Working out takes time—so does planning, shopping and preparing a healthy meal. Raise your hand if you wish there were more hours in a day. Hand up? You’re not alone.
Oftentimes, you have to cut back on certain activities to create time for others. But when it comes to your health, you shouldn’t have to make concessions. But you can make both happen, even when things get hectic. With a little strategizing, you can fit both fitness and healthy, home-cooked meals into your day.
Free up time to make your goals a reality. Doing that can be straightforward: You decide what you truly want and prioritize your life around it. When you do that, fitting in healthy habits to reach your goals happens naturally.
Track Where Your Time Flies
The key behind every happy, healthy and successful weight loss patient, is not that they have more willpower or better drive. What they have is a good time management plan and they know how make time for themselves. Working is important but your personal life and health is equally or even more important. Setting priority on what is important is crucial as it will determine what your life is. You need to allocate your time for work, workout, planning and preparing healthy meals, family and even some time for yourself. If you are good in taking care of yourself, it will have significant impact on achieving your goals and to other as well.
Start by keeping a journal for a day or two. Write down what you do and what time you do it, in real time. Example – Stayed an extra hour at work, 5:30-6:30 p.m.
Then, evaluate. Does anything surprise you? Snoozing longer than you thought? Maybe that’s an extra 10 minutes of time. Staying late at work consistently? Perhaps you can leave on time and have more minutes to make a healthy dinner.
Sometimes, free time won’t jump out at you so easily. So take a close look and ask yourself:
- Am I spending too much time watching TV, or on face book?
- What tasks take longer than they should?
- Do I push my priorities aside to do things that seem urgent but are really less important? Do I really need to make sure this is done right by doing it myself.
- What am I doing that someone else should be doing? What can I say no to? Can I delegate some of these tasks to co-workers/family members.
Set clear priorities
Most people overestimate what is realistic to get done in a day. Set clear priorities at the start of each day, so you know what you need to finish by the end of it.
When you create your to-do list, pretend you only have about 80% of the time you think you do to get it all done. That can keep you from overloading yourself.
Write down everything that “should” get done. Then edit it down to only the top few — make sure they include your health goals. Make your final number doable. Move things you know you won’t get to today to another day. That’s perfectly okay!
Cut Yourself Some Slack. Spending hours picking the perfect font for your PowerPoint presentation? Or stressing over whether your toddler’s clothes match? Focus on completion, not perfection. You just might uncover a little more time for your healthy habits.
Head to Bed Earlier
Even though you want to have more time in your day, it’s important to get enough sleep, too. When you don’t get enough shut-eye, it hurts your decision-making abilities, and makes you more likely to binge-eat and less likely to work out.
So the time you might take from your day to put toward your sleep gives you more than you lose.
Sleeping at least 7 hours a night leads to better and longer workouts, according to the Sleep Disorders Center at Northwestern University in Chicago. Enough sleep helps with memory, coordination, and mood, too.
To pinpoint habits that keep you up later than you want, check out your time log. Are you watching TV from 9 p.m. until midnight? Surfing the web? Whatever it is, put a limit on it.
Here’s a tip: Save 10 minutes out of every 30 minutes of TV by watching them on DVR and zooming past commercials. Watch three shows a night? You’ve just banked 30 minutes for some healing Zzzzs.
Be Early to Rise
People have the ability to make wiser choices in the morning than other times of day, according to research.
Mornings are a great time to get things done, before other things from your day intrude and pile up. Scheduling a morning workout will not only will not only keep the days events from causing you to skip it, but it will also give you a extra energy and mood boost and better concentration to complete your other tasks during the day. Plus, you start the day with a big positive check-mark on your healthy to-do list.
Follow Your Own Instincts
Many people fail at managing their time because they give in to too many requests and comments from people around them. You need to remember that there is no way that you can please everyone around you. Be courageous and firm in your determination to plan your time. This may mean that you have to say no at times. This is not selfish, this is self preservation if you truly want to achieve your goals. Listen to your own heart and act upon it. That workout is important. Planning and preparing your meals is important. You don’t have to feel bad about doing something that will benefit your health and happiness. Se asside what others are saying and follow your own instinct and heart.
