Chasing Zoltán Halmay (02 August 2018) Status
Zoltán’s Time	1:05.8 (no change)
Pool Length	25m
100m Freestyle Time	1:44.2 (0:01.2 improvement)
Weight	105.6kg (232.8lbs)
Training Distance (per week)	1200m
Total Strokes (100m)	44 strokes (3 stroke improvement)
Avg Stroke Rate	25 strokes/min

September 2018 Update: I figured I’d start each of these with the “just the facts” statistical updates and provide some initial commentary on the month before I get into anything else about “the chase”.

On Motivation and Prioritisation

The numbers don’t lie, a minimum improvement in time, a gain in weight (not likely muscle) and a missing post / update for August, doesn’t bode well for the start of this little experiment.  It gets you thinking about the goal you’ve placed for yourself (as well as your goals in general) and what needs to be done to accomplish those goals.

Upon getting back in the pool and seeing my times I was kicking myself.  Why did I miss so many swims?  Why wasn’t I more motivated?  Why didn’t I focus more?  And then made a few excuses.  I did have out of town guests.  I did get married.  I did have a lot going on.  Neither of those were productive activities though, neither were going to get me to the pool, loose weight (the item I believe will quickest result in improved times), nor would they help future performance.  I then thought that I just needed a bit more motivation.

Motivation to the rescue!

So a successful swim back in the pool and then maybe a search or two from some motivation and then I’d be back on track.  It did seem though like that might be a bit of an old paradigm for myself, this isn’t my first attempt to get fit or hit a goal or improve some aspect of myself or my life.

I did seem to be falling into a bit of a known issue location with these blog posts as well where post and talking about the goal provided some positive feedback before the work was put in, see Derek Sivers TED talk or the Trello team’s breakdown of the science on that aspect of motivation.

What did I need to do to be motivated? or more to the point, re-motivated?  There was so much online about how to set goals, keep motivated, and drive to success; but it wasn’t anything new and in reading it didn’t strike me as “oh that is the answer”.

Asking the Wrong Question

I think, for me at least, it is less of a motivation issue.  It isn’t that I lacked a reason for my actions or lacked an inspiration to have direction to my behavior.  Rather, the more I reflected, it wasn’t a lack of motivation, but a lack of prioritisation.  But more so a lack of acknowledgement of those prioritisation decisions.

Had I asked myself “should I prioritise a swim over the finialisation the seating chart for the wedding so I can get it to the printer in time” I would have chosen the seating chart; but I did that without that acknowledgement of what I was doing.  In having that understanding I might have even got a swim or two in during that time period as I might have prioritised wedding activities over swimming for the month, but in recognising that might have deprioritised other activities to ensure swimming didn’t fall far enough down the prioritisation list that it didn’t occur.

Share Prioritisation Not Goals

I’ve now gone down the path of sharing my priorities rather than my goals.  I’m not sure if this will avoid the feeling of accomplishment and keep me on track, but it seems worth a try.  It has already at least resulted in one swim I might have previously missed in that those around me now know I have this as a medium-high priority and have helped to ensure my swims don’t get missed, particularly when being replaced by lower-priority activities.

So next time when you are lacking “motivation” maybe the question isn’t what meme or poster or video is going to instill that motivation into you, but rather take stock of your priorities and determine if the outcome is what you want, determine what (if anything) needs to change in your prioritisation tree, and take action.