As I mentioned in Yesterday’s blog, the family and I were in New York last week.
Those of you that I have as Facebook friends with have seen that we packed an awful lot in.
3 or 4 activities every single day.
This was, as I mentioned yesterday, in part because we had the New York Pass.
We’d paid upfront to access to practically everything we might want to do.
So we thought we might as well do everything we could.
Partly to get our money’s worth from that, but also to stop us spending money elsewhere.
A number of people I’ve spoken to with were surprised that were actually able to physically fit in the number of things that we did.
As people often are in general with how much we do as a family.
Especially saying is that there’s six of us, three of whom also live in other houses with their other parents.
One of which is 22 miles away.
There’s only one way that all these things happen.
Planning.
For New York, we’d made a short list of all the activities we wanted to do between us.
I then added the locations as saved places on Google maps and identified combinations of activities near to each other and travel routes that made sense.
We then booked everything we could in advance and got clear on the process of later bookings for, or how to just turn up to, everything else.
All the activities and all the travel plans between them were saved as events in both our diaries.
With attached locations and notes for booking reference numbers or anything else we would need to know.
Even with all this, there was a few unforeseen problems that I might cover in future blogs.
But I can guarantee we would not have done half of what we did if we just woken up each morning and “gone with the flow”.
Realistically, we’re only going to New York as a family the one time.
We wanted to make sure we got the most out of it.
Planning and preparation allowed that.
As it does for getting the most out of most things.
Planning our workouts in advance means we’re more likely to fit them in.
Giving some thought as to what our eating will look like in the coming week will make better choices more likely.
Getting a few things in place will mean that, come Hungry O Clock, the easiest choice is a good one.
It’s easy to switch off to planning as it can feel restrictive if we allow it.
We tell ourselves that we “just want to go with the flow”.
And that’s fine.
If the flow is taking us where we want to.
If it’s not, a few minutes of tactical planning ahead here and there, can mean we navigate that stream of life much more effectively than just letting it take us wherever it wants.
Much love,
Jon ‘9 from outer space’ Hall
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RISE in Macclesfield was established in 2012 and specialise in Group Personal Training weight loss programmes for those that don’t like the gym and find diets boring and restrictive!
