Things To Do & Side Tracking
09, 02, 12
I know if you are like me sometimes you easily get side tracked. The more freedom I seem to have in a day, the more likely the day slips away without accomplishing much of anything important. As I write my blog today that is exactly what just happened for the last two hours. I downloaded two programs that were suggested to me by a friend: EVERNOTE and POSTBOX. I did not plan on working with these programs at all, just downloading them and looking them over for future reference. Once I started looking through them my sidetracking started. In fact, I am writing this blog on my new EVERNOTE program under Craig's blog notebook category. I'm making good use of it but I still have not accomplished a single simple item on my to do list of 4 items today.
Weight lift 45 mins
Cycle for 90 mins
And work on my balance training on my Wii FIT system
Work on organizing tax papers for my accountant
Just to show you how crazy this side tracking moment is for me, I am an exercise nut. I cannot go a day without exercise or I feel defeated in my quest for staying healthy and fit. Yet, side tracking with these new programs put me in my current schedule bind and it is Super Bowl Sunday with plans to watch the game. More alarming, one important item... organizing my tax papers for the filing this year is still 4 rows down the list. And worse, so far I have only had a bowl of oatmeal and two cups of tea for breakfast. Even if I start my workout this moment, I can feel the light headedness already from not eating enough today. How intense will this work out be? Not vary I would suspect. Consequently, my new list looks like this.
Eat an early light lunch
Weight lift 45 mins
Cycle for 75 mins (increase intensity a little)
And work on my balance training on my Wii FIT system
Work on organizing tax papers for my accountant
When I am most successful in getting things done, I find I do it best when I limit how long I work at a particular target area. I set aside small blocks of time to get something accomplished instead of working on something with an open timeline. Think about it. If you were writing a book, all it would take to get a good chunk of work completed over a 6 month period is to write 2 to 3 pages of text every day. At the end of six months, you would have approximately 300 pages written. But, if you sat down with the goal to write as much as possible every day, I suspect most of us would still be stuck on chapter 1.
THE KEY TO ACCOMPLISHMENT IS TAKING ONE SMALL STEP AT A TIME!
This principle holds true for everything you wish to do and accomplish in life whether it is learning something in school, learning to make a new recipe, learning to play a sport, playing an instrument, or simply living a healthier lifestyle. Taking small steps, one at a time, is the key to learning how to live a healthier life. When we try to accomplish too many things all at once, it is like going into a room in which you placed your mail every single day down on the floor for an entire year but never opened a single envelope. And then one day you finally have time to go into that room and read your mail. I am absolutely certain that the minute you open the door, you would be completely overwhelmed and unable to begin the task at all. You would simply close the door for another day.
When it comes to improving your health and wellness, closing the door for another day is the worse thing you can ever choose to do. Our bodies are only as resilient as they are healthy. While we all believe we can get back into the same shape we were when in our 20s, the simple fact is we can at best move back in that direction, but we will never be exactly there. That is a simple fact of aging. Also, each of us has a point of minimal return when we let our health decline too far. We can reach a point where we are so limited in what we can start redoing like exercise or playing a sport we used to love as a kid, that the benefits cannot overcome the loss of function a sedentary lifestyle has created. The best analogy I can think of is in the treatment of cancer. If you are lucky enough to be one of the fortunate ones whose cancer is detected early, your chances of treatment success are very good. But, if you ignore the warning signs or there are really no easy warning signs to see like with ovarian cancer resulting in a late stage cancer diagnosis, your chances of surviving are usually minimal. No matter what your doctors do, the likelihood of surviving the magic 5 year remission period may not be possible. Your body is no longer resilient enough to survive the horrors of chemo, radiation, and surgery required for your survival.
Weight lift 45 mins
Cycle for 90 mins
And work on my balance training on my Wii FIT system
Work on organizing tax papers for my accountant
Just to show you how crazy this side tracking moment is for me, I am an exercise nut. I cannot go a day without exercise or I feel defeated in my quest for staying healthy and fit. Yet, side tracking with these new programs put me in my current schedule bind and it is Super Bowl Sunday with plans to watch the game. More alarming, one important item... organizing my tax papers for the filing this year is still 4 rows down the list. And worse, so far I have only had a bowl of oatmeal and two cups of tea for breakfast. Even if I start my workout this moment, I can feel the light headedness already from not eating enough today. How intense will this work out be? Not vary I would suspect. Consequently, my new list looks like this.
Eat an early light lunch
Weight lift 45 mins
Cycle for 75 mins (increase intensity a little)
And work on my balance training on my Wii FIT system
Work on organizing tax papers for my accountant
When I am most successful in getting things done, I find I do it best when I limit how long I work at a particular target area. I set aside small blocks of time to get something accomplished instead of working on something with an open timeline. Think about it. If you were writing a book, all it would take to get a good chunk of work completed over a 6 month period is to write 2 to 3 pages of text every day. At the end of six months, you would have approximately 300 pages written. But, if you sat down with the goal to write as much as possible every day, I suspect most of us would still be stuck on chapter 1.
THE KEY TO ACCOMPLISHMENT IS TAKING ONE SMALL STEP AT A TIME!
This principle holds true for everything you wish to do and accomplish in life whether it is learning something in school, learning to make a new recipe, learning to play a sport, playing an instrument, or simply living a healthier lifestyle. Taking small steps, one at a time, is the key to learning how to live a healthier life. When we try to accomplish too many things all at once, it is like going into a room in which you placed your mail every single day down on the floor for an entire year but never opened a single envelope. And then one day you finally have time to go into that room and read your mail. I am absolutely certain that the minute you open the door, you would be completely overwhelmed and unable to begin the task at all. You would simply close the door for another day.
When it comes to improving your health and wellness, closing the door for another day is the worse thing you can ever choose to do. Our bodies are only as resilient as they are healthy. While we all believe we can get back into the same shape we were when in our 20s, the simple fact is we can at best move back in that direction, but we will never be exactly there. That is a simple fact of aging. Also, each of us has a point of minimal return when we let our health decline too far. We can reach a point where we are so limited in what we can start redoing like exercise or playing a sport we used to love as a kid, that the benefits cannot overcome the loss of function a sedentary lifestyle has created. The best analogy I can think of is in the treatment of cancer. If you are lucky enough to be one of the fortunate ones whose cancer is detected early, your chances of treatment success are very good. But, if you ignore the warning signs or there are really no easy warning signs to see like with ovarian cancer resulting in a late stage cancer diagnosis, your chances of surviving are usually minimal. No matter what your doctors do, the likelihood of surviving the magic 5 year remission period may not be possible. Your body is no longer resilient enough to survive the horrors of chemo, radiation, and surgery required for your survival.