How to make your New Years plans work
I have been well into a book called The Routine Machine.
In the book, John Lamerton highlights how to plan and win at planning, setting the path for you to keeping your eye on the goal, breaking it down and making actions to the goal end.
The problem is your minds ability to distract its self, this is why setting alerts to make your goals easier to do than not do.
Like leaving your running shoes by the door so you remember to go running over not, I do this with paperwork, if I want to take a order with me to the office, I make sure it is by the door, instead of leaving it at home, I know its there in front of me as I’m about to leave.
The problem with the brain/mind is, If I touched that paperwork on my desk and say to myself, I need this, in my brain, I have remembered the paper work, the brains job is done, so I don’t need to remember it again, thus, your mind can focus on other things.
Take asking your kids to remember their bags for school, you tell them, they get their bags together, sit down, in their mind they have remembered it and they are onto the next distraction (especially in todays world) but your in the car and the bags are in the house
But if you asked them to place them by the door, it lowers the forgetting risk.
Its the same with goals, you need to have a constant reminder around you, a reminder about the result that you want, lets take paying of the mortgage early, you have a constant reminder every month, every time you look at your bank account, you get a feedback loop and you are more enthused to get rid of that mortgage over going on holiday, even pushing you to working harder.
We all know alarms don’t work in the morning if we do not want to get up, so we have to make our WHY’s and rewards against the pains of not doing.
Yes, I said PAINs of not doing, I once set a task where if I didn’t do the task I’d lose something, like delete a video game, losing all my saved files, purchases, now to me at that time was pain to feel.
I have also rewarded myself for only eating third of a tub of popcorn, this was a big tub and once I start I cant stop, but I said to myself, if I stop, I can have a certain cookie that I love, and what do you know, I stopped, I put the lid on, I put it down, because my mind wanted the other reward and seen the benefits.
On top of this, I did the same the next day without the reward, now a new thought had been introduced that the monkey side of the brain, that the monkey liked, we have a result, the monkey in our minds (that part of the brain that causes trouble and is erratic) did this expecting the reward, that it agrees with.
You have to reward the monkey side and you also have to punish this side for not toeing the line, your monkey side of your mind is like an untrained puppy, its going to chew the wires and be naughty just because you gave it attention once when it did this.
So lets plan a good new years, sorry about the rant, I want all that read this to enjoy better year on year.