In case you haven't noticed because aliens gave you a lobotomy, I'm a self-help junky, and I'm constantly working on some self-improvement project or another.  The latest in my string of self-improvement jobs is four goals that I'm working on simultaneously.
1. Give up the nightly wine habit. (check.)
2. Turn the apartment into a serene setting worthy of magazine coverage. (not even close.)
3. Train for a 10 mile race. (Hold me, I'm frightened.)
4. Revise and polish my novel. (w00t)

Trying to tackle all four of these things at once is akin to riding a four-seater tandem bicycle in a race against myself that has no end. Several times a day, I need to climb backwards and forwards across the handlebars so that all four seats are in use.

Giving up the nightly wine habit has come first, since once I have my wine with my dinner, I'm ready to faceplant in the bed. If I didn't live with Steve, I'd wake up in my work clothes at 3 a.m. with the lights on, and then I'd have to get up and peel my contacts off my dried out eyeballs. Obviously, this situation isn't conducive to my Zen design project, running, or the book. So the wine goes out the window first. Then everything else should fall into place, right?

Yeah, not so much.

Of course, I immediately picked up an alternative habit to the wine, and that's stuffing my face. However, this hasn't been entirely bad, because it certainly moved my daily work-out to the top rung of the ladder, since I need to run faster to stay ahead of my mouth and its ambitions of world domination by eating everything that isn't nailed down.

The next project to get my full attention will be Zen design, since I should be doing that rather than stuffing my face. I only need to carve out 20 minutes per evening, and I feel I’ll make good progress there. I’d best set a timer for those 20 minutes, otherwise, you know, I see something out of the corner of my eye, and yell, “Shiny things!” and then I’m off in some other direction and I’ve lost the plot entirely.

Speaking of plot … last, but never the least, it’s time to work out a schedule for polishing up the book. I’m thinking weekends are the obvious choice as a timeslot, what between all the running and the zenning, I’ll need big chunks of time to sit down and get lost in my writing so that I’m distracted from anything resembling food that’s lying around.

I have another plan that sounds slightly ridiculous, and I’ve toyed with picking up this new habit in the past, and frankly, I keep forgetting about it. But I would really love to pick up a voracious tea habit. Yes, tea.

Why tea?

Tea is an all-purpose substance. You can have some black or green tea in the morning for a pick-me-up. I could have a variety of herbal teas in the afternoon as a relaxing little tea-ceremony-type-ritual as the hairiness of the workday threatens to make me starting gnawing on the office furniture.

And then when I get home and I’m looking at my evening projects, I can have a cup of chamomile tea in lieu of the disorderly eating thing.

Soon I’ll be stretched out across all four seats of my tandem bike simultaneously.

Have any habits you want to break?