The Plan.

So Lent starts in two days, and I'm starting to realize just how disciplined I am going to have to be over the next month or so to meet the goals I set a few days ago. On one hand, I am excited about Lent because I deeply believe in the value of everything I have laid out to accomplish. These goals essentially represent five principles I want to work on.

1 - Productivity
2 - Care for Self
3 - Responsible stewardship
4 - Intentional Joy
5 - Care for others

These ideas sound great, right? They sound like things that anyone would benefit from. However, I am also going to be brutally honest about my feelings on what is about to happen. It scares the shit out of me. I have never done anything that requires this level of commitment before in my life. As I said last post, I've mostly been able to make it by on pure wit and improvisation, so this whole living every day with an intention to be the absolute best I can is pretty horrifying. Exhilarating, but also absolutely horrifying. I keep asking myself about what happens when I lose interest, get bored, or just get frustrated. I don't think I can do Lent by myself. I've tried going it alone before, and even when it works, it sucks. So I want have decided to put some measures in place to make this process more transparent. It's going to make things hard in the sense that I can't cheat and skip a day of work on this project, but i think I will be happy with it in the end.

I want you, the Internet community, to help me out by keeping up with my progress. I have committed to post a new blog every day to keep a public record of how things are going with my Lenten commitments. Every day starting Wednesday, you can expect to see the following-

1) A basic record of what I spent money during the day. I am not going to provide a line by line report on the Internet, but I will keep such records myself everyday, and give you the overview. Feel free to comment on the wisdom of some of my purchasing choices or make suggestions. The intent here is that if I know people are watching what I spend, I will be less likely to make poor financial decisions.

2) I will keep a record of my running schedule and results. This will be somewhat difficult since i don't have a fancy dancy device to keep track of this kind of stuff, but at the very least I will tell you how many minutes I ran, about how far I ran (in laps around a location if I can't estimate the actual mileage)

3) I will post what part of my dissertation I worked on, and in the case that I absolutely have nothing to do on the dissertation itself, I will report what I did instead.

4) I will write a brief reflection on how I experienced the day, including insights and how I tried to approach the day as a whole. I will not keep records of specific conversations between others and myself, because I feel that while I am making my journey public, I have a responsibility to those in my social sphere to guard their privacy.

OK, so that's the plan in short. I do hope that a few people at the very least will take part in this process with me. I forewarn anyone who wants to keep up with me that for the week of spring break, I will be on a road trip to a sociology conference in Vegas. I am not sure how I am going to make daily updates during this time, but at the least I will keep a good record of every day's work and find a way to post it regularly during that time.

Well, here we go. I hope something good comes of this.