A Simple 5-Step Process to Separate Your Actions from Negative Thoughts

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20 Small Actions to Create a Fit Environment

I’ve learned, in the last seven years of getting fitter each year (from a really bad starting point), that when it comes to getting in shape, your environment is everything.

Small things I’ve done to change my environment make my life set up for getting fitter, slowly, gradually, but surely.

Consider two scenarios:

1. Person A has a long work day, gets home, wants to just veg out on the couch watching TV to relax. Is hungry so goes to the kitchen and gets some convenience food (he’s too tired to cook), gets some unhealthy snacks that are in the cupboard. Orders pizza later because it’s easy and there’s nothing else ready to eat besides some microwaveable stuff. After gorging on junk food, he’s too tired to do anything else but watch TV. Goes to sleep, gets up, rushes off to work, where there’s junk food all around anytime he gets hungry. Everyone else is in bad shape so he doesn’t find any motivation to work out. This cycle keeps repeating.

2. Person B has a workout time blocked into his workday, and has a workout partner waiting for him each day, so he won’t fail to do the workout. All his friends are relatively fit and often participate in various fitness challenges together. When they socialize, it often revolves around healthier foods. At home, he has no junk food, no convenience food, no snacks. No microwave. He has lots of healthy foods, and cooks them in big batches so that when he’s hungry and tired, the food just needs to be warmed on the stove. He participates in online social networks that revolve around fitness. He has no TV.

Which person is more likely to get fit? The person who has his life set up so that he’ll be likely to do the things to get fit.

The kicker, as you probably guessed, is that I am both Person A and Person B. Well, I was Person A and got overweight and unhealthy. Then I changed to Person B and got much healthier and fitter.

It was all a matter of creating the right environment. I’m happy to tell you that the changes aren’t that hard to make, and can be done over time.

The following are some ideas you can use to set up an environment conducive to getting fit — I’ve used them all at various times:

Get rid of the snacks. Don’t keep them in your house or you’ll be more likely to eat them.Don’t buy convenience food. You’re likely to eat this when you’re too tired to cook.Instead, cook big batches of healthy food once a week. Have it in the fridge, ready to be heated up.Take healthy snacks to work.Create a healthy eating challenge with your coworkers.Join Fitocracy (invite code: zenhabits) and make friends there. Log your activities.Join a running club.Find a workout partner.Set up an appointment with your best friend to go walking or running every day.Get a coach.Set fitness challenges with your friends. Log them online, on Facebook or some other social site.Have a chinup bar in your doorway, and do a chinup every time you walk by.Join a sports team.Have nuts and fruit with you when you’re on the go.Make it hard to turn on the TV (put it in the closet or something).Use a program like LeechBlock or Freedom to shut the Internet down at a certain time each day.Have healthy potlucks with friends or family.Publicly commit to posting body pics or measurements each week on your blog.Make a list of healthy restaurants, or healthy meals at other restaurants, for when you feel like eating out.Park farther away from things so you’ll walk more.

Obviously not all of these will apply to everyone, and they’re just a start of what can be done, to give you an idea.

Setting up a fit environment doesn’t have to be hard, nor does it have to be overnight. But I challenge you to do one of these actions today, and see what happens when you start creating the right setup for a healthy life.

Today is the last day to join the Sea Change Program and be a part of the Unprocrastination Course in July. Don’t put it off! Read more.

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How to Turn Your Ideas into Life Changing Actions

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Playing Through The Tape: Linking Actions To Life Goals

Staring at my lists of tasks during my weekly review (about 285 the last time I checked the count in OmniFocus) my eyes start to glaze over with the thought of just how much monotonous crap there is buried in them. What’s even more daunting is as I look over my system during my weekly review I add around 30 – 50 tasks while only destroying about 25 that have gone dormant or have been completed during the week.

If you have been a GTD or any other type of productivity practitioner over the years, you have at least been in this situation once or twice. What tends to happen when you provide yourself with ubiquitous capture is that after awhile a lot of unimportant tasks may infiltrate their way into your system; unimportant tasks that may have sounded like a good idea at the time, but no longer hold any value, or worse, tasks that you know you should complete because of some agreement with yourself or others. What happens is that your system starts to rot from the inside out, and after seeing an easy task like “call mom” sit on your list for 7 weeks you tell yourself that your system doesn’t work. You aren’t getting anything done.

The fact you have tasks in your system that are “uninspiring” and stagnant has nothing to do with how your system is failing you or how GTD just doesn’t work. This is more of a prioritization problem. GTD doesn’t talk about an old school A-B-C, 1-2-3 type of prioritization of tasks and projects but it does speak of how to make sure that important stuff gets paid attention to and the less important stuff moves to the back burner or gets trashed.

So, please, before you change your tool or give up on GTD completely understand that this idea of “action bloat” has nothing to do with either.

What I have come to find from reading Mr. Allen’s books as well as learning from my own experiences is that if something in my action list doesn’t sync with what I want to accomplish in my life, the chances of me doing it are pretty slim. What’s even worse is the chances of me not doing it and feeling bad about myself and the state of my system are excellent.

So here is where some real “soul searching”, goals, and dreams come into play. if your action lists don’t resemble what you want for your life, then two bad things can happen:

Your action lists stay stagnant and build up with tasks that seem like they have no purpose (because they don’t).You don’t accomplish any long term goals because your actions lists do not resemble these goals.

This all sounds good in theory but what about in practice? What about tasks like “take out the trash” or “clean the cat litter”? These don’t seem at all related to a higher purpose or life goal. You will run into a lot of tasks that are like this; daily/weekly/monthly tasks that seem like they are just a nuisance and don’t prove to be anything important.

All you have to do to make sure that a task on your action list links up to life goals is “play through the tape”.

Hopefully everyone reading this still knows what a tape is. Anyways, the best way that I have found to make sure that your tasks on your action lists are important is by “playing through the tape” of what this action will accomplish.

Here is an example:

Action: Call your momWhy? Because you haven’t talked to her for awhile.Why does that matter? You want to make sure that you stay close to your family.Why? Because your family and family life is something that is important to you and you value it.

Seems excessive I know, and maybe calling your mother isn’t the best example, but this little exercise can be applied to any task that is on your lists or even projects as well.

Here is the kicker. If you can’t “play through the tape” with a task and link it to some goal or important aspect of your life, put the task or project on your someday/maybe list or just get rid of it. If it isn’t that important there is no reason to do it, especially when you have 250 other actions that actually are important.

As time moves on you will start to find tasks that don’t belong at all in your system and you will be able to inherently “play through the tape”. You will start to see what is important and what isn’t in your task lists and with that be able to prune and tweak your lists to match your life goals. Make sure that you try this out, especially if there is some tasks on your lists that make you think that your system is broken or GTD isn’t working for you.

Chris is a developer, writer, tech enthusiast, and husband. He studies MIS and Computer Science at Penn State Behrend. Chris is also interested in personal productivity and creativity and how to utilize technology to get more things done. Check out his tech writing at androinica.com where he writes about Android.

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