2 Things Times 4 Weeks
This is a journal entry from one of the courses in the Craving Balance Learning Community. The exercise involved writing a list of wants and a list of needs.
Sometimes I feel so run off my feet by everything I’m doing that I can’t seem to carve out the time to do this. A part of me is really worried that I just don’t know HOW to do the exercise. A list of wants, a list of needs. But WHAT do I put on the list? If I just listed everything it would be reems and reems long. Should I, instead, focus on what I need and want specifically for December?
Another issue is deciding what would be considered a WANT vs. a NEED. I’ve learned that pretty much ‘everything’ is a want. Our needs are minimal. We need water to survive, we want clean water. We need shelter, but our wants dictate our choice of mansion over shack. We need to eat, but do we want chicken or fish? Being aware that most of our lives are dictated by our wants, not our needs, my list of wants would far outweight my list of needs.
And then, how big a want/need should I consider? I could, after all, just list the various household chores that I choose to do each week. Those would be easy to work my way through since I would be doing them anyway. Or do I select things that would be challenging to complete? Things I’d have to push myself to accomplish or things that are less important to me, those I might normally leave undone simply because there are other things I enjoy more.
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Wants
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Finish Hair Design Website
Finish Hillbilly Homestead Site
Finish Writer’s Round-About Redesign
Celebrate Christmas with Family
Publish 3-4 posts per week on WRA
Publish 3 posts per week on Future-Tarot
Write final 20,000 words of FoT
Finish Abundant Writer Website
Design Front Garden Bed
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Needs
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Write this list. *sighs* It shouldn’t be so painful.
Prepare house for house inspection.
Complete Web Maintenance Projects.
Attend end-of-school-year events.
Complete Christmas shopping under budget.
Enrol Baby Boy in Private Speech Therapy.
These lists don’t even begin to cover my lists. lol I actually keep a running to-do list where any time I have something I want to “get done” I add it to my list. I’ve structured my list around the things that work for me and can pick and choose from my list. The list is constantly growing but I’m also getting things done from that list. The biggest trouble I have because of the list is that sometimes I feel torn between two focal points.
Tonight, for example, I COULD choose to write this blog post that I’ve already put off all week. Or I COULD work on WRA’s face-lift, or Hair Design Australia’s new site, or any one of the projects I have in my running to-do list. But I can only ever work on one thing in a single moment. When I try to do more than one thing at a time I end up getting nothing of everything done. Deciding which one thing to focus on becomes the challenge. But, having spent this time writing this post it’s now on my DONE list and I no longer have to worry about it, until it’s time to write a new post. ;-) So, NEXT!