It’s all well and good to meal prep for a week, but that doesn’t fix the underlying issue.

One of my biggest struggles is to commit to habits that don’t seem essential. For example, I struggle to make food ahead of time and clean my room, because in the moment I’m supposed to do those things I think “nah, I can just eat ramen or step over that heap of dirty clothes for the rest of eternity.” Then I go back to doing whatever useless thing I was doing before.

Unfortunately, people who have their lives together don’t live like that. They actually do things preemptively to make their lives better (a shock).

The entire reason I remixed this column is because I lost all those good habits I picked up two years ago in the first incarnation. I didn’t maintain my good behavior, and I suffered for it.

I’m still somewhat at a loss as to how to pick up good habits forever. I’ve failed the meal prepping at least half the weeks I’ve been writing this column, and my room is never clean for more than two days at a time.

I roll out of bed late more often than not, there’s a roommate chore list that I haven’t looked at in three weeks, my dishes pile for an entire week before I get around to washing them and I just did laundry for the first time in a month last week.

However, I’ve meal prepped half the weeks. That’s half more than I was doing before. My room has been clean for a total of at least seven days, which is seven days more than before.

Maybe what’s important is a growth mindset. I can’t be bad at these things forever. They’re learnable habits that I have no excuse for not picking up. My failures now only serve to teach me areas I need to grow.

That being said, I know this week was brief, but such is the life of someone trying to maintain basic life functions.

Hultman can be reached at [email protected]