“You can’t do what is next now.” – Ally Love

So much of my morning journaling time is spent processing and thinking through quotes that I encounter in my daily travels, whether it be reading, meetings, or my favorite…my daily workouts.

Ally Love, a Peloton instructor, said this line during a 30-minute Tabata class the other day, which was 40 sprint intervals broken into 4 blocks of work. In each block of work, there are 8 sprints, each 20 seconds in length with 10 minutes rest between each. It’s awful. It’s fantastic. It’s one of my favorite styles of HIT (High Intensity Training) workouts. But in the moment, especially early on in the workout, if you start to think about ALL the intervals still to come, the head game can get in the way of achieving the goal for this style of training – to achieve the same output EACH interval. Rather than worry about the fact that it is only interval 2 of 40 or 7 of 40, Ally’s point was that you can’t worry about interval 8 when you are in interval 7. “You can’t do what is next now” in this setting meant that you literally can’t do the next interval. It is physically impossible. You have to first finish the interval you are in. Then you have to take your 10-second rest. THEN you can do the next interval.

As I went about my scheduled day after I cooled off and cleaned up after class, the quote stuck close to me all day. My prioritized to-do list for the day was LONG, and although it was full of things I am passionate and excited about, I would catch myself thinking about what was coming next while I was in the middle of something else. So I put myself back in the mental space of class earlier that morning – “You can’t do what is next now.” I physically couldn’t edit the grant application for a team member while I was facilitating a client call. I physically couldn’t work on a slide deck for an upcoming training while in the practice session for the #LearnGrants Online Summit our team organizes and I emcee. Absolutely couldn’t happen.

Perhaps I’ll turn the phrase into a laptop sticker, or more likely, I’ll put it on a sticky note and tape it to the stand that my extended monitor sits on to keep the reminder front and center. The irony of the phrase being a laptop sticker is that I wouldn’t see it while working…only while the laptop is closed. So that feels like it would sort of defeat the purpose.

Regardless of my decision on the laptop sticker, I’m curious. What are your thoughts on this phrase?