Last week, Leo at Zen Habits wrote about the Simple Living Manifesto. The basic premise is that you figure out what is important in life, and everything else can screw off. I’m a big believer in this theory, and I do my best to evaluate situations within this criteria. It not only serves to keep us on track, but it keeps me mentally and spiritually balanced.

It’s really no secret that Mer and I have a somewhat chaotic lifestyle. We both work full-time, we’re students, we run four blogs, and we have a small side business. Every so often, I need to step back and remind myself that all of this insanity is really and truly leading us toward our goals.

Our ultimate goal (or, more accurately, our focus) is happiness. It’s a vague goal, I know, but that’s OK by us. The steps to get there, and the widgets and sprockets involved, are a bit more quantifiable. The process started, as many things do, with money. I sat down one day with a bunch of numbers and a spreadsheet, and discovered that if we made the commitment to change a lot of things, we could be rid of all of our credit card debt by the end of 2007, and free up an incredible amount of cash. With the freedom from debt came freedom to dream about how we truly wanted to live. (Living Behind the Curve was, in fact, born from that process.)

We weren’t willing to sacrifice everything, but we were willing to find creative workarounds. We looked for ways to maintain some basic standards of living, like eating good, healthful, rounded meals within a very limited budget of both money and food. Food and cooking are an important part of family life to me — they make me happy — and so SRSLY was created in line with our goals/values.

So what happens when something doesn’t jive? Finishing my degree has been a goal for mine since I left school 11 years ago. I truly enjoy school — I’m a learning nut — and up until now I’ve been happy with my full-time course load. This semester, I ended up in a class where I was, quite honestly, miserable. I struggled for a few days, trying to decide whether or not to drop the class, which I did finally do Saturday morning. I also decided to keep my courseload down to three classes this semester.

While it may push back my graduation by a semester, dropping this course was ultimately the right thing for me to do. I made my final decision based not on the add/drop date (which I missed by a few days) or the impact this class will have on my graduation date (which is, at the very least, 3 years away), but based on the answer to one very simple question: does this mesh with my goals and values?

The answer was no.

Dropping this class costs me money, and it costs me time, but it wasn’t worth the toll it was taking on me. (Mer can concur - not only does she have the same class, but she was witness to my crankiness.)

This may seem like a trivial item — it is just one class, after all — but it’s an excellent example of how you can tailor your life to your goals. Decide what’s important to you, and fuck everything else.