I set up some quarterly goals for myself, and I thought I'd post an update about my progress so far:
Work enough to avoid needing student loans. I secured a job this month that should be more than sufficient to cover my living expenses. The work is a little bit tedious and frustrating, but overall it's much more interesting than I was expecting and I'm learning a lot. While this isn't a job that I would want permanently, it's definitely helping me get a feel for types of problems I've never seen before and I think it will serve me well in the long run.
Sit down with my fiance and discuss our finances. We haven't done this yet because we've been in full speed wedding planning mode. We have all of February and March left to do it, though. Actually, I think it would be ideal to discuss it when we do our taxes, because we'll already be looking a lot of the numbers we'll want for that discussion. The biggest thing, though, is to figure out what our long term goals are.
Work out three times a week. Fail. Like, horribly fail. Between my new job and school I'm now sitting at a computer for 8-12 hours a day, and it's starting to cause back pain. To recap my weeks:
- Jan 1-7: 0 workouts. I was sick, though, and I don't think running is good medicine for vomiting. I don't count this week as a failure because not exercising was the most healthy option.
- Jan 8-14: 3 workouts. Pass!
- Jan 9-21: 0 workouts. No excuses. I need to find a way to work exercise into my schedule.
- Jan 22-28: 1 workout. Better, but not good.
- Jan 29-Feb 4: ?? I got out three times this week to walk for about half an hour. I was mainly doing it to help my back (it's amazing how much it helps to move just a little), and it wasn't really enough to count as exercise.
Get my butt in gear and plan my wedding. Totally doing this!
- Bridesmaids Dresses I took most of my girls out shopping and found something that actually worked on all of them. As long the out of town bridesmaid tries on the dress and doesn't hate it I think that's settled.
- Lots of meetings. We've started meeting with other vendors that will be a part of our wedding, and we're making progress with that. I'm getting better about responding for emails in a reasonable fashion. (I tend to want to wait and talk to my fiance about emails in person before responding to anything but we don't see much of each other so it can take weeks when I do that.)
Increase the frequency of my posting. Ugh. I was doing pretty well for the first two weeks and then things kind of collapsed. I need to refocus and reapply myself. Four posts a week. I can do it!
Decrease my Alexa rating below 200,000. In January I went from about 538,000 to about 345,000. And then I changed my domain and I'm starting over. I'm actually still tracking for the blogspot domain as well, just to see what happens. As of today I'm at about 321,000 for my blogspot domain, and my rating has gone from about 21,000,000 on Thursday and Friday to about 12,000,000 today. It should drop faster than the other one did, because I already have traffic coming in here, but I'll need to work extra hard to get it down to 200,000 before my deadline. I'd been planning to switch my domain at the beginning of January for just that reason, but the domain was a gift and there was some delay in getting the necessary login information. I'm confident that I'm on track to meet this goal, though.
Declutter Challenge. I haven't done any decluttering in the past couple of weeks, and I still have that last bag of stuff to go to Good Will. I'll try to take that when I'm out running errands today, because then I can update my status bar. (Nothing counts until it leaves the apartment, and I didn't count how many items were in each bag before I took the others away.) I know I have more to get rid of, and actually ran some stuff through the wash specifically so I could donate them, but then I got behind and just put them away with the regular laundry. Oops.
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