At the end of October 2018, I wrote about 10 Steps to Future Me. I was a bit worried that I would be cutting back on work and frittering that extra time away. Those 10 steps were meant to move towards my idea of how I wanted to improve myself and/or find new activities to give my life some purpose and form once I am no longer working full time. I thought it might be time to review them, see what progress I had made, and think about how I might move forward on some of those 10 steps.
To be brief, there were 10 items to work on over time, but I really only planned to address 4 or 5 of them over the short term. What have I gotten done in the past 3 to 4 months?
- Fitness. I think I did pretty well here, probably because I have been blogging about it every Friday (accountability!). I hit my goal of exercising 150 minutes a week in 12 out of the past 18 weeks. I have already added strength training to my goals, with the ultimate goal of getting 150 minutes of aerobic exercise plus 60 minutes of strength training weekly.
- Reading more. No particular goal set, I’m not sure I did all that well. Though I did make it through The Odyssey (by audio recording). I’m trying to make it through my TBR (to be read) pile, and it’s slow going. I think I would like to set a goal of reading one classic, and finishing one other book from that TBR tower of books. Memorial Day seems like a good deadline for this, as it’s about 3-4 months away.
- Photography. No goal set, no progress made. I may think about setting some goals in the late spring/summer.
- Picking up crafts projects. No real goal set previously, just a plan to bring it out and leave it by the sofa. I did bring out some leftover yarn and practiced knitting for a little in the evening. I think it might be time to work in earnest on the (barely started) baby blanket. All the babies I thought might use it are already in school–we’ll have to see who is expecting this summer, they might get a hand made baby blanket.
- Connecting with distant friends. My goal was to send holiday cards before December 31, and I managed to do that. Though I suspect my list left people off I shouldn’t have. I am giving myself a pass on this one. I might let this goal have a rest for this round of reflection.
- Connecting with local friends. I didn’t really have a goal, and in fact I think I saw my friends even less than usual because of vacation and the holidays. The plan was to add up my social outings to establish a baseline, with a goal going forward to do better. Over three months, I met friends for planned outings 4 times, attended 2 get-togethers, and ran into friends serendipitously twice. So, 2 to 3 meet ups per month. I think it would be reasonable to try to increase my social interactions to 4 times a month (you know, maybe once a week?).
- Clearing the Clutter. The goal was to clear one bookshelf by Christmas. The result: utter failure. I made no progress on this whatsoever by my deadline. However, I made a little progress last month, and I will set a new deadline to get this cleared out by Memorial Day.
- Restart Playing the Piano. This is a far off goal. No immediate plans to work on this. Honestly, there is a lot of work that will need to go into preparing for this.
- Becoming a Museum Docent. This is also a far off goal, probably more appropriate for going very part time, or retirement.
- Engaging more with Organized Religion. Nothing was planned, and nothing was done. I think trying to attend a non-holiday service once (before Memorial Day) would be a reasonable goal.
To summarize, I think I did pretty well. I exercised, knitted, sent out holiday cards (I don’t manage that every year). I was very happy to finish The Odyssey, which wasn’t formally on my list. However, I did not clear out my bookshelf, nor did I really make any progress on some of my other goals.
Going forward, it looks like my goals for the next 3-4 months include:
- Continue to work on getting 150 minutes of exercise a week, plus 60 minutes of weight training.
- Start knitting that baby blanket.
- Read at least 1 classic and 1 book from my TBR pile.
- Finish clearing out that bookshelf, and figure out where it will go when empty.
- Go to 1 religious service.
- Average 1 social event a week. This could be an event, or meeting a friend for coffee.
We will see how much gets done (and maybe more!) when I report back in late May, early June.
Do you have a list of things you want to get to “some day?” Is there a big gap between what you have on that list and what you are doing now?