If I had to rank the reasons that prevent people from exercising, the one I have heard the most is definitely I don’t have time. And it is accompanied then by considerations of work, study, personal life, fatigue. Unfortunately, however, we often do not realize that time is made up of instants and, those instants, are everywhere.
Time is what you spend in front of your cell phone checking your social media or watching a TV series or lingering over dumb videos on YouTube. It happens to me too, let’s be clear; I don’t want to get into unnecessary lecture. You get the basic thought: the moments that make “time” are always there, and what we really need is just better organization, discipline, along with clear priorities.
I don’t want to say that anyone can do it – I’m not that conceited – but I know people who work grueling shifts, have a family, a life, and, along with that, they train. They are simply focused, passionate and disciplined.
For everyone else, including me, just follow 3 simple, practical and undemanding rules to be able to find an hour a day to be able to train. What are these rules? Here they are!
1. Always value your time
The many distractions that cause us to waste moments unnecessarily are one of our biggest problems. The trick to value time is to use two simple functions on your smarphone: alarm clock and countdown timer. Divide time into blocks to fit them together better, as in Tetris. Also, if you really want to make sure you do everything, consider your hours as if they were made up of 50′, that way you can handle interruptions and unforeseen events.
It is all about always knowing how long you are taking to do something. And try to be rigid. To take an extreme example, if you decide to take half an hour to relax on the couch (lawful for everyone), you set a 30′ timer, and when it rings, you get up. This way you have a tool to help you scan time efficiently. Like as a student, when mother would come into the room, turn on the light and force you to get up and go to school.
Ditto with regard to going to sleep. Set an alarm half an hour before it reminds you of the approaching time when you turn off every device, put your brain on standby, and rest your tired limbs.
2. Check your phone only at certain times of the day
Smartphones always provide you with usage statistics. If you look at how much time you spend on social media each week, your hair might fall out in fright (yes, I did it).
That time there is made up of the very moments we need to train.
This problem is easily solved: remove all notifications from social media and check them only 2 or 3 times a day. Shall we bet that the situation will improve? And also your serenity ;)
This summer I was on vacation in a place where the cellular network was poor, and after the first two days when I felt like I was out of the world, I realized that the world was right around me. Thank goodness I am not a heart surgeon, and even if I do not immediately respond to a message, nothing irreparable happens.
3. The keyword is regularity
Our day is marked by two definite moments: sleep and wakefulness. But the difference is the regularity with which we try to respect these moments. Always waking up and going to bed at the same time (more or less) helps a lot to have a rhythm, and – after a while – the “difficult discipline” will be replaced by a “simple and pleasant habit.”
In particular, what matters is the bedtime ritual. Trying to keep to schedules, putting away electronic devices at least half an hour before bedtime, and getting to bed before midnight are three very easy steps to find moments.
Because the “next day” begins when we go to sleep, not when we wake up. And, if you want to wake up an hour earlier in the morning to train, you also need to go to sleep an hour earlier: rest is essential.
And if I can’t make it
If you just can’t find the moments that are scattered throughout your day, you probably need to figure out what your priorities are and see if there is room for training. It is permissible that there are situations when you cannot, what really matters is that “I don’t have time” is never an alibi.
(Main Photo by Mitchell Hollander on Unsplash)