Thursday's Thoughts

I took the time today to catch up on, or at least try to, on a few blogs I follow. I managed to read a few post from Becoming Minimalist and karenika. I found Karen's post about 52 things to do and it really intrigued me. I don't like the idea of resolutions, but I knew I need to set some goals. The idea of 52, one per week, really struck a chord with me. That and a post over at Minimalist about other good thing to incorporate into a new year really got me going. I drafted up some vague ideas, then used the idea of the 52 things and wrote attainable goals from that. I won;t share them all here now, but one of my goals is to read more. I love to read and always have but I find that I'm reading less and less as I get older. I think I find I let distractions get in the way. I spend too much time surfing the net, reading what everyone else is doing. I thought that writing out a schedule would help me be more disciplined. Bah! Too boring.

I had set up my daily schedule in blocks of 30 minutes, with "rewards" and "drudgery" interspersed. I thought I would be motivated to get things done if I knew there was fun stuff to be done. To be fair, the schedule is less than a week old. But I changed it up by writing the activities on small pieces of cardstock so I can pick them out of a basket and do them in any order I want. I hope this will make my schedule feel less, well, scheduled! And hopefully it will help remove some of those pesky distractions that have been keeping me from the things I really do like to do! Minimalist has another good post that helped me in all this goal setting I have done today, right here.

I made a goal to read more. Then I narrowed that down to reading one book a month (I'm in grad school too), plus a few extra. I took some of Minimalist's advice and added 3 classics to my list, then split the other 12 up between non-fiction and fiction. Here's the list of books that I plan to read this year:

Classics:
Great Expectations
Gulliver's Travels
The Importance of Being Earnest

Fiction:
The Promise - Ted Dekker
Inkheart, Inkspell and Inkdeath - Cornelia Funke
Dragon Rider - Cornelia Funke
The Heaven Trilogy - Ted Dekker

Non Fiction:
Self Nurture - Alice D. Domar
Captivating - John & Stasi Eldredge
Ninety Days of God's Goodness: Daily Reflections That Shine Light on Personal Darkness - Randy Alcorn
Has God Spoken? - Hank Hanegraaff
The Life God Blesses - Jim Cymbala
Blessing Your Husband - Debra Evans

Some of these I have already started, so I hope to get a few more books in by the end of the year. Also, I do not know how grueling my MS program will be nor how many breaks I will have so that will also affect my pace. I am sooo looking forward to getting some good reading in again! And I will report on each one as I finish it, or maybe even while I'm still in it!