Summer Goals!

Q3 is about to begin! A reminder – I find that Quintiles are perfect for my year, which is defined both by the calendar year and the school schedule.

Q1 – Jan 1 to beginning of spring break

Q2 – Spring break to end of school year

Q3 – Summer as defined by school calendar (in this case, 6/4 – 8/14)

Q4 – Start of school to Halloween

Q5 – Nov 1 – Dec 31 (holiday, planning & reflection season)

Pictured above is my Q3 goals list. I also keep monthly lists which help me break up this list, and then I pull weekly to do items from that (and daily items from the weekly list).

It’s a lot of lists.

But it works for me.

(PS: “phone” under family has nothing to do with getting kids a phone – I have to send in my old phone for a reimbursement. Boring but necessary and is actually a multistep process because there is a forgotten password locking me out of erasing it! Anyway.)

Things I am excited about on this list:

1- Summer Reading. As I mentioned, the MMD Summer Book List was very enticing to me this year! I made an overly ambitious list of about 15 titles I’d let to get to, which isn’t realistic for me. But it’s possible I could churn through a book a week, which would be 10. We will see what happens! Here’s a snap of the (overly aspiration list – again, I know I won’t read them all!) for posterity:

Oh, and I’ve been mostly reading on my phone lately. It’s less glamorous and I am jealous of all the pretty Bookstagram stacks of summer picks! But I think this is the most convenient for me. I plowed through Field Notes on Love (very cute story, reads like a YA though I am not sure it is) in the past several days just reading in spare moments and while I am lying with the big kids at bedtime.

2- Kid days with A&C. Scheduled for 6/13 and 6/14. They are excited and so am I. They keep changing their mind about what they want to do, especially A.

3- 2 80 DO workouts weekly. Yes, I’ve decided to dive into the 80 Day Obsession – but not all the way. I want to keep running, going to Ultimate, and I sometimes need shorter workouts. Someday I may feel like going all the way and committing to 3 months straight but . . . not now. Plus, I think my fall goals will contain some sort of race training, so I’d like to keep running at least 2-3x/week.

(Random fact: this is the first year in quite some time I’ve tracked my workouts consistently online using Strava. I like the ‘credit’ I get when I see all of the activities in there.)

4- Summer travel. We currently have planned:

• Weekend away with Josh (belated anniversary trip)
• Girls weekend with college BFFs — currently being planned for August!
• Family trip to Legoland / Amelia Island

The rest of the time we will be here. It’s actually not a ton of travel – 12 days total. No long family megatrip like we’ve done in previous years (2018 – Whistler/Portland/Seattle; 2017 – Boston/Williamstown/NY/PHL). But I think there will be a lot of memories packed into that time.

5- Hopefully growth of pod, blog, etc! We are tentatively launching some advertiser campaigns (thank you to the many of you who supported this decision!) in July. It helps me to rationalize the fact that the pod has become a mini-part-time job for me. I do love doing it — it’s so much fun — but I feel excited for this step.

I also want to try to get AHEAD of some of the pod work – which can be hard! But we tend to have better, more organized episodes when we prep the scripts at several days in advance of recording, and it’s less stressful. (Laura is very prompt and typically ahead of the game; I am either totally on top of things or rather last minute depending on what else is going on in my life! But I always get it done 🙂 )

Off to lead the residents’ yearly retreat today, which I am opening up with an (optional) 5K on the beach! (Being one of our residents sounds awesome, doesn’t it!?)