Monthly Goals Update & Progress – May 2016

I believe in the wordings ‘A goal is a dream with a deadline’.  I understood the power of this quote only few months back. Ever since I grasped the power of that statement, I have been setting deadline for every task I like to accomplish. I also learnt from experience that it is not sufficient to fix deadline alone, but in order to achieve that goal, I need to build essential habits. Hence I am focusing my energy on good habit formation these days.

May month has been very productive so far. In order to achieve my long term goals, I have started to build few habits on May. Today I want to share with you on what are those habits I set myself for May. And how much, I have progressed so far.

Writing

I want to write better. Hence I decided to write at least 5 minutes every day. I am happy that I managed to do this almost every week days of May. I didn’t do this task on weekends. Still I see great improvement on my writing. Initially I started to write on my journal, once I am able to do that consistently for about 15 days, I started to write here at Quotes Master. I want to stick to this habit and write consistently here.

Reading

I have always been a voracious reader. I love to read books. But after my son born on 2014, I stopped reading. Mostly I blamed my kids for not able to read anything productive.  But I felt guilty for doing that.

Couple of months back, my friend suggested that she has been using kindle app and it is very good. Just to try it out, I installed that app on my mobile phone. That was probably the best decision I ever made.

After installing the app, I subscribed to Kindle unlimited reading. Ever since then my reading habit picked up. This month I decided to read at least 15 minutes each day. I follow this consistently even on weekends. I love reading more than anything in my life. So I don’t just stop at 15 minutes, I read as much as I want. And this gradually helped me to write as well.

Journaling

Just like reading, I also love to write down my thoughts on paper. Earlier before kids, every day I write down my thoughts. It has always helped me to understand myself better. So once I started to develop writing habit, I decided to write about myself on a book. In that way I won’t run out of ideas. That’s how I began this habit.

I included this habit on my morning routine. Once I am done with my exercise, I would grab my book and start writing about the day. I stick to this on all weekday and don’t bother about it on weekends. I have made considerable progress on it. I am also happy that once I started to write down, my mind feels relaxed.

Exercise

I didn’t start this habit this month. I have been doing it since last month. I am not an overweight person. But two back to back c-section for my kids totally broke my body. Besides, my long working hours before laptop ruined my health more.

So I decided to look after my health. I started with 20 minutes exercise every day. Initially I didn’t know what to do. So I would do some basic yoga that I learnt on my childhood. Then one day while browsing I found about this lady. After that I became a huge fan of her. I started with her weight loss challenge 1.0 on April.

Till today I am doing this regularly. I bought down 5 pounds of my weight and now I am in better shape.

Eating Right

It goes without saying that once I started to exercise, I wanted to build good eating habits. But this is one of my toughest challenges. Even now I struggle very badly at this.

So instead of cutting down everything I eat, which is anyway impossible for me. I decided few things on April and I am trying to follow it now.

• I cut down sugary items
• I try to eat in portions
• I eat only when I am hungry
• I stop eating when I am 80% full
• I stop eating junks on weekdays as much as possible
• I relax my eating during weekends and would indulge on cheat meals.

All these are helping me out. I am sticking to this routine on May too. I see good improvement on my body and mind when I eat healthy. My only problem is consistency. Whenever I get emotional, I eat mindlessly. I need to work a lot on this area.

De-cluttering

This is another area where I struggle. I have infinite things to declutter in my life. I have thousands and thousands of emails, photos, documents to sort out. The mere thought of it makes my head swirl.

So I started this declutter habit on May. I don’t have much time to work on decluttering every day. Hence I have started small. I spend 10 minutes every day to declutter. It could be cleaning my mail box, or desktop, or clearing my daughter’s clothes ..etc.

I simply set my clock for 10 minutes, and do as much as cleaning as possible. Once the 10 minutes is over, I won’t bother to complete the task further. I will come back to it next day.

This 10 minutes rule helps me to stick to this habit as it is not a huge effort. Also I have done good progress on my declutter project even though I spend very less time on it.I stick to this only on week days and on weekends I don’t bother.

Some key points I understood myself about this month

• When I form any habit, if I track that activity via a excel sheet, I am able to clearly understand what works for me and what doesn’t work. I should come up with good tracking system for every task I do. At present I do this only for writing, exercising and for eating. I want to do tracking for all the other tasks too.

• Whenever my mind is clogged with thoughts, I should begin to read motivating book. This immediately clears my mind and diverts it. I figured it out on my journal.

That’s all for now. These are May month habits I am working upon. I feel happy to share it with you. What are your goals and what is your progress. Share it with me on the comments below.

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