New Month, New Me: August 2018 Challenge
/2018 has been THE BUSIEST year of my entire life. No exaggeration. From girls trips to weddings to destination birthday parties to bridal showers and bachelorette parties, family reunions and concerts, I’ve literally done it all and it’s only August. I still have so much more to do! More weddings, more bridal showers and bachelorette parties, more concerts and even a few football games. So far this year I've been to Denver, LA, Greensboro, Nashville, and Cancun, and I've gone back and forth to Chicago so much it feels like I still live there. I still have 4 more trips scheduled this year for Orlando, Las Vegas, Tuscaloosa, and San Francisco but if it sounds like I’m complaining, I’m not. I’m so grateful for this life. I’m so grateful to be able to travel so much, celebrate with my friends, and spend so much time with family even though I live 4.5 hours away. I’m just exhausted! I’ve been going, going, going so much that I haven’t had the opportunity to take time for myself. So now that Summer '18 is winding down and I get at least two weekends out of the month to be in town, I want to spend some time working on getting my life together.
One of the ways I plan to do that is by going back to doing my monthly challenges. If you’ve read my first blog post, you know that every year I choose a Word of the Year to provide clarity and purpose for what I want to achieve that year. Well a few years ago, I was introduced to a planner that would help me take that one step farther. In addition to the Yearly Theme, there’s an opportunity to complete monthly challenges to focus on a habit that you'd like to create or break. I love this method, because this is what Kaizen is about: making small, gradual improvements over time to achieve lasting change.
For the month of August, my goal is to Increase My Productivity. I’ve realized that the last few months I’ve been all over the place (literally and figuratively), getting a lot done, but not efficiently or effectively. I’m always late for everything, I frequently forget things, and I’m never really focused, and it’s because I haven’t done a good job of planning.
So, my plan of action is to focus on 3 simple things:
Waking up by 5:45am every weekday morning (Originally by goal was 5:30am, but I wanted to be realistic and allow time to snooze my alarm at least once lol)
Getting to work by 8:00 am (at the absolute latest)
Making sure to open my planner every single day
I chose these 3 things because I've identified them as actionable countermeasures to the reasons why I’ve had such low levels of productivity lately. (I did a 5 Why analysis to determine the root causes. More about that in a later post.)
I will be tracking my progress daily using my planner and process control boards that I’ve created. There are a few other tools and apps that I plan to use to help with times when I’m easily distracted or when I have some extra free time.
I’ve also chosen a few books to read, some podcasts to listen to, and some TedTalks and YouTube videos to watch, in order to keep myself motivated and also learn new methods and habits to increase my productivity.
It may seem like I’m doing the most, but I’ve gotten the most successful results by creating a plan, establishing a solid system to track my progress, and fully immersing myself in knowledge to truly learn, grow, and sustain.
"Measurement is the first step that leads to control and eventually to improvement. If you can’t measure something, you can’t understand it. If you can’t understand it, you can’t control it. If you can’t control it, you can’t improve it."
- H. James Harrington