Reflections On A Month Of Blogging

I started this blog spontaneously on the 1st of January this year. I decided to change my life in some ways and on the last day of 2011 I thought it would be great idea to blog about my progress every day, so I can see how I go, connect with people and learn from them and maybe inspire them to take action as well. You know, motivating each other and stuff..

Blogging has been pretty good, it takes up quite a bit of time, doing research for example, but it’s also a great tool to keep on track. If I have to research and write a post I’m automatically learning something new EVERY day! Which is pretty cool.

I thought I’d make a list of things we have changed so far.

FOOD

•baking half of our bread ourselves
•go to the farmer’s market every week
•at least two thirds of our food is organic
•less processed food
•more cooking, preparing food ourselves
•eat vegan
•foraging(which I didn’t like so far)

MINIMIZING

•sorting things into sell, give away, keep, use
•de-cluttering space
•selling things
•whittling away at the things we think we do need, reconsidering them

SPENDING

•not buying anything else then the absolute essentials, basically just food
•spending diary, have a look at expenses for the month

LEARNING

•about edible plants
•about food
•about people’s lifestyles
•about alternative lifestyles, especially frugal living and alternative housing
•how to make bread
•how to install warm water units and compost toilets(starting to learn anyways)
•about blogging and wordpress

RANDOM

•no more petrochemical cosmetics
•more reading books
•less wasting time

Hope I haven’t left anything out..

So yeah, this whole blogging thing is keeping me on track and it’s definitely awesome to learn new things and talk to people about it.

What have you learned lately? What aspect of your life do you like to work on?

Saving Time, Killing Time, Wasting Time

As i said yesterday, i’m pretty good with saving money. Which is funny coz i’m not that good at saving time. I do work 40 hours a week, so that does take up quite a bit of it.

Often you can hear people talk about saving money, but then some are talking about killing time, while others again are complaining about how all their time gets wasted. So why would anyone kill time, that’s like saying, “Let’s go out and totally waste money!” or even worse, “Let’s totally waste our lives!”. Because once you finished killing your time, you’re probably dead.
Where are the priorities here?

Most of my waking hours i either spend at work or on the net, especially on facebook. I’m planning on halving my working hours, but I can’t do this at the moment. So that’s a thing for later.

What i can do is get off facebook. It’s hard, coz i find the internet so fascinating! There are so many interesting links and articles out there and you can find some nice people to chat to.

But i have to prioritize, and i don’t think being on the net should be a priority for me right now. What works quite well for me is “distracting” myself with better, more exciting things. Lately we have been going on drives through the country, one of my favourites, picnics in the parks, where we saw lots and lost of kangaroos, and you know things like baking bread or making plans..

Better off wasting my time with the roos!

It’s not so hard when i have interesting things to do, it get’s hard when i try new ones and they don’t work out and i get frustrated. When i have some spare minutes, that all of a sudden turn into hours on facebook and by the time i get off the computer i wonder “What happened to my day?”

So the plan is to save time, i’ll try and stay off facebook for the rest of the week, i might even manage to shrink the amount of tabs i got open on my screen from 200 to something manageable!

This is what i will figure out over the next days.

How do you prioritize time when you don’t have a whole lot of it? How do you deal with easy distractions?