The Esthitude Place

Holla folks, welcome to August officially from The Esthitude Place. We are pretty excited because it’s the blog’s 2-Year Anniversary this month. Did I hear you say Ahooooooo?

Here we are in a new month, and the year is flying away again.
A new month presents an opportunity to start again; an opportunity to retreat, restrategize and refire.

Already, 7 months are gone in 2017 and the remaining months are moving at the speed of *I don’t even know *. If you remember clearly, at the beginning of the year, we had plans, goals and resolutions and I want to believe that you’ve been checking up on your goals and measuring how close you are to smashing them all. Well, if you’ve not started, it’s best you start now.

Towards the end of July, I encountered some experiences that reminded me of life’s constant change, speed and brevity, and this reinforced in me the need to re-analyse myself and my life goals.

Do you take time to think of your life as a whole and what you hope to achieve with it? Do you know that at the end of life, it is not going to be about how much money you made, how popular you were or how beautiful /handsome you were. It is going to be about how you lived your life. More reasons why you need to start living intentionally, yeah?

Well, I take time to do this once in a while and ending of last month was when I tried doing it again: I read through my goals for the year, re-read my entries in my personal journal, marked the goals that were smashed, amended my goals where necessary and wrote new plans and thoughts.

This should be your mantra

One plan I came up with that I’ll like to share with you is what I call DE-CLUSTERING and it means to break down a group of items into smaller individual units. I’m going to use an example that I hope you can relate with.

As some of you may know, apart from being a blogger, I am a software developer. I develop web applications using C#, ASP.NET, Microsoft Technologies generally and then Html, JavaScript and CSS. Over the years, I’ve come to realize that I’m more comfortable with the back-end technologies than front-end (software terminologies), so I decided to take front-end more seriously i.e. I planned to go more in-depth with Html, CSS and Javascript; so I’ll download e-books, read materials, bla bla, but I’ll lose focus and start over. So late last month, I decided to change plans ( I decided to DE-CLUSTER). I decided to pick just one of the three, focus on and practice just it for a month,this way I can master it correctly and I’m making progress already.

Another example I can share is my goal to read the Bible through in one year. At the beginning of the year, I decided to do a complete chronological read of the Bible. I noticed that as at the ending of the first quarter, I was making progress but right now, don’t even ask me how far I’ve gone (I’m still far behind). An easier way of achieving this would have been to break it down into months and maybe into weeks. Say, Two books of the Bible per month or thereabout, then, I’d have been able to track my progress monthly and maybe I’d have made significant progress by now. I hope you get my point?

Definitely, it is good to multitask. However, there are times when multitasking only results in inefficiency. So, I’ll suggest you try DE-CLUSTERING your goals; break them down into smaller units and then execute one or two (max) at a time. This way, you can truly track your progress. Of course, there’ll be temptation to dip your hands into many things and yes, there’ll be social media to remind you of your friends and colleagues that are making it while you are still struggling with getting one thing right in your life. In those times, I want you to remember that life is a journey and we all are running different races; don’t time yourself using another person’s clock.

Have a long-term goal and then break it down into smaller chunks with deadlines, this way, you’ll be able to measure your progress and even in times when you don’t meet your deadlines, pull yourself together and try again.

So, what do you think of the DE-CLUSTERING method of goal smashing? Have you tried it before? Did it work for you? Share with me in the comment section.

Here’s to a simplified and DE-CLUSTERED August. I hope you have many reasons to smile.

Cheers!!!