Frugally Green » Progress Updates

What Green Changes Can You Make in a Year?

Tyler — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 13:15:37 +0000

It’s been a wonderful Christmas and, despite the economy, I feel like I’ve had a pretty stellar year.

That said, 2010 is quickly approaching and I’ve got a lot to do.

I gave a glimpse into my annual review earlier and today begins a week long process of intense planning for the upcoming year.

This is the first time I’ve ever formally done this and it’s brought me to the question, “What can I really accomplish in a year?” You’ve probably questioned what you’re capable of before, too.

Interestingly, it’s pretty common for people to overestimate what they can get done in a day and completely underestimate what they can achieve in a year.

This is clearly evidenced by my enormous daily to-do list and often non-existent long term plan. A year can be so hard to plan for – too short for your biggest life affirming goals and certainly too long for a goal like “remembering to program the thermostat.”

It can be really hard to figure out what you can get done in 365 days. Yet, to see what is possible to accomplish next year, all you really need to do is look at what you completed last year.

How has your life changed in the last year?

When I take the time to actually look at what I’ve done in 2009, it’s easy to see that my life has changed quite a lot. I’ve done all kinds of things like:

If you sat down for a few minutes and really thought about what you’ve accomplished this year, I bet you could come up with a pretty amazing list yourself.

Go ahead and do it and then give yourself a little pat on the back. It’s ok to congratulate yourself. You’ve earned it.

Planning for next year

If you’re like me, you’ve probably never put much thought into planning out an entire year because, well, it’s so dang long and hard to think about.

But, now that you’ve seen what you can do without much thinking, why not take a moment to nail down what you could accomplish if you did put together a plan of action?

If you want to, think bigger and make a plan for how you’ll outdo yourself next year. Or don’t! Just use your planning to focus your goals more specifically on a topic that’s important to you.

Maybe you were too specific this year? Use your plan to allow yourself to branch out and try some new things you’d thought about but never got around to doing.

The sky is the limit here. Your only ceiling is your own imagination.

What if you hate your plan?

Maybe you’re reluctant to start because planning out a whole year feels restrictive. That’s another thing that kept me from doing this for so long. What if you set it all up and then decide you don’t like it?

Well, that’s the beauty of a plan. You can always have a back-up. It’s not a contract. There’re no other parties involved and no lawyers are going to serve you a subpoena if you have second thoughts about your direction.

If you decide you don’t like your plan, change it. Just by getting started, though, you get yourself thinking about what’s important to you.

If, later, you find out that what you thought was important really isn’t, you’ll probably have a better idea by then of what is. Feel free to let go of things that don’t feel right.

If you want to start composting and then realize you hate it, stop doing it. If you decide to walk more, but then realize you’d rather be riding your bike, do that instead.

The whole point is to allow yourself to think big and try new things.

Final thoughts on yearly planning

Many of us plan out each of our days to squeeze as much productivity out of them as possible, but never take the time to look at how each day contributes to a longer, overall goal.

For some, these long-term goals are strongly internal, and that’s fine, but I’ve noticed that I get a lot farther when I put my goals down on paper than when I hold them in. It’s entirely psychological, but it adds concreteness to my resolutions. “I AM going to do this. See, the paper says so!”

What does your list of accomplishments look like for this year? Feel free to use the comments section to show off the things you’ve done. What’s been on your mind that you want to be sure you get done next year?

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If annual planning seems scary and weird, leave a comment, or subscribe get free updates.

Connect with me on Twitter: @tylertervooren

Happy New Year image by Sally M*

Keeping Up with My Frugally Green Commitments

Tyler — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 12:00:00 +0000

Thanks for dropping by today. Frugally Green started 5 months ago in April and since then I have made a number of commitments to change they way I do things in order to live more responsibly. I think it’s important to look back once in awhile to make sure things are still on track and I’m still moving forward, so that’s the intention of this post – to update you on my progress. Also, keeping you up to date with what I’m up to creates a bit of much needed accountability for me. Knowing that you’re out there reading and expecting some progress is a real motivator for me to stick with it. So lets see what I’ve been working on and how it’s been going:

Green investment

Back in May and June, I wrote a 4 part series on my journey to become a green investor. After carefully detailing what was important to me about an investment and how I would choose it, I finally made a decision at the end of the series and bought it. I intended to buy $2,500 in shares of the iShares Global Clean Energy ETF but this was my first time using an online broker, and I flubbed a little bit, only buying $2,410 because I could not figure out how to base my purchase on dollar amount instead of number of shares. The share price dropped before my trade was completed and I ended up with $90 just sitting in my trading account. Whoops.

Since purchasing the shares in early July, they have gone on a bit of a roller coaster ride anywhere from a few percentage points up to a few down. At the time of this writing, it’s up about 8%. I expect more turbulence through the rest of the year and that doesn’t bother me. This is a long term investment that I did my homework on and I will do my best to keep my emotions from clouding any judgment along the way by checking the progress as infrequently as possible, but still keeping up to date.

Hypermiling

A lot of readers found my article about saving money by hypermiling fairly useful. Personally, after 2 more months of practice, it looks like I’ve hit a plateau. I’ve yet to make it significantly above 24 miles per gallon. I’m still happy with this as it cements my roughly 7 mpg improvement over my old gas guzzling ways, but I still really want to hit 25 mpg. I’m going to have to do some real zen/ninja like research as well as trial and error to figure out how to make it there. You can be sure though, that if I figure it out, I’ll be reporting back. In the meantime, you can follow me on Fuelly as I track my gas mileage at every fill up.

A reader disagreed with me in the comments of that article about the effectiveness of slow acceleration. I used two tanks of gas to test his theory that faster acceleration is actually more effective and found that it did not work for me under normal driving conditions. I actually performed worse than normal. Still, his argument had merit and I can only encourage you to take the time to test and see which method is most effective for your car.

Also, I’ve quit turning off my truck at stop lights. I noticed after awhile that it was taking a long time to restart and, like I mentioned in the article, it might be wearing out my starter. I’ve decided to be safe rather than sorry this time.

Air drying laundry

This has been going awesome and I’ve practically eliminated my need for a dryer. I’ve got a long chain-link fence in my back yard parking lot that is adequately protected from the sun and usually has a light breeze – the perfect outdoor air drying situation. Every Sunday I actually look forward to pulling my clothes out of the washing machine and hanging them up on the fence. I’ve even stopped using the dryer to soften the clothes at the end of the drying cycle as I’ve noticed that I actually prefer a little stiffness in my clothing now (though this may be a psychological trick I’ve played on myself because I hate using the dryer).

A lot of people thought this would be a real time sink having to hang everything up and take it down, but I’ve found it to be just the opposite – I actually save time. I’ve become very efficient in hanging and removing clothes from the fence. And, when I’m not sitting around for an hour waiting for the dryer to stop so I can immediately pull my clothes out before they get totally wrinkled, I’m able to go off and do other important things with my day. It doesn’t matter how long the clothes hang on the fence.

I am starting to run into a problem, though, as I knew I eventually would. It’s started to rain again here as the seasons begin to change. I still have not set up a good indoor drying solution. I guess this had better move up the priority list. Luckily for me, a reader left quite a comprehensive set of instructions for me when I decide to actually do something about it. Thanks Debbie!

Be green, not elitist

I wrote this article after hearing a friend of mine argue with another friend about turning unused lights off in his house. It made me think about how I approach my personal commitments with other people. After some reflection, I noticed that I’ve fallen into the same trap before, criticizing others while trying to make myself look like a hero.

I am the last person on Earth that should be throwing stones and it really made me think about how to effectively communicate my values without seeming pushy or belittling others.

After some more development on this subject, I’ve adopted what I believe is the best principle for me: lead by example and let the rest take care of itself. Most of the people I come into contact with on a regular basis know where I stand on environmental issues. They don’t need me to explain it to them. By simply being truthful with myself about who I am, I naturally attract those that are more interested in this kind of lifestyle.

Everyone is free to implement change in the way that they see fit. They don’t need me to tell them how to do it. If someone asks me how I do it, I’m eager to explain, but I try very hard not to offer unsolicited advice anymore. It’s rarely appreciated.

I have to admit I’m still a little rude to litterers. I haven’t figured out the best way to handle a situation like that besides kindly informing them that they ‘accidentally’ dropped something while offering it back to them.

Eat less meat

Wow, this one has been tough. I started my eat less meat challenge about 2 weeks before actually publishing the article, and, like I mentioned in the comments, it’s been very easy to slip up and either forget which day I am on (I’m only eating meat every other day now) or accidentally eat something with meat in it without realizing it until it’s too late.

I’m starting to think it might actually be easier to simply go vegetarian! I’m not ready for that, though, and I must progress at my own pace. After a few weeks, it’s certainly become more routine and easier to handle, but it’s no walk in the park yet. I’d never realized until now how mindless a task eating has been for me – the steps often being little more than 1) buy food, 2) prepare food, 3) place food in mouth, oftentimes skipping step 2.

Changing such an ingrained habit is no simple feat, but it feels right, so I will continue despite the difficulty.

Final thoughts

Writing an update article like this has been really helpful to me. Hopefully it’s been helpful to you, too. Sometimes I’m stricken with doubt about whether or not I’m doing the right things or if I’m really making much of a change. Looking back and seeing where I’ve started from has given me some useful perspective and confirmed that yes, I am doing some worthwhile things here and yes, I am making progress.

That feels good to know. I’ve got a long way to go on this journey, but a quick celebration on the way there is a great motivator. Thanks for being a part of it all.

Now I want to know more about you. Have you challenged yourself to make any changes to your daily life? How’s it going? What’s been hard and what’s been enjoyable? What are the things that keep you motivated and on track?

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