I have determined that I want to get outdoors much more often than I've been able to in past years. Sometimes, small insignificant excuses keep me from heading out. For example, I am not much of a planner when it comes to going on multi day outings. Many times I find myself just spontaniously wanting to head for the wilderness...only to realize that I must first go shopping for food for the trip. This is often a deciding factor as to wether or not I actually head out or not. To cure the "what will I eat" excuse, I have made my own personal hiker box that is strictly dedicated to backpacking food...my own personal backpacker pantry if you will. Now when I go grocery shopping, I always try to find a few items to add to the hiker box. The idea here is so that when I want to head out, all I have to do is go scrounge through the box knowing that everything I need for a couple of days will be right there waiting to be tossed in the food bag.
Another thing that I have found helpfull is a personalized gearlist. Something thats durable....say with some lamination. This has a list of all the gear I own and makes packing up in a hurry pretty easy as I don't have to wonder what Im forgetting in my rush to head out. Since the list shows all the gear I own, I just go down the list and determine in my mind which items can stay or go depending on the season.
So what have you found and remedied that hindered you from heading to the great outdoors?
Here are a few other things which I haven't quite found remedies for (ideas are appreciated) :
Fear of going it alone.
Bad weather...(for some reason, I don't mind if it starts raining after I have been out a while....but it takes some real gumption for me to head out AS its raining... even if beautifull weather is predicted the next day)
Making up my mind and deciding just where I want to go...being that there are so many options around my area....i.e...do I want to stay close, go somewhere new, go somewhere familier, somewhere remote or somewhere I'll run into people...etc...etc.