Because time can be so slippery for me* I enjoy the idea of cut-and-dried time frames. I love weekly/monthly challenges and deadlines help me create the sort of urgency that helps me focus.
And while I am not all caught up in the ‘new year, new me’ thing, I do enjoy the fact that the changing of the year gives me a definite end/start point.
My current fitness objective is to create consistent, sustainable exercise practice. I am working on that now and I will continue to work on it in 2020.
My ADHD works against me in this goal. My inclination is to seek instant, visible results. To seek variety. To try to accomplish everything as once. To take on HUGE fitness projects. To switch gears frequently.
As I have noted in the 100 Day Reclaim posts, I am working on a number of ways to help me address those issues and I am trying to find the strengths in my ADHD programming – natural inclinations that will serve and support my fitness plans.
Since short-term challenges seem to be one of those inclinations, I am working them into my plans for the next while.
I’m not trying to plan a year of fitness activities, I’m working on something for the first 47 days of the year.
(I picked 47 because it’s my age and because it is an odd number that doesn’t add up to a specific number of weeks. That has a certain strange appeal to me.)
This way, I don’t have to try and see too far in advance. And I have a specific (and close) deadline. I can keep my time/activity experiments short and I can quickly change something that isn’t working.
I am still figuring out what I will focus on for the first session but I already feel better about selecting something because I know that I will a) only be prioritizing it for 47 days, not the whole year and b) I have a specific time when I will be starting the next thing, whatever that turns out to be.
How do you plan your next set of fitness challenges?
Do you have a time frame or a skills-based structure?
I’d love to hear about it, especially if you have ADHD and you have overcome the challenges of choosing a structure for improving your fitness levels.
*As I have mentioned before, ADHD gives me two time frames ‘now’ and ‘ not now’ and if I can’t cram something into ‘now’ then ‘not now’ could happen any time between the next hour and pretty much never.
PS – I know these short work cycles are popular in a number of professions but I first heard about them from Basecamp’s Jason Fried on Jocelyn Glei’s Hurry Slowly podcast.
