Present – Word of the Year – March 2020 Update

Good morning, friends. Today I’m joining Honoré at Morning Glory Studio to share my progress on my word of the year – Present.

For more information on how this is going, please read my previous posts:

• My introduction post to why I chose “present.”
• January Update
• February Update

Today’s post isn’t going to be as in-depth as I’d hoped because my writing time has been stymied over the last several weeks. But I want to write something just to stay on track and keep this in my daily thoughts.

In February, I set three goals. Here’s how I’m doing with them:

Continue clearing out the clutter:
No progress. I didn’t take a single trip to Goodwill! So I’ll think a little bit more about how I can make progress on this in April.

Embrace the messiness of each day:
Or, “revel in daily living” as Kat suggested in my February post! The thought was to only clean at set times during the day and not let worrying about messes take over my life. I haven’t followed through on this, but have been better about only cleaning during lulls. I haven’t let messes distract me quite as much as they did before, so I feel good about where I am here.

Remove Instagram from my phone and only check IG at my desktop computer:
This is the big one! I removed the app from my phone as planned and only checked IG on my computer. And, as predicted, I’ve only checked once or twice in the last month. There are moments that I’ve missed it, but overall I’ve been doing okay. I don’t plan to add it back to my phone. When it’s there, not only do I feel pressure to check IG, but I feel pressure to take pictures and then post them. Just letting go of that has made a difference in my ability to stay focused and present.

Not only have I taken IG off of my phone, but I’ve also taken the WordPress app off of my phone. I realized I was constantly checking WordPress to read comments, check stats, and to stay updated on other blogs. I really missed this app while I was sick over the last couple of weeks because I fell so behind on following blogs, but I know that I can live without it. I noticed that I was reading comments and blogs throughout the day, but not responding to any of them until the next morning during my computer time – when I would read the comments and blogs again in order to respond! I decided to stop and only read everything once before responding or commenting. This practice has also made a difference in my ability to feel present throughout the day.

Same with email – I barely check my email on my phone throughout the day and only really look at it once early in the morning. I’m not likely to respond to anything in depth on my phone because I hate typing on it, so why bother checking email? Especially now that the boys are both home with me and I know I’m not going to miss anything time sensitive from their teachers or therapists.

Now, if it wasn’t for the compulsive checking of CNN throughout the day thanks to this COVID-19 scare, I’d be doing pretty good with my phone! But I’m not going to worry too much about that “distraction,” because things are scary out there and I can only take so much of the news these days anyway.

My April goals will be similar to the ones in March – continue clearing clutter and find ways to stop using my phone as a distraction.

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Do you have a word of the year? Won’t you join our linkup with Honoré?