The Journey to Magnificence: Week Twenty-Eight

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Welcome to The Journey to Magnificence! This is week twenty-eight: August 19 – 25, 2018.

Oh boy. This week took a turn for the unexpectedly unproductive. I didn’t really get anything meaningful done besides submitting an exercise for some part-time side work. In fact, the biggest thing for this week happened to be the live orientation for the Goal Slaying Course.

It’s definitely a bare-ass minimum week.

week twenty-eight top

What I Said I’d Do

Spend 2 hours on the Goal Slaying Course
Start writing my review of the Slay Your Goals Planner
Complete Module 6 of the VA course
Continue working with my author friend for her book launch!
Complete Module 2 of the Get to the Point Workshop
Finish Module 4 of Intentional Blog (and the action steps, where applicable)

What I Actually Worked On

Wrote 1000 words a day
Listed current projects and contemplated their priority levels
#GoalSlaying 6-Step Program Live Orientation
Started watching The Bible Project
Started Module 2 of the Get to the Point Workshop

Sunday, Day 190 – One Long Day

I got up this morning at around 2:30 AM Eastern time, which is 11:30 PM Pacific time (on the previous day!). The flight into Portland was long (about six hours) and I wasn’t nearly as productive as on the way to Philadelphia.

My 1000 words got written, and I read a bit on my Kindle, but beyond that, I spent most of my time on my laptop watching some TV and movies from my hard drive and Alaska’s in-flight entertainment.

I made it within 20 minutes of finishing the Ferdinand movie before we landed, so at some point, I’m going to have to finish that! That wasn’t planned well, clearly.

The flights to Seattle from Portland were being delayed for everyone, not just our flight, due to air traffic control in Seattle. I blame the smoke and the fires, personally.

Washington has been in the clutches of smoke for a few weeks from all the wildfires in the PNW and in Canada. I’m sure everyone will be especially grateful when the usual rains sweep back in this fall.

Monday, Day 192 – Taking the Day Off!

I spent today mostly moving slowly, not doing much beyond the bare-ass minimum for most things, because I think I need the time to think about things and not take it too seriously.

Also, you know, to recover from last week’s trip to the east coast. No jet lag, but I didn’t sleep well last night despite getting over 8 hours.

It really is the quality versus the quantity.

One thing I’m really thinking about a lot today is prioritization.

There are all sorts of things that fight for our attention, but we have to decide what gets that attention and when.

Prioritizing things can feel daunting, especially if they all feel equally important and/or urgent.

But there’s this thing called the Eisenhower matrix, which basically places all things into one of four boxes:

Important and Urgent
Unimportant and Urgent
Important and Not Urgent
Unimportant and Not Urgent

This is a handy way to figure out what to focus on – hint, focus on the important stuff before the unimportant stuff, and ask yourself twice if something “Unimportant and Urgent” really needs your attention or if you can hand it off to someone else.

Tuesday, Day 193 – Worst in the World

So I live near Seattle, Washington.

Currently, the entire Pacific Northwest is covered in a thick blanket of smoke from wildfires all over the damn place.

The air quality in Seattle is literally the worst in the world right now, and we ain’t happy about it.

I skipped going on a walk this morning because I had a headache already from the smoke and generally am not feeling that great considering. Thankfully the forecast is saying it’ll start moving out tomorrow night into Thursday, and hopefully, by the weekend, we’ll be back to a more normal view of Seattle.

Cuz this is what it’s been looking like recently:

week twenty-eight smoke — Source: https://q13fox.com/2015/08/24/pictures-of-smoke-mesmerize-internet-as-haze-clears-in-western-washington/

It might be worth it to get an air filtration mask, especially since this is the second year running with this terrible smoke and I’m willing to bet it’ll keep happening until all the built-up underbrush is cleared from the forests that have been kept from burning for so long.

As it was a long day (massage day, yay!) the biggest thing that happened today was me writing 1000+ words and making a to-do/priorities list for current projects.

I feel like I do this sort of thing on a regular basis: make a priority list of current projects, but then never look at it again. At least this one has deadlines!

Wednesday, Day 194 – Goal Slaying Orientation & Ken Berry Videos

Tonight I participated in the live orientation call for the #GoalSlaying in 6 Steps course by Nadalie Bardo. I’m one of her affiliates, and besides wanting to take the course for myself, I also want to be able to recommend it to my readers with a true testimonial for it actually working.

Nadalie is a lot of fun! There were only two students on the call with her, but she recorded the session to add to the course for future students.

(As of today, it’s not been generally launched yet.)

The call was pretty short, about half an hour long, and afterward, I ended up on YouTube (not sure how that happened) watching Ken Berry, MD videos.

Ken Berry is a real medical doctor who teaches the keto way of life and all the medical benefits behind it.

But don’t take my word for it, take his! He recently did a video addressing that Lancet Public Health publication claiming that low-carb diets decrease lifespan.

(Spoiler alert – they don’t.)

Thursday, Day 195 – The Bible Project

The smoke is finally lifting from my area in Washington! We were able to open up the windows after two days of having kept them shut in 90-degree heat with no air conditioning. We live in a semi-below ground “first-floor” apartment, so that helped with the heat, but it got pretty warm at night.

I’m excited to be able to go on walks again without needing a mask or a wet towel over my face.

(I didn’t actually use either of those, I just skipped my walk.)

Bible Project

In any case, I stayed up later than usual tonight because, through a blog post I’d commented on, I found The Bible Project YouTube channel and started watching their videos.

For a while now I’ve felt like I don’t really know the stories in the Bible like I did in elementary (when I attended a private Christian school) and am eager to start learning them again.

Watching these might also help my understanding when we reach October, which is my “Hand-Copy 1 Chapter of Scripture a Day” 30-Day challenge.

This one is inspired by Sarah Ruszkowski of Freedom is Hers, which she’s currently doing for August.

I’ve been wanting to read the Bible for a while so I hope watching these videos will help me understand the themes and general messages before I get confused by complex books.

Friday, Day 196 – Distractions Abound

I’ve gotten sucked back into some great fanfiction over the past couple days. I know this is one of my downfalls, so at least I can recognize when it’s happening (regardless if I actually do anything about it).

I have a couple deadlines this weekend and next week that would really benefit from not reading fanfiction, and at the same time, I had to pull out my ancient HP laptop for the husband to use for a potential job opportunity.

He built his own gaming computer and didn’t need the Office Suite at the time, but now he needs to use Word and my old laptop has that on it 🙂

You know how, when you leave old computers off for a long time, the battery drains and it needs to download a million updates?

Yeah, that happened with the ancient HP and a significant chunk of the evening became consumed by getting this laptop ready for the husband and me task-switching between reading fanfiction and working on my deadline-stuff.

It was a weird night.

Saturday, Day 197 – The Family Gathers

In more recent years, my family has started to do yearly (summer) get-togethers so we all can see each other on a day that’s not Thanksgiving or Christmas. I really liked this idea, so it kind of spawned my approximately monthly dinners with my favorite cousin.

But it also is happening right in the middle of the husband and me being pretty busy. So we’re going to have to strategically work around it.

This week was not a great one for my “champagne moment,” which is the list of things at the top that I said I was going to do this week.

And that’s all right. It’s not ideal, but I’m not going to punish myself over missing the mark on what I could get done. Sometimes getting back from a coast-to-coast trip takes more than a day to recover.

That was definitely the case this week.

I’m happy to see my family today, though. In fact, we planned it for today to accommodate one of my cousins from all the way on the east coast who I’m not sure I’ve ever actually met (and remembered meeting).

Bonus points that he has the same name as my husband…

What’s Next?

So because this week took a weird turn for the unproductive, I’m going to take a good look at what I really need to get done next week in order to have a big win.

Client work
Write my review of the Slay Your Goals Planner
Edit & schedule multiple stories for Medium and posts for the blog
Finish reading an advance copy of a book (I’m part of a launch team)

And that’s all I’m going to put down. If I get through these, I can turn to finish my list from this week (mostly coursework).

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The Journey to Magnificence is a series of weekly summaries of my journey through courses and resources provided by or found through the Work at Home School, hosted and delivered by Caitlin Pyle.

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About the author

Colleen

Life coach, author, podcast host, cat mom, wife, Ravenclaw, and semi-compulsive hiker living in the Montana Rockies.