Getting Up

Last night, I was determined that today would be a positive and a productive one. I thought about it long and hard, telling myself that I would have "the productive spirit" in the morning.

This morning, as soon as I walked out of the bathroom, I was faced with a decision: back into the warm bed, or out into the cold living room to start my day.

Would I get things started right?

I knew that if I could just make it out to the living room and start my exercise routine, I would be just fine from then on---I have never known myself to go back to sleep after working out.

But that bed looked comfy and warm.

As I carefully weighed the balance, I thought momentarily of how goofy I must look, paralyzed by the silliest of choices.

In the end, I remembered my thoughts of the night before---my hopes for starting out early and getting a lot done. With that in mind, I headed out of the bedroom and ran through my exercise routine. (Success!)

The experience taught me something about making decisions: Preparation matters. While thinking about being productive the night before didn't give me the surety of starting off my day right, it did give me enough pause to make the decision logically. With more preparation (say, forming a habit), this gets easier.

Similarly, doing a lot of reading on the benefit of a certain action (saving for retirement?) makes it easier to act that way, because the payoff is fresh in our minds. I do a lot of reading of personal finance books for that very reason---even though I read over a lot of things I've read before, the act of taking in that information again is often enough to spur me on to some new behavior that better helps me get where I want to go.

This kind of continual preparation for continual decisions is where habits come from.