I’ve chosen my theme for the year: Go Easy!

I was inspired by Adele’s song Easy on Me. In my case, I need to go easy on myself.

I don’t really like going easy. I’m good at going hard and pushing through until I get results. This approach has worked well for me for a while.

Recently, I had a serious neck problem and frequent headaches, and I’ve been unable to get good sleep, which just made me more tired overall. Therefore, I had to really slow down and rest. It’s not nice, but it had to be done.

The truth is that I don’t like resting very much. It’s boring! What’s so enjoyable about lying there and doing nothing? I want to be doing stuff, to be excited, and to be experiencing new things. I don’t like being bored. (Or maybe I’m just doing resting wrong? Let me know.)

But I’ve heard of countless successful people who pushed too hard, had a burnout, and then had to reinvent their lives. I didn’t want to do that. Burnout may be inevitable sometimes, but I was actually aware of the fact that I needed to slow down before things became fully disastrous. With awareness and knowledge comes responsibility, so I sighed deeply and actually started taking breaks…

Over time, my neck problems and my headaches have begun to subside, but I still need to remember to take it easy. It is too easy to forget and go full speed again, only to hit the same roadblocks again.

Another trick I’m aiming to implement is to allow for transition time between activities. Often I run from one activity to the next, making sure my day is maximally productive and jam-packed. But that means I tend to be stressed about running late and cannot allow myself to take an extra minute or two if needed.

Unfortunately, this means I may be snappy or irritated with my closest people, usually my husband and my son. This isn’t nice for anybody, and I’d rather be more at ease in order to bring a more peaceful energy to our home.

So I’ll try to build in transition time (5 to 10 minutes) between activities as well as underplan my day as a whole. Think I can do these three tasks in an hour? Plan on doing two. Expect this task to take two hours to complete? Plan for two and a half.

As much as I don’t like going easy, that is what I’ll be aiming to do this year. I’ll allow myself time to rest, I’ll underplan my days/weeks/months, and I’ll allow for transition time.

Let’s give it up for going easy!