1) Minimize

The first tip is probably the most important.  You just can’t do everything in life.  When you try to do too many different things and get spread too thin, this is the single biggest threat to becoming a quitter.  Instead, focus on what you really want to spend your time doing and minimize out everything else.  For example, I was signed up for several survey-taking websites.  I had made decent money over the years taking surveys, but I figured out that it took up considerable time to complete the surveys and took time away from what I really wanted to be doing with this blog and other online ventures.  I chose to quit the surveys so I could finish more items that i really wanted.

• Quit what you don’t really want or need so you can focus on finishing the important things.

2) Commit

Once you have cleared away the extraneous items and tasks, look at what you have left.  If you really are passionate about something then take the time to reflect on why you want to accomplish that project and imagine what it will feel like to complete it.  Make a commitment to the task and make a conscious commitment to finishing the task.

• Knowing why you are doing something – and having a vision of what it will feel like to complete it – can help you make it to the end.

3) Serialize

Now that you have committed to a small selection of items, put each part of the task in an order and do the steps one at a time.  One huge risk of being a quitter is taking a shotgun approach and doing a little here and a little there.  You can’t tell how much progress you are making and it isn’t clear what to do next.  If you know exactly what comes next, it makes it easier to overcome that inertia and jump back in when you have time.

• Do things one step at a time to get to the finish.

4) Organize

Having good organizational skills will help you immensely when it comes to finishing projects.  Keep all your supplies or equipment organized and in good shape.  Being organized will help you to track how far along in the project you are so you can clearly know what is left to accomplish.  Also, when everything is well-organized you will find that you want to keep going and it will be easier to pick up where you left off.

• Clarity will help you see where you are in the process and make it easier and more enjoyable to keep going.

5) Segment

This is somewhat in opposition to #1, Minimize.  You can’t completely minimize and only have a single thing to work on, so segment your life into different areas.  Then when you have a specific area, it is much easier to apply all the rest of the rules to a specific segment.  For example, I had a ton of books I wanted to read and I had about 4 different books that I started and never finished.  I segmented “book reading” and got my act together.  Then in this narow space, I was able to apply the other tips much easier.  First, I made a commitment to set aside time for reading and finish everything I had started.  Then, I serialized reading them by putting my books in a stack right on my nightstand and read only the top one.  I also organized my reading by setting up an account at goodreads.com to track the books I had read, were currently reading, and planned to read.

• Divide and conquer: apply all the other tips to each segment of your life.

Logan Challenge

I challenge you today to start with #5 and segment areas of your life.  Then find one segment – an important one, or maybe a small simple area to get you moving – and then apply the tips to that area.

Good luck, and make sure to give me feedback if this was helpful or if you have your own suggestions.

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1) Set Goals

if you don’t have goals for yourself, then there is no way to judge if you are doing good or not.  It is much too easy to let things go without having the focus that a goal gives you.  What ever you decide on for a goal, it should be something tangible and it helps immensely to write them down or document them somehow.  Having a goal of “lose weight” is no good.  A goal of “lose 15 pounds” is better, and “lose 15 pounds in the next 6 months” is even better.  Make sure you quantify your goals, put them in writing, and set a time limit if you can.

2) Do it for Yourself

While doing things to please other people, or for some outside motivation can work sometimes, the only way to truly create good habits is to do it for yourself.  You need to own the task and make it fully yours.  Don’t work on losing weight because your partner wants you to; if you really and truly want to lose weight make it your task.  This gives you not only ownership and power, but it also takes away an easy scapegoat.  By being responsible to yourself you take away the possibility of blaming someone else if you fail.  If you don’t really want it for yourself, then maybe it isn’t right and you should rethink what you are doing.  You can always revisit your ideas in the future if you come to truly want to do it for yourself.

3) Be Consistent

This is really the nature of habits.  Make it habitual and create a rhythm and pattern.  Figure out a weekly schedule for exercise and stick with it.  This also applies to building on your successes, or consistently improving.  If you haven’t exercised in a while, it is much better to start slow and consistently build on that.  If you get out and run one time a week, do that for a month and then add a second day so you are running twice a week.  Be consistent about what you are doing and about building on your habits.

4) Make Your Good Habits Easy

Now this tip is more accurately “make your good habits as easy as possible” because what ever you are working on probably isn’t easy. So do what you can to make your activity as easy as possible. For example, find the best time of day for you to exercise.  If you can get up early and exercise – and it leaves you feeling good all day – then do that.  On the flip side, if you find yourself eating in front of the TV at night, change that routine and maybe exercise in the evening.  Also, try to string things together.  My gym is close to my kid’s school, so when I bring them to school I go dressed to exercise and work out on the way back.  Find simple things that you can change to make the habits easier.

5) Remind yourself Why

When you are in the middle of another set of crunches and you really don’t want to continue, it is hard to see the forest of why you are doing this.  Take time to reflect and continually renew why you are doing what you are working so hard on.  This can be reflecting back on the goals (you did set up goals, right?!), or reflecting on why you made this commitment to yourself.  Whether it is for a healthier, slimmer body, or feeling better about the way you look, it is vitally important to remind yourself why.

Do these tips apply to your situation?  Got a tip yourself or an interesting way you applied these?  Be sure and let me know.

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Keep Perspective

This one is the hardest for me.  I feel an obligation to get angry at stupid drivers or feel that it is my responsibility to police other driver’s bad moves.  All that this leads to is the potential for road rage – both for yourself, or being on the receiving end of someone else raging.  Instead, remind yourself that it isn’t your job to correct other people’s stupidity.  Keep your perspective on two things:

1. Traffic is fleeting and fluid and it doesn’t really matter exactly where you are in the traffic flow
2. It doesn’t matter how right you are if you end up dead or injured

Instead of focusing on a stupid stranger and getting emotionally involved with them, think about your family or your own personal hopes and dreams for the future.  Stay emotionally involved with the people and things that matter to you and it will be much easier to ignore that moron.

Create Good Habits

Figure out things that minimize stress during the actual drive and do them consistently.  For example, instead of trying to pick which lane is going the fastest and changing lanes back and forth, I like to get way over to the left lane and just stay there for most of my drive.  This way I don’t have anything to do except watch the car in front of me and wait for my exit.  This also applies to the reverse by finding ways of avoiding stressful driving situations.  For instance, if there is a section of your commute where you need to change several lanes of traffic quickly and it is usually a hard, stressful merge, either change your habits – like changing lanes sooner – or find an alternative route to avoid the stressful section.  You can’t always cut out all the stress, so do your best to quickly merge or get into a better position and then get back to focusing on relaxing.

Keep Your Mind Occupied

You need to pay enough attention to drive safely, of course, but sometimes the best thing to do is turn up the radio or tune in to a favorite morning DJ.  Keeping your mind focused on something else makes the problems of the road seem distant and less important.  If you are laughing or enjoying yourself it will be harder to get upset over yet another long commute.

NET – No Extra Time

This is an even more useful alternative for using your time.  I picked this phrase up somewhere from a motivational speaker and it has really stuck with me.  I plan on giving this its own post in the future, so I’ll just touch on it here.  The concept is to accomplish tasks during time that would otherwise be wasted.  You are not using any extra time – you need to be in your car for that commute anyway so you might as well make use of the time.  Accomplishing tasks can be anything from listening to audio books, planning out your day, catching up on phone calls (with a good headset of course!), or even taking public transportation so you can pull out your laptop or a book.  Anything you can accomplish during this time will cost you no extra time.

Avoid The Commute

This is not always possible, but avoiding the drive – or at least the rush-hour drive – completely is the best possible solution.  If you have flexible hours then you can try to schedule your day to avoid rush hour driving by coming in early and leaving early, or coming in late and leaving late.  If your job allows, talk to your boss about telecommuting.  I have made arrangements that during projects which don’t require in-person meetings I work from home anywhere from 1-4 days a week.  This has really helped out and saves time, gas costs, and the headache of driving completely.

I hope these tips get you thinking about ways to improve your commute which will make life just a little bit better.  So remember to focus on who and what is important to you in life instead of the morons you meet for a few seconds or minutes during your drive, get into good driving habits and avoid bad ones, and make the most of your time in the car.

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Tracking Books

For quite a while now I have been wanting to keep track of the books I read so recently I went looking for software or a website to keep track. I found a few good websites. My favorite is goodreads.com. It is free to sign up for an account and can easily track books. It has “shelves” which you can assign books to. By default you have a “read”, “reading”, and “want to read” shelf. You can add your own named shelves such as “I own it” or and other category you want to track.  There are a few other free websites so be sure to look around if this doesn’t fit what you want.  For software, I really didn’t find anything good – most people just suggested keeping an Excel spreadsheet like I do for my biking log.

iPhone Notes

I love carying my iPhone with me because I always have a place to jot down thoughts.  The Notes program is perfect for miscellaneous thoughts, ideas, or things to follow up on later.  You can even sync Notes with your Mac so you have them available on your computer.  This is a two step process:

1. In iTunes with your iPhone connected, in the left panel select your iPhone under Devices.  Then select the Info tab and scroll down until you see Notes and check the box that says “Sync notes”.  Now click Sync in the lower right corner and it should sync the notes onto your computer. Tip: the computer may warn you with a scary-sounding message like “this will change over 50% of the notes on your computer.  Are you sure you want to continue?”.  If you don’t have any notes already on your computer, this is perfectly normal and safe to continue.
2. The notes actually appear in the Mac Mail program.  If you don’t have Mail set up, you will have to do that now to be able to see your notes.  Once configured, the notes appear in the left pane under Reminders, Notes with the first line of the note appearing like the subject of an email, and then the entire note appearing in the email body section.  Very handy!

I hope you enjoyed these additional tracking tips.  I really like having an accumulation of data over time.  It is great to analyze for future reference, and also just to refer back to since it is so hard to remember everything.  Let me know if you have other data that you like to track or have found good methods.

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1. Make Sure To Unplug

By this I mean unplug from your job and really make it a vacation.  Turn off your laptop (or at least close your email program) and don’t check your email.  On my iPhone I have it set up to get mail from our work Exchange server and this is easily turned off.  Choose Settings * Mail, Contacts, Calenders and then select your work mail.  From there you can turn off Mail – turn off the Calendars setting too to avoid getting unnecessary meeting reminders.

Also, make sure that your coworkers know you are on vacation.  Just because you are in town does not mean you need to be available.  If it comes up that you will be staying in town, make sure they know you won’t be available.  You can mention that you’ll be taking some day trips (the more vague the better) and may not have access to email and may not have cell coverage.  Then you need to follow through and not check your email and let any calls go through to voicemail.

2. Plan

Even though you won’t have travel arrangements to plan, still plan ahead and schedule things.  Have a definitive start and stop to the vacation.  Plan out your activities for the days and if you are taking day trips then make sure to figure out driving routes and good places to stop along the way.

3. Treat It Like Vacation

You really need to work to remind yourself that you are on vacation.  Take your camera and video camera everywhere and take pictures just like you would on vacation.  Even buying postcards and mailing them to your friends “back home” can be a fun family activity.

4. Act Like A Tourist

Treat your town as if you were a tourist.  If you were going to a new city, you probably would check the official and unofficial tourism websites for activities.  Do that for your own town and you will be surprised with the number of fun activities you have never thought to do.  There are lots of examples of touristy things that you just never do when you live in a town.  For example, I live in Austin, the capitol of Texas – and I still haven’t visited the Capitol building.  Make sure you hit some of the touristy hot spots of your town that you just haven’t done.

5. Change Your Routine

This one is so important and challenging.  Since you will be in familiar surroundings staying at home, the urge will be strong to keep up your usual routines.  Work really hard to break the routines up.  Sleep late, or get up early.  Do something different every day for breakfast – go out for donuts or cook up omelets at home, but just do something different.  This can be part of your planning as well if you have something different planned for each day then you just need to stick to your plan instead of falling into your usual habits.

This goes for the rest of your plans too – don’t just head out to your usual family haunts for things to do.  Go across town and check out new places.  This even applies to simple things like going to the park.  Instead of going to the local park down the street, look up parks across town and explore.  Kids love exploring new parks and just finding them can be an adventure as well.

6. Call In Professionals

Do not let this time at home be used up doing chores and work around the house.  Hire someone to come in and clean your house either before, after, or during (if it won’t interrupt too much) your vacation.  Resist the urge to do the cleaning yourself and use some of the money you are saving by not traveling.  On the other hand, if you have other larger projects around the house that you really want to do, don’t do them during your vacation at all – either yourself or someone you hire.  Trying to coordinate with a contractor or landscaper can really mess up your time and stress you out.  This would be a great opportunity to use your upcoming staycation as motivation to get it taken care of on a weekend before your vacation.

7. Relax

One of the big benefits of a staycation is avoiding the headaches and hassles of planning, paying for, and executing the travel and hotel arrangements.  Use this to your advantage and try hard to keep your stress down.

Also, one good activity to plan is heading out to a spa for a day of pampering.  This works better without kids, but check around and you should be able to find a location that has kids activities to entertain them while you get to relax and rejuvenate.  Short of a spa, you could even take advantage of your gym’s steam room, hot tub, or sauna for a bit of relaxation and pampering.

Keep your goals and your budget in mind.  Don’t be afraid to spend some money, but don’t overdo things.  When you head back into the office after your successful staycation well rested and relaxed with vacation pictures to show off, it will all be worth it.

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Apply It To Eating

So what does this have to do with eating?  Simple – maybe you are struggling with being a vegetarian or vegan and are occasionally cheating and eating meat.  Change your point of view from focusing on your next meal to focusing on the bigger picture.  Where do you want to go with your eating?  Do you want to look back in 5 years – 10 years – and be able to say that you have been a long time vegetarian?  Do you want the overall health benefits?  Visualize what your goal is and then it will be that much easier to get there.

Apply It To Health

You can use the same visualization ideas for your health in general.  Your instinct is to focus on your weight today or struggle to get off the couch to go biking, or crawling in bed instead of doing push ups.  Focus on where you want to go.  Pick an ideal weight or set goals for your exercise plan.  Then when you are faced with a mundane obstacle you can focus on your goal and see yourself where you want to be and the obstacles melt away.

Apply It To Life

This same advice can be applied more generally to your life.  Are you stuck in a dead-end job or doing something you don’t really love?  Do you just focus on making it through the day?  You need a plan and you need to look at where you want to go instead of the obstacles of your day-to-day life.  Visualize where or what you want to be doing and keep that image in your head.  This can take the form of a plan in your head, or even better – write up a goal plan or hang up a significant picture of something to symbolize where you want to go.  Then when you start to get caught up in the small obstacles you can reflect on your goal and remember where you want to go.

Last Thoughts

Looking where you want to go is a great tip and can be applied to many aspects of your life.  From my experience trying to apply this to my mountain biking, I can tell you it isn’t always easy.  You should remember that your natural instinct is to focus on the obstacle at hand.  This is your challenge to work and overcome that instinct.  But that is the point exactly – work at where your focus is and then the ride itself becomes easier and almost second nature.

Got a thought or comment?  Be sure to let me know.

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Junk Food Vegetarian

Relying on junk food instead of real meals and healthy food because it is too hard to eat vegetarian.

Overcoming this problem is a two part solution.  First you need the willpower to not eat so much junk food.  You need to learn to say no and slow down your eating.  Yes it is hard at first, but it becomes easier as you eat less and less.  Second, it helps to have better alternatives.  The best way to accomplish this is to learn to cook more and keep healthy foods on hand.  Another backup is to find healthy restaurant options and eat out or get take-out more often.

Frozen Foods

Relying too much on frozen foods like meatless offerings from Morningstar Farms and Boca Burger.

This solution falls into a similar category with junk food regarding having better options.  I still keep Morningstar Farms foods in my freezer and they certainly have a place in our meals when we are just too busy and exhausted, but they play a smaller role.  I have made a big effort to use them sparingly instead of relying on them.  I’m actively trying to cook more and also just seeking out healthier options both fresh and frozen in the grocery store.  I have found really good tasting veggie burgers that don’t have wheat, dairy, or eggs in them.  I’m planning on including them in my veggie burger roundup coming up.  While not as bad as pure junk food, the key here is moderation and not relying on frozen food with huge ingredient lists for every meal of every day.

Child Care

Having children in child care accidentally being served meat.

The solution to this one comes down to being very vocal about what your kids can and can’t eat and making sure you talk to everyone involved in your child’s care.  For us, this was a matter of going into the kitchen and talking to the chef to make sure he/she knew our kids and their restrictions.  We also made a point to go in at different times so we talked personally to all the staff on both morning and afternoon shifts.  One school had nameplates on the tables that indicated the vegetarian restriction and even this wasn’t enough.  Talking to everyone and stressing the importance was our solution.  Another way to solve this is to bring your own food for your child.  Some child care places don’t provide meals or don’t provide vegetarian meals, so this may be your only option.

Final Thoughts

Unfortunately, mistakes happen and that is part of life.  Our lives are always too busy, but we need to make eating healthy and eating vegetarian a priority and make sure that we do for our selves and our children.  When everything else is stripped away, is anything more important than health?  Does anything really matter if we are sick and unhealthy?  Ask yourself that and make the time to avoid these vegetarian mistakes.

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Junk Food Vegetarian

This is probably the easiest and most common pitfall that us vegetarians can fall into.  When you can’t easily get fast food and don’t have time or the know-how to cook much, it becomes all to easy to grab for the nearest bag of potato chips and soda.  I was (and occasionally still am) a junk food vegetarian for far too long and managed to pack on about 35 pounds.  This becomes a dangerous cycle because then you have less energy from the junk food so you feel even less like making healthy things.  Also, your body adjusts along with the amount of food you consume – as you consume more food you get hungry quicker and want to eat more and create another bad cycle.

Frozen Foods

This is a step down from pure junk food, but I feel it is still a mistake.  While frozen foods from companies like Morningstar Farms and Bocca Burger are great, I spent too many years relying on them to feed myself and my family.  The Morningstar Farms Chik’n products have been popular with my kids, but they have a long list of ingredients and are full of wheat, dairy, soy, and eggs.  As I discussed in another post on food sensitivity testing, one of my sons and I discovered we have wheat sensitivity.  Relying on these foods and consuming them too much I feel has contributed to ear infections and congestion problems for my kids and myself.

Child Care

My 3 kids have all been vegetarians from birth and all have been in some amount of pre-school child care.  We had several situations where they were fed real chicken nuggets, fish sticks, and spaghetti with meat sauce.  I can’t do anything to change this, but I consider it a mistake that I wasn’t more on top of who was feeding my kids.

Final Thoughts

While eveything in life is give and take, I can look back and clearly see things I could have improved about my vegetarian eating.  I am very glad that I have chosen a vegetarian lifestyle and feel that even with my mistakes I am better off, and the world and the animals I have saved certainly are better off.

Do you have any vegetarian mistakes you have learned from, or things you just don’t know how to fix?  Be sure to comment and let me know.

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Track consistently

This is really the most important part.  When you have a nice long history of data it is great to be able to know what you have done and then you have a sense of accomplishment.  Get in the habit of recording your data as soon as you are done.  This will become natural and then you won’t have holes in your data.

Do something

It really doesn’t matter how you track, just keep track.  This can be a simple as writing it down in a notebook, keeping track in an Excel spreadsheet, or getting some specific software to help you track.  Obviously, if your end goal is something to display on the web then it makes sense to input it into a computer.  The format isn’t as important, however as data can usually be repurposed and translated to different applications once it has been entered on the computer.

Using the data

Make sure that you actually use the data.  Periodically go through your numbers and look at things like how often you did your activity, what improved, and what you could stand to improve.  If you have something that would make a great tutorial, publish it on the web and let other people enjoy and learn from your experience.

If you haven’t done anything like this before, I suggest you start today.  Yes, you may not have data from before which would be nice to have, but if you put it off more then you have even more data lost.  Make it important and simple, and keep with it!

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