21 Days to a More Disciplined Life: Day 9

I am reading 21 Days to a More Disciplined Life as part of my goals for 2014 and I'm sharing insights from each day's readings. If you want to catch up on my progress, read previous days: Day 1, Day 2, Day 3, Day 4, Day 5, Day 6, Day 7, Day 8.

Day 9:
Today's reading was all about how important breaking large projects up into baby steps is. You need to see successes in the small things to help you keep moving forward with your goals. Whenever I complain about being overwhelmed by a large goal my husband says, "How do you eat and elephant?" The answer is one bit at a time, emphasizing how important it is to take small steps and just keep plugging away at them.
Practical Application: Choose one of your larger goals and break it down into bite-sized pieces and create a plan of action for the next few weeks or months. One of my larger goals is losing weight/getting into shape. I am working on getting my eating habits under control, then I plan to start incorporating regular exercise. Once I am used to setting time aside for a workout, I plan to join the local gym (mostly because if I am spending money on it, I WILL make sure I use it). At the beginning of the year, I set a weight loss goal of 10 pounds in 6 weeks and I have already lost 5.9 pounds. Now set a weekly appointment with yourself to review and reevaluate your goals and how things are going. I have picked Thursday nights to reevaluate my goals, since I don't usually have anything going on that night.

Mega Project Progress: Today was Mr. R's 7th birthday so we'd planned a school field trip to a local museum. I knew it might be a bit harder to keep up with my goals and decided to plan accordingly. I set out today's mending projects yesterday so that I would be able to just dive right in when I got a few minutes free. I was able to get both done before dinner.

General Progress: Tonight was really the first time that I didn't want to clean up the kitchen. I was tired from all the added activities of the day and just wanted to sit after tucking the kids in bed. I told Jared as much and he told me that it was totally up to me. That was all I needed to hear and went right to working on the kitchen. I got it done in about 20 minutes, which reminded me that it truly doesn't take long when I just decided to do it.