I have decided to launch a new personal project to assist me in setting and meeting goals in a new and creative way. The goal is to increase fulfillment, creativity, adventure and moments of contentedness in my life through exploration of self and experiences. And I’ve decided to go ahead and blog about it all as a way to track it, keep myself on task and hold myself a bit accountable to moving forward with it. It’s called +EW42W-.

What is +EW42W-?

This term is short for “every week for two weeks”. The plus and minus signs reflect the fact that each week I will be adding or subtracting something from my life. The idea is that each week I will start something new that will last for two weeks. It’s all geared towards self-exploration, self-development, adventure and self-understanding. I am always making lists and goals and I’m usually good about pursuing and meeting them. I make work goals and personal goals. I make goals at the start of each New Year that range from concrete financial goals to esoteric “if I could do anything” goals. So why this new project? I just feel the need to launch a few way of looking at things, exploring things and seeing what does and doesn’t work for me on a personal level.

Why +EW42W-?

Why start something new each week and yet have it continue for two weeks? Here’s why I feel like this process is right for me:

• Starting something new every week works for me for projects. It keeps me refreshed about my ideas and enthused about projects and constantly challenging myself with new things.
• Doing something for only one week, however, doesn’t work for me. Either I don’t stick with it because something comes up and missing one or two days feels like missing too much of the limited allotted time. Or I don’t learn much from it because it’s tough to learn lessons in just one week.
• Doing something for a full month also doesn’t work for me. For many new things, a full month commitment feels daunting. Yes, this is how you develop real habits but my goal here isn’t to develop habits – it’s to learn more about myself and what makes my life feel fuller and happier and healthier.
• Since one week is too short of a commitment and one month is too long of a commitment, I think that two weeks is a good happy medium. I feel like I can do most things mostly-daily for two weeks and get something out of it.

Parameters of +EW42W-

I’m keeping this project pretty open for myself because I just want to see how it develops. It’s all just a personal journey. But here are a few of the things I’m kind of setting as guidelines:

• I will choose the week’s new task/goal on Sundays.
• I will choose based on what “feels right” at that time based on whatever is going on in my life at that time. However, I am about to start a list of +/- things that I can refer to each week to help me choose.
• I will blog regularly about my experiences with this – what I learned, what it was like, how it worked or didn’t work for me. This is to hone in on the purpose, which is self-understanding through the entire experience. I’m not doing it just for the sake of randomly doing it.
• I will challenge myself to stick with things that are tough but I won’t force myself to do something that really starts to feel wrong. I will, however, explore why it didn’t work for me.
• I will start this immediately (this coming Sunday will be the first task) but will not place an end date on it at this time.
• I will be honest with myself through it all.

Want to join +EW42W-?

Tags: +EW42W-, projects, self development