Snowflake Challenge, day 3
snowflake_challenge Day 3: Set some goals for the coming year. They can be fannish or not, public or private.
I have various and sundry goals for the year, but I think the biggest ones are... hmm...
Okay.
1. Starting in April, get really serious about finding and applying to full-time jobs, because my current one (though it's nice and has a reasonable hourly wage) is only part-time and therefore has no benefits. I'm keeping it for now because it meshes well with my seasonal tax-prep job, but I want something more stable going forward.
2. Finish at least three chapters of "The Guardian in Spite of Herself," because I failed miserably on that front last year (ugh, depression) and now that I'm feeling less pervasively gray, I would like to get back to more regular writing.
3. Relatedly, write something every day. This can be as little as a single sentence, but I find that I do best in life when I arrange my days (or weeks) to have reliable structures and patterns. Last year I was pretty successful at finally training myself into making daily flossing a reliable habit, so I'd like to try that with writing this year. :)
4. Also relatedly, keep up my daily to-do lists! I have used to-do lists off and on over the years, mostly when I am having particularly bad problems with depression (I always list a few gimmes, like meals, to make sure I have things I can cross off and point to as 'see, I am NOT doing nothing!' evidence), which is why I started up the habit again in 2016, but I've been trying to regularize it a little more, and plan some items a few days in advance, and it's been very helpful in creating a sense of stability when my greater life has felt too big and terrible to ever be within my control. I'd like to keep that up in good times so the habit will be in place whenever bad times roll back again. *wry*
(They always do. These past couple years were only the second time I've had long-term depression; it's been almost entirely situational, which was also the case with my first extended depressive period, so I was pretty sure it would clear up when my life got less chronically stressful. (Spoiler: I was right.) But even when I'm doing well, I still get my blue funks -- I have periodic clinical depression, which means that a few times a year, my brain chemistry randomly conks out for a few weeks -- and I like to have a well-honed set of tools for getting through them.)
5. Continue my decluttering project. I have a bunch more boxes and cupboards that need to be sorted through, and there are still a bunch more clothes I should try on and decide whether I'm ever going to wear them again. I think I'd also like to get a new computer chair, and maybe some kind of shelving unit I can use to store my spare gardening stuff instead of having it randomly stacked on my kitchen floor.
6. Figure out a way to get more physical activity into my life. It needs to be sneaky and low-key, and it needs to be easily slipped into a daily routine rather than a special-purpose event solely about exercise or flexibility. I already walk 1-3 miles a day -- this is easy, because I don't usually have a car and I have an established routine of going to take a photograph of Cascadilla Creek from the Tioga St. bridge every day that this is physically and temporally possible -- but I want to add something a little higher intensity, and maybe also something to improve flexibility since I've been getting a bit stiffer as I get older and that annoys me.
Any advice on the exercise front would be very welcome, btw! :)
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