This system is to be implemented by me from the first of January, as a New Year Resolution of sorts. Wish me luck, and read about my daily struggles with it over in the Dear Diary section!
So, as you can probably see from the samples on the welcome page, I really need a system to wrangle my life into some semblance of sanity. And so the system was born.
There were a few requirements that I started with:
- Should make me take action and whittle down my massive To-do List of Life.
- Should be strict enough to be enforced in a measurable way.
- Should be lax enough that I don’t have to account for every minute of every day, lest my lazy ass decide to just chuck the whole thing three days into it.
- Should make feel good, not like some worthless procrastinator.
- Should be cheap to do, since I always abandon projects and did not want to feel guilty about the money I sink into it.
- Should be easy to hide from family and friends (barring a few cool peeps), because I don’t want them snooping and judging.
So there you go. Easy peasy. A secret, cheap system of life wrangling. It would have taken me ages to think of it, if I hadn’t spent a miserable month away from home giving exams and having no access to WiFi. When you don’t have Wifi, the chances of distracting yourself from your boring course books are seriously limited, and so I passed away my time with daydreaming about the system. I even went old school and scribbled all my ideas on paper!
Then I came back home to my beloved WiFi, and was faced with a choice: how did I want to do this? Bullet journal? Blog? Pen and paper and lists? In the end, keeping in mind the fact that I wanted to go as cheap as possible, I went with free adult coloring printables! If you’re a child at heart, there’s no reason why you shouldn’t use the internet to encourage and delight that inner child! These were cheap printouts, and gave me the freedom to color in my pages as I wanted. Perfect!
So, without further ado, here’s the recipe:
Step 1: Categorizing my dreams
So I have a whole lot of things to do, and the idea of assigning them to a traditional to-do list didn’t appeal to me. How do I prioritize things? How do I just cram together everything from different aspects of my life into one list? It was kinda obvious I needed to categorize.
The first iteration of the system had categories based on what aspect of my life was to deal with the task. So there were tasks for Teacher Me, Student Me, Writer Me, Housewife Me, and so on.
But it was pretty obvious that stuff overlapped all the time, because Teacher Me needed to learn to code for her website, and that was stuff Student Me was going to have to do.
Also, this was leaving me with too many categories! Where would “reading books and boosting self-esteem” go? It’s a lofty goal, but… Is my education website part of Writer Me or Author Me? Where do good habit goals go? It was confusing, and kinda all over the place.
So I chucked it in the bin and started all over again. I even found a free printable to help me write down the categories!
Thankfully my Nerd Brain came to my rescue, and J. K. Rowling showed me the best way to categorize my dreams. Read on to know all about them!
Red Tasks:
These tasks require bravery. If I want to be an author with a blog and a published novel and fans shipping my characters with the stranger they met that one time at the coffee shop, I need to be brave. I need to stop being scared of what people will think of my book (I mean, honestly, I doubt distant relatives will read it), and just fucking write the thing.
Green Tasks:
Green tasks require ambition. They require my complete and utter devotion to the idea of showing the world I am not just a housewife tinkering online, but an entrepreneur who has her own education website, her own revenue stream, and an app to boot! Education is not only possible in traditional settings anymore, and all those people who smirk when I tell them I am going to do unconventional online classrooms have better watch out!
Blue Tasks:
Ah, my natural setting, requiring learning ability. I am a naturally curious person, which is why I am a Ravenclaw. I want to learn a million things at any given time, so I do suppose I am gonna be right at home with this category. After all, those languages won’t learn themselves, right? And I do need a refresher on how to code an app…
Yellow Tasks:
These tasks require my patience with my own self. My anxiety and low self-esteem tend to ruin my own opinion of myself, but the yellow tasks remind me to pay attention to myself, to love myself and be fair to myself. Habits I want to form find a place here, as well as all the time I want to spend improving myself.
Step 2: Assigning time to the categories
The tasks are all set up in their own separate categories. There’s no prioritizing, but a general sense of what is more important in a given set. Now, the trick was to assign time to these categories without making it feel claustrophobic.The first plan was to make sure I did something from each category every day, but that would turn into a shit ton of crap demanding my fledging attention day after day and night after night, so that plan got scrapped.
When I did NaNoWriMo, it worked because my brain had only one task to focus all excess energy on during the whole damned month. Something similar was needed here, so I decided to color code my weeks. In doing so, I ascertained that my brain would have one task to play around with all week, and I can extend it to the next and even the next if I so wish.
This would be a helpful way of stopping myself from googling acting classes online by saying, “Nope, that’s learning. We are not doing learning this week. We are all red, working on the novel.”
The weeks can shift around, and there’s no reason to distribute time equally. I simply want to focus on one thing at a time, get somewhere with a project before I abandon it for the next.
Step 3: Habits
Even though habits come under Yellow Tasks, they are special because I cannot assign weeks to them. They have to be done daily, or they won’t stick with my stubborn ass. I got a 100 day tracker free printable that I am going to use to track habits, and each new habit will be introduced after the previous one has run uninterrupted for ten days. The habits are cumulative. Hence, from the first of January, I start recording a habit (taking my meds daily, on time). When I am able to do this for ten consecutive days, I add another habit (brushing my teeth at night), and so on.
That’s it. That’s my system for getting shit done. Is it stupid? Is it insane? Does it look like something that might actually work? Who knows?
Calling The Shots 