Are you on top of everything?
Do you visit the dentist every 6 months? Do you get your oil changed every 3000 to 4000 miles? What about your mortgage/rent…do you pay late or on time? Are you picking up your kids on time? Are they eating their vegetables? Did you soak your oatmeal before cooking it? When you shop, are you bringing your reusable bags? What about supporting local businesses (especially local bands!) Don’t forget about the little guy! Are you up to date on the daily political news, and did you consult snopes.com to make sure you aren’t getting false information? Did you remember to make a smoothie today and did you meditate last night like you said you would? Did you proofread your Facebook post and make sure you used the correct form of your vs you’re? Did you check in with your friend about her job interview? And OMG please tell me you washed behind your ears and hopefully you didn’t use GMO soap. Oh no, you DID?? ACK! Think of the children!!

If you aren’t doing all of these things, you are a failure and should feel bad about yourself! You are a disgrace to humanity! WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU?!! Right?!

Ok ok you are probably picking up on my sarcasm. Let’s face it; there are only 24 hours in a day and we aren’t even awake for all of them. We really, really can NOT achieve everything that we want to achieve in a 24-hour lil pocket of time. It’s just physically impossible. Where my fellow math geeks at?! The number of tasks in a week divided by the number of days in a week is a finite number. It is NOT infinite. You can’t expect to get a boatload of stuff done in a short period of time.

Does that mean we just shouldn’t strive for being better? We shouldn’t strive to try that new recipe, that new environmentally-friendly trick, that new skill? You silly goose! Of course we should try new things. It keeps us on our toes and helps us to learn. It keeps our brains active!

The key to balancing your goals with not driving yourself absolutely insane is remembering to strive for progress and not perfection. It’s ok to want more for yourself. It’s actually a good thing! But don’t set yourself up for failure by setting 17 goals for this week and 17 more for next week. Count your blessings, celebrate your progress, and don’t stress so much about counting the number of things you haven’t gotten to yet. Feeling bad cuz you didn’t get everything done? Maybe you overplanned. Or maybe you screwed around too much on Facebook/Youtube. Either way! Figure out what happened and just move forward so that next time is better. No biggie.

Let’s not be so hard on ourselves. And let’s not be so hard on each other.

PS photo by Bridgett Rheam!

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