Yeah, I know I said I be blogging about our Decrapify Your Life project, which implied I’d be doing it more regularly. I guess it says something about the great challenge of this kind of life reboot that several weeks into the year I’m just now writing an update!
But I have been working on my goals, and I think I’m making some progress. Here are my goals for 2012.
- Eliminate our revolving debt. By Dec. 31, 2012, all credit card debt will be 0. I won’t announce our starting debt amount publicly, but let’s just say it’s a lot.
- Get serious about my freelance business, expand my work, increase revenue two-fold over 2011, and do projects I enjoy.
- Complete and self-publish an e-book about autism.
- Donate, recycle, or throw out 800 cubic feet of stuff. (Measuring that should be a hoot.)
- Run 1,000 miles in 2012 and complete at least one marathon, and if I can find one nearby an ultra-marathon (something greater than 26.2 miles).
I have discovered several insights so far that I’d like to share.
You gotta start. Well, that’s pretty obvious, but often we don’t actually take the first step toward achieving what we want so it bears repeating. There’s no point in figuring out everything before you start. As a matter of fact, it’d be a huge negative because you can’t, so you’d never actually start anything. Just go do ten minutes of something and start. Eventually, you’ll get things moving.
Don’t judge yourself for the mess you’re in. Don’t lament, wail, or rend your garments in anguish. It took a long time to get here, and it’ll take a long time to get out of it. This is OK. Show yourself some compassion. Don’t give up!
It’s about building momentum. It takes a lot of energy to overcome the initial inertia of getting started making changes in your life. In the beginning, the changes are frustratingly small. But they do add up, slowly and inexorably. Keep pushing the boulder and eventually it’ll roll down a hill. With any luck, it’ll squash some things on the way down.
Growth and transformation take time, perhaps a long time. We don’t expect our kids to just try something different for a few days and suddenly master it. Why should we have the same unrealistic expectations of ourselves? Again, it took us a long time to end up where we are. It will take us a while to get out of it.
Focus your energy on one maybe two things at a time. That’s it. I have five goals for 2012, and I realized in a huge hurry that I can’t focus on them all at the same time. It was completely freaking me out. This may be the most important revelation I’ve had so far because it’s the one that got me to let go of some of my raging guilt. I can’t do it all, and that’s true for every one of us. So I focused the last few weeks on training for my marathon, which is next month, and on money-generating activities like my freelance work and working on our taxes, which will be income since we will get a good-sized refund this year. (Yay!) This has the bonus effect of getting us farther toward our goal of eliminating revolving debt in 2012 by increasing our income without stressing about the debt itself.
Debt reduction feels ten times harder than a marathon. The simplest solution to reducing debt is to make more money, send it all to your credit card companies, and stop using your credit cards. That’s all much easier said than done, obviously. I have started discovering ways we’ve been sabotaging our debt in the past that sounded perfectly rational at the time. Things like “We’ll just pay it off at the end of the month” or “We’re building up rewards points” or “The interest rate is really low, so what’s the big deal” are simply rationalizations of what is, to be honest, just bullshit. If you can pay it off every month, use cash. If you can’t pay it off regularly, the rewards are almost never worth it.
Regardless of what Dave Ramsey says, there are going to be instances, obviously, where something goes to hell and you don’t have the money. Your car needs a $2,000 repair, you get a $7,000 doctor bill, your child doesn’t stop needing therapy, and on and on. As they say, some months there’s just way too much month left at the end of the money. I do think most of us can do a lot better, though.
We are slowly trying to migrate to a cash-based plan of buying things only with either paper money or debit cards. I’m looking into using an envelope-based budgeting system as well in hopes of putting some checks and balances on spending. It’s been insightful how much you have to change to go this route, though. We’ve connected our credit cards to so many accounts and whatnot (e.g., some auto-bill pay, Amazon) that it’ll take time to unravel that.
Decluttering our house feels a hundred times harder than a marathon. We’ve made very little progress on this, and that is depressing. I decided for now to let this sit for a few more weeks without worrying about it. I really have only been able to focus on one or two goals at a time. After the marathon, I should have more energy to devote to this mammoth project. And on a related note…
Allow yourself to table goals for a while in the interest of sanity. You can’t do it all, so don’t try. And Lord knows our lives are so chaotic and unpredictable that you have to show yourself some compassion. I had really hoped to finish a small e-book in time for World Autism Awareness Day in April along with a much needed blog redesign. Most likely neither will happen by then. I’ve felt pretty much on the ragged edge lately, so I’ve tried to give myself some grace to let some things go a couple of months to promote sanity. The positive news is that in letting those things lie fallow for a while but still having them as 2012 goals, I’ve found the creative juices are still percolating under the surface and ideas are coming on how to do them well when the time comes to pick them up again.
I wish I had a brilliant roadmap on how to make big changes in your life, but I don’t yet. About the clearest insight I can offer right now is, this stuff is hard. One more hard thing isn’t exactly what any of us need right now, but look at it this way. As parents, we know a lot about things that are really challenging. Think of all the obstacles and barriers we’ve overcome before. We’ve done it before, repeatedly, and we can do it again.
What fuels me here is that this is one challenge I know will pay huge dividends when it’s done. A more decluttered life with much less debt, fruitful work I feel good about, autism resources I can contribute to helping the entire community, and a continued commitment to maintaining good health.
So maybe this is better wisdom. Imagine the person you want to be and the life you want to have. Then imagine yourself not as a person striving toward that goal but instead as the person living that life. I imagine my life with less clutter and debt, work I enjoy, and being a positive contributor for many things autism, and I draw energy from that. Give it a try. And if you have ideas about what works for you, let us know!
I’m thinking you could be in the business of ‘life coach’. Good stuff, Tim.
Lots of truth here, Tim. I’ve come to similar conclusions around my health and a difficult work related problem. It helps so much to re-frame the goals into “what will my life look like if I make these changes.” It is the only thing that keeps me on track with changing unhealthy habits into healthy ones. Re the work situation, that’s more complicated, but I do know that it is something that I must shelve right now.
A couple items:
1. re: you gotta start — you also gotta start in a sane way. I have some “issues” re: fitness/weight, and the problem gets to be that I overdo it when I get around to starting.
I’m actually sitting here, telling myself I can’t do more cardio today b/c I injured myself when I overdid it on Monday (and couldn’t do it again til today).
Yes, there’s an intertia problem, but if one goes too gung-ho on certain things, you’ll push yourself too far.
2. Reasons for using credit cards compared to cash or debit cards — with credit cards, you can dispute the charges, which I’ve done when someone has screwed me over.
It’s a lot more difficult to do that when they’ve got cash-in-hand, and debit cards protect you almost not at all.
To be sure, this is not going to apply with regards to certain purchases (I doubt the grocery store will burn you for the cash), but it has helped for online purchases. It’s almost always better to use credit cards if you’re buying something online.
I was saving this post for a time when I had the mental clarity to take it in. Today was the day. Boy, no accidents. My goals are different (of course), but the struggles to begin are pretty much the same. Thanks for the kick in the pants and the permission to allow myself to be flawed. 🙂
One thing I’ve learned: Write it all down. There are many areas in any life that need work, and we can’t make significant progress until we focus on one thing at at time. The problem is, when we focus, if we don’t write the other things down, we forget about some of them, and there’s always a nagging sense of something else we should be doing. Writing them down frees the mind to focus on the job at hand, and as we accomplish things on a list, checking them off lets us see that we are making progress.
Dang, that is one impressive list! I mean, i feel like a total shlepp compared to your list of goals for 2012. but it sounds like you have a plan! 🙂
The advice looks good to me.
The advice given by people leaving comments looks good, as well. Meep’s comment reminded me of my husband’s strategy for getting in better shape — he bought a treadmill and started off easy, not pushing it too hard — but keeping track of his miles walked. His goal is to walk 1000 miles, no definite deadline, but he figures that once he’s walked 1000 miles, it will have done good things for his body.
I appreciate Meep’s warning regarding getting into things too quickly. I need to keep that in mind when I go back to hitting the treadmill after I’ve been sick.
Decluttering is HARD. My family always had a hard time – so easy to let the piles of papers pile up on tables, counters, toys get scattered, never sure for the place for things, etc. We had lived in the same house for 12 years – you would be so suprised what about of clutter you can collect in that time. When we moved – we took a VERY hardline approach – if we didn’t LOVE something – either is was very sentimental, something that we truly treasured, or it was something very useful – everyday – then off to donation/recycle/garbage it went. When we moved into our new house – it was so liberating not to take the clutter with us – and we thought long and hard about what would go where – so the clutter wouldn’t come back. Example – we have a drawer in the dining buffet that important papers go (bills, school homework, etc) that once a week (or month – if we get busy) we scan then can recycle/shred all the papers. It’s so much easier then trying to find places for it all. We also got rid of extra dishes and cups and mugs – only keeping what we use. Toys were pared down.
Not sure if that helps – I know moving isn’t an option for everyone – but maybe tackling a room/closet at a time – as if you were packing it up – might help…