Dive Deeper: Mid-Year Planning

Welcome to July!!!

2020 is half done (which might bring you joy or might bring you anxiety). No matter how you have experienced 2020 so far take a moment to breathe. It has been quite a year so far and you are doing great.

Since we have made it to mid-year this is a good time to review and reflect on how your life is going and think about any course corrections you would like to make.

Depending on how much time you can set aside you might want to reflect on areas such as:

• Health: (Physical/Mental/Emotional/Spiritual)
• Relationships/Connection: (Family/Found Family/Friends/Communities)
• Mission/Purpose/Goals:
• Experiences/Learning/Creativity: 
• Self Care: (See The *More or Less* Definitive Guide to Self-Care by Anna Borges)

Personally, I reflected on how I can keep focused on my year-long theme of Living Lighter and Diving Deeper.

For example, I reflected on each of my daily activities for the month of June:

• Fitness
• Pride
• BlackLivesMatter
• Spiritual
• Workweek/Weekend
• Other

After reflection on which I had found useful, which brought joy, which served their purpose and were done, and which simply became a headache I created my list of daily activities for the month of July:

• Fitness
• BlackLivesMatter
• Creative
• Wellness
• Workweek/Weekend
• Other

Of course, a daily task list for you would look different depending on what you want to focus on and what you feel you need to focus on. 

There are no right or wrong answers but some tips I have picked up are:

Balance Structure/Flexibility: 

Structure will help you not need to stress about making lots of choices each and every day. Flexibility means you have wiggle room if something comes up. 

For example for Fitness this month my structure is doing 3 a day: A short Darabee fitness program, yoga with Adriene, and then either a walk outside or a dance fitness class (Flexibility depending on the weather)

Set A Limited Number Of Goals:

Personally, I have found 6 (with a few of the 6 being multipart) work for me. This is not a hard and fast rule but from experience, if you plan to do say 20 things a day you will not get to them all and can become discouraged. If you have a larger number of goals you can always make them unofficial goals (See Below)

Record All Your Accomplishments (No matter how small):

In my lists, I have an "other" category for this exact reason. Personally, I find if I have a long list of daily tasks it can sometimes be hard to do other tasks as they come up because I will not get "credit" for it. With an "other" category I can list such items and feel I am accomplishing things. 

(Also think of tasks not necessary in terms of objective size but about how much effort you need to make, so, for example, setting up an appointment or making a phone call might not take much objective effort, but if it has been on your list for a long time or it is one of your "Impossible Tasks" doing what you need to do to get it done (asking for help, etc) is a major accomplishment. Celebrate these accomplishments!!!) 

So welcome to July and may the rest of the year serve you well.