This is my first time ever answering a daily blogging prompt, but I thought it was a good one so here goes.

I pay attention to how I feel. If I’m feeling overly anxious or depressed, it’s time to unplug. The boys get little bouts of screen time throughout the day to break up the monotony of school, and if they want more, we try to make them earn it by doing a chore or playing outside first.

For myself, unplugging means deleting social media off my phone. I actually unplugged a few weeks ago and haven’t really plugged back in. In my opinion, social media feeds comparison, and comparison is the thief of joy. I do believe that a lot of good can come from social media, but most of the time I don’t feel like it serves me personally. I can’t stand being bombarded with constant ads, and it’s too easy to get sucked into the mindless scrolling with all those reels.

Now that I’ve answered my very first blogging prompt, I’ve got a few more things I’d like to add.

Setting Daily Goals: Making Time for The Things You Love

For the past… Oh, I don’t know… what feels like forever, I’ve been thinking to myself that there’s never enough time in a day. There are so many things that I want to learn and do, but my excuse is always “I don’t have time” or “I don’t have the energy.”

The boys have this daily routine that they do for school. They have to get it done every day before they can watch tv or play video games. At first it was a way for them to learn to be self starting and independent, but as time has passed I’ve seen some incredible progress in them. Kender, my oldest, started playing the piano a little over two years ago. He’s been practicing every day for anywhere from 5-15 minutes, and it blows my mind how amazing he sounds now.

We’ve learned from experience with our homeschooling that being consistent every day is better than sporadically doing big chunks.

This has been my mantra lately:

Little by little, progress is made.

I don’t know why it took me so long to create a routine for myself. I’ve had a vague one for a while — wake up, make a smoothie, do the dishes, exercise, etc. Recently I decided to apply this concept of consistency to my personal goals; a daily routine for things I want to get better at.

Every morning when I wake up, I try to spend a few minutes doing each of these things:

• Say a prayer
• Read scriptures
• Draw
• Journal
• Practice coding
• Exercise
• Practice ukulele

The only thing I give myself a time limit for is drawing. I set my timer for around 30 minutes and listen to my scriptures while I draw. It’s easy for me to hyper-focus and get burnt out, so it’s helpful to set a limit there. For everything else, I try not to focus too much on the time. I just want to build a daily habit.

And all those things don’t always get done right when I wake up. I can usually get through coding before the boys need something, and then I get back to it once they’re taken care of. Over time, I hope I’ll see the kind of progress in myself that I’ve see in my kids.

Weekly Goal: Blogging

This blog has been a little bit neglected over the past couple of years, so I’m going to set a goal to try and post weekly. I’m also going to be redesigning some things on the blog to incorporate more of my art (and practice some of those coding and web design skills) but that will happen slowly over time.