After reading a bunch of other people’s journals, it made me want to write my own as well. However, my brain was telling me “but you’ll post two entries and then stop!” or “it wont be as good as other people’s and no one will read it, so don’t bother.”
Well. I may indeed stop posting after two entries, and I may be the only one that reads it - but I can’t stop thinking that I want to log my thoughts about this process somewhere, so… here we go!
New Goals
- draw - I spent a bit of time learning to draw last year, but I haven’t touched it since. I’d like to maintain that, just a tiny bit.
- justdance - the idea of playing Just Dance appeals to me immensely, plus it compliments my other fitness related goals in a fun manner. I’m terrified of playing it though. I’m awful at picking up new choreo and it makes me feel bad to think about. Yet I’ll never get better if I don’t practice, so.
- movies - this is a joint one with my other half. We enjoy watching movies, but we make such a big song and dance about the whole thing that I think we watch about one a year.
- questions - this has an end date (my assignment), and a goal amount (the number of questions in my assignment). The numbers are scary, but they always existed even without the beeminder goal. This just puts it where I can’t deny the amount of work I need to do every day.
- RetroAchievements - there is a community online that creates achievements for retro video games. It has reignited my passion for playing older games to a huge degree! The point of this goal is just to give me a fun goal to hit. I’m always going to be months ahead of it, so I might tweak it at some point to incentivise me to complete games rather than picking up new ones over and over.
- steps - I’m lucky if I hit 1000 steps on my days off, and now that I’m down to working only two days a week, that is not good at allllll.
- study - this is for me to put actual hours into my study time. Compliments the “questions” goal above.
- teeth - brushing my teeth twice a day on my days off is hard. My trigger for brushing my teeth has always been “just before I leave the house”.
- Thai - I picked up Thai language learning a few years ago and I loved it so much, but I fell off the wagon. This is just a simple one to have me do a little every day.
- tidy - turns out taking 5 mins to move dishes from the bedroom to the kitchen makes a huge difference, who knew?!
- workout - this tracks specifically any workout logged on my Apple Watch. This compliments the Just Dance goal.
Derailments
- justdance - I had to do one single dance. The thought of embarrassing myself (in front of just me) made me feel so physically anxious that I let myself derail. Talked myself into watching a single video of a just dance song on YouTube to make it feel less scary for next time (because I’ll be a bit more familiar with the dance, perhaps), and I’ve been looking hard into things to beat perfectionism to bring up with my therapist next time.
- study - made a mistake when I was trying to change the goal time and I derailed. Accepted the derailment as a reminder for me to be more careful next time. I did zero studying in the 7 day respite I got. Sigh.
Changes
I’ll need to go into each one and really think about how much safe time I want after a derailment, and to also make sure that my hobby goals aren’t so low as to make them inconsequential.
Thoughts
Most of my goals are tiny little things that (if I do a decent session one day) will tide me over for the rest of the week. The one I’m worried about the most is the study goal, but I can’t reduce the amount of time because I’m already under the “recommended” number of hours for my course. Still. I’d rather derail multiple times than fail my assignments.
