Asterisk

pursed lips

poised to disperse

a thousand star-tipped

seeds

she asks me,

"did you know

that if you ask

for more whooshes [wishes]

you'll definitely

get it?"

Waiting

in my selfishness
i'd rather be

startled by

Spring's arrival--

wondering

how the bush,

barren yesterday,

is suddenly saturated

today

with blooms.

but

this year

i must wait

patiently

like a gracious host

(imagine me in a cell phone waiting lot)

i hope to be here

when my guests arrive

“I am mortal, impermanent, imperfect, scared, often uptight and even petty, but wow, what a beautiful sunset.” —Anne Lamott, Almost Everything

Weekly layout

The other day, I mentioned a bullet journal weekly spread I created and have been using for (more than) a couple weeks. Here are some random reflections about it:

• A lot of planners on the market have horizontal (?) spreads where the days are stacked on top of each other rather than side-by-side. I really appreciate a layout that matches roughly how I visualize a week, somewhat like a week that has been cut out of a monthly calendar.
• Admittedly, I'm a huge opponent of monthly calendars beginning with Mondays. However, for a weekly spread, this is working out just fine. The Saturday and Sunday of the same weekend being on the same page works out nicely, and splitting the last column allows six columns to divide nicely onto two pages.
• The vertical layout also is a good shape if I want to think of each day from morning to night. I can interweave appointments and todo items roughly when they occur (or might best occur) during the day. (This is the concept of the "Stubby Todo List"--a short todo list of the things you actually need to complete in that day, as opposed to the infinite running todo list that is never completed; it's advised to write this in chronological order.) I don't number all the hours, but if something happens in the evening, I'll write it and the time at the bottom of the rectangle; something around noon goes in the middle.
• Which brings me to the "todo" section. This is where I put todo items that don't have to be completed on a certain day, but probably that week. If it doesn't need to get done on that week, I might put that task on my monthly task list, to migrate to the appropriate week or day later.
• "Notes" is for random stuff/planning/doodles.
• The four sections to the right of "notes" is something I invented when I came up with this spread. Right now it's serving as a landing place for special projects. For example, I'm trying to blog more often, so if I come up with a blog topic, I'll write it in one of the big squares, and when I post it, I check it off. Or if I want to work on decluttering the garage for 15 minutes I'll write that in one of the squares. Any bigger project that has multiple steps goes in here. I aim to create bite-sized pieces of projects that will move the needle on the goals in my life. 
• (I had a week when I knew life would be really out of routine, so I filled in those squares with gentle self-care habits that I knew would help keep me sane. By intentionally listing stuff there, I wouldn't be able to write in unrealistic projects that would lead me to feeling disappointed in myself for not accomplishing them. Literally, I made the squares: (1) Queer Eye, (2) be kind to yourself, (3) order take out, (4) FaceTime a friend this week.

Like I've said before, this is totally new to me. For years (14 to be exact), I've used a basic Moleskine (or Moleskine-esque) notebook to just list All. My. Todos/ideas. in a running list. I did the stuff in whatever order and then migrated the uncompleted tasks to the next page whenever I turned the page. I appreciated that I never lost an idea and also that it gave me the freedom to do things when my brain wanted to do them.

It clearly worked for many seasons, and there probably will be more seasons to come when I will go back to it. (In fact, I imagine in the summer when life and time is more fluid, I probably will go back to that format.) But for right now, this is meeting a need. It's helping me manage my days and weeks to make sure I don't have too much or too little on any given day.

I'm going on Week 6 (longest I've kept up a weekly spread before), so we'll see! For now, I'm celebrating something that is working for me.

Everything

Okay. Theo's self-assessment of his school performance came home the other day with his parent-teacher conference packet and this paper encapsulates me to a T. I love it so much I can't get over it.

Hmm... Did I try my best?? As long as we didn't have to exactly follow the directions, then yes, yes I did do my best.

Emi's morning routine

Ahh! Emi made the cutest routine chart on Friday, the very next day after I had made my habit tracker. I actually don't think she had seen my tracker at all. I forgot that on Thursday morning I had gotten fed up with how hard it was for Theo to follow his morning routine so I made him a tiny checklist*--before I had even made my habit tracker. (So really, I inceptioned myself and had forgotten that my list for Theo inspired me to make my own chart.)

* I got out a sticky note and said, "Let's start backwards." I made a checkbox at the bottom and wrote "chocolate chip"** and then we wrote everything else that needed to happen before that. I "laminated" it with shipping tape and then he asked me to cut a slit so he could attach a clip lanyard to it. He wore it around his neck and used a dry-erase marker to check things off. (And he said, "Thank you, Mama." Like he had just been waiting for me to do this...)

** Can we please talk about rewards/motivation? I really want to know your guys' thoughts on this. For adults and children. I've been surprised how my perspective on this has changed in the last two years.

Okay without further ado, here is Emi's adorable drawing (with her permission):

Left: Post-breakfast routine; Right: Waking to breakfast routine. (My favorite is step 4 where she ascends from her bedroom in the basement to the main level of the house hahaha.) Also, please note the number of times that hand-washing occurs. ;p

Habit trackers

I made a monthly habit tracker spread in my bullet journal this morning for April. Even though I've been using the bullet journal format since late 2019, I've only created and used a handful of monthly habit trackers spreads.

This is my very first one in December 2019:

It really helped me boil down what are critical things to do everyday and it gave me the tiny reward of getting to check off a box / color it in.

I used it one more time in January of 2020 and then drastically simplified it in March of 2020 to something like this:

Haha that was so cute of me to do a sleep tracker. It's the only time I did it but I thought it looked cool in someone else's bujo. I think at that time I was really struggling with feeling rested when I woke up, so I was trying to figure out patterns.

In the tracker above I must have been focusing on the habits that pertained most to mental and physical health. (David remember those DIY kettlebells you made me when the yoga place shut down??) 

I didn't seem to keep it up much tracking the rest of the year (probably pandemic related?).

In January of 2021, I brought back the habit tracking but more in a micro format, focusing on absolute essentials to guide me each week.

I created this habit "widget" for the the first time I tried a weekly spread, rather than just letting my day take as much space as it needed. It helped for that time, but I didn't keep it up for too long. I think after only two weeks, I got bored and/or felt too limited by the weekly spread. (Some weeks I need to write a lot, and others I don't need to. Having only two pages per week just didn't work for me for long.)

Incidentally, I recently picked up weekly spreads for a second time, and this time it seems to be working a bit better. I think it partly helps that I've found a way to make it vertical rather than horizontal. And also I think I'm in a season where it's good for me to see the limits of my time.

I had a couple weeks in February of 2021 where I somewhat continued the weekly habit tracker interspersed into my daily logs. 

When the kids were doing remote learning at home it was nice to have some routines, something that was just for me to do and didn't have to do with anyone else's anything.

That leads me to today, more than one year later. It was surprisingly fun to put together.

I could give more details on this if you're interested, but one thing to note is that these things are roughly in chronological order for the day. Some are habits for which I need to get back on the wagon (e.g, I've been sliding towards at 5:45/6 am wake time lately), and others are ones that are pretty habitual and yet I'd like to reward myself with a checkmark nonetheless (e.g., making the bed). Others are just cues to my schedule, such as switching over laundry (and a super new habit of using the Delay Start option on the washer to prep a load the night before). The timed items are just minimums; I find it helps me just to get started.

When I sat down with my journal this morning I wasn't expecting to make a habit tracker; rather, it had been on my list to think about my April goals/foci. I had been mulling over it for the past few days, and while I had some ideas, I also felt really overwhelmed by the thought of tackling my goals. 

The habit tracker seemed like just the right thing to keep me moving forward and balanced into spring. My goals can't be accomplished if my sanity isn't in tact, and my tiny habits every day are a huge part of maintaining my sanity.

--

Do you use a habit tracker? Please text or email me a picture if you do! I'd be so curious to see what you're working on.