I know that it�s possible to make major changes to one�s way of living, because I have made changes in the past and held on to them for many weeks... not exactly long-term, I know, but significant for a person like me who has the attention span of your average three-year-old.

Moods, motivation, feelings and interest level are NOT reliable indicators for me of what I should or should not be doing. Certainly they need to come into play when choosing what I want to make of my life over the long term, but on a day-by-day basis, going by what I �feel like� doing at any given moment is almost assuredly a recipe for overall life failure.

What works for me is to have a plan and then stick to that plan regardless of my shifting moods and the circumstances of the day. This is not news to most people, I know. But for me it is life-changingly, earth-movingly important information that needs to be kept in the front of my brain at all times.

I am not a person who can �wing it� successfully on most stuff. Some people seem to be able to just do what comes naturally to them and somehow find that everything important always manages to get attended to regardless of whatever unexpectedly pops up in any given day. They just mentally reorganize, reprioritize and move on. Not I. Not having a naturally organized brain, the only way I can accomplish a task with many steps or work a plan with many pieces is to work out in advance what I am supposed to be doing and when, and then try never to deviate from my routine.

Coming up with a plan initially is the difficult part... finding the time and all the pertinent information and then making myself sit down with it to pull it all together. Being realistic is the other most difficult part. Things like time, money and motivation seem abundant on paper but rarely stretch as far as I think they will in real life. Still, if I can once come up with a plan and then work at it long enough to tweak out the bugs as I go along, I can sometimes come up with a really effective plan for managing my life (or some aspect of it, at least.)

My weight, our budget and organization are the my �Big Three� nemeses (just pretend with me that I�d actually ever use a word like that in conversation--we all know that what I�d actually say out loud is, �They always fuck me up!�) Lack of organization is an integral part of the problem with the other two, but it�s also a portable, all-purpose problem in its own right, one that I bring along with me to season everything I touch. At various times in my life I�ve enjoyed a degree of success in one of those areas or another, for a period of time. And it�s almost always been due to having stumbled upon a workable plan.

Getting a workable plan down on paper is only the first hardest part. Once it�s all laid out and worked at long enough to work out all the unaccounted-for details, I like to think that that�s it, but it never ever is. Circumstances change, and usually that requires going all the way back to step one and writing up a whole NEW plan. On some level I KNOW this is going to happen eventually, it�s just that I never expect it to happen as soon as it does. I�m thinking in a few years I might have to adjust the plan... somehow it always turns out to be more like weeks. Maybe I need to have a day built-in to the plan for planning? That way I'd always have a pre-arranged time I have to make myself sit down and work on tweaking or rearranging my schedule according to whatever new stuff is going on. It's probably not foolproof, and I'm just the fool to find the holes in the theory, but maybe it would help. Maybe.

There are a few things I want to get working on, those being of course the aforementioned trio of problems with my weight, money and general organization (house and schoolwork being the current focus of that one.) Naturally the first thing I need is a plan, in this case a �basic week plan� as commanded by the FlyLady. With a new school schedule every quarter, this could become interesting... a plan that worked this quarter may not even begin to work for the following quarter. So I need to build into this plan a plan for changing the plan.

First and foremost on this plan has got to be a regular bedtime. I do not sleep enough... I never feel I have enough TIME to sleep enough, and yet I know that when I do make the time to sleep more as part of an organization plan, my time seems to expand accordingly. There is a theory that lack of sleep is related to obesity (due to it fucks up your brain chemicals somehow.) I just read somewhere that getting nine hours of sleep can increase your metabolism up to 40%! I don�t remember how reliable the source of this info was, but it�s certainly worth a try, don�t you think? The next most important thing is to keep the kitchen clean. I probably waste more money on food than on any other one single thing. If the kitchen is a mess I want to go out and eat. Having to clean up the kitchen before I cook just SUCKS. Cleaning up after a meal is a much simpler operation, but if I had to spend an hour cleaning before I can cook, and then spend an hour cooking, how likely is it that I�m going to spend another second in there to clean up afterwards? Yet this is precisely what I need to do... or more precisely, I need to clean up afterwards on a daily basis and avoid the hour of cleaning beforehand altogether. I don�t even enjoy going out all that much anymore... there�s lots of times it would have been cheaper and more satisfying to whip up something quick here at home, but we went out anyway because I didn�t want to deal with a week�s worth of smelly dishes and trash beforehand.

Exercise is another thing that needs time allotted for it, for it will never occur to me to just do it without some kind of plan. The walking is just not cutting it... you�d think after six months of walking a mile to and from work everyday that I�d have seen a noticeable increase in my fitness level, wouldn�t you? But such does not seem to be the case. My shins still hurt, in fact my muscles just kind of feel stiff and ache and hurt all over, and climbing up three flights of stairs still gets me way too much out of breath. It�s not helping me, and I�m not enjoying it.

I bought an exercise tape that is a 40 minute, total-body weightlifting workout and I think I�m going to try doing that three times a week and then do yoga another three days to help with the stiffness and muscle pains. I�ve also discovered that I can get a pass to the PE building on campus for $10 a quarter which would give me access to a heated, olympic-sized pool... an hour of swimming a couple of days a week would be an enjoyable way to get in a little more exercise. I�m going to be right near the PE building twice a week after my drawing class, and Tuesdays and Thursdays are going to be kind of a waste anyway as far as getting anything accomplished, since I�ve got classes those days in the morning and evening this quarter. I might as well get in some fun, relaxing exercise on those days instead.

So now comes the fun part... putting all these ideas into an actual plan, and also including such fun stuff as laundry and housecleaning and bill-paying and grocery buying and cooking. Oh, yeah... homework and READING ASSIGNMENTS need to go in there too.

I can do this... I just need to plan intelligently, working around times I know my motivation is going to be low or non-existant. And I need a plan for getting back on track after our mini-vacations in July and August. THAT fucks me up real good every time.

Today I�m concentrating on the kitchen, my laundry and general picking up and cleaning around here. I think it would be a great boost to The Plan to start out with a reasonably clean apartment.

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Previous - Next
Last Five
Crappy job crap, weird neighbor, and someone whose baby I apparently want to have - 2006-05-08
Live from the dump - 2006-04-09
Kind of like a muzzle for your brain - 2006-03-29
...and then she fell ass-first into my cereal bowl - 2006-03-28
Playing catch-up - 2006-03-27

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