The Power of a Schedule – A Check In

It has been 4 weeks since I posted my blog entry about my new schedule.  When I wrote Time – NonRenewable Resource although I was excited about it, I don’t think I realized how amazing I was going to feel following it.  I feel incredibly happy and proud of it.  I have been sharing my thinking and planning with lots of people and I truly feel like for me it has been one of the best things I could have done.

In the past four weeks I have been sticking fairly close to the schedule.  There have been a few hiccups where things haven’t gone quite to plan and I have also learned what works and what doesn’t.  It has all been an interesting part of seeing what schedule my time would actually be like.  Overall I have to say I’m thrilled with how it is working.  Having a schedule has been helping me make the most of my non work time and is helping me to feel like I’m a more rounded person.

The most surprising result that I have noticed in the last four weeks is that I no longer struggle with feeling like I should be doing something else.  Pre-schedule when I was doing one activity, like scrapbooking, I would often feel like I should be doing something else, like going to the gym.  I was feeling pulled in too many directions and like I didn’t have time for any of it.  It was a weird version of guilt.  With the creation of the schedule I’m finding that now I don’t feel that same pull.  Having a spot for all the things that matter means that when I’m doing something I can focus on just that and know that later I will have time for a different activity.  It takes any guilt out of doing the things I love because no one should feel guilty for doing the things they love.

Another thing that has been really fantastic about the schedule is how much I’m getting done.  In the last month I have spent more time with friends, done more hikes (6 hikes – 3 of which were on the same day), completed more scrapbook pages (I wish I had counted how many), read more books (3 –so close to one a week that I want), written more words, and even got to the gym more than I have ever before.  Then thrown in were a few things that although planned were not technically on the schedule, like Globalfest fireworks.  I feel really productive and can see the progress I’m making in all the things I love.  It actually amazes me when I think about how much I have gotten done.  It not only makes me feel good but it has also helped to keep me feeling grounded and centered.

Another benefit to having my schedule is that I have been making myself look for new things to do and places to go.  Sunday is my adventure day.  The only goal I really have Sunday morning/afternoon is to get out of my house.  In the last four weeks I have gone to some different farm markets, went to a pig farm and gone hiking.  It has been really cool to get to see things around my province that I hadn’t seen before.  I’m also already looking ahead to winter and what I will fill my Sunday’s with as the weather turns bad.  I know that this will be a little bit more challenging but I will figure it out I’m sure.  Heheh.  It is amazing when you start looking for things to do what you can find.  It is also amazing that even though I have lived in Calgary my whole life there is a lot of things I have never done or thought to do.

One last thing that I have seen that may not be directly related to the schedule but likely helped by it, is that out of the last 4 weigh ins 3 of them have had me with a loss on the scale.  It does make sense though the scheduling would help.  I mean I’m making time for the gym and food planning and prep which is a huge part of giving me success.  I’m also happier and more fulfilled in other ways so I don’t need to turn to food to make me feel better.  I’m also doing less mindless tv watching which always seems to get paired with mindless eating.

There has been some learning to come out of the schedule as well.  In the past few weeks I have noticed that I need to tweak a few things.  The first thing I have to tweak is my scheduled writing time.  I need to add in some evening time for my writing.  My morning writing sessions have been great for getting my novel organized (ie. fixing timelines, clarifying characters, ect) and to get my head back into the time period but they have not been as good for actually writing much in the story.  I definitely find my creative energy is higher later at night.  So my new schedule will flip one of my two sessions into an evening session.

The other thing I realized that I have to tweak is my meal planning, grocery shopping and meal prep.  My current schedule has me doing meal planning on Saturday and then shopping and prepping on Sunday.  Since my Sunday is my adventure day the thought was I could grab groceries on the way home and then prep in the evening.   The problem is my adventure day has been longer than I thought it would be and I have been coming home more tired than I figured I would be.  The solution will be to move at least the grocery shopping to Saturday. 

The last thing I have noticed is that while I was planning I left out a little of my non work time.  I completely forgot that Monday to Friday I have an hour where currently I have no plans.  I have decided that in my new schedule I will also come up with some things for my lunch hours at work.  It will give me 5 more hours in which I can get in activity or maybe do my meal planning or just read a bit more. 

All in all I have been really pleased with what having a schedule has done for me.  Sure there are times when I still choose to do nothing but at least now I know what I’m giving up if I go that route.  It has been quite motivating and freeing.  I don’t have to waste valuable time trying to figure out what I should be doing.  I always know.  The last four weeks have renewed me.  It has shown me that you really can do everything you want (even if you can’t do it all at once).

Losing Weight Can Suck Sometimes

I consider myself to be a pretty optimistic person.  I can usually find the silver lining to most things but lately I have been struggling with that when it comes to my weight loss journey.  I have had a whole slew of negative feelings, thoughts and actions creep in to my world when it comes to my weight loss journey.  I have been feeling like a rebellious teenager fighting against her parents only in this case my parents are all the changes I have made to fix my world.  So this blog entry is a straight up list of complaints and negative garbage that is in my head.   In writing it down it takes the power away and helps me look at it from some distance so that I can keep this weird backwards slide I have been on from going any further (or at least that’s what I hope anyway).  Essentially this is my entry to myself that lets me bitch but then ends with me pulling on my big girl panties and doing it all anyway.

Things that suck about trying to losing weight:

1. Having to pay attention to your food all the time. 

I feel like my life revolves around food which is probably half the problem.  Planning and prepping healthy meals takes a huge part of my “free” time and I resent it.  Sometimes I downright loathe it. 

2. Not trusting your body especially when it comes to hunger signals.

Having to ask yourself am I hungry or is this something else is enough to drive anyone crazy.  There are so many reasons I think I’m hungry and probably only a small fraction are because I’m actually in need of sustenance.   

3.  THE SCALE!!!!!!!!!

Yes it is just a number and it shouldn’t define you but it does.  No matter how much you don’t want to care about it and try to focus on the other ways things are getting better that stupid number still exists. 

4. Having to buy clothes

This shouldn’t suck but it does.  Every time I go shopping I have anxiety because I don’t know what size I’m going to be (pretty sure the sales people hate me to because I have to grab two or three of everything).   Oh and also the cost of clothes, seriously I don’t have enough money to keep myself in good proper fitting clothes.  Oh and the fact that your favourite clothes that you spent good money on start to look horrible.

5. Having to schedule my world around the gym.

I love the gym don’t get me wrong but there are times when I hate the fact I have to go.  Early mornings alarms, skipping favourite tv shows, or missing out on stuff with friends are all the bad side of having a regular gym routine.

6.  Giving up chips

Yep chips get their own spot because I curse them and the fact I can’t have them.  They are the only food I can actually taste without having.  I crave them.  I dream of them.  I can’t buy them because I have no control with them.

7. It doesn’t happen overnight

Seriously why aren’t I done yet?  

Time – Non-Renewable Resource

It happens every so often that I will read a book that will stick with me in some way.  Usually it is a fiction book that is particularly well written but sometimes non-fiction sneaks on to the list of books that have changed me.  This list is filled with book that change the way I look at things or think about things.  They are books that force me to question myself in some way or another.  The most recent book to make this list is “What the Most Successful People do Before Breakfast” by Laura Vanderkam.

I was given this book for Christmas from my Dad.  I know it is totally not your typical Christmas gift and Dad even felt the need to justify giving it to me by saying ‘I know you already do a lot of this but I thought it was a great read’. Well Dad you were right.  It is a great read and although I do some of the things she suggests already, I still gained a lot more out of this book.  This book in fact made me take a look at how I currently live my life.  It made me question a lot of my assumption on living a fulfilling life and the time it takes to do it.

Essentially the book, which actually has three short guides to time management, boils down to we only have 168 hours in a week and we only have a finite number of hours in our lives.  Laura Vanderkam offers a lot of ideas and suggestion on the best way to structure our days to ensure that we can get the most of what we want in life in those given hours.  If you are struggling to figure out how to be able to not only do the things you need to do but also the things you want, I totally suggest giving the book a read.  This entry is not meant to be a book review though, what I really want to talk about is the changes it has helped me to make.

The first thing I did when I finished reading this book was to sit down and make a list of the things that I really want to be doing with my days but feel like I don’t have enough time for.  It will be no surprise that the list included more reading, writing, scrapbooking, working out, cooking and spending time with friends.  These are things that I love to do but often find I don’t have time to do them.  These are things that leave me feeling happy and complete.  They are things that I want to make sure I always have time for because they are what bring me joy but that I had been struggling to make time for.

The second thing I did was to commit to tracking my time for a week.  I tried to track everything in 15min intervals as Laura suggested in her book.  There were sometimes I had to fake it because I forgot or wasn’t sure on the timing but I got it done.  I tracked 168 hours of my life.  It was eye opening.  I always knew I had a tendency to waste time doing things like playing games on my phone or mindlessly watching tv but it was crazy to see just how much time I was using on that.  One of the most interesting things to me on my tracking was the amount of tv I watch that I didn’t even particular like.  We all have shows we love but how often do we watch other things just because the tv is on.  I was blown away by how much of the time that is the case for me.  It was easy to see that although I think I don’t have time for the things I love that I certainly have opportunities to find more time to give to them.

The third thing I did was to create my own list of dreams.  She suggests that everyone should sit down and come up with a list of 100 goals you want.  She said to include personal goals, travel goals, professional goals, ect.  This was harder than it seems.  The first maybe 30 were really easy but it got harder and harder.  Mine started off with a list of places I want to travel and novels that I want to finish writing but by the end of the 100 it included a lot more smaller goals like hiking Mt Prevost to see the war memorial or reading Moby Dick again.  What I found most interesting about this list though was that it really brought into focus the things that I really want to be doing.  It really helped to cement the things that I want to do in my life both big and small.

With those three things done I set out to create a new schedule for myself for my non work hours.  I set aside time in my schedule to do all the things I wanted to do as well as things that I needed to do.  I knew when I was going to be doing everything from dishes to meal planning to going to the gym.  It was a work of art in time management as far as I’m concerned.  Hehehe!  I was excited to try it out.  I got to do exactly 4 days of it before the request came at work for someone to change to the later shift to help out with phone coverage.  Since no one else volunteered I offered to change my schedule from an early start back to a later start.  I had done the later shift before but had switched to the early shift to avoid some of the traffic.  Switching back to the later shift meant I had to go back to the drawing board on my new schedule.

Now you would think that shifting things would be easy.  I had my hours figured out with the early work shift and it seemed to flow perfectly so it should be easy to transition to a schedule where I start an hour and a half later but just moving everything later.  That was so not the case.  I was surprised at just how wrong that thinking turned out to be.  It is truly amazing how if you change one thing how it completely forces your hand to change everything.  It took a little figuring and a week of trying out a few things to see if things like an early morning session at the gym would work out (pun not intended but hehehe).  I had to get creative with my time and things couldn’t always be scheduled when I would want them but I made sure that I still got everything in.  I once again got to feel excited that I had a plan.

With everything figured out I knew I had just one more task to do.  I knew to help make it stick I needed to write it down.  So I quickly sketched it out with ink first.  Then in true geeky fashion (and because I love a good list) I created a word document that I could print and post.  As of this weekend (well a little bit last week as well) I am officially on track with my new schedule.  I’m excited for what is to come, not because of the fact my life is scheduled, but because of the doors this opens for me.  I now have time in my life for things that I have long said I don’t have time for (dating, hiking) and I have time in my life for the things that will help me achieve some long term goals (running a marathon, publishing a novel).  I feel like I will finally be making most of the time I have been given and there is something really amazing about that. 

Weekday schedule

Weekend schedule

As scheduled as things now look, I actually feel like I have gained a lot of freedom.  I have culled the big time wasters from my life and filled it with things that really make me happy.  We only have so much time in this world and this whole process helped me to make sure that the hours I do have will be used doing things that really matter to me.  Will stuff still come up that will get in the way – yep of course.  Will there still be days that I waste the time I have – yep I have no doubt of that either.  Will this help me find peace with the fact we only have limited hours – it totally already has.  I can’t wait to see when I look back six months from now, what I have been able to accomplish on my goals now that I have a clear focus and plan to achieve them. 

I can do all things I just can’t do all things at once!