Monthly Recap Update (or My New Habits)

I’m 1/6 of the way through the year and I’m still totally loving my Spark Planner and using it every day! I’ve been using almost every single feature of it (I’m still not 100% sure what to do with the monthly calendar, but I’m working on it) and it’s made a huge difference in my life!

I’m pretty much using most of the sections of the planner as they are intended. I use the weekly goal setting for weekly goals, monthly goal setting for monthly goals, and monthly challenges for monthly challenges. I love how I’ve been accomplishing so many of the weekly and monthly goals I’ve been setting. Some of my goals are easy to achieve (like how many workouts I’ll do that week), but I always set a couple of challenging ones too. I’ve been working on going to bed earlier and I’m setting weekly goals to slowly do that. I’m setting a goal to go to bed 5-10 minutes earlier each week. So far, I’m in bed 45 minutes earlier than before and I’d like to work to maybe 10-15 minutes earlier than I have it now.

Even though most of the features are being used exactly how they are set up, I’m still playing around with the weekly calendar and love what I’ve got going so far. I’ve mentioned this before, but I’m using the first of the 3 sections on the weekly planner as my blog planner. This has been so helpful for me and it’s really helping me plan out posts way in advance (for example, I’ve got a couple of things already planned for the end of this month in the works). This also allows me to see when I don’t have something fun to write about yet so I can work on what I want to write about that day.

The bottom section of the weekly planner relates to what I had set to be my 30 day challenge for last month. I’m using that section every night to write at least 5 things that I’m grateful for. There are a lot of repeating things on that list, but it’s a nice thing to do at the end of the day to reflect on what I’ve done and to keep myself in a positive mindset. I’m finding that even on days that I struggle to find 5 things to be grateful for, I can always figure out something. And that reminds me that even on my worst days there are still good things.

I started to do this in January but I really wanted to make sure I continued doing this last month. I never missed a day (I did forget to write once but I did it immediately the next morning) and now I have reminders set to go off to remind me to do my daily gratitude, weekly goal setting, and monthly goal setting. I’m making sure that I stay on top of things.

I’m not even letting myself slack off when I’m on vacation. I remembered to bring my planner with me when I went to Sacramento and worked on my goals in my hotel room at the end of each night.

I’ve just set up my 30 day challenge for this month. My goal is to not order delivery food for 30 days. I’ve done it before so I know it’s not impossible, but I’ve gotten into a bad habit of getting delivery food when I’m tired. I don’t need to spend the money (especially since delivery food has a minimum for an order) and I definitely don’t need the calories. I’m not saying that I won’t go out to eat at all, but I won’t be getting delivery food. If I want something from a restaurant, I’m going to have to go there to get it (I would rather not do take-out either, but sometimes I like to get something yummy but need to eat at home so I’ll allow that in my challenge).

What I’m loving about these monthly challenges is that they are starting to turn into habits. I’m still keeping up my January monthly challenge of 100% food tracking (I’m pretty much only using Recovery Record now). And I can totally see myself keeping up my nightly gratitude notes. I don’t think that giving up delivery food will be a permanent change, but I’d love it if I could keep delivery food to a minimum.

It’s so funny that for years I was trying to figure out how to do almost everything digitally and not have a paper planner or tracker anymore. I had finally gotten everything to that point and then started using my Spark Planner. It’s not a planner in the same way that my planners in the past have been, so maybe that’s why I never realized how great it would be to write some things down to track and that I would be able to accomplish more goals each month than I ever expected.

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My First 2017 Monthly Challenge (or Working On My Tumors) Getting More Productive (or More Monthly Challenges) Not Perfect This Month (or Challenged With The Monthly Challenge) May Challenge Recap (or It’s Time For Meditation) Monthly Challenge Update Time (or One More For 2017) Seeing My Therapist (or Building Habits)