Happiness Project

Gretchen Rubin wrote this book titled, "The Happiness Project" where she decided to set goals for herself every month to focus on things she believed were dragging down her sense of vitality and make a change.  She was quick to note that she is already a generally happy person: married, with children, doing what she loves (she was already a freelance writer living on her work).  Therefore, her quibbles weren't exactly exorbitant as say, someone living on the street, or even say, someone who's single and looking for love.  She documented her goals each month, and each month having an overriding topic, she then broke down quite a laundry list (in my opinion) of all the little things she wanted to change.  I didn't read the entire book, and I skipped the month of March entirely since it focused on working on your marriage, but I do like the idea of the pyramid-style approach she had, meaning she focused on a set amount of goals for January, then February, while continuing to keep up with the goals from January, would then add her new goals for February.  Rubin is way too Type A for me to keep up with since, frankly her list of goals per month were rather plentiful, so I've modified it for myself to be a little less daunting.  I decided to choose 2 things a month to work on, allotting one goal the royalty of my #1 goal, and obviously the second, my 2nd goal.  I'm not sure this worked the way I thought since I ended up giving more attention to my 2nd goal since it was easier than the first, but in either case, here's what I'm doing.

November:

1. Exercise 20 minutes/day; 
2. Organize/clean one part of the kitchen/day

I ended up doing much more organizing in the kitchen.  I am now the proud owner of a Lazy Susan and a utensil tray in my drawer.  I cleaned out the fridge, moved pots and pans from cupboards to that nifty giant drawer underneath the oven and now have a lot of empty space in my cupboards I don't know what to do with.  This was a lot more fun than exercising, which I still did, but not as regularly as intended.

December:

1. Apply for jobs that match my goals and interests (at least 1/week)
2. Organize/clean the bedroom
3. (continue organizing cleaning the kitchen - I still have to do the dreaded Free-For-All drawers, which means I will probably be buying little trays to put in there once I figure what is indeed in there)
4. And of course, continue exercise 20 minutes/day

December comes with its own set of extra goals being the holiday season, as did November which was not only National Novel Writing Month (i.e. let's all write 50,000 words in 30 days) but I taught workshops every Sunday for the event.

December I plan to do some present making involving canning/preserving/jam-making of some sort, which I've technically never done, but I have several books from the library, not to mention the remaining canning jars I didn't use after last year's epic canning fail (let's just say it involved me making soup and putting it in jars sans boiling to seal the lid - fortunately everyone was notified before any food poisoning set in).