Just Doing It

I don’t really feel like writing today. I’ve been working on the new version of my book all day, so writing’s the last thing on my mind. Once I get going it’s fine – it’s just that picking a topic to write about and actually getting started are the hard part.

So I’ll write about that.

For the past six months I’ve been doing Crossfit as I’ve mentioned many times. For the first four months I did it with a class that met three times a week. I never missed a single workout, even when I went up to Boston for christmas. I ran in the snow and did workouts in the basement with my sister.

For the past two months I’ve been following the workout of the day at www.crossfit.com, which ends up being 5.25 workouts a week. I missed one day. The details of that aren’t really important… I had an excuse but it could have been done anyway.

So, while not perfect, this is a pretty good track record – 134/135 workouts were completed.

I haven’t been super consistent with this blog (although I’ve been maintaining my 2 posts a week since I made that rule), but I have been writing at least a few times a month since the end of 2005.

I’ve been recording my daily output, excuses, and productivity on my forums for the past two months or so, only missing a few days while transitioning here in Panama.

I’m not a particularly disciplined person by nature. I used to always start things and then they’d fade away and I’d just stop doing them.

What has helped me tremendously is that I decided to just take the thinking and emotions out of each of these events. I’m not allowed to think about them, particularly whether I do them or not.

This blog is a good example. I didn’t feel like writing today but it doesn’t matter. I write every monday and wednesday, so I write today. If I left it to my emotions I’d skip it.

Same with my workout today. I’m tired because my sleep schedule has been screwed up, and the crossfit is 100 pullups, 100 pushups, 100 situps, 100 squats. That’s a lot.

But emotion doesn’t play into the decision. I just do it regardless, unless it’s physically impossible for me to do it.

It seems like everyone starts things and doesn’t finish them. When people start blogs, diets, businesses, or other “I’m going to do X every Y days” habits, I just assume that it will last a month or so.

To me everything is an indicator of everything else. If you don’t stick with one thing you’re not going to stick with anything else, so what’s the point? I try to stick to everything because I know that if I do that it’s much more likely that I’ll stick to other things in the future.

I guess that’s all I have to say about this. I was going to offer more tips, but really I think the only one that’s necessary is to cut out the emotion and just do it. When you catch yourself thinking “but I want to…”, you know that you’re making a useless excuse. Now it’s time for me to do some crossfit.