Morning thoughts
Kenneth Cooper, MD, the guy who started aerobic training, said that the training effect requires 12 minutes of effort, as I recall. Thus I am eager to get to 12 minutes on the Nordic Track, but even 7.5 minutes seems to be having some effect. Certainly the first 3 minutes are easier.
I realize that I’m blessed by being not only retired but with some cushion—too many face a retirement that promises to be problematic. I was thinking about this with my discovery of the power of a focus on "today." While you’re working, it’s generally extremely difficult to stick with daily plans at work (because of interruptions, meetings, crises, and the like), not to mention bosses who return from conferences full of ideas they want you to do. Indeed, when you’re following Covey’s 7 Habits you learn to schedule your important but not urgent work toward the beginning of the week, since if a day is blown out of the water by a crisis, you can possibly still do the work later in the week: scheduling early gives you a fallback.
Indeed, Bill Oncken wrote a classic management book, Managing Management Time, which basically consists of strategies to gain control of the timing and content of what you do: the best possible situation at work. (I highly recommend the book if you’re still working.)
So in the world of work, we grow accustomed to thinking of what we will do in the future: this weekend, when vacation or holidays roll around, and the like. The future focus, unfortunately, distracts us from today, which is really the day that we have.
But once retired, you have control of the timing and content of what you do, and it only remains to pick for today the things that fit with what you want to achieve and to learn to focus on today and not, say, the weekend, or the start of the week or the month or the year. Start now with what you can do today. If you do a little toward your goals each day, it quickly adds up.
