Month in Review

I'm back after spending the weekend with the family. I watched many movies, slept a lot, cuddled much with my baby boy. It was a pretty good weekend. Feeling rested, relaxed, rejuvenated, raring to go!

A new month began on Friday so I thought I'd take a few minutes to check in on my goal progress so far this year. No sense waiting until the end of the year and then trying to get on track at the last minute. It's good to see how I'm doing and understand where I need improvement.

If you forget what my goals are you can read them again here. I don't really have any way to track procrastination other than by my lists in my day planner and of course, it's only been a month so it's all fresh in my memory at this point anyway. In January I was strong and focused, on top of the procrastination situation, every week consistently except for one little relapse mid-month that lasted about 3-5 days, brought on by a bit of an emotional crises (I didn't just get lazy). The thing I noticed during this relapse was that even though I lost focus, I was still getting some stuff done. Everything didn't go by the wayside, only some things. To me this shows progress, that the world didn't come to a complete stop. Also my bounce-back was quite good, speedy and total, which impressed me. This might only make sense to people prone to falling into depression. One major accomplishment this month was the cleaning out and organizing of all the files in my email. Every day I dealt with email as it dropped in, never keeping any email until the next day. Then I took time here and there and started going through the build-up, dealing with it, filing it in My Documents where it automatically gets backed up to the server, or scheduling it into my calendar with a reminder that automatically gets sent to me when I need to perform a follow-up action. I started this New Year post-PC-Crash with close to 6000 email messages in my inbox and another 100 or so in email folders. Many of the 6000 had been dealt with already, but they were in the back-up, so they came back. Regardless I still had to look at them and see if I had dealt with them before I deleted them again, so it wasn't a small job. Today, I have 29 items in my inbox, none in other files. And there would have been less than 29 had I not just arrived back from a weekend away without checking email. This is definitely progress.

On the walking front, I wore my pedometer everyday in January and wrote down my steps at the end of each day so I would have a record. There were good days, and there were terrible days. I only got over 10,000 steps on three days. I averaged 5107 steps per day. This is actually what average people average on a daily basis without trying. So for me that's progress. I've gone from a sod to average joe. My average when I'm not paying attention drops drastically because so much of my day is spent on my butt in front of a computer screen. It's good to have the data though, very helpful.

On the creative writing front, I need to do some work. Yes, I tracked my word count. I wrote down zero upon zero upon zero day after day after day . . . But I did write a few days and by write I don't mean blogging and I don't mean bnm work stories or essays or anything else. By writing I mean completely creative for no other reason than it makes me happy fictional writing. I shudder to think how many words I write a day when you factor in all that other crap, but when it comes to my own personal creative writing I averaged 131 words per day, which I gotta say is 131 more words per day than all of last year, so it's a beginning.

And with that, I'm declaring January 2008 a raging success! Onward into February!

Mood: giddy
Drinking: nothing at the moment
Listening To: the door slamming downstairs
Hair: spiky