Week One Recap

On Monday, I had big plans for this week. I promised that I'd come here and tell you about each of the items that I use for planning and visualizing my future. I still plan to do that, but now it's going to happen this coming Monday instead of today. Due to the productive (but hectic) week that I had this week, I've decided that it benefits me (and I would therefore guess you as the reader as well) more if I use my Friday blog post to recap the previous week and to review what worked and what didn't.

My Rituals for Living Dreambook does this quarterly. Maybe it's my inexperience, but I feel that I'll be benefited more by doing this on a weekly basis. If sharing it with you helps you in any way (and I know that I find this sort of recap entertaining, if nothing else), then there's a benefit in doing it. Please let me know if you find these recaps interesting! I'll continue or discontinue them based on a combination of your feedback and whether or not they have a continued benefit for me.

Week One Recap

First up, I need to let you know that this has been a busy, chaotic week. The polar vortex that affects the East Coast also affects the "North Coast" (that is, the Great Lakes area, and perhaps more of the midwest). This has resulted in combined factors that I hadn't predicted. Leo (my husband) was off work two days this week (due to holidays), and Dinky (my ten year old daughter) was off school due to the cold weather that was predicted. 

The time I had set aside for blogging was, therefore, interrupted by a disruption to the routine that I had set out for myself. 

I had not prepared for this. If you plan on changing your routine and lifestyle to include some of the (life changing) rituals that I'm employing myself, I recommend that you ensure you've planned for the unexpected. I'd made the mistake of packing my days with so much writing (and not just blogging, either) that the disruption to the routine meant that I was unable to accomplish everything I'd planned to accomplish, and it had left me with little "sweetness" in my life.

Needless to say, this has been a stressful experience.

Blogging (that is this blog and Tis the Season -- I'll get to the blog list in a moment) is my job. I intend to treat this like a full-time work-from-home position (and yes, I intend to earn an income doing so). This means that I have to schedule the time that I spent blogging, but also that I have to be prepared for the inevitable distractions that occur throughout the day. 

I take this seriously, but until I've established viewership, it's more difficult for my family to take it seriously. We're working on that.

This week, I managed to write my five scheduled blog posts for the two main blogs (Enjoy the Ride and Tis the Season). I consider this a successful accomplishment.
I'm proud of myself for accomplishing this! But I'm also disappointed in the fact that I feel that some of these posts were rushed. As of today, I have also failed to produce the article for my Hubpages* account that I had intended. (There's still the weekend, and I do have an article started. I'll update you next week on what came of it!)

In addition to the blogging schedule, there were other parts to my routine that I wanted to accomplish. Next week I'll be talking to you about my journaling process (I've started the post, so it will be published, probably on Wednesday), but I want to mention it now because it's turned out to be the most interesting part of what I've done this week.

These are the additional things I intended to do each day this week, noted with what I managed to keep up with and what I didn't.
  • Daily Journaling (Yep!)
  • Daily Affirmations (Nope, but I'm going to keep trying!)
  • Daily Photograph (Missed a day, but still trying!)
  • Daily Reading (Nope, but I'm going to keep trying!) 
  • Daily Tarot Card (No. I'm torn on this one.)
  • Increased Movement (Yes, for the most part.)
  • Daily Cross-Stitch (Mostly. Some days were just busy and I have to protect my hands.)
At this point I think that it's fair to say that I'm experimenting with what works and what doesn't. Let me go over that.

What Worked from This Week

  • The Blogging Schedule - With the exception of the Tarot Blog (which I'll talk about in the "what didn't work this week" section), the blogging schedule worked out pretty well for me. I'm not speaking of Ava's (my partner's) part in the Tis the Season blog -- only my own. I feel good about how this schedule worked. Now that I'm settled into a routine, I should have one blog post a day for five days a week and then a Hubpages article one day on the weekend. I can do this! 
  • Morning Pages - I loved this so much that I want to talk to you about it next week. I've always struggled with journaling. The problem was a combination of doing it when I was tired and not knowing what I wanted to keep track of. Morning Pages took the pressure off of "knowing what to write" and allowed me to work on doing a simple brain dump and visualization for the morning. This has cleared up so much mental energy that I'm doing much better at managing my day and my time.
  • Daily Reading - Admittedly, I didn't manage to actually do this this week. However, I discovered that daily reading is another tool for clearing my mind. While I realize that most productivity systems that encourage daily reading account for self-help, non-fiction, or news, I read fiction. This is because it helps to keep me creatively boosted and it relaxes my mind. There's nothing quite like enjoying a fantasy to take my mind off of the daily grind. It's just the ticket! (And I managed a book review this week!)
  • Visualization - This has been interesting. I have a clear vision in my mind, but I can't tell you precisely whether it's a vision of what I want or if it's a vision of what's going to come to me. I've been known to have precognition or premonition in the past, and there are a few things I want that don't fit with the particular vision (though I'm deliriously happy with what I believe is coming my way). I write down the visualization every day. It's the same each day, but the words are different, and I believe that words have power.
I ended this week feeling excited about what's working. This is a good thing, as it's driving me into next week with momentum. I'm looking forward to seeing what we can accomplish for next week!

What Didn't Work This Week

  • Written Affirmations - To be honest with you, I'm torn on whether or not I should keep trying with this. There are two possible problems that I can see. The main issue is that they are time consuming. It's not that I doubt their power in terms of the Law of Attraction; It's that they require painful hand-writing (and I'm doing a lot of hand-writing at the moment) combined with a portion of my time that feels better spent in another way. The jury is out on this, and I intentionally left them out of my morning routine this week. I might try again next week. Let me get back to you on that!
  • Daily Tarot Draws - I do these for two reasons: The first is because it helps me to familiarize myself with the deck I'm reading from. The second is that it helps me to see the potential in each day. For example, on Wednesday I drew the Nine of Skulls (Pentacles in a RWS deck). This card told me that great things would come to me that day materially, and that I would end the day satisfied. Not only did this set me up for a self-fulfilling prophecy (and therefore to potentially have an amazing day), but it gave me a heads-up for what to expect. Unfortunately, this has become "just another thing to do" and I'm not treating the practice with the respect that it deserves. I'll revisit this in the future.
  • The Life Schedule - I hadn't accounted for changes in the routine, and this set me back a bit this week. I've experienced a lot of resentment and anger when things didn't go my way and I didn't have time to get the things done that I wanted to do. Having to work later in the day meant that I didn't get the time to play my way. This was difficult. I need to start accounting for changes to the routine in a way which will allow me to maintain my sweetness as well as my structure. This has been particularly difficult.
All of this needs to be revisited at a later date. Right now I'm simply not ready to run the Tarot blog as well as the other two blogs (beside which, I don't expect it to be helpful for others if I'm not feeling up to it), and written affirmations, while important, are a time-sink that causes physical pain to accomplish. 

I'll come back to all of this after next week. Next week I'm giving myself a week off from those two matters. The schedule is unavoidable, but I'll see what accommodations I can make. Dinky is off school next Friday as well for teacher inservice.

What I'll Keep Trying

  • Social Media (Facebook, Pinterest) - I had a rough time with social media this week. While I did alright with Twitter (I gained five followers and got some hits from links from Twitter), I failed miserably at both Pinterest and Facebook. Not only was there a lack of traffic from Pinterest, but I didn't consistently pin my posts. This is something I need to work more on in the coming week.
  • Personal Photos - I have a new camera, which I'm still learning to work. I owe it to myself and to my readers to provide personal photographs. At the moment I've been mostly using photos under Creative Commons from Flickr. This is going to be a challenge because I don't always have what I need to photograph to make the most of a post. On the other hand, this will change quickly: We're doing more and more crafting for next Yule, and more and more work in our home.
If you have any suggestions for how to make these things work for me, please let me know!

* This is a referral link. I earn money when you sign up and publish through Hubpages.

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