5 for Five: December Goals

I'm back after taking an unexpected week off from blogging last week. Between a day off to spend with my best friend and Thanksgiving the week just felt exceptionally short when it came to blogging.

Today I'm taking a look back at November. While overall the month was a good one between looking at apartments, my best friend being home from Maryland for two weeks, and it being my first month student loan free. But goal wise I didn't do so well. At all.

1. Get my healthy lifestyle on track. Yeah that was a fail. I didn't meal plan at all, went to the gym maybe once, and I definitely wasn't drinking 64oz of water a day. So of course I didn't lose three pounds.

2. Wake up and get out of bed by 7am at least three times a week. Fail! I really love to be lazy in the morning, especially when cozy comfy flannel sheets are on my bed.

3. Put more time and effort into blogging. I won't say I completely failed at this but I surely could have done better. At best I was blogging twice a week.

4. Clean my bathroom and room, then keep it that way. Fail, again. My mom ended up cleaning my bathroom over the weekend so I'm going to work on keeping it clean but I didn't clean it so I'm not counting this as any sort of accomplishment. And my room? Yeah, still a mess.

5. Read 4 books. I was able to read 2 books during the month. The Book Thief took me all month to get through, something I wasn't expecting. I was able to breeze through The Single Woman's Survival Guide: Letting Go and Moving On in a day so that helped me reach the half way point at the end of the month.

Like I said, goal wise November wasn't a good month for me. But I've set some new goals for December and am going to take a slightly different approach to accomplishing them. For November I just set those goals and then winged it when it came to actually accomplishing them. So for December I want to set goals for the month but then setting weekly goals that will help me accomplish my goals for the month.

1. Lose 3 pounds.

• Drink 64oz of water 4 days this week. Today through Friday is a good starting point for me, hopefully not too overwhelming.
• Go to the gym 2 days this week. I have three chances to get to the gym before the weekend. It can be done.
• Limit Mountain Dew to one can per day.

2. Wake up and get out of bed by 7:30am at least three times per week.
Last month I set my goal for 7am but that was just a bit much for me. I seem to be able to handle 7:30 much better so we're going to go with that for this month and see how things go. I have three days left to get it right so wish me luck!

3. Clean my bedroom and pack away summer clothes.
This week I'm going to start with catching up on laundry and putting away those clean clothes.

4. Put more time and effort into blogging.
I'm going to shoot for posting 3-4 times this week. I have some things I've been meaning to blog about so this shouldn't be a problem.

5. Read at least 4 books.
Yup, it made the list again. I know I can read 4 books in a month. And with BBC taking a break for the month I will be choosing the books myself so hopefully I can find something that grabs my attention so I can't put it down. I've already started Catching Fire {for the second time} but past that I have no books on list to read. Any suggestions?

I'll be back next week to check in and see how I did this first week of December. {where did 2013 go?!}

• Do you have any tips for motivating yourself to get things done? It seems I struggle to motivate myself to get up in the morning and to accomplish the tasks that I know I need to get done.