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odelaney

I needed some extra motivation for some things in my life, so I came up with the idea of using RTM to help me out. Now that we have push notifications for the iPhone, it seems well suited to giving me the extra nudges I need during my day to keep off the smokes and keep up with my training.

I thought others may find this useful, so here's how I'm doing it:

I've created a new list called "motivator" to keep all these reminders from cluttering up my inbox.

Within this list I've created reminders to nudge me 3 times a day about why I want to stop smoking (at the key times I want to light up - first thing in the morning, after lunch, after dinner); and once a day to give me a kick up the arse and go for a run.

The quit smoking nudges I want to vary as much as possible, so I've created unique motivators for each key moment of the day, and each day of the week, i.e. 3 nudges x 7 days, so 21 unique statements. Then each week, I'll shuffle them up a bit so it doesn't get repetitive. Same for the training motivators. And they're set to repeat weekly, so when I check them off each day, the following week's one becomes active.

So, now I'm getting these motivators throughout the day as push notification messages on my iPhone, then, if all goes to plan, I'll check them off as complete before I go to bed.

It's looking something like this:

Posted at 10:15am on July 8, 2009