Last week of February

February has been a month so far, and it's not even over yet. I've been so busy getting back into school and work, I haven't had much time at all for anything else. I don't even have tome for school and work! I feel like I've been behind in everything since classes started up again. But I think I might be able to start catching up.

I've taken a break this weekend from my usual catch up work. Saturday I dedicated the whole afternoon to Rhyhorn Community Day, and it was actually really nice and relaxing to take a few hours to relax and have fun with friends. The rest of yesterday and today I took some time to really organize myself. I've been feeling very scattered and hopelessly overwhelmed lately, and when this happens I sometimes take a kind of burn it all to the ground and build up from the ashes sort of approach. I took everything out of my backpack, cleared everything off my workspace, and just gathered everything on the ground around me. I took out my brain dump notebook and just started writing and thinking about what I have to do, and what might work to make things go better. I made up a new plan / system to try out for next month.

My new year resolution / theme for this year is to work on being less busy and scattered. I started by trying to limit the amount of things I was working on, but it's just resulted in a huge backlog of stuff to get to, and my system of scheduling is still just a mess. So my new approach is sort of a mix of minimalism, the SMART goal technique, and the Putting First Things First grid. In a nutshell, keep things efficient by being simple and specific.

To expand on it a bit, the minimalism aspect is to cut down all the activities I have going on from 'too much' to just the important stuff like my health, school, and work. I'm cutting down my dailies to the bare minimum that I need right now, like doing my breathing exercises and reviewing my schedule for the day each morning. I also wrote up a new bujo layout that will be weekly instead of monthly. The layout is also very simple, with just a daily check list of responsibilities and a small habit grid. I'm keeping it weekly so that I can focus on one week at a time so I don't get too overwhelmed jumping ahead in the month, and this also allows for more flexibility. The SMART goal aspect is mainly that I'm going to try to be more specific and time oriented in my tasks and projects, and in writing my agenda and goals. These are the aspects I have the most difficulty with from the acronym. I'm going to use the Time Management grid along with the minimalism to cut out wasted time and distractions, and to become better at prioritizing tasks. What might be more difficult is moving from doing things as they become urgent to being effective and getting things done on time, but I think it will get easier as I catch up.

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I don't know how clear this all is, I have picture in my head of how I envision this working, but between being tired and having worked on this all weekend, I don't know if it's coming across clearly. I have been much more productive today, and I've been completing some important tasks that have been sitting on my to do list for a while. I'm honestly feeling alot better just having a plan in place for this next week instead of just jumping in blind to deal with whatever comes up. I feel like the stuff I was worried might not get done, I'll actually be able to get done. For now though, it's late and I've got to got to get to bed.