This book to the right is important. You will know that by then end of this post.
One of the big things related to planning your day and getting motivated to do things is getting rid of all of those distractions in your head. On a daily basis we apparently think about the same 98% of things that we thought about the day before.
We are living distracted and the worst thing about it is that we are always finding more and more things on the internet to distract us from our goals instead of of simplifying our lives.
I fall into this distraction trap as badly as anyone. I am looking for a new digital camera and must have spent 20 hours researching forums, websites, reviews on Amazon and more.
And again, earlier this month I was looking for a new pair of headphones to listen to movies with and went through the same process. I spent 10 hours deciding what headphones to buy and in the end I spent $23 on ebay for a pair of headphones. All this work is not at all worth the time that we spend.
The main help for many of our distractions is lists.
David Allen of Getting Things Done fame says that your mind will not let go of distractions and ideas and thoughts until you put them somewhere that your mind will trust.
One thing that I do in some parts of my life is to have lists. For this and other blogs I will have a list of post ideas and for around the house I do the same. Some parts of my mind are not always clear though. I do not have all the processes in place.
A process is as important as a list. If you were to move you would have 20 or 30 things that you would have to do between now and the moving day. If you have this process down then it stops your mind of thinking up distractions that may or may not be important for your move.
So in weight loss or health improvement you have a new and important tool here in this post.
First, find all of the things that you think about to do with your new lifestyle and write them down, you can expand on them now or later but the sooner you flesh out ideas of food, exercise, ideas of better fast food, taking up old or new activities the sooner that you can let your mind move on to newer and previously unknown ideas. I use a simple $5 notebook from the grocery store and I am sure this kind of simplicity would work well for you too.
Secondly, go through this list every day to add new items or delete items that were not important in the end. If you accept that you can write things down and realize that the list is not set in stone and items can be deleted later then you will not overthink if something should go on the list or not.
In times when I am overwhelmed with distractions I grab this book and read the notes that I have made in the past and not implemented and I also write down everything that is on my mind. To me this is a great way to stay organized and to not get distracted by some of those things that do not matter as much as my mind sometimes thinks that they are.