As I said, I have a year (or almost a year) in front of me because of my maternity leave, and I thought that I needed to plan it well to avoid loosing any time.
The idea first occurred to me when I realized that I can barely remember what I did in my last (and only) maternity leave, and this time I want to do something different: I want to use all the time I will have to become happier, changing some habits and adding (and removing) something from my life.
So I decided that my year had to become a project. This means that I have a goal and a set of topics I want to focus on.
Clearly defining the content of a yearly project is not an easy task, but I think this mind map summarizes my project quite well.
The most important thing was defining the key areas to work on. I chose: Work, Home, Kids, Personal, Other (which includes what for me can be considered fun).
Of course, tons of topics necessarily remained outside the map, but I think it's obvious that I cannot cover everything.
I tried to focus on simple things that I want to improve and that I believe will make me happier at the end of the day.
On many of these topics, I already started a journey and they were therefore automatically included. Some of them are goals that I have never been able to include completely and were included because "i's now or never"...
One of the topic, the Personal one, is very much related to self improvement.
I decided to focus on three key points: Focus and perseverance, Going minimal, and relationships.
And while preparing the mind map, I realized that these three personal improvement areas are deeply linked to many other topics I included in the project (see the arrows).
I think work, kids and home are pretty obvious areas where I really want to improve, and I included in Other the main things that make me feel well in this period. I think this area can change in time, but since one of my key topic of self improvement is the capability to keep the focus, I decided to write them down too, in order not to change them too often.
I have had many versions of this sheet, but I decided to freeze it because, as a very good procrastinator, I could have go on changing it forever and never started to do anything.
So, now that my satellite mind map is clear, I can proceed working towards my goal.
I decided that I won't have a very structured approach, at least for the first period, especially because I have to give birth in 15 days and I know that all my resolutions could break in a minute. I went instead for a lighter approach: I decided that I have to do at least 3 things every day that go in the right direction, that help me fulfill one of the goals in the chart.
I'll start with this and publish my three things every day.