Confessions of a Slacker

So how is that Greener Faster Challenge going you may be asking.

The truth is we have been slacking. Three things that have slowed us down.
1. It was more important to me to get involved with the election. Our policy makers will make decisions that have the greatest impact on energy use.
2. We fell behind on tracking. I never did get an easy tracking system in place ..which meant we weren't seeing how we were doing...so we all forgot.
3. With travel it seemed we had done the really big stuff. Like going down to one car..so it was hard to get motivated to make more changes. Coordinating the use of our one car was taking enough time and energy.

To be honest, if we were doing this on our own...I'd probably throw in the towel and move on. But since we have made a commitment to a group, giving up is not an option ( the power of social influence.

Some thoughts on how to get motivated.

The competition is not motivating me..in fact it gets in the way. I don't want to compete with the five other families. I want to learn from them and I want them to succeed.

We had a discussion about prizes early on and there is interest in not having all the prizes go to the one family that reduces their energy the most ( though that should be recognized and rewarded) Some other prize categories could be:
*Most innovative energy reduction idea
*Most dedicated family
*Most generous ( family that shares the most ideas to the rest of us)
*Most public ( family that shares the most publicly via blog, TV, newspaper,events)
*Most social: family that gets the most other people involved (like our neighborhood 10 day no car challenge last year)and an
*advocacy award for the family that engages or communicates most with policy makers. So I'll share the ideas with our group next week.

My goal this weekend is to get back on track with tracking...we need to try a system that is easy and visible. Stay tuned!