Hobonichi Weeks – Week 24 of 2020

Happy Monday, friends. I hope your weekend treated you well. The weather was gorgeous here, so we spent a lot of time outside!

I like to take a few minutes on Mondays to reflect back on the week that just ended. I use my Hobonichi Weeks to write a few lines about each day, track my daily/weekly tasks, document my habits, and keep up with how much time I spend writing each day. I commit to sharing my progress on my blog each week because it helps keep me accountable and moving forward! My major focus right now? Transitioning towards a plant based diet. (And I have a long way to go!)

Last week I shared that I’m going to be using my habit tracker to slowly transition to a more plant based diet. My first obstacle is to cut out fast food in my life and I did really well! We ate at McDonalds on Saturday, but I followed my rule to eat vegan if we pick up something. I ordered only french fries after being reassured that McDonalds no longer uses beef tallow for frying.

And remember my temptation tracker from last week? I was going to use it to document every time I was tempted to eat out but resisted the urge. Well, I found that I wasn’t as tempted as I thought I’d be. I feel like I’ve had much tougher weeks, but I only logged two temptations – which definitely helped with my plan to prepare all of my own meals. But since I logged two instances of being tempted, that means $20 will go into my corgi fund!

This week I’m still focusing on preparing all of my own meals. Instead of tracking individual temptations, I’m going to reward myself with $5 into my corgi fund every day that I avoid eating out. And that means any eating out, even if my order is vegan (which was my caveat last week). I’m still thinking about a more robust behavioral plan to get me to my goal, but I haven’t had the opportunity.

I hesitated to use money as my reward. We are able to pay our bills, but we’re not rolling in the dough over here. Yet we’re spending a lot of money on eating out, way more than $5/day per person! And if mama cuts back on eating out, then we all cut back on eating out. My hope is that we’ll also be saving a tremendous amount of money as I sock away little bits at a time.

I hope this wasn’t too boring, but I’m finding that this blog gives me a lot of accountability. In the last few years, I’ve started and stopped with this goal so many times, but never said anything because I was afraid of failure and looking like a dope. But reading Atomic Habits reminded me how crucial accountability is and I’m using a lot of the principles from that book to help me reach this new goal, which has felt unattainable for decades (literally).

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It was a good week for all my habits, other than not pushing the snooze button. Given the state of the world, I feel the pull to do more reading, thinking, and writing, yet feel stuck about how to accomplish that. I’m very happy with the consistency I’ve had with my blog, but wish I could use it for more thoughtful purposes. There’s so much swirling in my mind and I want to find a way to let it all out, other than on the messy pages of my journals. So that’s another thing I’m thinking about lately – how to write more. It might mean that I shift the structure of my morning a bit to make room for something else. Which is scary, because things have been working so well for me!

I plan to be back on Wednesday with a knitting and reading update. See you then!