Shownotes:

Have you ever wanted to do something but failed to do so because of the excuses you’ve had for yourself? You might have said you don’t have enough time, or that something else needs your attention. This is something that you can easily resolve through an online marathon. The whole idea is to help you get into a healthy habit that will make you productive and will make you so much better in general.

Hello and welcome to The Traveling Introvert. Today I am going to talk about how I'm doing a marathon, but not a regular learning sort of a marathon. I'm doing an online marathon and I want to talk through the experiences that I've had because I've done this twice now.

So the idea behind this online marathon is that you have five key areas that you concentrate on. You have sleep, fitness, nutrition, most important, work. You know what? I've forgotten my last one, so let me look it up. Planning, and do you work with a team online and you get points for planning your day, hitting your fitness girls, hitting your nutrition goals, hitting your sleep goals, and then doing your most important work. So the thing behind the most important work is we get so caught up in our day to day lives of just doing life, that sometimes things that are really important to us get left behind.

So one of the times I did this marathon, my most important work was continuing to write my book. I have a couple of books that have been on the back burner for about nine months. I've been doing a little bit here and there but I haven't been consistent. So the whole point behind the marathon and is that you do at least 10 minutes on your most important work per day because that 10 minutes per day ends up being a lot of time, it ends up being over an hour per week and if you do up to 100 minutes worth of your important most important work per day, it leads up to a lot of time. I ended up writing half of a book basically the last time that I did this particular style of marathon, so the most important work.

So what I learned is that for the sleep patterns, I don't regularly go to bed at the same time for various reasons. It could be for travel, it could be I'm attending an event, but I put in plans that I know I could achieve, you want wins, quick wins that you can get. For nutrition, it was eat a piece of fruit per day and to help me make sure that I would get to that, I made sure that my fridge was stock to the Sunday before the marathon started, with fruit that was easy to eat that I liked. It could be strawberries, it could be cherries, it could be an apple a day. I just put a piece of fruit because if I put, eat an apple a day, it seems more of a chore but if I just put fruit, that gives me a variety of things to choose from that then I can say, "Well I had a handful of grapes that was eating fruit for the day."

For fitness, you try and sort of look at a wide range of things that you could do. So it could be, I will either run, or do cardio, or go for a walk in the park, or go to the gym, or I will cycle at least 10 minutes per day and that can be your fitness goal, even stretching, yoga, whatever it might be, it counts towards your fitness goal. So one thing that we've learned as a team is that some people like to get their most important work done straight away. First thing in the morning they'll go, they'll get it done, get it knocked out because then they find they don't have as much control over the rest of their day and things happen, fires happen, clients happen and then they never get back to their most important work.

What I have found is that happens, but I'm not the best in the morning, so me trying to do my most important work in the morning is a no win for anybody but I've, because of this, have realized when I'm most productive, when it's good for me to do things. I've started to get into a habit of one thing. I discovered a really cool app to go to the gym called Zombies, Run! Which I'm a little in love with, I haven't yet coughed up for the paid version, but we'll see. The thing with this marathon is it's supposed to get you into habits and because you then fall into a habit, you're using less glucose to make decisions. The less decisions you have to make in your day, the more things that you can do.

So the whole idea behind this is to get into a rhythm, get into a habit that makes you feel good and it's better and it gets your most important work done. Your most important work can change from day to day, from week to week but at least you have that feeling of accomplishment that hey, I did a hundred minutes of coloring today. I did a hundred minutes of self-care, I did a hundred minutes of gardening. There's one person who's done a hundred minutes of setting up his new home. He just bought a new place with his partner and he's setting it up because moving is one of those things where, because life is happening at the same time you are moving, I definitely know people who have boxes that haven't been opened in six months since they moved because they just haven't gotten round to it.

So this is the things that people use for their marathon. The marathon is done with a company called Ultraworking, who I love and I love working with them. They do many other things, but I just wanted to talk about setting habits and how sometimes your most important work can get left behind just because of life.

So my challenge to you moving forward is think of what your most important work it is and what can you do for 10 minutes per day towards that most important work and what a difference that can make in your life. Thank you for listening. This is Janice from the careerintrovert.com, helping you launch your podcast or your book as an introvert.