The cheese, losing things, and new apartment goals seem like they can be solved in whole or part by one-time changes. Alicorn's suggestion about cheese sounds right, and you should also consider switching to healthier cheeses and avoiding or altering situations where you would snack on cheese. Similarly for losing things, I found that I would lose stuff less often once I had dedicated locations for key items (e.g. keeping my wallet by the door, my cell phone in my jacket pocket), which is also a one-time decision followed by a commitment to sustain the practice.
But you might want to wait on physically organizing your stuff until you get the new place. It seems like the move would unlock a lot of extra time you could use to work on all the other goals. You just have to remember to keep up your momentum once you make the move; for me, there's always the temptation to give myself a pat on the back and permission to relax for a while after doing something big.
Basically, I'd suggest starting with the improvements that are just about removing obstacles, impediments or distractions (for these, you just need a one-time burst of energy, which even many ordinarily akrasic people can do, I think), then use your extra time & energy to tackle the ones that are about altering existing habits or creating new ones.
What sometimes helps me retain my momentum, after a big improvement like a move, is making sure my internal narrative notices that if I'm not working on something now, when I have momentum and a newfound supply of extra time, then I'm not likely to do so in the future; in other words, the way I spend my time now is not being traded with future time, but is instead representative of future behavior. So in this sense when I start now on one thing, I am inclining my future self to start on the next task.
This was helpful (or at least feels helpful right now, before I've actually started doing anything). Making the apartment my first priority is a good idea.
The "losing stuff" doesn't so much have to do with how things are organized around the house, but how they are organized when I'm in transit. I lost my wallet on the train when I set it down next to me (after showing my train-pass to the conductor) and then forgot to pick it up again when I left. I previously lost a hard drive when I was temporarily living at a friends' house, and then he moved to a new house and I moved home. So it's not a single one time change I need to make, it's some kind of change in the way I keep track of things while I'm going places.
Lately I've been identifying a lot of things about myself that need improvement and thinking about ways to fix them. This post is intended to A) talk about some overall strategies for self-improvement/goal-focusing, and B) if anyone's having similar problems, or wants to talk about additional problems they face, discuss specific strategies for dealing with those problems.
Those issues I'm facing include but are not limited to:
Of those things, three of them are things that require me to actively dedicate more time (finding an apartment, getting exercise, social life), and the others mostly consist of NOT doing things (eating cheese, making bad jokes, losing things, getting distracted by the internet), unless I can find some proactive thing to make it easier to not do them.
I *feel* like I have enough time that I should be able to address all of them at once. But looking at the whole list at once is intimidating. And when it comes to the "not doing bad thing X" items, remembering and following up on all of them is difficult. The worst one is "don't lose things." There's no particular recurring theme in how I lose stuff, or they type of stuff I Iose. I'm more careful with my wallet and computer now, but spending my entire life being super attentive and careful about *everything* seems way too stressful and impractical.
I guess my main question is: when faced with a list of things that don't necessarily require separate time to accomplish, how many does it make sense to attempt at once? Just one? All of them? I know you're not supposed to quit drinking and smoking at the same time because you'll probably accomplish neither, but I'm not sure if the same principle applies here.
There probably isn't a universal answer to this, but knowing what other people have tried and accomplished would be helpful.
Later on I'm going to discuss some of the problems in more detail (I know that the brief blurbs are lacking a lot of information necessary for any kind of informed response, but a gigantic post that about my own problems seemed... not exactly narcissistic... but not appropriate as an initial post for some reason)