or CHAPTER X from Marti Soosaar’s e-book “A New Beginning”
Writing something down works almost the same way as saying it out loud. A message spoken aloud is stronger, of course, but if you put your goal or plan down on paper, it is more likely to become firmly embedded in your memory.
In your mind, thoughts tend to be scattered all over the place. On paper, they take on a more concrete form.
Repetition is the mother of learning, as the old saying goes—and Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve tells us much the same thing. Hermann Ebbinghaus was a renowned psychologist who studied how and how quickly information becomes stored in our memory in the late 19th century. Broadly speaking, his findings are also captured by the Estonian proverb: repetition is the mother of learning.
You think of something. You think you should write it down. You think about how to phrase it. You write it on paper. You read it again. You read it aloud to yourself. You read it aloud to a friend. That already adds up to seven repetitions. It is now much more likely to stick in your memory—and once it is written down, you can always go back and review it whenever necessary.
A good example is adding your workouts to your calendar. If you agree with friends that beginner ice hockey practice takes place at the ice rink every Tuesday at 7 p.m., add it to your phone’s calendar. Otherwise, you might suddenly realize that you completely forgot about the first three practices. Then you start thinking about how much progress everyone else must have made and how they will surely make fun of your absence in the locker room, and so on. If the workout is in your calendar, you will not forget it and will show up. By the end of your third practice, you will already be able to skate backwards into defense and easily steal the puck off the stick of a friend attending their very first practice.
Start keeping a training diary. If you do endurance sports, there are countless smart apps available to you—Strava, for example, which I mentioned earlier. If you are a gym rat, Estonians have developed a gym app called Gymwolf. It does almost everything for you; all you have to do is lift the barbell. If you cannot find the right app, do not like Excel and want a truly old-school training diary, you can, of course, use a paper notebook. I was just leafing through my own training diary from 2000, and it gave me quite a few ideas. There is definitely something satisfying about browsing through page after page of handwritten entries. Producing monthly summaries that way is admittedly a hassle.
Here is another simple way to keep a diary. If you use Toggl to measure your productivity and time—another excellent piece of software created by Estonians—set up a project called “Workouts.” Simply start the timer at the beginning of your workout and stop it at the end, just as you would when tracking your working hours. If you do not need any analysis beyond how much time you spent exercising, Toggl will give you a clear overview.
If you are a lawyer who uses Toggl, you cannot bill a client €100 for that hour of training as you do for your other Toggl-tracked hours. However, if you are consistent with your workouts, you may be able to raise your hourly rate to €150 in the future.
If we take the calculation a little further, it would be more profitable for the firm to make you run every day. If you run for one hour a day and log three working hours at €150 each during seven hours at work, that is better than spending eight hours at work and logging four hours at the lower rate. The firm gains €50 every day.
Real-life mathematics is actually even harsher. People who have been accustomed to staying active throughout their lives are generally smarter and fitter, charge €200 per hour and manage to complete 4.5 productive hours in a working day. Those who do not exercise really are limited to three hours. Calculate that again, and the difference is now threefold: €900 versus €300.
You can take this argument even further by considering where and how the lawyer who earned more—and therefore had more money left over—would invest it. After covering daily expenses, they clearly had considerably more money available for investments. That brings us back to the chapter in which we discussed how small things become big.
“Why should I write it down? I’ll never look at that diary anyway,” some people may think. It is a little like taking a ridiculous number of photos of the Eiffel Tower on your phone while traveling—photos you will never look at again, even though you could buy a much better one right there, or anywhere else in Paris, for about €1.50.
At the same time, writing something down has an effect similar to crossing off a completed task on your to-do list. You get to experience that small sense of satisfaction in your achievement once again and enjoy a minor victory. The very act of recording your workout may therefore serve as a small reward—provided you do it immediately after finishing, of course. If you fill in your diary retrospectively once a week, the effect is somewhat diminished. Instead, you may have to make a mental effort to remember which day you went to the gym and which day you took your neighbor to the Nordic walking trail. How far did you even walk that day? That, in turn, makes filling in the diary less enjoyable.
You do not actually have to read and analyze your diary every day. When necessary, however, you can always look back objectively at what you really did or failed to do. If you have not written anything down, your annual review might sound something like this: “I went swimming quite often last year, but I still gained 7 kg. I certainly didn’t notice the water level in the pool dropping when I climbed out.”
If you had kept a record, the truth would be there in black and white. In reality, you went swimming an average of once a month, usually just as your employer’s sports benefit was about to expire. Every other time, you merely lounged in the hot tub like a walrus on the shore. On five of the remaining six occasions, you swam only 200 m. Once, however, you were really on a roll: you powered through 2 km like a torpedo and remembered how you used to swim those distances every day in high school. “I did do it, after all,” you recall at the end of the year—but your training diary would clearly show that you swam only 3 kilometers over the entire year.
REALITY CHECK: HOW ACTIVE HAVE YOU ACTUALLY BEEN?
Why does it have to be so complicated? Keep a diary and analyze it later? Want an easier option? There is an even simpler one. The simplest diary is an ordinary wall calendar. You have probably received some from companies whose loyal customer you have been—or companies that would like you to become one. Hang the most inspiring calendar in your hallway, leave a pen dangling beside it and mark an X on each day after returning from your workout. At the end of the year, count the Xs. Did you get more than 200?
Psychologists also recommend keeping a record when trying to break a habit. If you like to snack, go ahead. Let us simply agree that before putting a piece of candy in your mouth, you will write down what triggered your craving for something sweet. Where did it happen? Who were you with? What had you been doing beforehand?
There are essentially two possible outcomes. You may discover that the effort of writing it down outweighs the pleasure of eating the candy, so you skip the snack. Alternatively, the things you record may reveal patterns that you can then start working to break.
Let us say you discover that every single time you stay to watch Aktuaalne Kaamera at 6 p.m., you miss your workout. You can then consider which matters more: watching the day’s news roundup at 6 p.m. and losing your motivation to exercise by sitting down on the sofa, waiting until the 9 p.m. news bulletin, or listening to Vikerraadio’s news through your headphones at the gym.
You do not always have to write everything down yourself. There are also skilled professionals who can help you. Personal training and having a trainer create a training plan for you are excellent sources of motivation. This is not only because you have a day-by-day schedule telling you what to do, but also because you will presumably have follow-up sessions with your trainer and opportunities to review your progress. How would you feel if you had to admit to your trainer that you completed only about a third of the plan they had carefully prepared?
If you want to find a personal trainer, go to Stebby and search for “personal training” or “personal trainer.” You will find many highly experienced professionals who will certainly be ready to help you.
This was the tenth chapter of Marti Soosaar’s e-book “A New Beginning.” We have also published the previous chapters, which you can read on our blog. You can download the complete e-book HERE.
If you have now realized that you have not actually been very active and have decided that it is time to do something about it, choose a workout HERE.
