Today is Day 19 of the 90-Day Challenge. I have set 4 goals that I want to accomplish in 90 days. Let’s see how I’m doing:
- Publish 2 e-books. I have continued to keep my commitment to work on my first e-book from 6:15 AM to 6:45 AM every single day in the month of April. I still haven’t allocated additional larger blocks of time to this project, which I clearly need to do if I want to achieve my goal. This is my third status update reporting that I failed to do this, so I am obviously not pleased about it. Even so, the progress is coming along step by step. One issue that hurts my productivity is that mornings are not my most productive time. My brain takes a while to warm up and the caffeine needs time to kick in.
- Have a 34-inch waist. My results here have been mixed. I ate fast food three times this week because I have been exhausted and was too lazy to go shopping. When I’m tired, I make stupid eating decisions. I did start walking for exercise though (I mentioned earlier that I have a recurring lower back injury, so I wanted to start with something very low impact). Over the last four days, I walked 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 45 minutes, and then 60 minutes. I walk at a fairly brisk pace, so it gets the blood flowing. It’s a start.
- Eliminate 100% of the clutter in my home. The progress on this goal is way ahead of schedule. My bedroom, kitchen, and living room were already decluttered as of last week, so I just maintained these areas. I also almost completely decluttered the dining room, which was the worst area of my home. I mentioned in last week’s status update that this goal is really Phase 1, which is to eliminate the clutter, and Phase 2 is to really begin to eliminate my excess stuff. I wish I had approached my clutter this way much earlier. Since my main focus isn’t on eliminating yet, I have made extremely rapid progress on getting rid of the clutter. I have put a lot of stuff away in closets and organized boxes in the garage in the area that I cleaned up last week by taking the recycling to the recycling center.
- Go on at least 1 date. I have been a total slacker on this goal this week. I had intended to take some new pictures and then post them on a dating website with the profile I wrote last week. I didn’t do it. I have no excuses. One good thing is that cleaning up my home is making me feel a million times better about bringing a girl over. I was definitely embarrassed about the clutter.
I’m still making progress, which feels great, but I think I can do better. The biggest challenge that I have been facing is fatigue. In fact, I was so exhausted Sunday that I decided to take a nap and ended up sleeping for an hour. Vince Lombardi once said, “Fatigue makes cowards of us all” (this quote was also attributed to General George S. Patton). I think this is so true. When we are tired, we have much less determination to do what we know we should do. I have pretty much decided that my next “30-day trial” is going to be to develop the habit of going to bed earlier. In fact, I will probably jump the gun instead of waiting until May to begin. Normally I don’t recommend trying to develop two habits at the same time because it dilutes your focus and reduces your probability of success. However, I haven’t had much difficulty getting myself to work on the e-book each morning, and getting to bed earlier should only make it easier.
I hope you are making progress on your 90-day challenge. Or if you haven’t been participating, feel free to start at any time. The current 90-day challenge ends June 30. What’s something amazing that you could do before then?
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