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Week 4 - Read more

Just a quickie this week.  I do enjoy reading, but never allow myself time to do it. It's great to get immersed in a good story, or to learn and better yourself in a business related or self help book.  I'm not setting a target for this one such as x amount of books or chapters per week, just simply read more...

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Week 3 - Just Turn It Off!

There’s no money to be saved, and no particular health benefits with this weeks One Small Change.  Our modern day world is fast paced and our business and home lives are all too easily connected together.  Emails, texts and Facebook messages mean we are constantly in a worldwide conversation 24 hours a day. As the owner of a small business, I often feel that I always need to respond to things straight away.  Whether it be an enquiry for new business, or a response to a colleagues questions, my phone or iPad is always by my side, always connected.  I often find that when I get home from a 10-12 hour day at work, one of the first things I’ll do is go online and reply to enquiries, or send messages out about business related stuff, or sometimes even just useless stuff.  Quite often the kids will be asking me a question and my response will be “hold on a min” or “hang on, I’m just busy”.  They’ve normally not seen me since breakfast time and there’s probably only an hour left until bedtime.  That time needs to be their’s, so from now on when I walk through the door, my phone will be turned off - off off - not just on silent, until at least their bedtime so I can be there for my family when I get home.  Whatever’s there can wait.  There’s always later - or tomorrow…

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Week 2/52 - Alcohol - potential saving - £400+

This week's one small change, as I'm sure you guessed by the title, is to cut down on alcohol consumption.  Again, like last week's coffee change, I'm not planning to stop drinking altogether, just planning to drink a bit less.  As with all lifestyle changes, whenever you go all out to stop doing something altogether, it's great for a little while, but then eventually you slip back to the same old habits, sometimes even having more of what you cut out on. So my one small change is to not have a drink on 2 days when I normally might have one. Now on these 2 days I might normally have 3 or 4 cans of lager.  By cutting this out, it's going to save me about £8 a week, plus around 1600 calories!  Total that up for the year and it's a saving of about £400 and 83,200 calories!

The great thing about the one small change experiment is each individual thing I change isn't massive, but add it all together and the cumulative savings are massive over the course of the year.  Last week's change was to take coffee to work with me so I wasn't buying it from McD's or Costa or the likes.  It was really easy to do, and the added benefit was that because I was taking the time in the morning to make a flask of coffee, it was also making me likely to take some lunch and snacks with me instead of buying stuff whilst I was out.  That added about another £20 in saving to what I was already saving with the coffee.

So, here's the benefit so far:

Cash saved - £25 from coffee, £20 from lunches, £8 from alcohol - £53 a week = £2756 a year!

Calories saved - 500 from coffee, 200 from lunches, 1600 from alcohol - 2,300 a week = 119,600 a year!

Pretty good results already only 2 weeks in, imagine what can be done over 52 weeks!

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Week 1 of 52 - Coffee

For those who don't know what this blog is about, I've challenged myself to make just one small change every week for a year.  The point of the small change is that it's easy to do, and the cumulative effect of 52 changes over the year should make a big difference to my lifestyle.

Now, don't let the title mislead you, I'm not giving up coffee, that'd be ridiculous!  As a driving instructor I'm away from the house for most of the day so normally a couple of times a day I'd be going somewhere like McDonalds or Costa to get a coffee.  The price of a coffee can range from £1.49 up to almost £4 depending on where I go.  So, my one small change is take a flask of coffee with me every day.  I've got an espresso machine at home so can make quite a nice coffee, it just means an extra few minutes of preparation in the morning to make sure it's done.  There's a couple of plus sides to doing this.  Firstly there's the cost saving.  I could easily spend £15-20 a week on coffee, but also it's always tempting to have something else when I'm there, maybe a sandwich or a cake, taking my weekly spend to maybe £25 or more.  Spread that over a year and that's £1300!  In comparison taking it from home will probably cost about £1 per week in coffee and milk.  The added bonus is when I go to a coffee shop I'd normally have a latte or cappuccino, whereas a flask will be just coffee with a little bit of milk, so as well as saving a few £'s it'll also save me a few calories.  So, the whole point of 1 new change a week is already showing the benefits, imagine how much I'll save with other future changes!

What could you easily change that could make a difference?  It won't necessarily save you a lot in the short term, but the cumulative benefits over time could be massive!

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One Small Change - What’s It About

One Small Change is a bit of a personal experiment, read on to find out more.  

Did you make a New Year’s Resolution this year?  We’re now a month into the New Year, have you stuck with it?  If you have, then fantastic - you’re in the minority.  I haven’t made one for the last few years, I don’t see the point.  We punish ourselves for a few weeks then give in to temptation.  This is normally because the challenge set is too big.  As humans we’re creatures of habit, especially when it comes to our health and wellbeing.  If you’ve eaten poorly for several years, then suddenly deprive yourself of everything and drastically change your eating habits then your body will be shocked by the changes which is when temptation kicks in and you resort back to your old ways.  

I was recently listening to a Virgin podcast and one of the guests being interviewed was a guy named Dalton Wong.  He was talking about his book ‘The Feelgood Plan’.  I’ve not read the book so can’t comment on it, but one of the things Dalton said was about making just one small change to your lifestyle.  By just making one small change it’s more likely that you’ll stick to it.  This got me thinking about the number of things I could change in my lifestyle, and how making these small changes could make such a difference.  So, my little experiment is, for the next year I’m going to make 1 small change to something in my life every week.  So by the end of the year I will have made 52 changes which will have made a difference to both my personal and business life.  I’ve got loads of ideas of things that I could do, from drinking less, making better choices at mealtimes (for those who don’t know me I’m a driving instructor, so it’s all too easy to eat utter rubbish whilst I’m out), and changes I could make at home such as getting up earlier to be more productive or taking the dog for a walk more often. I’d love to hear your ideas, so please share them with me.  I’ll start each change on a Monday and I’ll write a short blog each week about the journey so far.  I’m going to make a short but honest note about things in my life right now that I expect to see changes in.  I’m not sharing them right now as some things are quite personal.  But if the ‘one small change’ project works as I expect then I’ll share them along the way.

Week 1 will start on Monday 6th February 2017, so please check back next week to see how I’m getting on…