alwaysnewME

Well, I’m going to have to give up on this for while, because I have lost my camera.

Sigh.

I now have a job that is exciting and challenging, and it naturally leads me to want to accomplish my work, so I can’t take all the credit.

Yet, in order to get all my work done, I use techniques that I have learned to avoid procrastination: dividing tasks into small pieces, tracking what I do so that I can take pride in my accomplishments, and setting aside time for relaxation—short breaks during the day and also time in the evening or on weekends doing things I enjoy, guilt-free.

I feel much more at peace with myself. When I get behind, I acknowledge that it is because I have had an extremely busy week or because I am tired or under the weather, instead of feeling like I am a lazy person. I think I have, for now, broken the cycle of procrastination, guilt, and shame.

Now, the summer is coming up, and with it the dissolution of all those short-term goals and demands on my time that have always helped me focus, so I will see how I am doing come June…

Once I created a special time for it, 30 minutes before bedtime each day, I slipped right back into the reading habit. I’ve found myself reading voraciously outside that time, as well.

Turns out joining a book club was not really helpful. I did read the books, but most of the other people in the club didn’t, and I resented taking time away from literature I know I will enjoy to read these other books that I really didn’t find very interesting.

So I’m not reading the last book club book. I’m going to read a book that interests me instead. :P

This was a fun thing to do. I wish I had devoted a little more time to preparation, but considering how busy I was, I think that just walking in there with a half-way coherent talk was an accomplishment.

It is very hard to find a map of our local bike & pedestrian path.

I finally found one, and am using my GPS reciever to measure all the distances on it.

When I am out running, I see lots of people out running, walking and biking for fitness, and I’m sure they’d like a convenient way to measure the distance for their favorite routes.

I want to scan in the map that I found and mark the distances off on it, and then publish it on my website for other people in our area to use.

I’m going to try grading 30 minutes each morning, before I start any other projects. This way, grading won’t get crowded out of my daily schedule by tasks with more urgent deadlines.

I graded lots of stuff this weekend.

One thing that helped to motivated me was putting a list of the assignments I had to grade on my blog, and then crossing them off one at a time as I finished them. I had a sense of accountablility and my friends cheered me on. :)

I think it is easier to redirect, to change a bad habit into a good habit, than to just try to stop doing it.

Whenever I find myself chewing or picking at my hangnails, or feeling the urge to do so, I am going to try to stop and put on some lotion or some cuticle moisturizer.

I basically spend almost my whole day reading, for work or for relaxation, but too much of my relaxation reading is online. I don’t spend nearly enough time doing something that used to be my #1 favorite activity, which is reading books for fun.

Lately I have been reading a little bit before bed each night, but if I end up working late on something, or just watching too much TV, that gets squeezed out of my day. I think I need to make reading time into a sacred time… at 9:30, the TV goes off, or the laptop is closed, no matter what, and I go brush my teeth and get under the covers with a great novel.

Since I started running again at the end of August, after an illness, my pace has dropped from 13:00 min/mile down to 11:30.

I’m doing fairly short distances, 1-1.4 miles, and trying to get out 5 days a week or so.

I’m trying to build my distance up, too, by 10% a week. I don’t know if that’s contrary to the goal of increasing my speed, but it seems okay to do both for the moment.

I think speed intervals are key. It builds muscle and endurance, and it just seem to get my body used to the idea of running fast.

I never realized what a revolting habit my nail-chewing was until I had to sit next to someone who chewed their nails for an hour straight.

It was absolutely disgusting to hear them sucking and smacking away at their fingers, not to mention the actual sound of the chewing!

Now, whenever I catch myself with my fingers in my mouth, I think back to how nauseating that was!

I never ever bite my nails in public anymore. It’s GROSS! And once shame stopped me from doing it in public, I found it a lot easier to resist the urge in private. The habit was broken.