Introductions are in order!

Hello all! My name is Yami Hodges, and this is my challenge blog. Here, I will be keeping track of my work on the "Power of Less" New Year's Challenge, as well as my progress in applying the principles of Less to my daily life.

First, let me tell you a little about myself. I am a student at the University of Utah, majoring in Computer Science. More importantly, I am a writer, and an artist. I breathe music. If I don't have my headphones, something is wrong with me. The same goes for my sketchbook, or at least some blank paper and a pencil.

I used to be addicted to reading. I always had my nose in a book, to the point of getting in trouble for it. I've fallen out of this, much to my dismay, so when I heard about the New Year's Challenge, I knew what I would do.

The New Year's Challenge (started by Leo Babauta of Zen Habits, author of The Power of Less) is rather simple. Start a habit. Any habit. Ten minutes a day, 7 days a week, for a month. Naturally, my desired habit is to read every night before bed.

Not to break into a tangent or anything, but New Year's has always been a tough time for me. I have long been in the habit (there's that word again!) of making a whole page worth of New Year's Resolutions...and then getting overwhelmed and keeping none of them. So this year, having only one thing to do, I'm finding myself scrambling. Why? Because I'm used to having so much to keep track of and beat myself up over...only this year, I've got one thing to do, and I'm doing it, so I've nothing to beat myself up over, either. My brain doesn't like this. So I decided to give myself just ONE more thing to do, but put it on the back burner, so if I do mess up, I won't get upset about it.

This one more thing is to keep a steady routine, morning and evening. In other words, I now have a set schedule for the morning and before bed. This schedule is fairly simple. It includes meditation, checking my RSS feeds and the weather, reviewing my goals, and the usual morning things like brushing my teeth and making some tea. In the evening, it's about the same, mostly in reversed order, but also adds packing my bags for the next day and cleaning my room. (This way I wake up to a clean room, which just brightens my whole day!)

I keep this schedule where I will see it, and do my best to adhere to it, but if I mess up, it's totally okay, because it's optional in the first place. No stress, see?

So, anyway, this blog will be used to track my success in those two areas, and, as previously mentioned, in applying "Less" to my life.

So far, so good. I've been reading Leo's book nightly, and I recently processed my inbox down to zero. This is very good. Now I just have to do my other two email inboxes...and then keep them that way. I've been very good about remembering to meditate, which is usually the hardest part of my morning routine. I've got to do it before I put my contacts in, which is usually the first thing, because if I don't meditate before that, one thing will lead to another and I'll be on my computer without having meditated...and then there's really no going back.

Well, here we go, friends.
Onward and upward.