design your intentional life.
It’s all about balance. Whether you’re mindfully experiencing the seasons, caring for your home, organizing your finances in a thoughtful way, planning your next goal, cultivating a gratitude practice, or taking a moment to examine your life via journaling, we are here to help. You can balance your progress with ease, intention, and joy.
Use a Decluttering Checklist
Animal shelters are always in need of used towels and other linens. Call and ask what they’re accepting first, and then donate away to animals in need. They don’t care that you got bleach on that purple one.
Take a Decluttering Challenge
Have a more peaceful space. Having fewer things makes it easier to organize and enjoy what you do have—and you don’t have to expend the mental energy it takes to deal with the chaos of clutter.
Make a Declutter Plan
Important tip for how to declutter a home: it doesn’t count as having decluttered something until it is actually gone from your possession. You can’t put it in your garage or in your car.
Automate Your Finances
When you go for a run, lift weights, or spend some time in your favorite exercise class, it’s easy to accept that you’re tired and need some rest. After all, you just worked out! But after you’ve gone shopping or paid your bills, you don’t tend to put your feet up. But as it turns out, mental work is work, too.
Grow a Windowsill Herb Garden
Think about the fresh herbs you typically buy and cook with. Do you use the whole bunch, just composting the stems or adding them to your vegetable stock? If so, great. If your usual recipes call for a smaller amount than it’s possible to buy, though, you may find yourself regularly letting fresh herbs go brown in your crisper drawer.
Get Started Composting
If you’re trying to reduce your food waste as much as possible (perhaps by organizing your kitchen or making more vegetable stock), composting is a logical step on your journey. It keeps those last scraps of food waste out of the landfill and turns them into something better.
Organize Your Kitchen
A simple, clear organizational strategy helps us see how to reduce food waste by buying less food overall and using what do buy after we have it. It has a definite impact on the amount of food we have to throw away.
Make Homemade Vegetable Stock
While you’re cutting up veggies for your meal, take a second to glance skeptically at the contents of your crisper drawer. Is anything still good but getting to the edge? Wash it, chop it, and add it to the stock container in the freezer.
Set Your 2021 Goals
What is your goal for your work or school this year? Are you looking to achieve something particular at your job, start a project on the side, or find a new job that allows you to live your purpose? Brainstorm some options.
Pick Your Financial Heroes
What is this person’s financial story?
What are the major challenges they’ve faced? How have they succeeded?
Why does their story resonate with you? What do you admire about them?
Reduce Plastic in Your Kitchen
Just like tracking your spending or counting your calories, actually looking at what you’re throwing out regularly will let you make the most informed decisions that you can.
Track Your Spending
Before you get to work on your spending habits, you need to know exactly what they are. This is how you’re going to get that data!
Take Something Off Your To-Do List
Is there something you’re doing supposedly to save or make money, but doesn’t? Some people can rock a couponing app, for example. Others spend hours adding coupons, watching the associated ads, trying to find the correct products at the store, and scanning them, only to realize later that we had spent, in the end, more (unless that’s just us).
Check Your Financial Values
We spend so much of our time trying to fit our budget into our income that it’s easy to see it all as “needs.” And yes, some of them (maybe even most of them) are needs. But let’s take a few minutes to think about it in the big picture. After all, this is your money that you’re earning to support your life. Let’s make sure it’s actually supporting your financial values!
Work Toward a Zero Waste Bathroom
We tend to find a configuration and routine in the bathroom and stick to it. We can use those habits to our advantage; once we optimize them, we can just lock in again, and the benefits will compound on their own.
Assemble Your Finance Team
It’s time to create your own Justice League. (Or knights of the round table. Or Avengers. Or whatever.) Choose three of your friends or family members to be your financial confidantes over the next year.
Get a Water Bottle
It takes a plastic bottle at least 450 years to degrade, yet we only recycle 30% of them in the U.S. Ouch.
GIVE YOURSELF A FINANCE AWARD
You deserve security and wealth. And even when the process is slow, you’re making it happen. You should be proud. So, here are some reminders to use as prizes, phone backgrounds, cards to stick on your mirror, or whatever else you need them for.
Optimize Your Coffee Habit
Chances are, you have built some daily habits around your delicious mug of energy juice. That makes it a great opportunity to make a difference.
Build an Emergency Fund
An emergency can happen to any of us, and when it happens to you, you don’t want to be worried about how close to the limit your credit card is, or how you’ll pay for groceries this month, or where you could possibly get the money. You do not deserve that kind of stress.