Ahh Time. That thing we “have” or, more often “don’t have.”
For an aspiring endurance athlete, time is a key variable. The truth is that time matters in endurance sports. If you want to be good at a race or event or adventure that takes 1, 2, 10, or 20 hours to complete, it’s going to take TIME. Not just days, months, and years, but also hours per week. For most of us who have responsibilities outside of sport, this is tough because we have families, jobs, friends, food to cook, pets to pet, and hobbies to hob. All these things take time, and what do we usually end up with? Not enough time.
But are you really out of time? Is all the time you’re spending outside of training really on things that are a higher priority than training?
In order for us to make the gains that we want to make in endurance sports, many of us need to spend more TIME training in the week, which means we need to do less of other things.
“But wait, Coach, I can’t spend less time at my job, or less time with my family?!?!”
I agree. Which is why one of the most important tools for prioritizing your time is for you to perform a TIME AUDIT. It’s hard for us to manage our time if we don’t know what we’re doing with our time! Are you spending an hour a day on social media? BAM, that’s some training time! Are you making dinner 6 nights a week and could order out once or twice? BAM, that’s some training time (unless they are a hopeless cook, in which case you might be better off just doing it. Orrrr, order out!).
If you haven’t done a Time Audit, I guarantee you will be able to identify a few hours of the week during which you can use your time for higher priority activities.
How do you do a time audit?
- List your categories. These are the general categories of ways you spend your time. They don’t necessarily need to be in priority order, but maybe split into two groups, one of High priority time, and another of Low priority time. Here’s some examples to get you started:
- Highly productive work
- Marginally productive work
- Quality family time
- Less quality family time
- Social
- Entertainment
- Futzing
- Training
- Time with pets
- Define how you’re going to track your time audit. Are you going to simply write it down on a sheet of paper? Are you going to track it in an app? Are you going to enter it in a spreadsheet? Whatever it is, make sure it enables you to record it easily and fast (See step 5).
- Set your time interval to track. Are you going to write it down every 15 minutes? 30? 60? I personally recommend either 30 or 60. Obviously shorter periods give you more accuracy, but I find that 30 minute intervals work pretty well.
- Use a recurring alarm. Set an alarm to ring at that time interval you decided on all day.
- Record it FAST. Whatever your method, spend no more than 30 seconds writing/noting/recording what category you’ve been doing for the last time period
- Be HONEST and CONSISTENT. Were you really working for the last 30 minutes? Or were 20 of them spent in a youtube loop? Were you really spending family time for the last 30 minutes? Or were you looking at football stats on your phone while your kid took a bath?
- Repeat for 5 days.
- If you have a pretty stable life, you might only need 2-3 days to get a really good idea.
- If your weekends are hectic too, I recommend doing a couple weekend days as well.
- Reflect, damnit! Once you’ve done your time audit, look back and figure out where you’ve been spending time in low-priority tasks, and move that into high priority tasks!
Once you’ve tabulated the results, take a step back and probably a deep breath. Finding out that you’ve been using time less than optimally is all at once excellent and complete shit. Complete shit because it’s clear you’ve been missing out. Excellent because you now have more time to put towards training.
Now, what are you going to do with that time?
Next up is a Stress Audit. You know you need that shit.
