October 16, 2016 , when I got back from my honeymoon, I said I was going to be emphasizing a fitness focus by looking at using a goal accountability report card. Really this is getting the tempo for doing these things more into 2017 and beyond. Work and life took my eye off the ball but it didn’t stop me from actually keeping the report card. What’s the point of an accountability exercise if you only do it when you know you are going to score well? That’s like only going to the doctor when you are healthy. The sobering reality is that right now I’m failing on my five goals, but I didn’t need a report card to actually tell me that.
To recap, I divide the year into thirteen phases of four weeks each. I’m grading myself each day on five goals. I’m then looking at the averages each week and then the averages for each phase. Ideally I’ll “graduate” from a goal as I consistently ace it and it will be replaced with another. My five initial goals were:
- Diet: Nutritious, whole foods based diet plan
- Sleep: 7-8 hours of sleep
- Activity Level: Get ~10K steps, or break 2800 calorie burn
- Callisthenics: 5 minutes per day
- Yoga/Meditation: 15 minutes per day
That’s pretty much it in a nutshell. How hard could it be to do five minutes of callisthenics day, or do a little yoga or meditation for a whopping 15 minutes? How hard could it be to get my butt in gear just enough to hit 2800 calories or 10K steps? I’m giving myself a couple of “free days” each week so how hard could adhering to the diet be too? Lastly, I generally get enough sleep so that should be a total cake walk. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
Here’s what it really looks like:
Phase 11 | Phase 12 | |
Goal 1 | C+ | C |
Goal 2 | B | B+ |
Goal 3 | C- | C- |
Goal 4 | F | F |
Goal 5 | F | F |
If some kid brought that home as his class grades he’d be in big trouble. The fact is that I didn’t force myself to be accountable I just watched the zeroes add up. The grades on the diet would have been even worse if I didn’t have the free days. Most of my grades on the non-free days are F’s and D’s. I didn’t even ace the sleep part.
I get it that life is busy and you can’t always nail everything, but these aren’t ambitious goals to hit. These are very easy to hit. There is always time for every single one of these things. It’s not that hard to have just a little diet discipline five days out of seven. Going into this last phase of the year I’m going to double down on hitting these metrics so that I have good momentum going into 2017. Here goes nothing…