Back in 2018, I started “monthly challenges.” I found that a few months into the New Year, I found it hard to always keep my “resolutions” in mind and by February, I was disillusioned. So, I decided to start monthly challenges, where each month, I’d pick something to work on. You can find a recap of those monthly challenges here (it ranged from flossing everyday to switching from paper towels to microfiber cloths to reduce my paper usage.) 31 days or less, I found, was the sweet spot for making small changes. If the changes made my life easier or made me a better person,
And now, they’re back! I’m committing to a full year (12 months!) of monthly challenges. The key? At the end of each month, I decide what the next month’s challenge will be. I do this so that the challenges reflect what I really need to work on in that moment. Setting a full year of challenges ahead of time isn’t realistic for me, because my life is a whirlwind and each month, life happens and I need to focus on something else.
January Monthly Challenge: Recap
Unfortunately, this challenge was a bit premature to set. With a 6 month old infant, it’s still hard to stick to any sort of schedule. There are sleep regressions, middle of the night teething wakeups, and in our case, sickness that ruined sleep for the first few weeks of the month. Thus, when I’ve been up for half of the night, I need every extra second of sleep I can get, so I was sleeping until Roma woke up.
The whole point of me setting the challenge to wake up at 6am was so that I could be a more productive person throughout the day by setting the pace with organizing myself at 6am. However, that would have required very minimal hours of sleep, and there would be absolutely no productivity in that scenario.
Long story short, I failed my January challenge, but in my defense, it wasn’t the right challenge to set at this time in my life. Lesson learned!
February Monthly Challenge
I’ve been thinking a lot about how quickly time is passing and how it’s insane that I have an almost 2.5 year old and an almost 8 month old! Literally, how?! So this month, I want to prioritize one-on-one time with my kids. Each week, I want to focus on each of them individually. I’m going to work extra hard (time block the heck out of my days) so that I can have some special alone time with them and not feel stressed about work.
For Roma, I want to take her to a music class! There’s a music class every Thursday that she can make, and I want to take her to that – she’s never been! Otherwise, maybe it’s just not sending her off to pickup Luca from school with the nanny and instead, playing at home together and going for a walk before it’s time for lunch. These are little windows of time that I know would fill me up so much and make the kids happy. Plus, what’s having a ‘flexible’ work schedule like if I don’t take advantage of it?
For Luca, I want to surprise him and pick him up from school and do a picnic lunch on a day when it’s in the high 40s (today would’ve been perfect!) or take him on a scooter ride. Or maybe take him for a treat after he wakes up from nap as his afternoon snack. I always go to grab coffee at the coffee shop downstairs and it would be so fun to take Luca for a croissant (he loves the ones they sell down there!) I miss our one-on-one time especially, and I know he misses it too.
So, just a couple hours a week to devote to my family. Not every day, just a couple of hours during the work week. And I feel better just thinking about it!
I encourage you to either make your own monthly challenges this year or follow along with mine! Who’s with me? Leave a comment with your monthly challenge and let’s keep ourselves accountable!
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