Yesterday, I wrote about one of the accountability mechanisms I commonly use: “streak accounting.” Tracking a streak is a simple way for me to hold myself accountable for things that no one else notices. A few people asked me about my current streaks. Regrettably, I have not maintained all of the streaks that I have started. For now, my biggest streak is the number of days that I have written a blog article in a row. Today will be the 3,000th blog post in a row that I have written since I first started several years ago.
Currently, I am on day 94 of a streak that I started at the beginning of this latest 365 commitment. That streak is effectively doing a +1 push-up, sit-up, squat, and a run. So this morning, I ran around my neighborhood and, along the way, I stopped to do 20 push-ups, sit-ups, and squats. I did that a total of 4 times, with the fifth stop totaling 14. This method of going out my door and running around, with periodic pauses for my routine, has proven to be effective. A routine such as this is not complicated, requires very little equipment, does not require any memberships, and I can do it in the morning, afternoon, or evening whenever I can fit it in. I can go long or short, depending on the duration. Currently, the minimum time commitment is about 30 minutes, which is a solid exercise interval. I have noticed that lately I am going for more prolonged durations just because I like to listen to things while I am doing it, and at times I listen to nothing and just think.
What I find interesting is that of all the exercise routines that I have had in my life, all the memberships, all the subscriptions, all the equipment, books, and trainers, the thing that I have settled on is a simple path around my neighborhood. There are several small parks roughly 1/2 mile apart that serve as the perfect stopping points for a short routine. One of them even has a pull-up bar, which this morning I was able to do five pull-ups. Embarrassing, but in 100 to 200 days from now, I can get back up to a respectable number of repetitions.
The fact that I have settled on this solution after 50 years is why we should listen to people who have experience more often. Commonly, they will have gone through the various machinations of trying to figure out the perfect system, and they will have ultimately landed on the brilliantly simple solution that accomplishes the maximum amount for the least amount of expenditure of resources. This is my working definition of simplicity. The solution that achieves the most with the least expenditure. Simplicity is not a concept but rather an equation.
The idea that the simple usually wins applies to far more than exercise routines. In every walk of life, the simple always wins. Take, for example, my system for managing household bills. I hate, loathe this process. It is the bane of my existence, and over time, I have wrestled with the method of dealing with the snail mail that comes into the house. I asked someone for advice on this, someone who had been dealing with it for a long time, and she showed me her method, which was really simple. The key principle was to touch something only once and redirect anything else to a key person for handling that particular job. I decided to invent my own version of this simple process, and I may have discovered something that I will stick with this time.
Turning my attention to business, I realize we are currently working to figure out how to take our new product to market. I have hundreds of young people after me all the time, trying to tell me that their product or service is the latest, fancy way to accomplish this at a fraction of the price. I am pondering the idea that all these are just complicating a straightforward matter. Instead, I will find someone who has done this many times over their career and find out the simple process they settled on. I might accept that the simple usually wins.
