Keep Trying

I want to apologize for missing a scheduled Friday post. You may not have noticed the missing post, but I did. I have a self-imposed schedule for this blog and new posts are supposed to arrive every Monday, Wednesday and Friday morning. As you can see, there is a missing post for this week.

I could come up with a ton of excuses why there wasn't a post yesterday:

• I woke up later than I wanted.
• I had a morning meeting with my new boss, so I couldn't take a little extra time to write.
• The normal work day spiraled to an 11 hour work day, meaning I got home much later than expected.
• When I arrived home, one of my dogs was waiting for a bath (which I pushed to Friday as other things came up during the week).
• After washing the dog, I wanted to eat (as I hadn't eaten a meal through the day, only unhealthy snacks).
• I had laundry to do since I am going out of town tomorrow.
• After all of this, I ended up sitting on the couch watching a movie I haven't seen since the 1990's.

As you can see, there are a variety of reasons I didn't get a blog posted yesterday...except, all of these reasons are crap. The real reason I didn't get a blog posted yesterday is because I didn't make the time to post one. I missed a deadline (self-imposed, but a deadline nonetheless) because I chose to not do the work. I did a lot of other things, but just didn't write a blog post.

I'm not going to beat myself up for missing the post, but I can learn a few things from this experience:

• Habits are important: I recently took two weeks off blogging to go on my honeymoon. Prior to this, I posted every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. It took a while for this to become a habit. In the beginning, I had to force myself to stick with these deadlines. Once writing was habitual, it became second nature and I built time in my schedule to write. It only took two weeks to lose this. It will be easier to start it back up, but will take work in the beginning.
• We have to make the time: We are all busy people. We have lives outside of the things we want to do (especially the things we do for fun). There are a lot of things competing for our limited time. We have to choose what we want to do and then make the time to do it. It's not always going to be easy, but we have to choose each day. I chose to watch a movie instead of writing. Is it the end of the world? Nope, but it did keep me from accomplishing what I wanted to accomplish.
• We have to prioritize our tasks: There will be days when we have to choose between things we want to accomplish because there is only a finite amount of time each day. Maybe you have to put off the Spanish lesson to run three miles. Maybe you have to put off weights to write. We may not accomplish everything we want to accomplish, but we have to figure out how to accomplish the most important items.
• Don't beat yourself up: We're all human. I'm not going to dwell on the fact I missed a post yesterday, but I will learn from the experience. I can write the post this morning and still have my three posts for this week. My day got away from me and I chose to do something other than write. It's a new day and I have new choices to make about how to spend my time. I may not get everything accomplished today either, but I can try.

Every one of us has things on our "list" we want to accomplish, but we fail to make the time to accomplish. What's on your list? How much of a priority is it? Do you really want to accomplish it or do you like talking about doing it more than actually doing it? Come up with a list of what you want to do today and then prioritize this list. Make the time to do what is most important for you. If you don't get things done, don't make excuses and don't beat yourself up, just try again. Keep trying until you do.