January 5th

So today was really the first day of focusing on my New Year's resolution. It actually went pretty well.

I got up at 5am and worked out at the Gym. This isn't much out of the ordinary, but what was different was that I pushed myself a lot more. Over the last few weeks I've really focused on doing some of the lifts that I don't usually like. For example, over the last 2 years I could count the number of times I did the dead lift and squat on one hand. Now I do one of those lifts every time I go work out. Men's Health was right, those lifts really do work your ENTIRE body! Also, if you like to feel immediate results, these are the lifts for that.

Today I also made the decision not to get an iPhone. In May my Verizon contract will be up, and I'll be able to switch providers without paying a penalty. Right now I pay about $80 per month for 900 minutes on my plan with unlimited texting. Don't get me wrong, I'd LOVE to get the iPhone. I spend so much time in airports and in the middle of nowhere, it'd be really nice to always have access to the internet. But it'd cost me a couple hundred bucks up front just to get the phone, then every month it'd cost me about $30 in addition to the minutes I'd have to pay for. So in the first year, it'd probably cost me about $560 just to have the iPhone, and I'd rather do something different with that money. There's so many things in the Twin Cities I want to do! I also learned today that I won't get my W-2 until the end of January, which means I won't be able to file my taxes until then. So in January my SPM partners and I will have to try to get the business taxes done and filed so that we'll be able to do our personal taxes as soon as we get all of our paperwork mailed to us.

I think I only did incrementaly better on focusing at work. I got caught up on a lot of the emails and phone calls that I had, but I still spent a lot of time multi-tasking and getting distracted. I need to turn off my email alerts and leave my gmail closed. I get distracted by personal work too easily. By the end of this week I'd like to get to a point where I'm pro-active instead of being reactive to things that I need to get done in my projects. This will be especially important for next week because I'll be traveling out to Los Angeles to our plant and it's hard for me to do anything but watch over my projects when I'm out there. I also have some really important funding requests coming up that I need to be able to spend time on because as soon as the funding gets approved they'll want to move really fast!

I didn't do any reading today yet. I plan on reading a chapter in "Smart Couples Finish Rich" with my fiance Megan. Last night we read the intro and I thought it was a lot of fun to go through it together and be able to discuss the points together and agree on things that we may need to change in our lives.

As for my last resolution, the house is a mess. Maybe after we read our chapter I'll spend 10 minutes cleaning everything up and putting things in their places.

I feel like tomorrow will be a very productive day. I don't have any meetins planned for work, so I'll be able to spend some time in the gym in the morning and really focus on catching up on all the things at work that I need to do, especially all those tasks I am REALLY not looking forward to doing!