Marcia Francois's Blog, page 11

The week that was… weekly reflections… 15

very odd driving on the highway at night while there is loadshedding

I’m feeling very discombobulated at the moment so this is going to be short!

I cannot believe how few people currently read this blog – it’s completely disheartening and is giving me pause even though I know I write for myself. I used to tell myself “no-one reads blogs like they used to” but actually, that’s not true.

This week I only finished one book – The trouble with goats and sheep by Joanna Cannon – I’m still not...

{Goals} Line-a-day – a different way of journalling

I’m not a fan of journalling… at all. But I do love a project where I can look back and see what I was up to at the same time last year, three years ago, seven years ago, etc.

An example is the photo challenges I participate in on Instagram with Susannah Conway.

The challenge has a hashtag, for instance #Aprillove2022 and then I usually add my own hashtag to each of my photos, like #marciasaprillove2021.

I love looking back and seeing how different each April has been for the last s...

Line-a-day – a different way of journalling

I’m not a fan of journalling… at all. But I do love a project where I can look back and see what I was up to at the same time last year, three years ago, seven years ago, etc.

An example is the photo challenges I participate in on Instagram with Susannah Conway.

The challenge has a hashtag, for instance #Aprillove2022 and then I usually add my own hashtag to each of my photos, like #marciasaprillove2021.

I love looking back and seeing how different each April has been for the last s...

The week that was… weekly reflections 14

Happy Easter!

a corner of my gardenIn South Africa, we have four four-day weeks in April and May due to Easter, Freedom Day and Workers Day. This year, those four weeks follow one another which means two things:long weekends!work is squished into four days instead of five!

(instead of 20 days to do the work, we now have 16!)

I already felt this pressure this week but reminded myself that my self-imposed to-do list (#upholder) doesn’t make sense in a 4-day week and some thing...

2022 word of the year update – Q1

This year I chose a main word, delight, and two supporting words – balance and rest.

I’ve spoken enough about rest – how it wasn’t working and how I’m doing a reset.

But for now, let’s talk about the other two words.

I chose balance so that I would not work all the hours of every day and that my life would look more balanced. As my coaching client said so beautifully last year, I can enjoy my work without being consumed by it.

I set some specific actions for myself every week and...

The week that was…weekly reflections 13

I know this means exactly nothing to anyone else but I broke my 12-week writing streak . I only remembered on Wednesday when I saw my pre-written post publish. How is this possible? I think it’s because we went to in-person church and then to buy winter school clothes for the kids and that change shook up my routine.Some other things happened this week too – I forgot about two appointments. Two! After the second one, I have now decided that I need to put “after work” appointments on a rem...

2022 Q1 resetting the rest challenge

I knew going in that #rest22in2022 was going to be the hardest challenge for me.

Still, I thought I had it figured out but I realised after two months that I needed to reset what rest looked like for me.

I also saw an Instagram post on 7 types of rest, bookmarked it and when I had time, did a thorough review of why “rest” wasn’t working for me:

what was working?

weekend rest, probably because there’s more timeI can always default to reading because that is a daily habit

what w...

2022 goals – a quarterly update

We’ve spoken a few times about setting quarterly goals which is a really nice way to take stock sooner than just every year and readjust your sails if necessary.

You might even like the idea of seasonal goals.

If you do set annual goals, now is a great time to reevaluate if you…

still want to continue as you have been doingknow what’s working well for youhaven’t even set goals for the year

When I took the time to write down what’s working well, what’s not going well and what I ...

The week that was…weekly reflections 12

Today, two years ago, was South Africa’s first day of lockdown, level 5. Don’t even go back and read my posts for that first month or two; I was a complete idiot writing things like “how to make the most of lockdown” and such nonsense. I mean, my kids took one look at my list of things to keep them busy and promptly ignored it. I had big plans to do organising and cleaning projects around the house and instead, I just worked more. Madness! Oh well, we all live and learn.This week was an out ...

3 things I do that help my productivity

I adored reading this blog post from Ramit Sethi. It’s one of my favourite blog posts of all time.

One of the main things that were insightful for me is that fundamentals are first, second is psychology and third are the details. Most people focus on the details when they actually need to start focussing on fundamentals.

Fundamentals are things like sleeping enough, psychology is being able to say no or set good boundaries, and the details are what type of notebook or app or calendaring system ...