morning rituals and daily duties

Thanks for all your nice comments both on the blog and our Facebook. It feels pretty awesome to have decided to stick around here a little longer and see where our work and ideas can take us. It's a whole new chapter and a very exciting one for many different reasons. Our main purpose with "sailing the world" was indeed to find nice and fulfilling places to stay, for a short time or for a longer before we head towards a new adventure, and it seems this stop in the US will have to be considered one of the longer ones for now. 

Since work is and will be our main occupation during this prolonged US chapter, I find it more important than ever to find peace and balance from within. I am the sort of person that can spend 20 of the days 24 hours on a project if I only love and feel for it from the bottom of my heart, so I need to balance out the number of hours spent on working, with something that keeps me grounded. I have a lot of great intentions, but I also know that I can easily get caught up in things, on the border of becoming obsessive. While working hard and pushing boundaries is a good thing, it is never healthy to let anything consume you wholly. It's always good to back off, recharge and come back with objective eyes and a quiet mind. Daily yoga helps so much with that part. 

So what's even better with the amazing kitchen space that I work from, is that above it is an unoccupied loft office space, and which we have sort of transformed into a private little yoga studio. I normally arrive around 9 am and start my mornings with 45 minutes yoga and meditation up there, and finish the evening with a longer session. The video shows some of what I worked on this morning. Core strength and balance. 

This might seem silly, but below is a schedule which demonstrates pretty much how I have planned my days for the moment. I have made this one just to be sure that I get done all what I want to have accomplished in a day. 
The small image of me in the right corner is a clip from a video I'm working on finishing.

Being in the start up process and very much in the experimental stage of things, I try to limit waste of time in each day. I know how social media and other news sites tend to drag you in, and how easy it is to get disoriented if anything random pops up out of the blue, but once you've firmly decided how more or less you want your days to proceed and when you've learnt to keep and promote that idea in your subconscious, it's easier to stick to what you are supposed to be doing. Besides obviously being very determined as to what I look to achieve, I find writing plans and notes for myself very useful. Might be a female thing, what do you think?

That's roughly how most of my weekdays look like right now. Weekends Alex and I try to head out with the bike or do something other than work. Good thing with being freelancers or working on your own projects, is that you can switch days and hours as you please. But even so, I find having an overall knowledge of what you want and where you wish to be heading is a good strategy for every aspect in life. Lessens amount of time wasted and you'll steadily transport yourself towards your goals.
This is a great toast I made today (besides a pretty awesome carrot/ginger soup and the eleventh version of brownie of the last few days). It's home made olive tapenade with capers, parsley, zesty lemon juice, sea salt and olive oil on a thinly sliced and toasted (home made) whole-wheat bread with a filet of avocado and garden fresh heirloom tomato… approved by 4 of 4 people in the kitchen :)

Do you also write lists and practice yoga or how do you keep yourself focused?