Us humans find it very easy to write off doing something because it’s “takes too long”.
We “don’t have the time for it”.
We’re “too busy”.
And I get that.
We all have very busy lives.
As I’ve said before, I know that both from over two decades of helping people with this kind of thing…….
And from having four children across four different schools spread out over over 20 miles, all their activities and other commitments, a busy business, a very busy wife and a packed social life.
But a great question to ask when we think that something takes “too long” is…….
“How long too long?”
As in how how long will it actually take and how long are we actually willing to spend on that thing.
Because we often have only vague ideas at best on the answer to this.
When people tell me that tracking their food takes too long I’ll ask them “How long too long?”
“How long does tracking your food take and how much time would be willing to spend on it?”
We’re normally reluctant to answer this type of question.
A common response would be “Just too long”.
But common responses lead to our common results.
How long does tracking take per meal?
Like really?
Somewhere between 10 seconds and 3 minutes maybe?
For a total of between 1 and 10 minutes a day I would say.
Has anyone ever actually done a full day’s worth of tracking and found they spent more than 10 minutes on it?
Or did they stop because it felt a bit of a faff and said “It takes too long”?
And if we’re not willing to spend that number of minutes per day, then how many minutes are we willing to spend?
7?
5?
3?
Same with exercise.
How many minutes do we think we need to spend to actually make forward progress?
Is that number genuine or is it a very ’rounded up’ amount?
And how long are we actually willing to spend?
As always, there’s no right or wrong.
Who would I be to tell you how you should spend your time.
But let’s get some degree of precision in how long things actually take and how much time we are willing to spend before deciding whether we do them or not.
Much love,
Jon ‘Tall Sally’ Hall
P.S. What we do at RISE both won’t take as long as you might think (we can develop eating changes that take zero additional time) AND is worth the time invested (many times over). Check out the risk free trial at www.myrise.co.uk/apply
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RISE in Macclesfield was established in 2012 and specialise in Group Personal Training weight loss programmes for those that don’t like the gym and find diets boring and restrictive!
