According to a time and motion study done with the crews of emergency vehicles, if a piece of equipment can’t be reached in under 6 seconds it tends to not get used at all. The relevance to your life is that you can’t expect more from yourself than from highly trained personnel who do their work every day with lives on the line. If they default to whatever is quickest and easiest, what chance do you have of doing something when you make it hard to do?
None, that’s what chance. If you keep your exercise bicycle covered up with boxes and clothes you will never use it. If you have to rummage for your gear you will not go snowboarding. If you keep a desk cluttered with crap you will not do any work. “But it only takes a minute”, you say, to clean up and get to work. That is a minute that will kill you. Slowly. You will die inside a little each day because you don’t ever find that minute. There will always be some distraction or reason to do something else.
Think of a monkey that has been trained to do a certain skill but is easily distracted. If you show him a banana or something shiny he will instantly focus on that. Then the next shiny thing. He will get distracted over and over, and never do the trick you have spent so much time teaching him unless there is nothing else to play with. Because he’s a monkey. And so are you. We are all that monkey, easily distracted and able to focus only on what is in our monkey-space, right there in front of us. Don’t tell yourself you will find that minute. None of us do. The pile of crap accumulates and soon your plans are forgotten. And the snowboard goes up on Craigslist because you “never use it”. And you lose a little more of yourself and what you want your life to consist of.
But you’re different! You have the strength of will to push through and find that extra time to dig your treadmill out from under all that stuff, find a place to put everything, and log some miles. Because you’re capable of putting in that effort each time. Except that no one is. We all take the easy way out, whatever that is. It has to be easier to do the right thing than to not. There is a reason why fighters go away to train for a fight. You must keep the thing right there, no distractions, no excuses possible, or else you will simply not do the thing. You will want to, mean to, plan to, intend to, but it will not actually happen. If it is out of reach of your arms it is out of reach in your life. So save those seconds and your life along with them.