December Goals: Forming Habits To Prepare For The New Year

I've been sharing some of my attempts at becoming a more organized person.  So far, I feel pretty good about my progress, but I know that I still have a *long* way to go!  So this month, I basically want to work on taking things slow and trying to form some habits.

I know that I am a person who gets all these ideas (too many ideas at once) and I want to implement them all right away, and then I get tired and burnt out and just stop.  *That* is the problem I am trying to address this month, because I wish to be doing much better at keeping up with things in the coming year.

Motivation at the top of my To-Do list!

Here are a few things I plan to continue doing this month:

• Doing 1 load of dishes and 1 load of laundry each day. (I slacked on the dishes yesterday and they are still over there waiting for me...).  I read a post that suggested setting up a google calendar to give you reminders of everyday things, instead of just appointments (lots of great tips in that post for frazzled mamas!).  So now I get alerts on my phone asking if I've done the dishes and whatnot.
• Menu Planning.  (Then, remembering to get everything ready.  Last night I thawed dinner, and rolls from the freezer, forgot to bake the rolls and then when they were almost done, realized I hadn't made the rice!)
• Making Lunches Ahead Of Time
• Having my daughter straighten her room and pick out clothes for the next day after dinner (that has been a huge solution to the morning fights of "oh no you can't wear that" because we can adjust the night before).
• Continue training my children to put things where they belong (instead of wherever they decide to drop it...and yes I do realize that this will be ongoing, probably into their teens.)

Here are a few things I would like to get accomplished this month/begin making habits of:

• Finish re-organizing my pantry/garage shelves and write dates on items in permanent marker.  I want to get in the habit of doing this to new items before they are shelved.
• Get into a better habit of using my blogging binder/organizer (its been hit and miss but I'm getting better).
• Have at least a couple of blog posts pre-scheduled the night before, so I have more time to play with my daughter during the day.
• Make lists of what I need to do the next day before I go to bed at night.
• Start going to bed earlier and getting up earlier.
• Finish up the 4 library books I've got checked out before I check out any more  (I'm a sucker for books!)

I'm really trying to not overwhelm myself.  I'm not superwoman, and I have destructive little minions roaming about, so I'm going for a bit of balance instead of three days of psycho cleaning mode and then collapsing until psycho cleaning is necessary once more.

I'm sharing this with you because I want you to know that I'm just a normal person with many, many flaws.  A lot of times, I read a blog post and think "Wow!  That person must have it all together!  I wish I could get it together like her!"  But that may or may not be true.  I think we all have a tendency to compare ourselves to others and beat ourselves up because of our shortcomings, and never really look at our strengths.

Nobody is perfect.  We all have good days, and bad days, and even worse days.  We all face slumps where we don't feel like doing anything, and we have all days where we overdo it because we have a burst or energy.  That's just life.  We can't dwell over one single moment, we just have to imagine our life is like a graph.  It will have peaks and troughs, we just need to make sure that slowly but surely it is heading in the direction we want it to go!