There are three times in the year that I am introspective (Okay, more introspective than usual.):

• The beginning of September because it still feels like the start of the year.
• The end of December because it is the actual end of the year.
• And the end of February, the beginning of my life calendar, since it’s when my birthday is.

Since my birthday has passed, I realized that I’ve already been falling behind on some of my intentions for this year.  Most notably, I haven’t been keeping up with the frequency of blog postings that I wanted.  D-oh!

It has been busy and I have a bad habit of not taking time to write about things when I am in the midst of them.  And then I have to reflect a little after the fact to make sure that remember everything correctly.  But I still have ample time to get back on track to writing 52 blogs this year, right?

As the saying goes:  Fall down seven times.  Get up eight times.

So, I’m brushing myself off and getting back on schedule.  Actually, to help me stay on target with my intentions, I’ve created a weekly checklist.  This will be my first week using it, so I’m excited to see how it goes.

When I was working in IT, we had a regular maintenance window on the weekend where we would run diagnostics on the servers and perform required maintenance activities.  Until we created a checklist for everyone to follow, we were getting sporadic results and a lot of inconsistencies.  Once we had the checklist and everyone followed it, we had a consistent and reliable result.

The best thing about the checklist was that you didn’t have to “think” too much about what had to be done.  You’d look at the list, do a task and then cross it off the list.  And then you went to the next item.

I’ve used daily checklists before and found them helpful.  I’m hoping the weekly checklist will give me a broader perspective on the tasks that I want to get accomplished.

This is especially important to me because I’m juggling a few projects now and I need to make sure that I am doing regular work on each one.  My current list has daily tasks that can be checked off and at the bottom of the page are the weekly tasks (i.e. write a blog post).  All of the tasks fit on one page, so I can look at my week at a glance.  This will be especially helpful when the week is coming to an end and I have an idea what is still outstanding.

March will be my testing month to see how it goes. So, excuse me while I check “write a blog post” off my weekly list…