This week, we will be talking about how to get your plan of action together so that you can achieve all of those things – get fitter, more energised and more confident.
Last week we talked about setting goals, I know I have talked about this before so it is very important to always start off with your goals and we talked about how we can make those SMART goals. This week, now that you have your goal in mind, hopefully you have done the homework, you can start to make your plan of action.
What you will need is a sheet of paper, you can draw some lines on it if you want to, make sure that you have a table so that you have Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday Saturday and Sunday across the top. Then you probably just have early morning, late morning, early afternoon, late afternoon and evening down the side. Then you just have to start adding in all your commitments and time constraints that are things that you can’t change. So I always start with work, add your hours in first because that is obviously something that we all need to do, we all need to earn money.
Make sure that you leave gaps for if you get an hour’s lunch break because that is obviously a time that you could be using to start achieving your goals. Add in as well if you know that your commute takes half an hour make sure that you add travel time in as well at that time.
Once you have done that on your table and added your work in try and add in next of all your meals, it is really important to plan ahead. So if you start by adding in breakfast, making sure you have given enough time to prepare a nice healthy breakfast in the morning that will help obviously. Next month we will be talking more about nutrition and what to eat but make sure you have given yourself enough time to eat breakfast. Then lunch as well, if you take a lunch break make sure you have given yourself enough time to get some food and to eat it as well. Then dinner time, how long it takes you to prepare a nice healthy meal and also to eat it, then also snack times, they usually happen on the go but you might want to pencil in some time aside for those as well.
After that you would look at scheduling in any family commitments, if you have children and you have to take them certain places, you have to pick them up from school or things like that then you would add that in next as they are things that are not really negotiable but also bear in mind, if you are just dropping the kids off somewhere, you have time perhaps in between dropping them off and picking them up that you could be achieving your goals in those times so don’t just discard that time, make sure you are thinking about what time you have spare.
We will assume that sleep is between 10pm at night and 6am in the morning, that will give you a nice amount of sleep which will help you feel more energised so then in the time you have left over if you have a look at your sheet of paper you should find that you have quite a few hours left over in the week where you can start achieving your goals.
What we have learned today is that when people say they don’t have time it is really just an excuse. We all have 168 hours in a week so it is just how you use them and making sure you use them efficiently to achieve your goals. So looking at your table, count up how many hours you have free and then start to set time aside for you to achieve your goals in those free hours.
Your homework for this week is to write that plan of action. You may not be sure exactly what you are going to actually do in your plan of action but at least now you have the time set aside to start achieving your goals and next week we will be looking at how you can use that time efficiently to get you on the way to achieving your health, fitness and weight loss goals.