…you plan to fail.
I know that. But yesterday I didn’t follow that advice (oops). And as a result? I am failing.
Monday, my day was pretty crazy. Up at 5:15am, out the door and on my way to the airport at 6am. Security, breakfast, flight, etc… land at 9:30am and head straight to office (with a team, so no chance of slipping out for a workout). Worked like crazy till 4pm, and then it was back into the car and back to the airport – this time to head up to Ohio. I landed there at 11pm, had a 20 mile drive to my hotel, and that would then be my first real chance to hit the gym. Um, right.
I knew going into the week what my schedule for the day was going to be, and in fact, I spent most of the day thinking about that whole “plan to fail” thing. I tried to plan a workout, telling myself that I’d lift weights when I got in, but that plan wasn’t necessarily realistic. As the day wore on and I got more and more tired, I started downgrading from lifting weights (hardest), to getting some miles on the ellipical (medium), to at least reading on the stationary bike for a while (easiest)… until I had downgraded to not working out at all. By spending the day being vague about what I needed to get done, I didn’t get anything done. Major fail.
Part of the problem was not putting an imperative around it. By 11pm, my rationale for skipping my workout was that I could work out double the next day. But what happens when you stack it up more and more? Eventually your backlog is too big to catch up on – and you may start even skipping what you’re supposed to do today because it’s too daunting to think about that and what you’re supposed to catch up on for the last week. That was the case for me this morning – I woke up after only getting 6 hours sleep (ugh, that is far too little for me, and yet it’s all I’ve gotten the last few nights), and was so put off by the idea of doing a hard workout to make up for last night, that I slowpoked my way around the hotel until I didn’t have any time to work out at all.
Tonight, though, I broke the system – and I made a plan. I needed to work on something jointly with the analyst on my project, so in the hour after dinner, while he took his turn at putting the draft together, I immediately hit the gym. Kara Goucher weight training program, coming right up! That was what I needed to get done tonight, and I got it done. By the time I finished, I only had to wait about 20 minutes for him to send me the draft – and now I can get to work on editing it, with a feeling of accomplishment. It feels so great to have used that hour productively, and I’m proud to have gotten “my plan” done.
So the plan for tomorrow? Up at 6:30am, and I’m going to do 30 minutes on the treadmill to get my day off to a good start. If I have time (depending how slowly I’m moving in the morning), I’d also like to throw in 30 minutes of Jillian Michaels’ Yoga Meltdown… but the treadmill is THE PLAN. And it will get done.
What’s your plan?