I hate when I fail my monthly challenges. I try to set them up to be things I can be successful at as well as things that I want to do. I always feel so accomplished when I end a month and see what I’ve been able to do. And so many of these monthly challenges are things that I still keep up with every day. I love that I have created so many positive and productive habits. And I always hope that whatever my next challenge will be that I have the same outcome.
But that wasn’t the case for this past month. Honestly, this may have been the biggest failure of a monthly challenge for me. I challenged myself to try to work on creating some weekly meal plans that I could have ready to go. A weekly meal plan seems easier to me than figuring out each day one by one to be ready for a week. And while having a meal plan still feels like a bit of a reach for me to be able to do, having a plan is the first step to making it happen. So even if I only planned out a good weekly meal plan but never used it, I would have considered that a win with this challenge.
I didn’t even get started with planning last month. Some of this was due to being busy with other things, but I can’t use that as an excuse. I could have found the time to do this if I really wanted to. But I never had the motivation to do it. I know that this would be something good for me, but I just didn’t want to. And this is the ongoing struggle I’ve had with being better at cooking at home. I don’t like to meal plan. I don’t seem to always feel motivated to cook. I don’t know what it will take to make this click for me, but I really want to be hopeful that something will. And I just have to keep trying until I figure it out. And I guess this idea wasn’t the right thing for me at this time. I’ll keep the idea in case I do find the motivation to do it, but I guess this past month made me realize while I loved the idea it wasn’t right.
And while I would love to have a monthly challenge this month that I know I will be able to be successful at to redeem myself from last month, I’m not going easy on myself. I picked another challenge that I have been putting off and I know there is a high risk of me having another big failure at doing. My challenge this month is to reorganize my desk and filing system.
This might not sound like a big deal, but my desk has become a catch-all place in my house. If I have paperwork I need to save for taxes, it gets dumped on my desk. Eventually, I’ll put it in the file folder I have for taxes, but there is almost always a huge pile of paperwork on my desk. And if there is something I want to put into my filing cabinet, all my file folders have labels for things that I don’t need or use so I don’t know where to file them.
I’ve been putting off organizing my desk for a long time. I know I need to do this, but I was always finding excuses why I shouldn’t. When I wasn’t sure what my job situation would be, I was putting it off because I wanted to make sure I was creating files that would be right for my new job (even though I knew almost every job I have is mostly digital files and I wouldn’t need to file things away). I’ve held onto things that I know I do not need or use, like information from when I was a substitute teacher.
And because I spend so many hours of my day at my desk, I want the space to be much more functional and not feel cluttered and hectic. And the only way to accomplish this is to do a big cleaning and organizing mission. And I also know that to do this, things will have to look messier for a while. I need to pretty much clear everything out of my desk and sort through them before seeing how to put things back. And maybe because things have to get worse before they get better, I’ve been putting this off every time I tell myself I need to do it.
I do hope that this month, I follow through with this. I know I might keep putting it off and fail again, but I have to set it as a challenge because I need to try. And maybe I’ll surprise myself and this won’t be as bad as I think it might be. And in a month, I might be writing about how I was overreacting about this challenge and it wasn’t that hard to get done.
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