Tag: resolutions

Half Year Reset

~ MumWriteNow ~ Leave a comment

It’s that time of year when I reflect on what I can improve

There is something about the arbitrary passage of time that is on my mind recently. I am nearing forty and trying to have no regrets of time lost. But now it is June I feel the need to reset my goals.

I often use the Gretchen Rubin method of having 21 in 2021 etc which I have in my journal but this year I decided to revisit my vision board. This is a practice I learnt that I had achieved the aims of a spa trip, some sister time and have certainly tried to get out in nature. I had a recent Artist Date exploring the azaleas which gave me a lot of joy. And I have been trying to find ways to look after me eventhough my son is having a tricky time.

The inconvenient truth about life is sometimes one thing goes right then, another goes wrong. I don’t mean even just the big stuff. Detailed plans seem to me the stuff of wild dreams. I have written about my disdain for plans before not to discourage planning but to try and reassure anyone I know, life doesn’t work like that.

So this year for my reset I wanted to be more realistic. The algorithm sent me a message (like it’s the from universe but more likely just the sort of wellness content I am consuming). I am following a 50 day refresh led by Smilin Aislinn on youtube. Watching her videos just made me smile, she’s not worried if your journey looks completely different which clearly as a nearly-40 year old non-model I have in no way a similar life. But I am inspired to try and be consistent. Keep up habits that help with both my energy and creativity.

If you are inspired to anchor each day with healthy habits, she recommends setting both your goal and intention behind them. And most importantly not to be a perfectionist about it. There is no need to go back and revisit if you miss one. I missed off get up early from the list I made because that one is a given for me. These were the habits I created to support me:

Simple Habits to Help Energy and Creativity

Habit one: Morning pages. Everyday three pages as soon as you wake up. Or do them imperfectly like me. My intention is to have a space to be creative, reduce stress by journalling my worries and find me time at the beginning of everyday

Habit two: Green juice and lots of veggies on top of my normal food. My intention is to add to my energy by being healthy but not restrictive. I have tried a number of wellness fads and this one has stuck. If I am more consistent hopefully it will support healthy recovery.

Habit three: Afternoon meditation. I can’t always sleep in the afternoon but I find taking a restful moment each day for 20 minutes will give me a better chance of getting through my day even with fatigue. If you’re bad at meditation, I’ve written my guide for fidgets.

Habit four: Three gentle exercise days and three yoga days. I know that doing very short and gentle workouts makes me feel better as long as I only do it to my level. The appreciation I have now of being able to do this bit more having been living with fatigue for nearly 18 months makes it so valuable to my sense that I am recovering. Again being consistent hopefully will also see some positive improvement in my endurance as the weeks go on.

Habit five: Ten minutes reading daily. You may see I have recently posted some reviews and I am enjoying reading books again within my limits. I am still making my way through 40 books before 40 from my to be read (TBR) pile. Reading will always be my greatest inspiration and it’s a joy to build up my concentration despite the fatigue.

Habit six: Skincare. I am guilty of buying lots of skincare products and letting them sit looking me each day. Taking a bit extra time to use the jade roller and various potions is adding that bit of self-care at the beginning and end of each day. It’s my small way to remind myself to look after myself even in the toughest of times.

Anniversaries are a time to reflect

~ MumWriteNow ~ Leave a comment

It is certainly a big year in my life to reflect upon and find a way forward from this week on

With an unnerving sense of head-shaking disbelief, I am about to meet two anniversaries this week.  They feel both momentous and give me a short burst of existential depression. I have experienced these waves of insignificance since I was a child, and it took me until a few years back to find out what it is called. The New Year and birthdays are particularly bad for me : feeling a true sense of time and my existence and my irrelevance in the universe.  The coming week I am commemorating two anniversaries and I can’t help feel a little strange about it.

My blog is three years old, it has been growing slowly and steadily and I have plan to make it more of a place to talk about writing, as I had originally intended, as 2022 continues. But as I reflect on what I have achieved, I also reflect on how much of my life has been swallowed up by the pandemic years, it has become both my blogging topic and also invaded my home and time in ways we could never have known when I first wrote about my anxieties in March 2020.

This leads me to the other anniversary that I have to mark in this coming week. It is a year since I caught covid. At times, I still can’t fathom that I have not yet got over the infection. I have been recently taking an online course Pamela Rose’ Fatigue Rescue and one important part of a journey to recovery is to understand and accept your condition. The main thing that I have been doing (in addition to seeing doctors, attending therapy and a variety of wellness helpers) has been that I have believed myself. I do have a fatigue condition. I will get better. It will take time.

And it’s the time that feels so unbelievable to look back on, this anniversary will probably not be one that I have to look back on again (it might be, but this time next year…) But despite doing a lot of work around mindset and taking this condition seriously, I have some sadness to be marking a year this week. I am seeing it as an opportunity to change my life and prioritise what is important. But in doing so, I have to acknowledge that there is loss too. The loss is not as momentous as that many have experienced and I still say that I have been lucky. But it is ok for a moment to grieve a little of what has been lost in the last year.

I am looking forward

What I want to do now is get through this week and then look forward. I have been working out the kinks in a story that has taken my interest and will report more often about how that is going. I have planned some more reviews to share on the blog as these remain my most popular posts. I will probably write a little less about my health journey from this point. But for now I want to acknowledge that this is a moment where I can reset Mum Write Now, a little and look forward to what I expect to be a much better year.

In 2019 I had goals…

~ MumWriteNow ~ 6 Comments

Any fans of the Gretchen Rubin Happier Podcast know Elizabeth and Gretchen reset every year with a list of goal. But instead of over-arching vague ideas, they get you to be specifoc. In 2019 I did it all: I set a word of the year, I set new goals 19 for 2019 and I started a Happiness Project. Habits were changed: more time was spent reading, blogging and cleaning. But despite that I am struggling to feel the sense of achievement I ought to. So I thought it was time to review what I had achieved.

CAREER GOALS

Writing goals: I plotted the first three chapters of my comedic novel and I blogged almost every week but did I complete my first draft of my novel? Reader, I think you may know by now I did not. I am 24 days off my first post on this blog: could I get it in on time for my Blogeversary?

Work Goals: Within months of starting the year, I started a new job. Thank you Universe for finding me flexible, interesting work. I have a lot to learn but I just found out I passed probation and I am a permanent staff member. There’s lots of training coming up in the New Year so this is one thing I can tick off my 19 for 2019.

Blog Goals: It was part way through the year before I started to get a hang of this blogging stuff. I have set up a Pinterest page and I am planning to develop in this area to make my content more. professional in future. This one will go to next year’s list.

A bit more time for me

HEALTH AND WELLBEING GOALS

Selfcare Goals: Are yoga and swimming part of my weekly life? No, they are not. Upholding these goals have been a very long term struggle. The few hours I have to do it, I do not get up and go. Lets be honest, this one will always have to be on my list but I am working on how to make it a habit.

Friendship Goals: I have completed some of my goals to see people more though scraping them in at the last minute by seeing Movies the last couple of weekends of the year. We are yet to have people for dinner but I know we had friends for brunch once, so that counts. I think I need to combine the exercise and friends goals probably to fit it all in.

Activity Goals: I didn’t manage to see three musicals but I did see two and the Tutankhamun exhibit so I am putting this down as a win. I know expensive activities can’t be everyday, but I am glad that the practice of Artist’s Dates is opening me up to a more creative life.

FAMILY LIFE

Education Goals: I am still stuck in the quagmire or applying for the right support for my son. This is a difficult one to have as a goal because I am at the mercy of other people. Despite not being through with this part of the process, I can say I have given this my all, dedicating a lot of time and often too much of my energy to a broken system. So, a win for me if not yet for him.

Relationship Goals: I can’t really tick off these goals but I can move them to the next list as aspirations. My husband’s work has been all-consuming but, just maybe, the light is coming at the end of the tunnel. I think we will see a lot more of each other in 2020.

BETTER HABITS

Phone time: Maybe because these goals were concrete and achievable. I have halved my time of social media. I have been better at saving my photos to the cloud though I need to share them more often with family members still.

A little less time online

Eat lunch at home: The past few months, I have been buying lunch out again but one plus of my new job is a I have a coffee machine at work which reduced my eating out costs. This one is to reestablish habits of earlier in the year.

So overall, I completed 10/19 goals and made some good new habits along the way. My housework goals were separate so I think I will give myself some extra points.

What I have learned is to be specific where I can to help me get that sense of achievement. I also need to review goals more frequently- some I had forgotten I had set! I must order them by priority so that I make time for crucial things like exercise or big things, like finishing the damn draft.

Seems like it’s finally time. Now I need more than goals, going to make my 2020 vision…!

Making Time To Read

~ MumWriteNow ~ 9 Comments

First up, it has been a few years since I read as consistently as I have read in the past few months so if you tell me you have no time to read, I’ll believe you. I set a Goodreads Challenge to read forty books this year, so far, I am on track. But I have only been able to do that by making time to read. This has made me think about the strategies you need if you want to read more. Scratch that, if you need to read more.

When I first had my baby (he’s six now), I was still a member of a book club with University friends and would turn up increasingly late and having read increasingly less. My husband’s schedule often meant I couldn’t go, so I dropped out. (Sorry lovely friends, no grown-up time for me) And with that, I have read less and less.

Being a parent is very full on at times. My son isn’t the biggest fan of sleep and my first foray back into reading was listening to audiobooks on my phone, sat on the floor trying to keep him settled at night. He no longer needs me to sit in the hallway just outside his bedroom to all hours. This may explain why some of my brain power has started to return. Just a little more sleep than a few years ago. At that time, I mainly enjoyed books I had read in the past: classics like Pride & Prejudice or Anne of Green Gables, not to mention Harry Potter which whiled away a fair few of those uncomfortable hours sitting in the dark.

I always read a lot on holiday by sharing the childcare, but it shouldn’t have to be one or two weeks a year where I can do this. So, I have been analysing when I can read and making time to do so.

The Evening

The evening should be a good time to read (on the nights my son decides to go off to sleep at a reasonable-ish time.) But as well as trying to overcome the fatigue of my day, clean up the house, the TV goes on when my husband gets back. Even though he has work to do still, he likes a background of rubbish TV. So I could say turn off the TV, but this isn’t realistic for everyone, particularly if you just have one main room in your house like we do. One solution: we have some of those headphones that connect to the television so he can listen, and I can read or write.

There is also the time before bed. I give myself an earlier bedtime than the husband so that I can read. But you know what happens if you’re too comfortable, falling asleep is what happens. I suppose that instead of always saying I should use my evening, I have had to be more realistic about finding little pockets of time to read.

Going out

Not unlike my article on trying to find a place to write, my top tip would be to leave the house. This may seem like the ultimate indulgence, fancy going to do something you love in a comfortable café or even, as does not happen often, having a weekend away. But the thing is if you want to write, you have got to read.

One way I justify taking time away from home to read is by reading in genres that I am writing in. I say genres because I cannot decide and have several works started. Creative butterfly that I am, I am as happy flitting from one book to another as I am writing one book and then another.


As I read more, I learn more about the genres that interest me, whether psychological thrillers, fantasy, historical or literary. None of this research is wasted. Not least because it makes sense to spot trends in publishing whether the bloody books ever get written or not!

Organisation

Another massive change I have made since the beginning of the year is organising my house more. This has partly been inspired by Marie Kondo but also by great Youtube influencers who share their routines (see suggestions below). I find that having simple routines in place has really helped to keep on top of the basics around the house. By gradually working through the categories set out by Kondo, I am quite literally making space in my life for what I want more of. In this case, the time to read.

I have been much stricter about always having something to read. Instead of using some of my commute or housework-time to listen to podcasts, I juggle this with reading. Although I think that there is amazing story-telling to be found in Podcasts so I don’t discount time spent doing this (even if it doesn’t count towards my Goodreads total!) I have my kindle app, I have my kindle and I have (gasp) real books. I have identified those books that I want to read through the Goodread apps and then I flit between them.

Flitting may not be for everyone but the truth is that on the ten-minute bus journey to work, I have a few minutes for a self-help book by Gretchen Rubin or a lightweight comedy. I can’t bear having to cut off a scene of great tension so these I keep for times when I have escaped with my book and have a set half an hour to read.

Motivation

As part of my resolution to read more, I have set up an app on my phone telling me how much I use my phone. The statistics are horrifying! But now I can see the Kindle usage go up, I feel better about the whole thing. Though the stats they give you may show you spend way too much on there generally, it has made me more mindful about what I want to use the phone for. Keeping up with friends and reading being two priorities

Although I still think social media can help with your goal to read more. There are some great book lovers #bookbloggers and the #writingcommunity on Twitter and an invaluable source of help and support. Not least to increase my TBR (to be read) pile. As well as my reading challenge, I have shared the books I have read online. All of which adds some much-needed accountability.

If you’re a Mum like me, how do you find time to read? Do you feel guilty if you take the time? I listened to a great podcast recently, Sarah Mackenzie of Read-Aloud Revival also shared how she makes time to read. An important point she makes reminds us if we want our children to grow up readers, it’s good for them to catch us reading. Happy reading!