November Challenge – 2018 – Ki
Can I get a hell yeah for October being over?!
Man, I tell ya… EVERY year for like the past six years, October attacks me like I kicked it’s evil little black cat. I don’t kick cats. Cats are purty.
Okay, so let’s get to the point here. Today is November 1st and it is time to start reporting on our Girls Got Goals challenge. We actually started the 29th of October but it has taken me three days to figure out what my goals will be and get them somewhat organized for this post.
I have thought about my goals for the past few days and have even written some down in color coded fashion cause…CDO. (That’s Obsessive Compulsive Disorder but alphabetically… nevermind).
Seriously Ki, goals. Focus much? Okay yeah, I set some goals and I even made a pretty little tracker sheet to keep track of them on! Ain’t that nifty?
Yeah, me thinks so. If you’d like a copy of your own goal / habit tracker sheet, check out our Worksheets page to see what all we have available for you or click the download link to purchase and download your copy of my new habit tracker.
My Goals
Self Care
Self Care goals are red. That’s because they’re the most important goals (and I happened to pick up the red pen when I was getting ready to write them out).
It’s actually quite common for women, especially moms, to put themselves first. I, like Beck, tend to put other people, other tasks, other things before myself because…I don’t really know why.
I have to remind myself that my biggest responsibility is to take care of myself so that I am here and healthy for my son and family. I cannot do what they need me to do if I kill myself trying.
My health is important. Now that I’ve hit 40, I have a little bit of a different perspective on things because I know the serious issues will start soon if I continue following in my mother’s footsteps as I have been my whole life. So I need to take control of my health first and foremost and take care of myself while I still can.
1. Handle the medical issues. I’ve been in a self debate with the whole healthcare issue. I get healthcare from the VA that is mostly free but I also have the option of getting health insurance through work and have pondered with the question of do I pay for health insurance or just use the VA. The VA has it’s downfalls. For example, we know my rheumatoid factor has tested high on all of the past lab tests going back to 2012. But the VA doesn’t see any damage to the joints on X-Rays, so they won’t treat. Well, the whole point of early detection and treatment in Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) is to prevent damage to the joints, or at least delay it.
As such, I need to make some hard decisions about my healthcare and take action. I ran out of pain meds in September and the chronic pain in every joint every day is really exhausting by itself. It’s also depressing. I need to decide what to do and get a move on it. So this goal includes reviewing my health insurance plan and making the appropriate changes, getting lab tests done, and visiting my regular doctor to discuss options. Each of these will only need to be done one time this month.
2. Brush my teeth twice a day. Like Beck, I’m really bad about not doing this before bed. I usually wait to go to bed until I’m ready to just collapse and close my eyes. So, I need to make sure my teeth are brushed before I get to that point so that my teeth are brushed twice a day.
3. Consume at least 1,000 calories per day. I have a tendency to get wrapped up in various activities that I’m doing and forget to eat. Sometimes I just don’t feel like it. MyFitnessPal screams at me when I don’t get at least 1,000 calories. While I’ve much improved on this, just last week it happened again so I need to make sure I’m consuming a healthy amount of calories each day.
4. Keep my sodium consumption under 2,700. I was diagnosed with high blood sugar last year and was told to watch my sodium intake. I started paying attention to it and found that most days, my sodium intake was above 3,500. I’ve started keeping track of it and steadily decreasing how much salt I consume. So, each day this month, I need to ensure it is less than the recommended daily maximum of 2,700.
5. Take my meds every day. It’s very hard for me to be consistent with pretty much anything. I have adult ADHD and forget everything until the most inconvenient times to remember them. I am currently only on Prilosec for acid reflux and B-12 for my B-12 deficiency. It is vital to keep my B-12 levels up in order for me to be successful at anything and to prevent it from damaging other body functions. I need to take my meds every single day.
6. Check my weight daily. I know that Beck doesn’t do this and some people recommend not doing this. But I don’t have the same problem that a lot of people do with getting discouraged from gaining a pound or two. I’ve read enough studies and seen enough doctors to know that our weight fluctuates all the time and that I, by monitoring my weight daily, I can start to understand what impacts the scale and when my body does certain things.
7. Enter everything consumed into MyFitnessPal seven days a week. Again, I’m bad at being consistent. Entering my consumption into that website helps me to keep track of my sodium levels as well as how many calories I’m consuming. This has helped me make sure I’m not under eating or over eating.
Home
Home goals are really easy for me to set because I’ve already got them on my to do list each day, and they’re orange. The hard part comes in when it’s time to actually DO them.
Nobody comes to visit me, I don’t have to worry about the embarrassment of somebody walking in and seeing the house a mess. I’m a creative person so a mess means my mojo was working. Yeah!
My house isn’t usually messy in the sense that there’s crap everywhere. The problem is, my mom raised me to be meticulously clean…to a fault. So if there’s a spec of dust under the damn couch, it eats at my brain a little bit. I’m in recovery and have learned to let a lot of that stuff go. But I’m also deathly allergic to mold and need to ensure that there isn’t any growing anywhere.
1. Do the dishes when the sink is full. Here’s the thing, I cook once every two weeks because I meal prep. So every two weeks, I go grocery shopping and then spend two days cooking the meals for the next two weeks. I do the two or three times during the meal prep but then it’s just the daily cups and prepped meal dishes. The problem is, we let that all stack up all over the counters. That’s bad. Very bad. Mold and ants. Florida. You know? Do the dishes when the sink is full.
2. When doing laundry it requires washing, drying, folding and putting that ish away. Yeah, me too. I’m one of those guilty ones that washes and dries and then gets dressed from the dryer. My goal is to do the laundry once per week which includes washing, drying, folding, and putting away.
3. Clean kitchen once per week. Again, I don’t cook every day, so the kitchen doesn’t need to be cleaned every day. But it needs a good bleach down once per week because…mold.
4. Clean the office once per week. I spend most of my time in my office working. It needs to be clean. I need to clean off my desk once per week which includes dusting and sweeping the floor.
5. Clean the bathroom once per two weeks. I am the only person that uses my bathroom, my son is not allowed to use it. I am a clean person. My bathroom only needs a scrub down bi-weekly.
6. Clean the floors once per week. Dogs. Dirt. Well, more like sand. Florida. They bring in piles and piles and piles of sand. Plus, paws are on the ground outside several times a day in the dirt and yuck. Clean the floors. That means sweep and mop.
7. Water the plants once per week. Cause…they’re dying.
8. Take the trash out at least once per week. I tend to forget this. ADHD. Then the garage starts to stink. Ewww. Take the trash out.
9. Take the recycling out once per week. I tend to forget this also and then I run out of room in the recycling bins and they end up filling up my counters. Stoppit! Take the recycling out once a week. It’s that simple.
10. Clean the dining room once per week. Mainly because the dining room table is right underneath the air conditioning vent and so yeah…dust…mold…yuck. Clean it.
Family
Family goals are written in a light blue. That’s the pen I picked up, there really wasn’t a method to that madness.
I don’t have a big family, it’s just my son and I really. I have a grandmother close by but she’s mentally ill and won’t let us in so we can only talk to her on her porch through a locked screen door. So, I don’t really have a lot of family goals here.
1. Have 1 in depth conversation with my son every single day. My son is 14 years old and spends most of his time in his bedroom playing video games with his friends. These conversations usually consist of lessons about how life works. For example, today’s conversation was about health insurance; how it works, how a person gets insured, comparison to healthcare from the VA, some of the problems with both, etc. These conversations will help give him the wisdom to make good decisions later on in life as it is not stuff that is taught in school.
2. Grade papers 5 days a week. My son is homeschooled. Since he is a teenager, most of his schooling consists of reading, researching, and completing assignments. I do teach some lessons, but not very many. As such, there are a lot of papers to grade if I let them stack up and don’t stay on top of them. Also, by grading the papers each day, I can see any areas where he may need me to step in and clarify things for him while it’s still fresh in his head.
3. One new dog command per week. We are training both of our dogs to be service dogs and we’ve gotten kind of lazy on the dog training. The dogs are very well behaved but we need to stay on top of it and get them ready to go out into the public before I’m so crippled that I need to rely on it. So, my goal is to train them on one new command each and every week.
4. Bathe the dogs once per week. This really is a family event. I need my son’s help to keep them in the tub when it’s bath time.
5. Two family outings. It’s very easy for us to be reclusive because I work from home and he’s homeschooled. I’ve gotten used to living without a bra on so leaving the house has become a chore. Besides, we need to get out and have some fun once in a while. So twice this month, we need to leave the house and do something.
6. Two family visits. Like I said, small family. My grandmother is in her 80’s, I do like to check on her every few weeks. Also, my parents are moving back to the states from Puerto Rico so I will need to visit them at least once.
Social
Yeah, I’m not really a social butterfly either. My social goals are ironically written in purple pen, my favorite color. Not my favorite category.
I have a very low tolerance for dealing with people to be quite honest. It’s not at a super scary postal level or anything, I wouldn’t hurt people. It’s just that I get overly annoyed at stupidity, lack of common sense, intolerance, judgmental comments, negativity, generalizations, etc. etc. etc.
It stresses me out to be social. I guess I’m an introvert or whatever. I’m happiest in my own little world doing my thing. So not many goals here.
1. Do whatever’s necessary to be available when the sloth lets me visit Beck. Our pattern seems to be once every other year or so and it’s been a year so yeah…it’s about time.
2. Spend adult time with other humans. Yeah, I stole this one…and a few others. But whatever. I’m not going to put any restrictions on this one because it’s so very rare that I do it that I’m going to congratulate myself if it happens at all.
Hobbies
Hobbies help us escape from the everyday work and chores that weigh us down and are written in green pen. It gives us something that we enjoy doing. It could be fitness or sports related, art related, collection related, anything really!
1. Create one thing a month and post it on MDC. (the crafty group on Facebook) I actually owe a member of the group something so I really need to make this a top priority. She’s been very understanding and has postponed the due date for me a few times, but I need to get it done and get it mailed.
2. Visit a cemetery. I know that sounds weird. But it’s something that Beck kinda turned me onto. I like to visit the local cemeteries, especially the historic ones, and pay tribute to our ancestors that paved the way for us. While I’m there, I document some of the graves and put a GPS tag on them so that their descendants can find them in the future.
3. Color a page. What am I, two years old? No. I am one of those people that uses adult coloring as a stress reliever. When I feel too broken to walk the cemeteries and too lazy to craft, I color. When I color, it’s sort of a meditation in that I don’t pay attention to anything else at that time, I just zone into what I’m coloring and escape reality for a little bit. I color little bits at a time and try to finish one page per month.
4. Take a hike. My son and I like to hike through a nearby forest looking for ruins from an old town that used to be there. When don’t go often but we always enjoy when we do go. Now that it’s cooling off, I want to make sure we go at least once per month.
Exercise
Regular exercise is important for preventing diseases such as heart disease and diabetes. It also helps with arthritis as it keeps the joints from stiffening up so much. It has also been proven to be a stress reliever.
1. Have 30 active minutes each day. Since I lost the October Killer Cardio Challenge, I need to repeat the challenge until I’m successful.
Also, I need to get in the habit of being active each day as my desk job keeps me pretty sedentary.
Since I am currently out of pain medicine, I’m not going to set any other exercise goals at this time. After I see the doctor this month and know what I’ll be able to handle, I will set personal goals at that time. They just won’t count toward this challenge unless I use them to obtain those 30 active minutes required by the challenge loss.
Work
This category has a lot of goals for me. I am already in the career I chose, so I have goals that I need to meet for that. But I am also working toward entrepreneurship and have goals for that as well so that when I retire, I won’t have to stress about finances.
1. Check my personal email daily. I’ve historically been really bad at this. I get so many spam emails that it gets overwhelming and it all adds up super quick. If I check my email and clear it out each day, that will help prevent my inbox from filling up with thousands of emails.
2. Complete Access Requests daily during the work week, so five times per week. I can’t go into detail about this one as it is a work duty that is classified. But I need to accomplish it daily.
3. Clear out work inbox daily, five times per week. This is pretty much the same as number 1. While my work email doesn’t fill up with as much spam, it does get pretty heavy traffic at times. Keeping it cleared out helps my stress levels.
4. Run and send F Report once per week. Again, can’t get detailed on this one. I know which report that is and what needs to be done with it. It’s an easy task to gloss over and forget about, so it’s an appropriate goal to have.
5. Run and send PR Report once per week. Same as number 4.
6. Run and send U Report once per week. Same as numbers 4 & 5.
7. Verify team members work and update status report weekly. Again with the no details here. I’m running a major project at work that I need to see through to completion so I need to monitor my team members and ensure they get things done correctly.
8. Run Gamification report. This is a monthly task so only needs to be done once this month. It includes pulling reports, developing a presentation, presenting the results, and communicating the results out to the department.
9. Complete Sunday Stats once per week. This is the post of how I’m doing on this challenge. My goal is to post a completed status every Sunday.
10. TMDC Email four times per week. This involves another website I own. I need to write four emails each week as part of a promotional email series that I created on that site.
11. TMDC Post once per week. I’d like to write at least one post per week and publish it on that other website.
12. Monday Motivation post once per week. My goal is to post the status of my weight loss journey to this website every Monday so that you guys can follow along and hopefully be inspired by my journey.
13. FS Email three times per week. I’d like to write three new emails per week for those of you that have subscribed to this website so that I can make sure to give you the most current information I have on the broad topic of weight loss.
14. FS Post twice per week. My goal is to publish a new post twice a week for you guys, not including the Sunday Stats and Monday Motivation posts. These other two posts may include a new recipe, a new study, or an informational post, for example.
So yeah, that’s a lot of goals! And with that, it’s time to get started. Let’s see how I do.
Remember, forget skinny…train to be a fit badass!
~Ki
a.k.a. Roadrunner
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