A new start: get things written down

or CHAPTER X of Marti Soosaare's e-book "A New Beginning"

The idea of writing it down is almost the same as saying it. Saying it out loud is more powerful, but if you put your goal or plan down on paper, it's clear that it will stick better in your memory.

In your brain, your thoughts are pretty much pillow-to-dollow and on paper they take a more concrete form.

Repetition is the mother of wisdom, the old saying goes, but so does Ebbinghaus' forgetting curve. Hermann Ebbinghaus was a well-known psychologist who, towards the end of the 19th century, investigated how and how quickly things are stored in our memory.His discoveries are described in very broad terms by the Estonian folk proverb: repetition is the mother of wisdom.

Thinking about something. You're thinking about writing it down. You think about how you'll write it down. You write it down on paper. You read it over again. You read it to yourself. You read it to a friend. That's seven repetitions. Now it's much more likely to stick in your memory, and once it's written down you can always revise it if necessary.

A good example is to mark your training in your calendar. If you and your friends agree that there will be a beginners' ice hockey practice every Tuesday night at 19:00 at the rink, put it on your phone calendar. Otherwise, you might find that you've missed the first 3 sessions altogether, and you'll start to think that the others have progressed so much in that time, and you'll probably be made fun of in the locker room for missing them, etc. If you have a training session booked, you don't forget and you're there, and by the end of the third training session you're able to skate back to the defence with your back to the front and easily snatch a litre of stick from your friend in the first training session.

Start keeping a training diary. If you're into endurance sports, there are tons of smart apps out there. The aforementioned Strava, for example. If you're a gym buff, the Estonians have created a gym app called Gymwolf. It does almost everything for you, you just have to lift the bar yourself. If you can't find a suitable app and don't like excel and want a real old-school exercise diary, you can of course use a paper diary. I just flipped through my 2000 exercise diary and got quite a lot of ideas from it, and the pages and pages of a full diary are definitely fun to flick through. Of course, it is cumbersome to do a monthly summary this way.

Here's another simple way to keep a diary. If you use Toggle (again, a great Estonian-made software) to measure your productivity and time, create a "Workouts" project for yourself and just press the "on" button at the beginning and "off" button at the end of your workout, just like you measure your hours. If you don't need any more analysis than how long it took you to train, you'll get that overview nicely from there.

If you've used Toggle as a lawyer, you can't invoice your client for 100€ for this training session, like you can for your other Toggle sessions. However, if you are consistent in your training, you can increase your hourly rate to €150 in the future.

If you do the maths now, it would be more profitable for the bureau to make it compulsory for you to run every day. If you run for an hour a day and accumulate 3 hours of work (a 150€) on the clock for 7 hours of work versus 8 hours of work, you can get to Toggle for 4 hours at a cheaper price. For the office, the daily benefit is 50€.

The real-life maths is actually even tougher. Those who are used to moving all their lives are generally smarter and in better shape, and charge €200 an hour, and manage to do 4.5 useful hours a day. Those who don't exercise but limit themselves to 3 hours. If you recalculate this, the difference is now triple: €900 vs €300.

From there, the topic can be developed further to where and how the lawyer who earned more and had more money left over invests. Clearly, after the day-to-day expenses, he had considerably more money left over for investment. Perhaps back to the chapter we were talking about, how small things can become big.

"Well, what am I going to write about it, I'll never look at the diary anyway" some people think. Isn't it a bit like clicking a bunch of stupid pictures of the Eiffel Tower on a trip with your phone, which you'll never look at later, and which you could buy a much better quality photo of for about €1.50 from the same shop or anywhere else in Paris.

However, writing a note has the effect of drawing a line in the task-list over something you have done. You relive that small satisfaction of achievement and enjoy a small sense of achievement. Maybe the very moment you write it down is a little reward for the effort. If you do it just after the workout, of course. If you fill in the diary retrospectively once a week, this effect is a bit diminished and there may be more of a mental effort to remember which day you just went to the gym and which day you went to the cane track with your neighbour. How much walking did you do that day? This in turn eats into the enjoyment of filling in the diary.

In fact, you don't have to read and analyse this diary every day. However, there is always the possibility to objectively review what was actually done or not done. If you haven't written anything down, you can take stock of the year by saying something like "I went swimming quite often last year, but I still gained 7 kg in the year. I didn't notice that the water in the pool dropped when I got out".

If you had things in writing, you would have the truth in black and white. In fact, you went swimming on average once a month, just as your employer's sports allowance was about to expire. Every other time, you were just floating in a bubble bath like a morsel on the seashore, and the other five of the six times you swam only 200 m. But one time you had a real rush, did 2 km like a torpedo and remembered how you used to swim the same distance every day in high school. "I did it," you'd recall at the end of the year, but your training diary would clearly show that you'd only swum 3 kilometres during the year.

Why does it have to be so complicated? Fill in some kind of diary and analyse later. Want easier? There's an even simpler way. The simplest diary is an ordinary wall calendar. You can surely get them from different companies of which you have been a loyal customer or who want you as a client. Put the most inspiring one on your hallway wall, with a pen hanging next to it, and draw a cross on the wall each day after you come home from the gym. At the end of the year, tally up the crosses. Did you get more than 200?

Psychologists also recommend writing things down when getting rid of a habit. If you like to snack, let it go. Just agree that before each time you pop a sweet, you'll write down the reason why you're having a sweet tooth. Where did it happen? Who were you with? What were you doing before?

In essence, there are now two options. You discover that the effort of writing is greater than the pleasure of eating the candy, and you don't snack. Or patterns emerge from what you've written down that you can start to break.

Let's say you discover that every time you stay up at 6pm to watch Current Affairs, you miss a workout. Then you can analyse which is more important. Whether to watch the daily news recap at 6 pm and get off your training by sitting on the couch, or to wait until the news at 9 pm, or to listen to Vikerraadio news through your headphones in the gym.

You don't always have to write things down yourself. There are also good professionals who can help you. Personal training and letting a coach make a training plan for you is a great motivator. Not only because you have a daily record of what you need to do that day, but also because you have a place to follow up with your trainer and do analysis. How would you feel if you had to admit to your coach that about a third of the plan he or she had worked so hard on was done?

If you want to find a personal trainer, go to. Stebbysse and put the keyword "personal training" or "personal trainer". There you will find a range of highly experienced professionals who are ready to help you.

This was the tenth chapter of Marti Soosaare's e-book "A New Beginning". We have also published the previous chapters, you can read them on our website. from the blog, you can download the whole e-book but HERE.

Now that you've realised that you haven't really been exercising and decided it's time to do something about it, choose a workout. HERE.