WHB: Weekly Habit Building

As I mentioned before, there are a lot of areas of my life that got out of control during the last few months. Following my own advice, I will now start to build new habits that will eventually put me on top of all recurring tasks that make my life work.

As this is the first article in a series of posts where you can follow me in the process of getting on top of my daily life again, I will first give you an introduction of what I am planning to do here.

What areas am I going to work on?

Although my life is quite far away from my absolute dream life, I will start with building the foundations on which I then can build the life of my dreams. And they look as follows:

• Doing the chores following the ideas from FlyLady.com to build habits that make it easy and fun to life in a neat and clean home.
• Implementing “Getting Things Done” ba David Allen into my life to keep track of all my projects an tasks and learn to focus on what I can do at any given moment in time.
• Blogging regularly and effectively market my blog to attract new readers using the techniques I learn in the Blog Mastermind Course by Yaro Starak.

A fourth area that I want to focus on is my financial situation, but I can’t think of any habits that will help me reaching financial independence, so I’ll defer that for a while until I have a clear idea how to reach that goal.

Doing the chores

There are some simple habits that will give me control over this area:

• A daily morning routine that gives me a head start into the day and gets me going.
• A daily evening routing to ensure that everything is in place when I go to bed.
• A weekly routine to do some basic cleaning of our apartment.
• Another weekly routine to do a more in-depth cleaning of one room per week, circling through our apartment, so at least every 5 weeks every room gets my attention.

This is mostly it, according to FlyLady.com, and I know that this system works because I used it before to do the chores.

Getting Things Done

This Area is a little harder to implement, not because it is more complex, but because it will have a much greater impact on my life. This is not only about paper processing and tasklists, but it hits some of my weakest spots, including self discipline and working out of my comfort zone.

I will not go into a full description of the Getting Things Done System. If you want to dig in deeper, you can read all about it in the Wikipedia Article on GTD or in the Book titled Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity by David Allen about this great system and how to implement it.

I will start with daily inbox-processing and a weekly review, and then continue with introducing a daily timeboxing-session to knock off as many tasks off of my tasklists as possible. I will start with a very short period of time - one that I can follow through by all mans, and then expand the time until up to a level that I feel OK with and in balance.

Blogging regularly

This blog is not only my outlet for creative self-expression, but will also become the base for my own business that will hopefully eventually allow me to quit my day job. In order to succeed in blogging, I will join the Blog Mastermind Course by Yaro Starak today, before it closes its doors to new students.

Through the free resources available, I have a good idea of what I can expect during this 6-month-course, and as a long-term reader of Yaro’s Blog Entrepreneur’s Journey, I believe that the investment in time and money will be easily worth it.

As I’m not a member already, I don’t know what my concrete tasks are. But I know that his course centers around habits, so I will allocate a daily timeboxing slot to work on this blog.

My goal here is to build a blog through which I can provide you with the best stuff on living your dream life, and help you as best as I can on your way.

My goals for this week

Every week on monday morning, I will post my weekly goals to this blog, and also put up some consequences if I don’t reach my goal, or set up a reward if I do. I will find out what way works better for me, and then use that on a regular basis.

This week I will commit to the following habits on a daily basis:

• I will keep my Hot Spots clean and ensure that they are clean before I go to bed in the evening.
• Processing inboxes every day using the GTD Methodology.
• Working on my blog for an hour a day, following though the Blog Mastermind Course’s first lesson(s).

If I don’t manage to follow through this plan, I will not eat crisps or anything alike for a whole week!

What new Habit(s) will you start today?

Write about your plan in the comments, and maybe put up consequences or promise yourself with a reward. Stick your plan somewhere where you will see it often, and follow through with it. This way, you will collect some successes that will make you feel good.

But don’t over-stretch yourself, and don’t try to turn your whole life around on a single day. It probably won’t work.

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