I can’t quite believe that we’ve reached December and that another year has nearly gone! This marks my final month of introducing a new healthy habit and reaching my goal of making and embedding 12 small changes that will hopefully make my life easier/healthier/more fabulous (or the first two at least). I’ve committed to myself that I will do a year of each habit and then review which ones really have made a difference and that I’ll continue, so I’ll start that in January.

We all have a lot to juggle, and part of the point of the habits has been to try and systematise (is that a word? Spellcheck would suggest so…) my life so that mundane stuff just happens and I can focus my energy on the fun stuff. In November I started working on a weekly plan that helps facilitate this.

I’ve drawn up a little template in OneNote (which means I can view it on whichever device I have to hand) which includes the following:

• Where I’m working (which could be office, London or home and will required different planning)
• Where Paul is working (if he’s away, that has implications for childcare)
• What the kids have on (e.g. if I need to worry about birthday parties, swimming lessons etc)
• Other events (e.g. a night out, hair appointment)
• College (helps ensure that I breakdown monthly tasks into manageable chunks and makes it less overwhelming)
• Practicalities (such as bin day, this is exciting stuff)
• Planned exercise (more likely to happen if written down)
• Meals (not too spontaneous, but means I only have to think about it once a week, and can plan an online shop in advance)
• Thing to do (the list was getting massive, so just trying to tackle one thing a day makes it more manageable and likely to happen. Procrastination be gone)

So it’s quite detailed! I’ve got a template set up and the skeleton planner set up for 3-4 weeks out, so I can pop in events etc as they come up. For long and boring reasons I won’t go into, for the purposes of planning, my week starts on a Friday, so the plan is to spend a few mins (it only really takes 10 mins or so) filling it in for the upcoming week. The daily habit is to check the plan before bed every night and make sure that I’m set up for the following day – the right kit is packed for school, the dinner is out of the freezer to defrost etc. It also means that I can make tweaks, as it’s not necessarily set in stone and it might need to be flexible.

Hopefully this will help become second nature and help me get the boring stuff done with minimal effort!