Simple Tweaks to Improve Your Weeks

Today I've got 6 simple ideas you can use to improve your weeks and bring back daily joy to your life. We often overcomplicate things when really, noticing the little things can bring us back to feeling excited about our lives all over again.

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Transcript

1:54

You're listening to episode 212 of the Mindful Productivity Podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Steckler. And today we're going to be having a conversation about some simple tweaks that you can make to make your weeks better. If you're feeling like you're in a slump or you need to change up, stuff is just feeling like Groundhog's Day and you're messing up the days of the week, I can relate. I do this a lot. And keep on listening because I have some really fun, actionable and easy and motivating tips for you today on how you can start feeling better on a regular basis and start getting excited about your life again. Welcome to the Mindful Productivity podcast. I'm your host, Sarah Steckler, and this is the place to be to live a more mindful and productive life. If you're ready to turn daily chaos into calm and start your days with intention, then get ready to join me as we dive deep into mindful living and personal productivity. It's time to connect with your true self so you can live the life you want to live. And it all starts It's Now. I was recently having a conversation with one of my good friends. We use the boxer app a lot, so we check in all the time. I'm away from my family and friends. We're always moving. And so I love that app because it really allows me to stay connected with a lot of people. And we were having this conversation because we check in with each other throughout the day. She actually runs her own business, too. So we're always on the go. And we were talking about... We had this moment of checking in with each other. And she said, I feel like I've been really whiny and complaining a lot. And I said, I don't really think so. But then I started thinking about it and I was like, well, but I noticed that I have, too. And we just started having this dialog about what we give our attention and our energy to. And while I think there's nothing wrong with venting, we all need to do it. I think sometimes we can also get into this other side of the pendulum, where we get into this cycle of it just becomes natural to look for the frustrating things or to give more attention to the frustrating things. For example, sometimes I ask myself this question, if I'm having a day and everything is going wrong, It feels like I just want to tell everyone I know about how frustrating my day is. But then I ask myself, what would happen if you didn't tell everybody about it? What if you took some time to go on a walk and let the steam roll off your back and you did some journaling about it? And sometimes that's the correct answer. So I guess I'm just sitting with, where are the times where I really, truly need someone to listen? And then where are the other times in my life where I don't need someone else to know about every single problem or issue I have? And I think it just becomes so natural in our society with social media to want to tell everyone everything. I have this constant feeling of, hey, if something happened, maybe I should shout it out into the void. And we were just having this conversation about how that does no way serve us, right? And how it's been really nice to focus more on the little joys. And something I actually just wrote in one of my journals today was that I want to get excited about the little things again in life. And I have a tendency to go through bouts of depression and anxiety. And when I'm in those states, sometimes I forget just how wonderful it can be to focus on small things. We can wait, like most of our lives. We can get in these cycles where, oh, I'll be happy when, right? Or, I just wish something really wonderful would happen so I could feel better, when really most of our life is the mundane, right? Most of our life experiences are going to be those mundane moments. And the times when we actually have big high adrenaline exciting, wonderful things happen are few and far between most of the time. And so I was writing in my journal and I was talking about how I'm excited about different things happening. And I've been enjoying. I set up this whole pool, little tiny kiddie pool in my backyard. We have all these pigeons because we currently live in the city. And I set up this pool for them with a fountain. And they've been enjoying it every day. And I was just reflecting on how much I love that. I love throughout the day, if I'm walking through my living room, I can peek outside and look at the pigeons. And I just get so much joy from seeing them eating their little snacks and cleaning their little feathers and getting off fluffy in the pool. So I was thinking about that and I was like, you know, ultimately, I really want to give little joys in my life more weight. I want to give more weight to those little things, right? And that's something that there's a book called Buddha's Brain. I can't remember. I think the guy's name is Rick, something. I can't remember his last name. But if you read that book, he talks about the neuroplasticity, and he talks about how when you give more attention to the things in your life that feel good, right You strengthen that pathway in your brain. You actually make yourself happier. I'm dumbing it down. But I was thinking about that. So that's the first tip. And there's actually six things I wrote down today that I want to talk to you about. But that first one was really leaning into Thinking about the little joys in your life and giving them more weight. What if instead of just sit thinking, oh, yeah, pigeons are cool and they're in my backyard and that's cute, what if that was a bigger part of my day? Even if it only was five minutes of my day, what if I looked at it as a bigger part of my day? And it's interesting, right? Because we automatically do that with negative things. If a frustrating situation happens or you get a package and it's completely damaged or All these other little things that could happen to your day that maybe only take up 5, 10 minutes of your entire day that's hours and hours long. Those things can suddenly ruin your whole day. But we rarely think about that with joyful things. So anyway, I know it's been a little bit repetitive here, but I just really wanted to get that hit home because it's really powerful and it's really fun. And what you focus on really does grow in your mind. Right now, I'm even thinking of my whole day today. And I've taken the day off. I've been relaxing, but I really focused on the pigeons. So that's the overarching thing in my mind. I'm like, oh, my gosh, it was a day of pigeons, even though it was just 5, 10 minutes of that, right? So interesting how our perspective changes on that. So that's the first thing that I wanted to talk about, was giving more weight to the little joys in our life. The second little tweak you can make, and again, these aren't revolutionary things, right? But creating something to look forward to maybe every day of your week, or if not every day, having a couple of days a week where you have something very small that you're looking forward to. And again, this comes back to that first point of adding more weight to the things, right? But I was looking through my notes I make notes in my journal and I also put it right on my Google calendar when a new show is going to drop on Netflix or a new movie comes out, streaming, whatever. I always put it on my calendar and I make it a big deal because when I was younger, if a movie came to the theater, it was such a huge deal. It was like, oh, my gosh, we're going to go see it. Or if something was going to premiere live on TV over the summer, that's what we were going to be doing. But I feel like we have lost that, because everything's so instant now. It's rare that everyone's watching something at the same time or something is going to happen live. I think that's why stuff like the Super Bowl or the Oscars or whatever, still have that feeling to them because there's this excitement when something live is happening and you know other people are doing it at the same time. So I've noticed we've lost that, or at least I have. So I wanted to start bringing that feeling back. And I was like, I should start putting all these things that I'm excited about on Google Calendar. And then when I start my week on a Monday, it's fun to be like, oh, wow, Thursday, this new movie drops that looks really great. I love the trailer. I'm going to tell my friend about it and we're both going to watch it this weekend and then have a conversation about it and see what we liked or go back and forth on Voxer, whatever. And it just becomes, it becomes a bigger thing. So thinking about movies that may be dropping could be something that you look forward to. Right now, it's also super hot where I am. So I've been making homemade lemonade, which I don't know why I've never done this in my entire life. It's so easy. And if you've never done it, you just you must. But I basically just take a glass Mason jar. You could take any cup. And I cut up an entire lemon into, I don't know, I cut it into eighths maybe. I cut it in half. I cut those in half and I cut those in half one more time. And I put it in a Mason jar. And then you can do whatever amount of sugar you I think the first time I tried it, I did four tablespoons of sugar and I was like, whoa, it was a little too much for me. So now I do two, maybe three tablespoons of sugar and then also put in just like a fourth cup of your favorite frozen fruit. If you can get frozen Target has this frozen passion fruit blend. And if you get that, oh my gosh, so good. It has passion fruit, dragon fruit. And you basically just put that in the Mason jar, still frozen, and then you muddle it up. I just have a wooden spoon. I don't have a muddle, but you muddle it up. And then you add in a bunch of ice. I think I add in six regular size big ice cubes and then fill it up with cold water. And then it's a Mason jar. So I just put one of those plastic twisty lids on it and shake it up. Best lemonade of my life. And now I make one, at least right now, during the summer, I'm having two or three a week. So I'm having it every Wednesday for sure. But it's something I look forward to so much. And then I'll do either different fruits. So I've done lemonade with passion fruit and dragon fruit. I've also done with peaches and frozen strawberries. Oh my gosh, that one was so good. The peach one, so good. So if there's something you can do like that throughout your week, something that you can really look forward to. Maybe it's like getting a boba tea on your way to work or whatever. Again, these aren't brand new ideas, but isn't it crazy how we forget to do these things? We forget to set these intentions. And then you start doing them. And before you know it, you're like, oh, I'm happier. Why am I happier? I just don't think that we have to overcomplicate our happiness and our joy in our lives. I think it can really stem from all these little things. So other things that you could look forward to, it could be a different meal or maybe you enjoy the structure of things. So my husband's currently deployed, but when he gets back, one of the things we love to do that we haven't done in a long time is we pick a day of the week, sometimes Thursdays or Fridays, and we call it a Shitty American Spaghetti Night. And it originated because we were... He was stationed. We were stationed overseas in Italy for a while and we had access to all this amazing pasta there, the best pasta. You could just buy it at the grocery store. It was so fresh and like, oh my gosh, the olives, the food there, outstanding. And so we would make spaghetti at home or we would go out and get it. And it was incredible. But it was funny because every now and then we were like, I still want the shitty American version. So we started having these shitty American spaghetti nights. Basically, it was just like your run of the mill spaghetti that you get in a box, no big deal. And marinara sauce. It was just what you could find at the store, right? And we do the big thing of garlic bread and and we'd have it. And it was always really good. And so that was something to look forward to, right? Like, I mean, taco Tuesdays, whatever you want. But if If you've lost your way and you haven't created a meal-themed night in a while, that can also be something to look forward to. Another thing is putting something on your calendar or doing something for yourself that you're not going to see for a while. So unfortunately, for a lot of us, this can be ordering stuff online and you get that dopamine hit of getting it later. But that's not always a good practice. I know for me, I'm trying to declutter my life and not spend so much money in ordering things. But another way you can get this same feeling is putting a book on hold at the library. So one of the things I always like to do is if there's a new book that's dropping, you can literally go to barnsandnoble. Com or wherever that are going to be talking about new releases or new books, go online or use your little library app and put books on hold because a lot of times they're still on order and nobody's put a hold on them yet. I I cannot tell you how many times I've got my grubbed little hands on a brand new release book from the library and where a lot of other people are paying 25 bucks or something for it, you can get it from the library. And it's so fun to put a book on hold and get that notification that it's ready. Granted, sometimes books are on hold for a long, long time if you're in line. But again, something really fun to look forward to. Okay, I think I've really hit that point home. I think you get what I'm saying. The third one is to create a 10 minute rundown in your home. And this is something I want to get better at for doing on a nightly basis. It ties into a similar way that you might shut down your home at night, close your home. One thing my mom always did when I was little, she would shut down the kitchen. And I think that was a way of her keeping us from going in there and constantly being like, can we have more treats? Can we have more treats? So she was like, oh, the kitchen's closed at the end of the night. But it was also her way of tidying up the kitchen, right, at the end of the And that's something that I want to get back into in my home. It's not only shutting the house down at night. And I don't just mean the cleaning, but also there's something about that, the intentionality. Every night I have to lock the front door and close the slider and do all these things. But when there's the intention behind it that you're lovingly closing your home and securing everything, it just brings a different feeling. It brings a different energy to the experience. So with a 10 minute rundown, it's basically just coming up with a list of things that you could spend 10 minutes doing that would make your house feel better. And I say 10 minutes because that just feels like such an accessible thing. It could be a one minute rundown. It could be five minutes if it's really hard for you to get started. But basically just telling yourself all you need to do is spend 10 minutes doing something, whether it's wiping down the kitchen counters or unloading the dishwasher. And what's so funny about that, too, is so often, It's the pivotal part. If I don't unload the dishwasher, the whole kitchen will just get backed up in so quickly. So unloading the dishwasher could be part of that rundown for you too, because it's the catalyst towards everything else getting messy. And that could be a metaphor. There could be so many other things in your life that are unloading the dishwasher. I know in my office, the minute I have too many journals stacked up on my desk, then it's like the chair. Everybody has a chair in their house where the minute you start putting clothes or something on it, it just becomes a big pile mess and it seems to attract more stuff. We all have something like that in our lives. So keeping on task here, a 10 minute rundown is just something that you're doing that helps your home feel better or helps you feel better. So make a list of what those things could be. They could be cleaning routines. They could also be a 10 minute rundown for your own mental health. So maybe that means like going on a five minute walk or jumping on your treadmill or or doing a couple jumping jacks real quick or doing a 10 minute brain dump, anything like that, a 10 minute rundown. The next tip I have for you is to do something different in your house or in your world. Every week. So wherever you spend your time. But I was watching a video all back that was talking about how it can be actually so incredibly wonderful for your cat's mental health or any pet to create something different in their space every day. So this woman was experimenting with different stuff. So one day she threw a dining chair into the living room, set it right in the living room with a blanket on it. And the cat was totally interested in it. Jumped up on it, went underneath it like a fort. The other day she put catnip in a different place. Another day, what did she do? Oh, she got a box from the garage and put it out on the patio or something. There's all kinds of things. And it was really helpful for the cat's well-being and mental health. And I was thinking about that and I was like, man, I feel the same way when I switch stuff up, right? It's like when you're little and you're like, Mom, I rearrange my room. Come look at it, right? It's the best feeling to have a change of some sort sometimes. And so we do this seasonally, a lot of us, with decorate for fall or Christmas or whatever. But you can do this in other ways, too. You can switch out paintings. You can move things around. You can change or experiment with the lighting in your home. You can switch up your routine in the evening. So maybe right now you're doing something on autopilot every night. Maybe you do something differently. Instead of picking up your phone and doomscrolling, maybe you're deleting those apps, right? And instead, reading a book or doing something different. So doing something different throughout your week or making a choice to do something different. And maybe to that means eating out or trying a different meal or all these kinds of things. The other one, the other tip is to start creating more of an ambience for yourself when you're doing things. This could also apply to your job, depending on what you do. But one thing I do is I actually, in the beginning of the year, I can't remember if I shared this, I actually got a tiny little TV for the kitchen. And my mom has always had one. And I was like, you know what? I what? I want a little TV for my kitchen because I was feeling lonely at night because my husband's deployed and you have to clean up the kitchen. And I had all these glaring overhead lights in there. And it was just me unloading the dishwasher in silence. And then I was like, what if I changed up the ambience? So I actually got a kitchen lamp. So now I have this really warm kitchen light that I have in there. Changed the whole feeling of the kitchen. So now I actually want to be in there more. And then I got this little kitchen TV and It came with a subscription to SiriusXM, which I love. I just love it. I love all the EDM, BPM. Some of my favorite stations on there are BPM. There's an Armin van Buren one, I think. And then I also listen to country. I love country music. I don't know if I've told you that. And I listen to all these different things while I clean the kitchen with my warm little lamp that's on in my kitchen. And it makes such a huge difference to have that ambiance in there. And then also to throw on YouTube, there's so many endless cool things on YouTube now. You can listen to like Thunderstorms or Rain or Lo-Fi or Dark Academia, like pretend you're in the library and there's vampires in the background, but you're studying and there's ambience for that. Or there's actually like, Jurassic Park ambience, which is so cool. Halloween, you name it, right? So throw that stuff on in the background when you're doing things, when you're working, when you're journaling, when you're cleaning. It just makes such a big difference. I just love it so much. Again, these are simple little things, but they can really change up your whole week. And then the last tip I have for you, tip number six, is just to evaluate your time sucks. So where in your days are you just succumbing to a lack of awareness or a lack of intention? This is not to say that everything you do in your life has to be with attention and that you can't have moments where you just plop down on the couch and stare at the TV or doomscroll. Sometimes we need that, right? But it can be really helpful to look at where is your time really going, right? And to really map that out and take stock in that and then ask yourself, is this how I want to spend my time? Because I know for me, I really noticed lately I was spending a lot of time on threads. This is the second or third time I've deactivated it. So if you follow me on there and you're like, where's Sarah? It's because I'm deactivating it because I'm like, I can't be on here all the time. So whether that means deleting apps from your phone permanently or maybe just at the beginning of, at 6:00 PM, you got to take it off your phone and to reinstall it later. I don't know. Really look at where your time is going and be intentional about how you want to spend that time. It's like you can crowd out your evenings with what you want instead of minimizing your time by falling into this trap of not being aware of where your time is going and then feeling like, I don't have any time to read now because I didn't... What happened? What did I do? So really evaluating where your time is going. So just to do a quick recap of the tips we talked about today, one one more time. It's to, one, give little joys in your life more weight. Give more weight to them. Let them just ooze over your whole day with pink confetti and make that the highlight of what your day looks like and what you experience experience. The second one was creating more things to look forward to throughout your weeks and put them on your schedule. Three was creating a 10 minute rundown throughout your week. This could be every day. This could be a couple of times a week. The fourth one was something different, right? So we talked about the cat example, but also creating something different in your life or your routine. And five was creating that ambiance, changing things up, whether lighting or music, whatever. And then six, again, was evaluating where your time is going and what's really sucking up your time. So again, I hope this podcast episode was helpful in giving you some ideas for some simple things that you can do to bring joy back into your daily life, back into making your weeks better. Again, I am hopefully going to be dropping more episodes more regularly, again, here on the podcast. If you would like to support the show or you want to see what else I have going on, you can always head on over to my website. It is Sarahsteckler. com. I have more resources for you there on planner publishing and mindful productivity. And you can always come say hi to me. I'm still hanging out on Instagram @sarahsteckler. I hope you have a wonderful week ahead, and I'll see you back here soon.