Some changes need to be made, people!  I don’t do New Year’s Resolutions.  I won’t consider my progress failed if I slip up within the first month of a promise to myself.  What I will do is make a list of things that need improvement and evaluate my progress frequently.  There won’t be a “do this every day, and if you miss a day, you blew it” or a “stay away from this, and if you cave and indulge, you lose.”  Instead, I will sit down and reflect.  What did I do that was good for this goal this week?  What did I do that was bad?  How can I make it easier in the coming week to do more of the good and less of the bad?  I will call them Weekly Me Meetings.

First comes the list:
1. My face
2. My hair
3. My budget
4. My schedule

My Face
I’m currently on Day 4 of a new face care routine. After discovering that I have a weird skin type (dry with large pores), I read that coconut oil is a great way to treat the dryness without clogging pores. Well, I happen to have quite a bit of coconut oil at home for various projects, so I’m all set. The advice is to wash your face daily, use a scrub every 2-3 days, then massage the skin for 30 minutes with coconut oil. I’ve found out a horrifying but interesting thing about the massage. Your face will be slick with oil as you massage, but as your skin warms and moves around, the pores open up and some blackheads that didn’t come out during your wash will become dislodged and float to the surface on the coconut oil. You can literally wipe away blackheads as you massage the oil in. I was told that I could see results on Day 3, but my pores are still pretty huge. I’m not going to give up yet. I have several years as a tomboy to repair here.

My Hair
No more excuses! The hair in back reaches my shoulders now and my bangs are down to my cheeks. It’s no longer in the awkward middle stage of growing out from a pixie cut. It’s also long enough now to straighten. My new routine is washing less often, but when I do, use a heat repair serum, air dry, straighten and spray, and touch up with dry shampoo in between. It holds straight pretty well, so I’m not having to re-straighten it between washes. I will post pictures soon.

My Budget
Yeah, so I have to get things under control. The holiday season sent me into a mad buying frenzy, and one of my cards has a ridiculous insurance fee. When I signed up for this card, it didn’t seem like a big deal. $1.66 for every $100 isn’t much to pay to have the security of knowing that if I lose my job or have some other crisis, I could catch a break on payments. At least it seemed that way in the beginning. By the time I noticed that the insurance fee plus interest was exceeding my monthly payment, it was too late to drop coverage. I had 60 days to decide before it became permanent. Now, I have to pay essentially twice my interest each month just to maintain the balance. It’s eating up a chunk of cash and now I can’t find information anywhere on what constitutes a “qualifying life event” to even use the insurance. My plan for handling this situation is to transfer my balance to a card from my bank where my payments will actually make an impact on the balance. It won’t lower the payments I’m making, but it will help me pay off the principle, and that’s the goal after all.

My Schedule
I recently sat down with a year planner and realized that I don’t have a schedule. I can’t have a schedule. There are things that I have to do at certain times during the day, but between those times, I can’t make solid plans for anything. I can’t definitely say I’ll be running errands at a certain time or that I will have a specific time to sit down and work on projects. Maybe I’m not making those things important enough. Things can change the moment I get home from work, and sometimes if I’m not sure whether I have time to start working on a project, I will end up mindlessly scrolling through facebook. I need to make my projects more important that a spontaneous trip to the store, and if I’m not at a stopping point, I need to say “Please give me a moment.” It makes me uncomfortable to be the one people are waiting on. I feel tense if I’m the last one out the door and absolutely sick if I’m going to be late getting someplace. I need to value myself and my time enough to do the things I want/need to do. It’s okay to be busy as long as it’s productive. No more killing time with mindless clicking so that I can be out the door at a moment’s notice.

To help me stay on track with these changes, I will be making use of the Passion Planner. It’s more than a typical day planner. Before you start filling in your schedule, you go through a series of simple exercises to identify your personal goals. List them all out and then, in less than a minute, pick the single most important goal. You write down all the steps it will take to complete the goal and assign reasonable deadlines to use when filling out your weekly/monthly plans. A bound planner is available for purchase, or you can print off the PDF for free as long as you promise you have shared the page on facebook or some other social network. I’ve already shared mine on facebook, but I felt the need to write about it here. Get your Passion Planner here.