Have you ever arrived home from the gym only to find that you left something there? Or worse yet, you didn’t realize you left an item there until you couldn’t find it, and by that time it was no longer in the lost-and-found? I can’t even begin to tell you how many times I have had both of these things happen to me.  Just off the top of my head I can tell you that I have lost a swimsuit, swim bottoms, goggles, as well as all of my toiletries. It’s very frustrating not only because losing things can get expensive, but it is also a big disruption to my routine when I have to go buy something before I can go to the gym again.

Several months ago I tried to figure out what I could do to solve this problem. The more I thought about it, I realized that what I was doing at work would help me in this situation as well. I work as a phlebotomist (I draw blood for lab tests) and we have to make sure that we do specific things to identify each patient and prevent germs from being spread. The first hospital that I worked at trained us to follow a very specific routine so that we wouldn’t forget to do anything. What was great about it was that once I had the routine down, I never had to worry whether I had forgotten to do any of the numerous things that I was required to do. And if I got interrupted mid-process, I was able to go back to the point where I had left off, and I knew immediately that I had completed everything up to that point.