I have realised it is one of the most difficult things to do – stay focused. Even if you are strong willed, there is always some external factor that is forcing you to take the easy way out.

When I started taking my weight seriously, I decided to go to the gym regularly. That meant skipping the late nights and having a fixed hour of sleep so I could wake up on time. I wake up at 5:30am to be at the gym by 6am. Why wake up half hour early? I spend a good 20 minutes on the pot in the morning thinking about the world and life in general. I know, TMI right? My bad. 🙂

I have heard it all when it comes to persuasion from friends who want you to spend a late night with them. Just last week, a friend, rolled her eyes when I told her I will go to the gym on Sunday at 6am – I can’t help it, my weekly off is on Monday. It takes a lot for me to put my head down, shuffle my feet, look up at the person and decline the offer. People also look at you strangely when you drink alcohol in water. Ofcourse it tastes terrible!! This ensures I stick to just a glass of it and have the glass with the least calories on the table!

Here are some things that are working for me when I want to stay focused:

Just do it – I tend to overthink situations and circumstances. I make a mountain out of a mole hill. I find that the best way to do anything is to just do it. Without overthinking it, without wondering what others will think of your actions. Frankly, no one cares.

Measure it – I had this problem of going to the gym everyday. You know what worked? Putting X marks on the days on my calendar. Since my calendars are synced across my phone, computer, Outlook and Google Calendar, I was always reminded of the days I went to the gym and had fun and measured it.

Don’t over do it – Personally, I cannot over do anything. I always reach a point where I get saturated with what I am doing and then want to stop. That happened to me with Twitter. I am on a break right now, and it feels good to not post a 100 tweets a day. I burnt out and I think this frequency of usage is just fine.

Visualise end result – When making a marketing strategy for a client, I want my boss to see it and praise me. Then, I go ahead and make a presentation I am satisfied with – going through 3-4 iterations in the process. Visualising the praise always helps me stay focused on the task at hand.

Unleash the fawesomeness – Fawesomeness is the ultimate level of being awesome. No, its actually being FUCKING AWESOME!!! Its not hard to get here. All you have to do is think of how fawesome you are and behave the part. That’s it. Fawesome people are focused, end of story.

Also, while we are on the topic of fawesome, why don’t you be it right now and send out a tweet about this blog post?

I don’t think of these as rules. Just framework guidelines and tools that are there to utilise when I am in a spot every so often. I have used these to lose 6kgs this month – and the month is still not over. True story. All of this after eating a bowl of strawberries in cream last night. Life is good!