How to Audit and Optimize Your Calendar for Better Fitness and Health

By Your Health Magazine Contributor

Your Health Magazine Contributor

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How to Audit and Optimize Your Calendar for Better Fitness and Health

Most of us are not giving up the gym due to the lack of 45 minutes. We give up when it is 4:45 pm on a Tuesday – after a day of meetings, errands, and last minute emails – and our only task is to get our frayed nerves to come up with something new to do for an hour: add 5 lbs to the bar or try that new class, or perhaps decide that today is the day I take a break. It is that five-minute haggling in the locker room that kills us, time and again.

Why “I don’t have time” is rarely the culprit

If you asked most people why they missed their workout, they will tell you that they were too busy. That is rarely the whole, or even the primary, story. They may have had an hour, but spent ten minutes in the decision-making process, scrolling through Instagram for inspiration or convincing themselves that they were not in a good place to train, having finished a strenuous session last night. In that span, they have lost the time, or the motivation, to make one more decision about one more activity.

Decision fatigue. Decision fatigue is a state of decreased willpower resulting from the mental effort required to make decisions throughout the day. It has a number of cognitive manifestations: most notably, it makes us less likely to do things we genuinely want to do, because we are more easily convinced of the falsehood “not right now.” The idea is that in order to make a decision about exercising, you need the appropriate amount of willpower, but you may not have it due to having to make a slew of other decisions, and so you decide to skip it. It is much simpler to believe that you “don’t have time,” if you have very little willpower left for making another decision.

The opportunity cost of an “open” workout plan

Now, let us focus on the fitness aspect of that example. If you have not pinned down your exercise time, you have not made one decision about exercising; you have made five or six. You’ve made the decision of when you are going to do it, as well as what you are going to do (weightlifting, running, or something else?), and a few others as well. If that time is going to be eaten up, what are you going to do as a backup? What are you going to wear? Do you have a secondary backup? These are small questions to answer, so it does not seem like much. However, they all tie together. When you have not made those decisions, they attach themselves to the decision of whether or not to exercise.

Your brain begins to associate “fitness” with something open-ended, with a number of variables left unmentioned. Open variables are harder to solve than closed ones. This is the mental calculus of fitness. It is always running in the background, whether you are aware of it or not.

Audit your calendar like you would a budget

In order to optimize something, you have to first diagnose it. Open a calendar on a normal week. Not your aspirational week; a real one.

Mark out all the things that relate to fitness. Now, divide this up into two groups: events where you pre-committed (a class you signed up for, morning jogging with your friend), and events where you simply decided to show up (a “workout?” block in your day planner, a vague nighttime slot with the expectation of visiting the gym). Most people find that the second category outweighs the first considerably

That second category is a tax on your mental energy. Each of the events you marked is a missed opportunity to make a decision with greater ease, to have made a choice at your most deliberative time, rather than when your decision-making capacity is siphoned into other areas.

Once you have finished auditing, the next step is to close these decisions: make them in advance so that your brain does not have to engage further.

Make exercise appointments, not options

Annotating “exercise” in your planner is an open question. Making a block of time at 5:30 p.m. on Monday, as a class, is a closed one. There is less mental room to waver, when your brain has only one decision to make in regards to exercising. This is not just a neat trick, either. There is a strong scientific basis for this, in the work of Peter Gollwitzer on implementation intentions. Decades of research on the behavioral formation of so-called “if-then” plans culminated in a study which detailed over a hundred experiments on the matter. The research found that creating specific cues and “if-then” plans can improve the likelihood of following through on intended behaviors.

Build a default and a backup, and stop rebuilding from scratch

Often, events take place that cancel a pre-commitment. A meeting goes long, your kid gets sick, or the gym is closed. There is a tendency, in such circumstances, to begin to think of your fitness plan as defeated. You will, therefore, need to start rebuilding your options, and make new decisions on your fitness, but those decisions are more difficult to make, due to the events taking place.

The alternative is to build your backup plan when you make your first plan. For example, if your plan is to do a strength session at 6 a.m. on Tuesdays, your backup plan might be to do a 20-minute bodyweight workout at home before 8 p.m. that day. Both decisions are now made at your most deliberative time, rather than trying to make them during a stressful morning.

This is another reason why group classes are so helpful. The scheduled decision about your fitness also decides what the workout will involve, and you have the additional benefit of social accountability. If you are looking to reduce the number of decisions in your week, it would be worth your time as well as your limited decision-making capacity to go to your local fitness class and reserve a few spots for yourself. For example, if you check an East Dallas fitness class schedule, reserving a few slots can change an abstract notion of “I need to work out” to “I have a class at 6 on Tuesday.”

Cut friction the night before

Many decisions about fitness take place not in the context of your calendar, but in the ten minutes before you are going to exercise. What should I wear? Where are my sneakers? Can I get food first? Each decision, while smaller, is an additional tax on your day. Environment design takes care of these decisions for you.

Pack your bag the night before, as well as lay out your clothes. If you need food before, you should have it prepped in the fridge, rather than trying to brainstorm at 5:45 in the morning. These additional steps do not demand much in the way of discipline, because they are not a question of discipline. They are a question of having your environment decide these things for you. The same principle is at play in the work of Wendy Wood on habit formation, wherein you create consistency in context. The more your behavior matches its environment, the less cognitive resources it uses.

Batch the planning into one session a week

Rather than making decisions about fitness on a regular basis – what to do or not do today or tomorrow – batch them all together into one weekly planning session. Most people find that doing this on a Sunday evening is ideal, but any time that works for you will do.

Looking at the week ahead, make a decision on what you want to do for fitness. This might involve locking in certain classes, or deciding on your preferred times for exercising. Set your backup plans. Think about the things that could interfere with your fitness time, and how you will deal with them. Commit to these decisions.

This is also a good time to set aside time for rest. Don’t make it an afterthought – mark it on your calendar with as much specificity as you do your workout time.

Use status quo bias in your favor

Locking in a decision with specific criteria means that, by default, the decision is to exercise. The reason why this works is the same one that subscription boxes use on a regular basis. People are much more likely to renew their services, rather than cancel them, due to the simple fact that it is easier to do one than the other. This is also the reason why pre-commitment is so helpful in decision-making: your future self has to work extra-hard to break from the decision you made, rather than simply being able to opt out. Make a commitment to yourself, and your future self will have to follow through on it.

Run a two-week check, then adjust

Once you have started this process, let it run for two weeks, and then evaluate it. What did you find yourself struggling with? Find a new time for the session, if it was regularly inconvenient; find a new sleep schedule, if waking up earlier became a struggle. Did your backup plan turn out to be useless, due to being unrealistic? Be honest about it and change it up. Set your future self up for success, rather than failure.

Run this process again for another two weeks. Check out what worked and what did not in the second round, and adjust accordingly. Repeat this back-and-forth process, until you are making minimal adjustments in each round. That is when you get close to having found an optimized plan.

According to Wendy Wood’s research, roughly 40% of our daily behavior is habitual. The less you have to think about it, the better. The whole point of this calendar system is to make exercising such a habit, that it is less taxing to your decision-making capacity. Your new calendar system is not really about building fitness into your day; it is about locking up the arguments you have with yourself about whether or not to exercise.