blog sticker

I was sorting through some plastic storage bins of old stuff yesterday, and was happy to find a couple of sheets of stickers that I'd forgotten about-- neon smiley faces, and some animals. You see, over the past few months I've been tracking various things on my wall calendar with stickers: different kinds of workouts, my daily household chores, writing time, and other self-improvement measures. The concrete physical act of putting the sticker on the calendar and seeing them accrue is oddly rewarding -- even more so than using joe's goals, which I had tried a year or two ago. I'm not on the computer 24/7 and since most of the tasks I want to track don't involve the computer, using the site was more of an obstacle than a reward. (Plus I got sidetracked by getting obsessive about what the relative worth of different tasks might be, since you can assign them point values.)

When you sign up to do the 60-day Bikram challenge at my yoga studio, they put a chart on the wall with your name on it, and you add a star sticker to the chart each day you complete a class. The experience of the challenge has its own momentum, and the yoga is intrinsically rewarding, but somehow the stickers help. Even this past spring when I did the challenge for the second time -- knowing that I could and would complete it -- the stickers were still a nice form of encouragement. So I decided to adopt stickers for my own purposes at home.

So, although I haven't written a blog post in six days, I can tell you that I completed 8 workouts, 3 household projects, 4 writing sessions, and had one rest and recharge day. It actually wasn't a great week for getting stuff done, but it's nice to see that I accomplished some things even though I felt really scattered. So now a green smiley face is going up on the calendar. Like anything else, if I just keep doing little bits maybe I'll improve...