intentional living – Page 3 – Keeping it creative

Blogging, crafting, creativity, Cricut, goal setting, Health and Nutrition, Home cooking, intentional living, life hacks, lifestyle, manifestation, mindset, personal development, Planning and journaling, reflective journalling, Setting goals and intentions, watercolour painting

Setting up my 2025 Vision Board

Posted on Jan 22, 2025Jan 22, 2025 by Laura

Last year, for some unknown reason, I think I must have decided against making a 2024 vision board. I’m not sure why, but maybe I didn’t feel up to it or perhaps I had a variety of commitments at the beginning of January and decided it was too late in the month to work on one.

For 2025, I decided that, for me personally, it’s not really important to have the board finished in super quick time and it doesn’t matter if I’m still working on it towards the end of January. I wanted to have a slow start to the first month, really pondering over what I would like the year to look like. I found it helpful to revisit a couple of old blog posts of mine in which I’d talked about key questions you could ask yourself to prepare your mind and what to actually do to improve your chances of manifesting everything you’ve visualised for the year.

I decided to create a larger display, rather than using two pages in my bullet journal as then I can have it on my craft room / office wall to look at all year round. I also chose to combine images, motivational sayings, affirmations and a few cute decorative elements to make it visually appealing. I’ve spend days thinking about what I truly want this year, flicking through a huge stash of Psychologies magazines, answering deep questions from my previous vision board posts, journalling my thoughts and closing my eyes to visualise things. I’m so glad I put lots into the preparation as my 2025 vision board is now complete and turned out exactly how I wanted it. I can’t wait to share a photograph of the finished product!

And here it is…

Photo credit: Laura Jones for Keeping It Creative

My main categories

Diet – The plan this year is to eat more plant-based goodies than ever before. We’ve made so many healthy and delicious vegan dishes this Veganuary and we’ve also found a cafe that has a range of vegan friendly cake options. It’s getting easier and easier to eat a plant based diet and my husband and I have already made a number of changes over the years such as soya milk on our cereal and oat milk in our hot drinks, vegan spread on our bread, lots of plant based alternatives to meat such as soya mince, veggie sausages, VLTs etc.

Creativity – I want to develop my watercolour skills even further this year, whilst also engaging in mindful and calming activity after busy days. I got a gorgeous book for Christmas which provides exploratory activities and projects with a nature theme. I want to incorporate a weekly slot of time to experiment and develop a range of techniques.

Blogging – I want to spend more time promoting my blog posts so that I develop a wider readership. I used to consistently post pins on Pinterest but I’ve let this slide over the last few years. I get plenty of readers but I want to reach individuals who do not have their own blog as well as those who are keen bloggers.

PCPI work – I thoroughly enjoy my work at the university but it’s really important to me that I’m making as much of a difference as I can to the students. I particularly want to develop my feedback skills for medicine sessions, particularly with young adults who are in the initial stages of their uni course.

Kaizen – I recently started a short book called The Little Book of Kaizen – The Japanese art of transformation, one small step at a time. I’m enjoying reading it and doing the exercises at the beginning. The idea really appeals to me, so, to make sure it’s a focus for me this year, I’ve added a photograph of the mini book on my vision board with a view to working through all of the chapters. I’ve even pick out a cute notebook to use to jot things down and I’m using my fountain pen to write beautifully inside.

Cricut – As you probably already know, I’m obsessed with making stickers and cutting them using my Joy Xtra. However, I also have the smaller Joy machine and also invested in the EasyPress 2 when it was on offer at a discount. I have lots of vinyl and HTV as well as some iron on papers so I want to spend time this year getting creative and using them all up. I have so many ideas but I now need to schedule time to actually get making things. I added a Cricut bug sticker to watch over me and remind me to have more fun playing with my machines.

Getting organised – We have a lot of stuff in our house and some of it needs purging. As well as trying to use up craft materials before buying any more, I also want to re-organise our home so it’s easy to clean and keep tidy.

Final words…

That’s everything on my vision board for this year and to ensure that everything on the display comes into fruition, I will be checking in with it at the beginning of each month and using the different aspects to set mini monthly goals. I’ve developed pages in my bullet journal to list my goals and I’ll make sure at least some of them relate to things I want to manifest throughout the year.

I hope you enjoyed seeing my board and that it’s inspired you to have a go at creating your own. It doesn’t matter if you don’t get around to it for a few weeks – there’s still plenty of days left in the year to take action.

Good luck!

Bullet journaling, goal setting, intentional living, lifestyle, planner girl, planner lifestyle, Setting goals and intentions, sticker making

My Winter 2024-25 Bucket List: Maximizing the Season’s Potential

Posted on Nov 25, 2024 by Laura

I started creating seasonal bucket lists in autumn 2023 and earlier this year I shared a short guide to them in a blog post, where I discussed exactly what a bucket list is, the benefits of making one and some tips for deciding what to include so it is tailor made to you. Over the last week, I’ve been working on my winter 2024/5 bucket list and it’s quite different to my previous winter season one which I’m really pleased about because I want to make sure I plan new opportunities for myself and my husband.

Today, I’m sharing the two page spread I created in my bullet journal where I add the bucket list items, small illustrative stickers to go with each and a few snowflakes and sparkles to fill the gaps. Although it was quite time consuming, I had so much fun making most of the stickers using Cricut Design Space, my Cricut Joy Xtra and a couple of sheets of matte sticker paper and then planning their positions over thew two pages with an icy blue background. I also found a few extra tiny stickers in my mini Carpe Diem ‘Season’s sticker book.

My finished bucket list pages

I think the result is so aesthetically pleasing that I’ll be sure to keep checking in with pages, selecting goals for each of the winter months (obviously doing the Christmas ones in December), then deciding on one or two to complete or start to work on for each week across the season. As I finish them, I’ll be adding little tick stickers that I also made with my Cricut Joy Xtra.

Final words…

Creating a seasonal bucket list is a great way to maximize the potential of the coming months and it’s so much fun too. As you can see, I love getting creative with mine in my bullet journal but you could simply make a list and tape it to your fridge or add your own cute little doodles to show what you want to achieve.

And, if you don’t achieve it all, it doesn’t matter. You may find that your priorities change or that other opportunities present themselves that you want to do instead. You might run out of time or decide that you simply don’t want to do one or more of the items. For example, I had on my list for this season to create an autumnal quote page in my bullet journal with hand drawn elements, but, by the third week of November, I’ve still not done it and it seems pointless to spend the time drafting one out and decorating it when my focus in now on winter and what I want to do over the next three months.

I hope that seeing my bucket list for this winter has inspired you to have a go at creating your own. You’re quite welcome to use some of my ideas if you have similar interests to me and Pinterest has a good number of lists too, but I recommend taking your time and really thinking about what you love about the season, activities you’ve done before and want to make time for again, or things you’ve always wanted to try, either on your own or with loved ones. Let me know in the comments what your top three are!

Wishing you a fun filled winter season,

goal setting, intentional living, life hacks, mindset, productivity

Monday Matters: How writing a Not to-do list can revolutionise your days

Posted on Oct 21, 2024Oct 16, 2024 by Laura

We’re all familiar with the concept of a ‘to-do’ list and have likely used them many times in a bid to make our day super productive. We’ve probably tried to make ourselves feel like we’re winning by adding a few things we’ve already finished or got started on so we can quickly tick them off. However, sometimes, we’ll have felt disheartened when we’re approaching bedtime and discover that most of our list needs migrating to tomorrow’s to-dos because we weren’t productive enough, have too much to do, or, we got distracted by other things.

Creating a ‘not to-do list’ can be a wonderful tool to help us identify and eliminate tasks, habits and distractions which prevent us from focusing on what really matters and stop us from being as productive as we would like to be. In a nutshell, a ‘Not to-do list’ is a list of activities you choose to avoid doing so that you can manage your time effectively. This might include things like the following:

anything which distracts you on a regular basis
things which drain your energy
bad habits that you want to remove from your working time
things which don’t currently add value to your life
unnecessary tasks i.e. things which don’t need to be done
other people’s responsibilities

Ideas for items to add to your not to-do list

Your Not to-do list should be highly personalised depending on your own wants and needs but here are some ideas to get you started.

Checking your emails repeatedly throughout the day
Mindlessly scrolling social media
Checking your phone in bed – either last thing at night or before you get up
Drinking coffee after 3pm (when you have work the next day)
Going to bed later than 11pm (Sunday – Thursday)
Spending time thinking about / stressing over things which are out of your control
Reading negative news
Things that are not my responsibility
Doing tasks which would be best delegated to someone else
Multi-tasking (or attempting to)
Saying yes to tasks or events that aren’t a priority right now
Working whilst eating lunch
Spending time with individuals who drain your energy
Forgetting to take regular work breaks
Doing work after 5pm
Procrastinating by watching lots of productivity videos (binge watching) on YouTube
Keeping ideas, thoughts and must dos in your head instead of writing them down and scheduling time to deal with them
Not identifying your top priorities for the day
Eating unhealthy snacks which make you feel sluggish
Making excuses to avoid / put off difficult tasks
Aiming for perfection – forgetting that done is better than perfect
Setting too many goals at once

Final words…

I hope you’ve found today’s post useful and it’s helped you to consider tasks, habits and distractions which prevent you from being as productive as you could be. I would really appreciate it if you took time out from your busy schedule to drop me a comment sharing your top three things to add to your ‘Not to-do list’.