What does this mean? I’ve got to kick it up a notch and take ownership of my own level of fitness. Although I don’t use them every day, sites like fitday.com have helped me recognize how many calories I burn and how many I take in. This resolve makes it easier to say no to myself when I want an extra slice of pizza, or when choosing between soda and water with my meal (especially when it’s pizza).

Next, I’ve started to work exercising into my routine. It’s not firmly established yet, but today I ran for twenty minutes on our elliptical trainer before work and began a program called One Hundred Pushups that I found through the blog Get Fit Slowly. The one hundred pushups routine is simple, free, and challenging. I’m just starting out so I can’t comment on long-term results, but I definitely feel a burn in my chest and shoulders already. It’s humbling to try to do pushups these days considering how many I could do ten years ago, but I’m committed to do many more than I started out with.

Finally, I’ve decided to seek out support. I’ve informed others that I want to eat healthier and make better food decisions, and I’ve found support in the community at Get Fit Slowly in the form of reminders and the knowledge that I’m not alone in my goals. I’m even telling you so that I can publicly commit myself to these goals.

President David O. McKay stated: “The healthy man, who takes care of his physical being, has strength and vitality; his temple is a fit place for his spirit to reside. … It is necessary, therefore, to care for our physical bodies, and to observe the laws of physical health and happiness” (“The ‘Whole’ Man,” Improvement Era, Apr. 1952, 221).

—“Lesson 24: Keeping Physically Healthy,” Duties and Blessings of the Priesthood: Basic Manual for Priesthood Holders, Part A, 177

It’s been almost two months since my last blog post? No problem! This post as an opportunity to redefine my goals for this blog. I’m not going to commit myself to posting here every day- a few times a month sounds more like it. I’m planning on taking the same strategy to fix the other things that are left undone.

Some things that went undone over the last few weeks will definitely stay that way, getting pruned off and out of our lives in the process. For me, that list includes a few TV shows I recorded to our DVR but were really more of a time-waster than entertainment, RSS feeds that I didn’t really read anymore, and other similar goals. Now the only trick is to make sure that other time-wasters don’t creep in to fill the void- there are plenty of other worthy goals worth tackling.

In Elder Richard G. Scott’s devotional at Brigham Young University this week, he highlighted the importance of learning about the Atonement. Here is part of BYU NewsNet’s recap:

“The Atonement is that essential ingredient of our Father in Heaven’s plan of happiness,” Elder Scott said, “without which that plan would have no significant meaning.”

Although this challenge applies specifically to students at BYU, we can all learn from studying about Christ’s Atonement. As part of our Easter celebration this year, my wife and I are participating in part of our church’s Easter pageant, specifically in a scene that takes place at Christ’s tomb. It’s a very moving scene, and I’m glad that it has helped us remember our Savior this Easter season.

Elder Scott then challenged students to “establish a personal plan to better understand and appreciate the incomparable, eternal, infinite consequences of the perfect fulfillment by Jesus Christ.” He testified as an Apostle of the Lord Jesus Christ that one’s understanding of the Atonement will enhance the knowledge and skills learned at this university.

Until I can turn my goals into habits I may have to get up over and over again, but it’s much more important to work on my goals right now as much as I can instead of using excuses like “I’ll start doing that after I graduate” or “I’ll wait until I have some free time”. Those aren’t very good reasons to delay goals, and the end result is that we lose out on all the progress we could have gained in that time. I love this quote from Elder Bednar:

A spurt may appear to be impressive in the short run, but steadiness over time is far more effective, far less dangerous, and produces far better results. Three consecutive days of fasting ultimately may not be as spiritually effective as three successive months of appropriate fasting and worship on the designated fast Sunday. An attempt to pray one time for five hours likely will not produce the spiritual results of meaningful morning and evening prayer offered consistently over five weeks. And a single scripture-reading marathon cannot produce the spiritual impact of steady scripture study across many months.

David A. Bednar, Brigham Young University-Idaho Devotional, September 9, 2003

Think of it this way: If your goal is to retire with a million dollars, there are two types of ways you can do it. One way to get a million dollars all at once at the last minute, by winning the lottery or having a really great idea come to you out of nowhere. Winning the lottery is something like trying to hit a home run in baseball with every swing. This strategy might win one or two games through the whole season with a lot of fanfare, but Major league coaches know that consistent winning comes through stringing together a few hits and good strategy rather than trying to have every player hit a home run every time up. This is the equivalent of saving up smaller amounts all throughout life in order to reach the million dollars. It suggests that we should leverage the power of interest and savings in our investment plans.

As Seth Godin has said, “the home runs you almost hit don’t count“. Each time we swing for the fence, we don’t have anything to build on when we miss.

Success in spirituality is achieved through the same means that it is achieved in our daily life, through regular and consistent achievement of smaller goals. No one act can get us into heaven. Achieving our goals through baby steps lets us build on our previous successes, and we can start to achieve forward momentum in a world that is constantly pushing back on us.

Reading Statistics

Right now the website keeps track of how much of a book of scripture you’ve read and displays the percentage as a small bar. As someone who grew up memorizing the backs of baseball cards, I’d love to have more detailed statistics than this, including some information about how many pages I read per day or how many days I’ve missed my reading schedule.

Read at your own pace

On Read the Scriptures you decide which book of scriptures you’d like to read and how fast you’d like to read it. A few schedules are all set up and ready to use, such as 30, 60, or 90 days to read the Book of Mormon. You can also set up your own reading schedule which will let you read at your own pace.

Work as a team

A newly-upgraded team feature lets you join teams with others and get basic statistics on their reading. Again, I’d love to have more stats here, but it’s enough to tell me that my wife is quite a ways ahead of me in her reading.

Keep notes as you go

I like to keep notes on scriptures, but I sometimes wish I could write more than what I can fit in the space of the margins. Read the Scriptures has a web-reader feature that lets you read and write at the same time, without limiting the length of the notes you can write.

In a nutshell, you list all your goals and pick the most important one to work on and do it until it becomes automatic. As part of your reminder process, you set up a new reminder for the next time you need to do it. Give it a try!

Start with goals.

Settings goals has been a key to enjoying life for me. I like to have goals in a few different categories, including financial, spiritual, personal, and education. In addition to your own goals for yourself, don’t forget family goals or any other type of goals that may apply to your situation. Think of different ways to improve yourself, and work consistently at these goals until they become habits. When I served as a missionary in Argentina, our mission president reminded us that “a goal that is not written down is a dream”. My problem had always been that I didn’t have goals, I had dreams. I wanted to dream about what the future would be like without doing anything now to change that.

Set good goals.

Good goals are SMART. This means that they are Specific, Measurable, Agreed upon, Realistic, and Time-based. These principles apply to all goals, not just personal ones.

Specific Goals

My wife and I are saving up for a new washer and dryer. Our goal is to buy one at the end of next month, but that’s not very specific. In our case we haven’t figured out exactly which one we want (that’s another goal), but once we do, we’ll specify what exactly we want, like “We will save money to buy the Whirlpool Duet Sport washer and dryer”.

Measurable Goals

When we started looking and washers and dryers, we realized that there was a huge price difference between all washers and dryers. Some were high-efficiency and others were top-loading. We want our goal to be measurable, so since we’re saving money for appliances, we want to add something measurable to our goal, such as “We will save $1500 to buy the Whirlpool Duet Sport washer and dryer”.

Agreed Upon Goals

Think of those around you when you make goals. If they are directly involved in the outcome, they should have some sort of say in your goal. In our case, my wife and I both have to agree upon the goal to buy a washer and dryer. This helps us both commit ourselves to saving money for this purpose.

Realistic Goals

If I wanted to buy a washer and dryer next week and hadn’t set aside any money at all for this, it wouldn’t be realistic. Make sure you don’t set yourself up for failure when you set your goals, because that takes all the enjoyment out of achieving it in the end.

Time-based Goals

Having a time-based goal means that you have a specific time in mind for when it should be completed. This way you can measure your progress at any point in time, and track yourself along the way toward this goal. For our goal, my wife and I can say “We will save $1500 by June 30th to buy the Whirlpool Duet Sport washer and dryer”. If the goal is a long way in sight (or even more than a week or so in the future), it’s often helpful to break up that task as well, and say “We will save $200 a week” or something similar, so we don’t end up trying to put together the money the last day of June and calling it saving.

After we have our SMART goals, we’ve got a good start, but we’ve completely left out the implementation. Remembering to address the five principles of SMART, however, will help us realize the interim steps we need to take on that way, and we can set up our own reflection time to track our progress and make sure we are working toward our goals. This process has helped me to enjoy the journey of achieving goals rather than just the end outcome.

I’ve decided that my best way to do this was to inspire myself and reward myself with a more exciting gym workout. I’ve set up my mp3 player to download some new podcasts from IfYeArePrepared.org (I’ll talk more about this later) for me automatically, and I’m pretty excited because these daily podcasts have LDS conference talks and other inspirational messages that will help me start out the day well. Getting up early will also help me move other things to the morning, including my daily scripture reading. I’m pretty excited.

Steve Pavlina has told me how to get up right when my alarm goes off, and 43things has linked me to a community of people who are also trying to wake up early. In my experience, a sense of community is really helpful in achieving goals, especially ones like exercise and weight loss.