Time management essential for reaching fitness goals
With today’s hectic schedules, effective time management is essential for meeting your fitness goals. Unfortunately, when push comes to shove, often it is our health and wellness regimes that draw the short stick. Applying time-management strategies to your day will ensure you never put your fitness second and will help you achieve any goal you set your mind to.
First, start by analyzing the last two weeks. Reflect and put absolutely everything you did over the last two weeks into four different categories.
1. Important and urgent: Did it relate to your health? Did it need to be dealt with immediately? Was the task happening right in front of you? Examples of this might be deadlines, emergencies or solving immediate problems
2. Important and not urgent: This covers anything that does not require your immediate attention, however needs to be planned for. Examples of this would be reading, personal development and improving your health/fitness.
3. Urgent and unimportant items: These tasks should be minimized or eliminated in future. This is often detailed as time wasting or poor planning. Examples can be interruptions/distractions, spending time checking social media/ taking unnecessary phone calls.
4. Unimportant and not urgent items: This is anything that doesn’t have to be done anytime soon, nor adds value and should be minimized or eliminated. These are often trivial time wasters like watching mindless TV, chatting to those you don’t have to and playing video games.
If you notice that most of your tasks are important and have the elements of urgency, then you can start planning for them. You can also start reducing the unimportant, time-wasting tasks, making certain the time you blocked out for exercise cannot be disrupted.
Next, plan your week in advance. Most people just take one day at a time and then wonder where their time went. These are the people who say “I don’t have time for exercise.” Living day to day can increase stress and hand over control of your time to external factors. Putting structure into your week by writing what times you are unavailable while making time for life will help to keep you in control. Choose when and how you will complete your tasks and when and how you will meet your training objectives.
Now, get a great night of sleep every night. The unfortunate truth is if you are lacking sleep you will ultimately lack focus. Try to set an evening routine and stick to it. Once you are in a regular routine, you will find yourself benefiting in all areas of your life.
Finally, prioritize your day at the start of each day. Too often people get lost throughout the day, so taking a few minutes each morning to confirm what tasks you are taking on will have positive impact on your productivity and leave space open for your workouts. Remember that we all have the same 24 hours in a day – you decide how to use them.