I’m a big planner. Plans work really well for me. I like to think about what I want my behavior to be, make a plan to drive that outcome, and then execute against the plan.
If you think about it, I’m both “delegating” the act of decision making and I’m also not waiting until the moment of choice to make a choice. It’s hard to pick the salad over the burger and fries in that moment, but it’s easier if you pick salad because that’s what you chose to do in the first place (through the plan).
Anyway, I realize plans don’t work for everyone. But if you’ve never tried it, I recommend it!
Here’s mine for the Dedication 6/12 project:
Four tabs: Exercise, Diet, Weight, and Journaling. On each, I shade in the cell corresponding to the day in the 10-week plan according to how I did against my plan. In the end, I hope to see mostly green! I also sprinkle some emojis for fun. Here’s what I am tracking for each.
Exercise
Here I keep track of my progress against my running plan and my walking plan.
For Running, I want to be able to run a 5k in 30 minutes. I’ve done this plan before so I have the benefit of knowing it works. This time around, I’m doing one thing different: I’m going to fold in intentional cross training on off days. I have a list of activities I want to try and do on these “off” days, from push-ups to cycling. This evolves, so as I learn of new activities, I will try to add them. The idea is to keep it varied.
For Walking, it’s simple: 10k a day. It’s not that hard. Just know you don’t stumble upon 10k steps by happenstance. It has to be intentional. But if you get out there, the steps add up.
I use an Apple Watch for tracking steps and workouts. I’m also on Runkeeper.
Diet
This is a simple journal of what I’m eating. My plan is to use protein bars and salads to make up the bulk of my meals during the week. Weekends are intentionally less strict, but I want to stick to the meal schedule and have at least one salad on each of these days.
The key with this is to not be too insane with it. I don’t count calories.
Weight
This is a simple journal of my weigh ins. I weigh in daily. I keep track of how I did vs previous day plus have a weekly trend tracker (avg of all deltas between each day and the same day the previous week for a seven day week sample).
Journal
I want to write 70 blog entries for each day of the journey. Things are great now that I’m starting, but I know at some point I won’t feel up to it. The blogging keeps momentum going.