An Attack of Common Sense

Life may just be a massive game of, Tetris...

I began writing a blog based around seeing various people ranting online and parked it in a folder because I didn’t feel as though it was beneficial to anyone who may happen to read it. After a long personal debate, I’m planning on publishing it (after some revision) online at some point, but it inspired me to write this instead - this being what I think is a more useful blog entry and something I’m not hesitant about sending out onto the interwebs…

There’s a routine that I have been accidentally developing. I say ‘accidentally’ because I’ve only in the last few weeks stepped back and realised that it was actually a consistent range of actions that appear to be streamlining my life and business at the moment.

Getting right to it, there’s often nothing more useful than some serious bullet points:

1. Plan your day:
…Not actually as you wake up, but from the morning/afternoon or night before. Things I plan in advance are my movements (via my gym and personal diary), my food, my training and my admin, what I post to my Instagram account. Anything on top is extra until I become efficient enough to add it in as a regular task. Before I became a PT I sometimes planned ahead, but there was never any consistency.

2. Find the gaps and fill them:
…By this I mean - once you have planned your day, look and see where there are any areas of ‘dead-time’, meaning; time where you can literally stare into space and do absolutely nothing … and fill these gaps by doing things that are of interest to you. This will make you a much happier human-being (this is a fact). I have about four different ‘non-fitness’ related things that I can get on with, one may very well be to push my business forwards, but I try not to make it all about the work.

3. Eliminate annoyances:
…This can be anything for anyone. For me, it’s not looking at my Facebook/Instagram/Twitter feeds for longer than 10mins collectively for the entire day. Yes, you’ll miss a lot of what your friends are getting up to, but news feeds are full of things that enable you to judge people subconsciously and consciously by the nature of the ‘posts’ being shared. I don’t need to know everything at all times, so if it’s not ‘breaking news’ from various media outlets, then it’s probably okay if it passes me by.

4. Do number 1 again (yup, plan your day)
…I’m talking about having planned the day already and then something unexpected happening so you need to reshuffle the deck and set tasks earlier or later depending on the situation/s presented to you.
Usually it’s a client cancelling a session because they are ill or the trains are severely messed up, and this means my day can get shifted around at a moments notice. This is all made easier because I use a diary and I had the day planned out anyway, so in my head it’s like a game of Tetris and all I need to do is slot the right bricks into the right places, even after I’ve turned them around eight times.

5. Make sure you’re not hungry:
…Sounds like a pretty basic thing to master but, if you’re a busy little squirrel most days, then this is where planning your day (yep, number 1 again!) is vital. Provided you’ve planned all your food and snacks for the day (possibly having done some prep the night before) you will be eating/snacking every three or so hours from thirty minutes after you wake up in the morning, or not; depending on your routine (we are all different and there’s no hard and fast way to do nutrition) but get the basics right and you will reap the rewards.

Sure, there are a plethora of other tasty tips but, if you’ve read this and noticed a pattern, great! Planning, being organised is a sure-fire way to stamp out inconsistencies (a word I will use along with it’s opposite on this website so get used to it).