Should you be keeping a tight schedule on when to take your walks? Does making a schedule actually help? Should you make a personal schedule for exercise and stick to it?
Schedules, do they even work?
Recently we’ve discussed goal setting and how that can greatly help when done in a reasonable way and steps taken to achieve it. Today, let’s dive into scheduling. If you’ve ever been to a typical job or normal public or private school you’ve likely had experience with schedules already.
Many people balk at the thought of making actual schedules for their free time as well. They think it will take all the fun out of their life if they live in too structured a way. No one said you can’t leave openings in your schedule to do whatever you feel like doing. Personal schedules aren’t right for every person- basically nothing is, but they do help a lot of people actually get their life in order and increase their productivity.
Like most things, whether a schedule works is completely dependant on how much work you put into keeping it.
So, how strict should your schedule be?
That really depends on what will work for you. Some people need a much more strict schedule to keep one at all. Other just need to schedule a few things in to make sure they get those things to fit in their day or week.
For you, if you don’t have previous personal scheduling experience or you’ve had failures of them when tried, try to think what type of schedules worked best for you in working situations or even school. Was a much more tight schedule (very little time buffers between and during the segments) work good for you or did they stress you out more? How about looser schedules? Did those lead to more goofy off or did you actually use the flexibility to your advantage?
Only you can judge what type of schedule will work best for your life, situation and needs.
Schedule examples
I’ll give a few examples here. Use these or combine them. Take pieces or just make something completely unique for your situation.
Your phone is a great tool for scheduling. There are loads of apps and sites that can help you make a schedule. I have made ones on Excel and set alarms to remind myself or certain aspects of my schedule that may get forgotten until they become routine and to make sure I keep pretty much on schedule.
My Current Schedule looks like this:
Your phone apps may vary but could look similar to one of these:
Should you specifically schedule what type of exercise?
For some you may do this always and it work great. For others you may need to just do it for the first few weeks until you fall in to a routine or what exercise you do on what days if you decide to cycle your exercise routine.
Maybe you Walk three days a week and do strength training one day a week. Do Saturdays work best for the strength training or would Tuesday? How long do you strength train? How long will your walks takes? My walks take at least 30 minutes most days. It’s why I generally put flex near them on my schedule when I’ll be taking longer walks. Other exercise could be aerobics I do indoors an dthat’s usually 15-25 minutes worth.
So, will you use more schedules?
Do you already schedule your life? How about just you exercise times? How flexible do you stay? As you can see on mine, I try to stay fairly flexible in my life, especially on my weekends and half day. Whatever you choose make sure you pencil in some walks this week.
Hope to see you strolling along,
Kimmie