If you’ve been around the personal development space at ALL you’ve probably heard of the 90 day year, 3 month sprints, challenges and more which are all designed to completely and totally transform your life in a single season.
I’m not here to help you get six pack abs or run a marathon, there are approximately 83 million of those videos on YouTube.
I’m also not going to promise or pretend that we can become different people in quarter of a year – real change is slow and often boring BUT is also more lasting than fads.
So I’m going to begin documenting here what I’m doing for a personal challenge here for the next 90 days and I want to encourage you to play along. In a minute we’ll get into some guidelines but first, why am I doing this? I’ve spent the last 20ish years in self-development spaces – years ago that was blogs, then tele-seminars, webinars, podcasts, vlogs, social media channels, and too many courses for any one person.
In that time I also built my own successful consulting business and worked behind the scenes of a LOT of creators and it was an eye-opening experience!
If you’re interested in the stats, I’m currently 40 years old, I live and work in Kansas, I am single (and happy about it!) and have a dog and a couple cats. Life is good! I own a 100 year old home which I’m slowly renovating, I like to garden when the bugs are not eating me alive and I have a full time job which I enjoy most of the time.
And you might be thinking similarly, my life is pretty good, what needs to change?
We all have areas which are not as good as we think they could be, bad habits we want to break or good habits we want to adopt. If you’d like to participate, now is a good time to pause and brainstorm what would be awesome to have in your life 90 days from now. Don’t filter yourself, just make the list and then keep reading to get to the next step.
There are two ways you could go about the next 90 days: focus mode or widespread progress.
Here’s how I think of focus mode: my dad restores antique cars as a hobby and he has this friend who will pick up a project car and get obsessed about it. He’ll turn down invites to tours and meetings and vacation just to finish this car. All of his time and effort goes into that vehicle until it’s done. Then he’ll happy go to the tours in the car and really enjoy it. My dad, who is working on 4-6 cars at once thinks this is crazy. But it works for his friend! He doesn’t do anything else but that ONE project until it’s complete.
If you look over your list and a bunch of the things make you go “eh, I guess” but one or two stand out as YES that’s the one, then focus mode may be best for you.
The second option is widespread progress and this is for the person who looks at a list and wants to do ALL the things ALL at once. The idea of focusing on saving money while not decluttering or being more social while also not getting in more steps in is insane. If that’s you go for widespread progress.
For awhile now I’ve been doing widespread progress on a lot of goals and I begin with the App “Productive” – it’s free to download and allows you to set your own daily goals. I add 10-15 goals and every day I check off the ones I’ve done. Then every month I track how many goals I accomplished per day.
Right now my current goals are:
- Walk 4,000 steps
- Floss my teeth
- Scoop the cat litter box
- Make my bed
- Do all the dishes before I go to bed
- Journal
- Publish online (blog, newsletter, video)
- Cleanse my face
- Reach out to a friend
- Use lotion
- Get in bed by 10pm
If I notice that a goal is not as relevant or important to me, I’ll remove it.
If a habit is so firmly set that it’s routine, I may remove it from Productive because I don’t need the reminder (this happened with meditation because I have a streak of 7+ years).
Now, for some of you this might feel SUPER tedious and overwhelming so let me describe the focus mode.
In focus mode, you’re going to be like my dad’s friend on the car. You know what you want the end goal to be and work relentlessly toward that end without many distractions. Now, you’re not going to quit your job or ignore your kids for 3 months, but all your free time is going to be focused on this project.
The benefit here is that there’s an end date, you’re not going to be revamping your closet *forever* nor would you spend eternity learning to knit.
How you view success here is important, in widespread progress you want to see yourself doing more of the positive things or less of the negative things over time. If you’re in focus mode you want to be done or nearly done with a project OR have established the consistent habit at the end of 90 days.
There’s no one way to do things so pick the method that works best for you and, if you choose more than 2 goals, you’re in widespread mode. Just go with it.
So with all that said, what am I going to be doing over the next 90 days? Well, I’m clearing out my productive and setting some new goals. I’ve learned over time not to be precious about my streaks, and the midpoint of the year is a good time to note records and cleanse it all in favor of new habits. Next up I’ll share my new goals so come back to check that out soon.