Getting Things Done ~ Conscious Awareness and Just Do It!

Do you have a bucket list? Do you have things on it that you intended to do in a certain time frame? Do life circumstances keep you occupied in such a way that it sometimes seems you may never accomplish the activities on your list?

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I was feeling that way recently. Blindsided by the number of items still left un-done on my 50@50 list I decided it was time to reevaluate my list and to analyze why more of it hadn't been accomplished. And my first thought was to let go. What I mean, is to reevaluate each item on the list and decide whether it was still important to me. Was, for example, completing a meaningful piece of art still something I wanted to do? After contemplating the value of each item, I decided that each item was still important and that I was not willing to take anything off of the list. Okay. So now what?

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The next thing I did, was to decide if my time frame is realistic...and this is where I made the first change. I decided that it is not important that I accomplish all of these items in one year. In fact, I really don't care if it takes me five years. What is important, is that I make steady progress toward completing every item.

Just after "training" :-)

About half way through the tour ~ Ashley made us do this! :-)

So, I decided to make a conscious effort to put some of the items on my calendar, or to otherwise make space for them in my life. For example, Rick and I have decided to get out of our post-grad rut. You can read about it here. Saturday, I made reservations to take the Desert Ridge Marriot Segway Tour! DONE! It was so much fun and was everything I had hoped it would be. Now I can confidently mark it off my list. Incorporating the things on my list into our week-end fun and annual vacations will ensure that activities like learning to kayak, taking the light rail, and swimming with the dolphins get done. Once a week I will be more aware of my menus and I can consciously try out a new fish recipe and I can do one meatless meal per week and try out a new vegetarian dish. I can pay attention to techniques that work well and to mistakes I make, and I can learn from them. Before I know it, I'm sure I'll be pretty good at both :-)

What is on your bucket list? What strategies will you use to accomplish the things that are important to you?