New financial year resolutions 2018

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This post was started yesterday but I'd been up all night with my daughter so I never got very far into it. I'll try to finish it today, and then I want to get a couple of review posts out before I finish the products in question.

Anyhoo. This is another resolution post. Why? Because we're in the first week of the new financial year in Australia, and that always feels like a fresh start to me - so I'm treating it like the beginning of January.

If you're up for making some goals for the next six months, feel free to join me!


Stick with the smoothies

I mentioned to my husband recently that I'd realised neither of us eats much fruit. This is crazy: before children, I used to eat tonnes of fruit (especially apples) and these days I also make sure that my kids eat plenty of fruit, so it's high time I did the same for myself! 

While I generally eat well (lots of lean protein and vegetables), I think what's happened here is that because I barely get time to eat as a primary carer, when I do eat, I tend to reach for things that will fill me up for a little while - so a meal, or if a snack, then something energy-dense like a muesli bar.

What I've started doing over the last two weeks is throwing bundles of whatever fruit we have into the NutriBullet whole, and then the kids and I will have a cup each of that for the next couple of days before I clean it out and start again. My aim is to keep this new trend going, and the best way to do that is to continue with it until it turns into a habit. Then it'll be here to stay.


Clean out my closet

If you read my 2018 life resolutions or the follow-up post to that where I looked at how well I'd done (see the latter post here), you may remember that I promised to reduce household clutter by 20% across the board, and I've done pretty well in every area except my own closet. Why? Because it's upstairs and I'm always watching children downstairs so it's not easy for me to get up there!

But I'm determined to go through the stuff on my shelves in particular, since that area has become rather messy and it's not easy to keep it neat, given how small each shelf is and how narrow I have to make the separate piles.

While I don't have many clothes (and I mean that: I have about one quarter of the amount of clothing my husband has, perhaps even less), I still have a bunch of stuff in there that I never wear so I need to work out if I'm not wearing it because I'm never going to wear it, or if I'm only not wearing it because I'm currently stuck in my motherhood trackie/hoodie attire, which will eventually change (maybe ; )).

By the end of this calendar year, I want my closet to be looking more streamlined. Fingers crossed.


Reorganise the makeup shelves

This one will sound rather odd to the uninitiated, but it's been something I've wanted to do for a while and I've kept putting it off. 

As you may know, I'm not someone with tonnes of makeup (although I do have more than enough) and I don't store it in drawers because half the point of buying nice makeup for me is that I can look at it. This means I have my compacts and any original boxes they came in sitting out on display shelves in my room, and even though I'm not a super clean person or someone who has many nice things, I keep those shelves pristine and dusted, and I make sure that everything is ordered well so it looks good and it's all sitting in straight lines (so unlike me I know).

What I should note about my makeup shelves is that at least half of those compacts are in fact empty, because I've either finished the products or de-potted them but kept the original packaging since it's too nice to throw out - and, you know, just because I've finished something, this doesn't mean I can no longer enjoy looking at the fancy packaging. It's all part of the value for me.

Anyhoo. For my birthday and also last Christmas, I received some new items and I need to make space for them. I've had three Marc Jacobs eyeshadow palettes sitting on the 'desk' part of those shelves for a while, but I now have two more of those palettes and I need to find room for them on the shelves themselves. This means I need to reshuffle things and make decisions about which empty compacts to keep and which ones to throw out, and it's a task I've been avoiding because I like how everything's ordered at the moment and I don't want to stuff things up.

But it's time to throw out some old stuff and make room for the new. Let's hope I can do this in the next month or so! I'll feel a lot better once I've got the new order settled, as sad as that may sound ; )


Get through my draft posts and edit my photos

At any one time, I have over fifty posts in my drafts and at least three rows of photo folders, all of which contain hundreds of photos each. It's a lot, and it does my head in.

I've been wanting to get my draft posts down to no more than thirty and the folders down to no more than two rows for ages, but every time I start to get my drafts down, I edit more photos and therefore have more drafts again - and every time I edit lots of photos, I take more and then have more folders to contend with.

What I really need to do is work at all this from two different angles on a daily basis. First, I need to get two posts up every day until I've gotten myself down to thirty drafts (and after that, it's just maintenance). At the same time, I need to edit one lot of photos per day, so that I'm removing two draft posts but only replacing one.

Once I've done this, the drafts won't look so daunting every time I open my computer and my numbers of unedited photos won't be so huge that I can't find the photos I'm looking for.

Wish me luck! It won't be easy, but I'm determined.


Get the low-hanging fruit

I was on no buys for skincare and makeup for the first half of this year, and I managed to get my numbers down significantly. Then for my birthday month in June I bought myself a few things and also received quite a bit from others for my birthday, so suddenly my stores have filled up again and while they're not as bad as they were, I still want to knock them back into shape again.

I'll be doing updated inventory posts at the end of September, so between now and then, my aim is to knock out as much makeup and skincare as possible so the stuff I received in June doesn't make a difference to my numbers by the time September rolls around. Yes of course it will mean that my numbers likely won't go down that much (if at all), but I don't want them to go up either and avoiding that will be my number one aim.

So for the next few months I'll be working on the smaller items in my collection (sample skincare etc) and also those things that are almost finished. Thankfully I'm at a stage in my skincare 'cycle' where I'm about to finish some full-size products, which will allow me to bring in fresh items very soon. And as I finish things, I'll sneak in my samples and minis first so that I'll be knocking out the 'stragglers' in July and August.

Looking forward!


Get a proper filing system happening

I haven't had a filing cabinet for years because my old one went to my parents' house when we moved to Berlin, and I forgot to get another one when we returned so my filing 'cabinet' has been a bunch of baskets up until now - and while it's in reasonably good order, nothing's labelled or separated so it takes me a few minutes to put my hands on things (sometimes longer) and I'm not happy with that situation.

Thankfully my parents said I can have my old filing cabinet back because no one's using it, so this will happen in the next few weeks - and after that, I can finally start getting things into better shape. 

I really can't wait for this: living without a decent filing system has been giving me the sh*ts and I'm always worried that I'll lose things, and although that hasn't happened yet, it may still and that's not a good thing.

Soon!


In sum

They're my new financial year resolutions! I usually have resolutions in my head for the new financial year but I haven't written them down before, so I'm glad I've done that and I'll aim to update you in a few months so you know how I'm going with everything.

Do let me know in the comments if you have anything you'd like to get done in the second half of 2018: I'd love to hear.

Hope all's well with you, and speak soon x


* All images courtesy of unsplash.com


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