Are you an octopus on roller skates?

MotivateMe!
Providing Strategies to Overcome the Procrastination Habit with a Daily Dose of Motivational Medicine
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In This Issue:
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* Today's daily dose: Are you an octopus on roller skates
* 100 day challenge: A busy weekend
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Today's daily dose: 8th November 2010
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"Talent without discipline is like an octopus on roller skates. There's plenty of movement, but you never know if it's going to be forward, backwards, or sideways. "
Writer, H. Jackson Brown, Jr.

This sums up quite nicely where we are if:

We don't know which of our goals are our MAJOR goals - where should we focus our talents and energies? While we should be working on more than one goal at a time - think 1 short-term goal, 1 medium-term goal and 1 long-term goal, any more than that and we are probably trying to do too much - unless you can link them as I have done. BUT there is a caveat. I am a great believer in multi-tasking where possible, but not to the detriment of my main focus or goal. If we do try and pull in too many directions at the same time we go nowhere or worse still - end up spinning our wheels - please excuse the pun.

What do I mean by short-term, medium term and long-term goals

Well I will give you a personal example.

My long term goal is to re-decorate my entire house. It's been a few years and it's looking a bit tired with teenage kids, friends and fur kids roaming the place. So my medium term goal is to complete one room before moving on to the next. Now I'm sure you've all seen the makeover shows - where they bring in a team of people and they can do the entire job in 5 minutes. Well I do all my own re-decorating. I quite enjoy the therapy of painting and it's great exercise too. But it does mean it is going to take me some time to work my way through the interior. And then if and when I get bored, there's the outside to consider. Although I may commission someone to do the high bits - given that I do suffer from vertigo.

So the short-term goals are as you can imagine:

    * Strip the rooms of the contents
    * Remove carpets
    * Choose paint colours and buy them and associated paraphernalia
    * Paint ceiling
    * Wash and patch walls
    * Rub down and paint.
    * Organise new carpet - choose, pay for and get it laid
    * Organise new furniture - ahead on the game on this one - bed has been ordered and will be delivered on Friday along with a new one for my daughter - who didn't get one when her room was repainted.

And so on. Each room will have it's own set of challenges and issues, but the rule is - one room and then move on.

Now I have to balance all of the above with earning enough money to pay for it all, which is where my second major goal comes in to play. No ad-hoc personal spending. Remember my personal 100 day challenge of restricting my ad-hoc spending... no new clothes, shoes, coffee, lunches etc - and restricting my purchases to whatever I can get out of a supermarket. It's been an interesting challenge and I have failed once or twice - I needed a new journal and our supermarkets don't sell quality stationery - so I went to somewhere that did. But by not buying coffee and the odd lunch over the last 50 days means I have money for bigger ticket items such as paint and paint supplies. It's also helping the weight loss too, not the buying of paint, but the not buying of coffee's - ooh you know what I mean. And of course my third linked goal of losing 10 kilos in the 100 days is also on track :-) and I know the extra exercise of painting and cleaning will help too. My other challenge in my 100 day challenge as you know is to discard 100 things in 100 days - or more accurately 100 groups of things. Removing everything from a room really does focus your attention on what you want to put back into it once the room has been re-decorated. So there are lots of things to donate and discard, so it's a good job it is bin day tomorrow :-)

As I mentioned to you yesterday, we do need to stick to it ... and we do need to follow through if we want to move forwards. I hope you have given yesterday's message some thought, or are you like that octopus on roller skates?

Kind Regards

Elle

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100 day challenge:
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I am just updating the weekend information. I spent part of Saturday turfing through the shed to find my painting paraphernalia which has given me LOTS of new things for the discarding 100 things gallery - as I knew it would. Was I procrastinating in getting in there - yes probably and when I show you the picture you will understand why. Ah the things we keep just in case.
 
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