CHAPTER X from Marti Soosaar’s e-book *A New Beginning*
The idea behind writing something down is almost the same as saying it out loud. A message spoken aloud is certainly more powerful, but when you write your goal or plan down on paper, it’s clear that it will stick in your memory better.
Thoughts in your mind tend to be rather scattered, but on paper they take on a more concrete form.
“Repetition is the mother of learning,” as the old saying goes, but Ebbinghaus’s forgetting curve confirms this as well. Hermann Ebbinghaus was a renowned psychologist who, toward the end of the 19th century, studied how and how quickly information is stored in our memory.Very broadly speaking, an Estonian proverb also describes his findings: repetition is the mother of learning.
You think of something. You think you should write it down. You think about how to put it into writing. You write it down on paper. You read it over again. You read it aloud to yourself. You read it aloud to a friend. That’s already seven repetitions. Now it’s much more likely that it will stick in your memory, and since you’ve written it down, you can always review it if needed.
A good example is marking your workout schedule in your calendar. If you agree with your friends that there’s a beginner’s hockey practice at the ice rink every Tuesday evening at 7 p.m., write it down in your phone’s calendar. Otherwise, you might find that you completely forgot about the first three practices, and then you’ll start thinking that everyone else has improved so much during that time, and people in the locker room will surely make fun of you for missing them, and so on. If the practice is noted down, you won’t forget it and you’ll be there—and by the end of the third practice, you’ll already be able to skate back on your heels to defense and easily snatch the puck from your friend’s stick during your very first practice.
Start keeping a training log. If you’re into endurance sports, there are tons of different apps out there for you. Strava, for example, which I already mentioned. If you’re a gym rat, Estonians have created a gym app called Gymwolf. It does almost everything for you—you just have to lift the barbell yourself. If you can’t find a suitable app, don’t like Excel, and would prefer a real old-school workout journal, then of course you can use a paper journal. I was just flipping through my own workout log from the year 2000 and got quite a few ideas from it—and a log filled page by page is definitely fun to flip through. Of course, compiling monthly summaries this way is a bit of a hassle.
Here’s another simple way to keep a log. If you use Toggl (yet another excellent piece of software created by Estonians) to track your productivity and time, create a project called “Workouts” and simply tap the start button at the beginning of your workout and the stop button at the end, just as you track your work hours. If you don’t need any analysis beyond knowing how long your workout took, you’ll get that overview right there.
If you’ve used Toggl as a lawyer, you can’t bill a client €100 for that workout hour, just as you can’t for your other Toggl hours. However, if you’re consistent with your workouts, you’ll be able to raise your hourly rate to €150 in the future.
If we do the math, it would actually be more beneficial for the firm to make running every day mandatory for you. If you run for one hour a day and log 3 hours of work (at €150) with 7 hours spent at work, versus spending 8 hours at work and logging four hours in Toggle at a lower rate. The office stands to gain €50 every day.
The real-world math is actually even harsher. Those who have been used to staying active their whole lives are generally smarter and in better shape; they charge €200 per hour and manage to put in 4.5 productive hours per workday. Those who don’t exercise, however, are limited to just 3 hours. If we recalculate this, the difference is now threefold: 900€ vs. 300€.
From here, we can take this topic further to consider where and how the lawyer who earned more—and had more money left over—chooses to invest. Clearly, after covering daily expenses, he had significantly more funds available for investments. Let’s go back to the chapter where we discussed, how small things can become big.
“Well, what’s the point of writing this down? I’ll never look at this journal anyway,” many people think. It’s a bit like taking a ridiculous number of photos with your phone while traveling at the Eiffel Tower—photos you’ll never look at later, and for which you could buy a much higher-quality photo right there or anywhere else in Paris for about €1.50.
At the same time, writing things down has the same effect as crossing off a completed task on a to-do list. You relive that little sense of satisfaction from your own accomplishment and enjoy a small sense of progress. Perhaps the very moment you write it down is already a small reward for your workout—provided, of course, that you do it immediately after finishing your workout. If you fill out your journal retrospectively once a week, then this effect diminishes slightly, and you may actually have to make a mental effort to recall which day you went to the gym and which day you went Nordic walking with your neighbor. How far did you actually walk that day? This, in turn, diminishes the enjoyment of filling out the journal.
In reality, you don’t have to read and analyze this journal every day. If necessary, however, you always have the option to objectively review what you actually did or failed to do. If you haven’t written anything down, you’ll end up summarizing the year something like this: “I did go swimming quite often last year, but I still gained 7 kg over the course of the year. I didn’t notice the water level in the pool dropping when I climbed out.”
If you’d kept track of things, the truth would be right there in black and white. In reality, you went swimming an average of once a month—just as your employer’s sports subsidy was about to expire. Every other time, you just lounged in the hot tub like a walrus on the seashore, and on five of the remaining six occasions, you swam a mere 200 m. On one occasion, however, you really got into the groove, covered 2 km like a torpedo, and reminisced about how you used to swim the same distances every day back in high school. “Well, I did get it done,” you’ll recall at the end of the year, but your workout log would clearly show that you swam only 3 kilometers over the course of the year.
REALITY CHECK—HOW MUCH HAVE YOU ACTUALLY MOVED?
Why does it have to be so complicated? Keep some kind of log and analyze it later. Want it simpler? There’s an even easier option. The simplest log is a regular wall calendar. You’re sure to get them from various companies you’ve been a loyal customer of or that want you as a customer. Hang the most inspiring one on your hallway wall, keep a pen hanging next to it, and after you get back from your workout, mark a checkmark for each day. At the end of the year, count up the checkmarks. Did you get more than 200?
Psychologists also recommend keeping track of things when trying to break a habit. If you like to snack, go ahead. Let’s just agree that before every time you pop a piece of candy into your mouth, you’ll write down the reason why you had a sweet craving. Where did it happen? Who were you with? What were you doing before that?
Essentially, you now have two options. You’ll discover that the effort of writing it down is greater than the pleasure you get from eating candy, and you’ll stop snacking. Or, certain patterns will emerge from what you’ve written, and you can start working on breaking those patterns.
Let’s say you realize that every single time you stay up to watch *Aktuaalne Kaamera* at 6 p.m., you skip your workout. Then you can analyze which is more important: watching the daily news summary at 6 p.m. and sitting down on the couch to take the wind out of your workout,hold out until the 9 p.m. news, or listen to Vikerraadio news through headphones at the gym.
You don’t always have to write things down yourself. There are also great specialists who can help you. Personal training sessions and having your trainer create a workout plan for you are excellent motivators. This isn’t just because you have a detailed daily schedule of what you need to do that day, but also because you’ll likely have follow-up sessions with your trainer to review and analyze your progress. How would you feel if you had to admit to your trainer that you only managed to complete about a third of the plan they carefully put together?
If you want to find a personal trainer, go to Stebby and search for “personal training” or “personal trainer.” There you’ll find a number of highly experienced specialists who are definitely ready to help you.
This was the tenth chapter of Mart Soosaar’s e-book “A New Beginning.” We’ve also published the previous chapters; you can read them on our blog, and you can download the entire e-book HERE.
If you’ve now realized that you haven’t really been getting much exercise and have decided it’s time to do something about it, choose a workout HERE.
