nathan and audrey

Have you ever made a commitment to do something you really want to do but can’t quite get over the hump with it? Examples of these activities include: exercising, practicing an instrument, learning new skills, school, or practically anything that requires a high level of intensity and sacrifice in order to achieve your goals. Quite often we set high goals for ourselves and begin the daunting task of making those things routine in our lives. Once something becomes routine it is easy to do without any focus or effort, but its hard to get there. In this post I hope to identify a primary reason why we have so much trouble succeeding at these commitments, give an example from my life of this, and then discuss how to fix the problem.

The Problem

So you have a goal. In this example we will use working out, but it really can be anything that requires constant determination and effort. Your goal is to work out four days a week for an hour each session. You know this will get you into shape and you believe you can do it with ease. Now that you have established a goal, you start doing it. You very quickly realize how much work is required to keep at it, eventually missing a few workout sessions here and there until you don’t go at all.

What happened here? One of the major problems that occurs with our commitments is that we have a false assumption at how good we will be at a given task. For example the person who made the above commitment hadn’t worked out in a long time, and an hour four days a week was a lot of work, but they thought they could do it easily. The false expectation of their abilities caused them to commit to something that was beyond their will power. The commitment and expectation effectively raised the bar of entry for the task to become routine. The higher this bar of entry is the harder it is to mentally overcome the barrier.

What happens next is that the failure causes a peson to begin to doubt themselves. Their confidence in the own will power becomes so low by all of the failures that they expect to fail at all of their commitments.

The goal of this post is to identify areas in your life where you have raised the bar too high, so that you can focus on creating realistic expectations thus lowering the bar.

Real World Example: Me

I want efficiency! I want to be as efficient as possible at everything in my life (productivity, work out, school). I create higher bars by expecting high efficiency from all the tasks I complete in a day. I will introduce two examples from my life where this caused me to fail over and over again, and that when I eventually created realistic expectations I won.

Bicycle Commuting: I live about 5 miles from school. I have been trying to bike/exercise at least 5 days a week for the past two years. I finally realized that my desire to always be the best was raising the bar so high that I could never consistently ride my bike. I realized that I expected to be at school within 20 minutes. I had broken the barrier twice and I created an expectation of completing my journey within 20 seconds or so of that mark. To bike to school in 20 minutes required a lot of strenuous effort, which was a turn off to me. When I finally realized that this is what stopped me from biking I set a more realistic expectation for “tired nathan” at 25 minutes per ride. Once I made this realization I immediately started riding more often, even when I was tired. This was a revolutionary change in my life because I no longer felt like I had to strive so hard. It was better for me to lower the bar and work out consistently than to demand a high cost and quit to quickly.

Time scheduling: I always wanted to be right on time (I still do!). This caused me to plan on arriving at a location about 1 minute till the meeting or whatever started. It also made me overestimate my ability to accomplish a task quickly. Last semester I constantly set up expected times for studying, and when it would take two or three times as long I would get upset with myself and lack of effort. The truth was that it wasn’t for a lack of effort, but because I expected more from me than I was able to give.

Solution: Set Realistic Expectations

The person in the above example should set a goa for themselves at three times a week for a half an hour, and if that doesn’t work out go with two times a week. The key is for that person to identify what it is about the task that is making the bar too high.

Start looking at goals or tasks in your life that you want to do and just can’t quite accomplish. Ask yourself,

• Am I being honest with how long this will take?
• Am I expecting too much effort from myself?
• Can I relax the requirement to accomplish this activity in terms of time and or effort?
• How far do I need to lower the entry bar to be consistent at it?

Life isn’t about making one big change. Its about being in a constant state of transformation into something better. One cannot hope to be transforming huge things in a not time. We must realize this and set our expectations where we can honestly work hard, but still not be overwhelmed by the task. It is more important to do a task at a low level than to not do it at all. You must identify what it is that makes it too hard for you and fix it in some way. This requires you to be brutally honest with yourself. Have fun!

Let me know of your successes and failures as you try this.

-nathan

Well, I haven’t blogged in about four to five months, and would like to start things off again with a post about a new routine I am attempting to incorporate into my daily life.

I have a terrible time waking up when my alarm goes off in the morning. My wife can tell you of her rude awakening to my morning snooziness when we first got married. I was generally a five to six time snoozer in the morning. She on the other hand had and still has the ability to get up on the first ring. Over the past few years I have thought of numerous ways to either fix the problem or presented arguments for its validity in my life. Currently, I’ve only improved my wake up number of snoozes to three, and even then I usually sit in bed for twenty to thirty minutes after the snoozing has finished.

In light of my recent hardships as a first year grad student, I have realized that I must start my days more focused and productive. Too often last semester I would get up mid morning (9-ish), but then start studying around 11 to 12. Therefore, I am resolved to test out waking up every morning at six o’clock. I am going to commit to this habit for a total of thirty days and test its effectiveness in my life.

In order to carry out my new wake up routine I have done what any great grad schooler does: google it! I read a few blogs [http://www.stevepavlina.com and http://studysuccessful.com] about how to wake up in the morning when you want to. I decided that I would give these methods a try and report my findings here. Steve Pavlina gives a detailed set of posts about the intricacies of the method. Study Successful describes a simplified version of the Pavlina Posts. If you have the time they are worth the read.

Onto the wake up routine! The approach is simple: practice waking up while you are focused and alert a bunch of times. For me this meant the following:

1. Get into night clothes
2. Set my alarm for approximately three minutes ahead of the current time
3. Get into bed and attempt to relax
4. When the alarm goes off turn it off
5. Perform a routine of stretching and getting out of bed
6. Stretch my legs
7. Use the restroom and go to the kitchen (I didn’t actually use the restroom every time, but stood there for a bit to simulate the time spent in the bathroom)

The purpose of the exercise is to train your brain and body to perform the set routine when it hears the alarm rather than allow your mind to give its suggestions about whether or not you should wake up. This brings up a very important concept that I have bought into over the past few years, which is muscle memory. I play guitar and am very focused on being one of the best guitarist. Playing guitar has several facets, but the most essential is the ability to let your muscles memorize the correct way to do a task, and let them do it automatically without brain intervention. This requires extensive practice. I will post more about this later, but for now suffice it so say that the practice routine above is set to accomplish the same tasks of muscle memory for my morning sleepy brain.

The reason why it’s important to practice this is that so often our morning brains are too sleepy. This morning brain doesn’t remember the important reason why we need to get up, or rather it finds it very easy to reason why we don’t need to get up. My morning brain convinces me that I can afford to sleep a little longer. This is toughest or nearly impossible when I have no immediate reason to get up in the morning. When I have a scheduled appointment my morning brain has less arguing authority, but when I have not appointments I sleep until my morning brain is done complaining about how it needs to stay in the comfy bed.

I performed eight repetitions of the above exercise in my first practice session and employed it into my routine the next day. The result, it actually worked. The first morning my alarm failed to go off, but I looked at my clock at about 6:15 and said I’m going to do this and started the routine. It was awesome because once I started stretching I was out of bed within a minute or two without any thinking or reasoning. This is a tremendous success because I am so terrible with getting out of bed when I don’t have to. I am very impressed!

I will be honest I think I need one or two more practice sessions to really engrain the routine into my morning muscle memory, but I think that it is well worth the effort. I will report back as to the effectiveness of the routine as I get further along into it.

If you really want to start waking up on time, take a look at the aforementioned blogs or just follow the simple method laid out in this article. Exercise your morning wake up routine several times in order to really get it engrained into your morning. Let me know if it works for you!

Lately, or rather for my whole life, I have been extremely spotty with getting up when I want to in the morning. I am so bad that my habits have caused and adaptation in my wife to the snooze lifestyle.With that said it has been increasingly frustrating not getting to work when I want to over the past few months. There are usually a lot of things that I need/want to accomplish in a given day, and if I get up too late it doesn’t happen. One thing that I have been trying to make routine is an exercise regiment with weight lifting at least 3 times a week. I don’t think I have achieved 3 times a week in over a year. One of the biggest reasons for that failure is lack of early start time in the day. I have flirted with the possibility of getting up early and working out to start the day off, but I can’t get up on time to make that a viable option. So I have been left with hoping I get up early enough to allow afternoon workout time.

This morning was exceptionally annoying in that I actually got up at 6:15, but couldn’t leave on time. I have always been peeved with my inability to be consistent at waking up. The reason why I’m ranting is because today, and I don’t even know how I got there, I found an interesting blog article about waking up when you want to. The article is  http://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2006/04/how-to-get-up-right-away-when-your-alarm-goes-off/ by Steve Pavlina. This article gives a really awesome technique to change our bodies to wake up when the alarm goes off. The essential component to his method is muscle memory. The article is definitely worth the read.

The Method: train your body to physically do what you want when you want. When we allow our brain to control whether we get up with the first alarm or not we are allowing an untrusted source the opportunity to change what we really want. Yes, our brain works against us in the morning. The reason why our brain can’t be trusted is due to the fact that it is usually still extremely sleepy when the alarm goes off. This makes us more susceptible to the nagging excuses we always have for being lazy. Mine is… hmm… its so nice here in bed, and Audrey really wants me to stay, and I can sleep a little longer and be on time… my body must need sleep since I’m not getting up right away… and whatever other junk I come up with. Steve’s article offers practical advice on how to change your alarm waking habits.

The basic premise is to practice waking up with the alarm. You create an environment where you really aren’t asleep, but simulate sleeping and waking to the alarm. By doing this 3-10 times per training session, and for a few training sessions you can make progress on your waking habits. You really should read the article because Steve articulates the method much better than I do. I buy into this technique because I have been and athlete my whole life and know how important muscle memory is, and in addition to that I have played guitar for several years and learned muscle memory is a key component there as well. So, I really think this method should work. It is really simple.

The reason for me posting this article is that I’m wondering how getting serious about my wake up time will help my daily productivity and natural rhythm during the day. I think I will try it, but of course after I talk to Audrey. I’m so sick of starting my day off with the frustration that I wanted to be at work at 7 a.m. but I look at the clock right before I leave and it is 7:23.

That website has several other great articles on productivity, and are great reads.

-Nathan