100 Dreams

One of the exercises I discovered while reading 168 Hours has been absolutely mind opening to me.

The method of the exercise is to write down 100 dreams/goals/visions you have for your life (and if 100 is too easy go for 1,000). Keep writing until even all the tiny, dumb ideas are out in words.

Then sort and group your dreams and see what bigger themes emerge. Those themes are the areas of your life and interests you want to focus your time on.

My dreams fell into the following groupings:

family
home making
food
fitness
blogging/social media
reading

There were many more smaller groupings but the book suggests that you really only have the time to focus on three groups in your free time and one of them has to include exercise because no one else can exercise for you.

Family and food are pretty much necessities for me but I’m surprised that home making made the list (I have someone come clean my house twice a month but I’m still very interested in decorating and organizing). My fiance and I have started hosting our families for dinner to hit all three of these birds with one stone. I thought entertaining guests stressed me out but it was really only the anxiety involved with hosting parties where a young adult frets over who will or won’t show up. Our families are dependable and will show up so that turned cooking for them and spending the evening at home with them into a very enjoyable experience.

Fitness, blogging/social media, and reading are my three hobby type free time groupings of choice. Since completing my list of 100 dreams, I’ve made fitness even more of a focus for myself and splurged on signing up to work with a personal trainer at the gym once a week (who gives me homework so I have a good plan for what I should be doing on my own the rest of the week), gotten myself a FitBit which is like the ultimate pedometer plus polysomnograph (sleep tracker) plus it creates beautiful online infographic style stats. And I’ve started multitasking and reading books via Kindle for iPad while I’m on the cardio machines at the gym. I’m also focusing my time spent blogging and on social media doing the things I do best and turning it back into a pleasurable hobby for myself. I want to focus my blogging on my key groupings to reinforce the value of my time spent.

How do your dreams group up?

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{ 4 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Sandy September 22, 2011 at 4:03 pm

When you mean dreams, do you mean what your brain thinks during the night? Or what you want for the future?
And if it’s what you want for the future, how is that distinguishable from wishes?