a different course of action?  I Would love to hear what you are up to.

PS - Tonight I got totally ticked off at Ian, because he was complaining that it takes me 10 minutes to say what could be said in one sentence.  He tells me that I wander off topic, take too long to get to my point, and do too much unnecessary explaining.  Yeah, I was so mad, I haven't talked to him for a couple hours now.

I was only going to get on tonight and write 3 sentences covering what goals I did last week and what goals I plan to do next week.  Instead I wrote out another novel.  I'm beginning to think I have a problem.  Maybe I should give the guy a break for having to listen to my rambling all the time and start talking to him again...