Getting Where You Want: Habits and Simplifying

work in progress, water lilies on Stonehenge

This is the second post in a series on practical steps you can take to handle a busy life and achieve some goals.

1. Put as Much on "tracks" as you can - this comes from our time in England. The English are famous for being creatures of habit. Our friends take holidays for the same weeks every year. They do the wash at the same time every day. They shop on the same day every week. They have people over for dinner every Thursday night. You get the point? There isn't much planning for these events, everyone knows about them. They just happen because they always happen at certain times. This keeps things in a rhythm and removes opportunity for procrastination. (How much time do you spend thinking about brushing your teeth? Probably not a lot because you do it the same time every day and just do it without complaining - same principle writ large is very powerful.)
2. Baby Steps - Break down your goals into small steps. Then just start slotting those small steps into your daily to do list.
   

• My husband is a good example of this. He has memorized certain large bodies of information just by reading small portions of them for fifteen minutes a day.
  
• A few years ago, I started drawing with the small goal of drawing for 15 minutes a day. At the time, I had two toddlers and a baby. My days were filled with diapers and tears, I needed an escape and 15 minutes at home was all I could manage. That small step has changed the course of my life!
  
• My blog has been all about baby steps. First step, I just began it. (I didn't even know that I had to turn the flash off on the camera!) But, I began, and then have slowly, as I have had time, improved aspects of it. (If I had tried to set aside several hours to build up a blog concept, template, writing voice, career plan, etc before I started posting, there would be no Rose's Art Lines to this day.)
• I have another friend who does this all over her life. It builds great contentment in her life - she knows that she is working on all her major goals and dreams, even if they haven't all been achieved yet.