“I Don’t Have Time to Exercise” – Let’s Prove That Wrong in 5 Minutes

If you’re someone who often finds themselves saying, “I just don’t have the time to exercise,” I ask you to invest five minutes of your time today — because this blog post might just change your life.

Location, budget, and time are the three main factors that determine whether someone succeeds or fails with a fitness routine. But unlike location or budget, which are flexible, time is fixed. 

It doesn’t matter whether you’re the world’s richest CEO with a net worth of $209.5 billion like Jeff Bezos, or you live humbly with only the clothes on your back — we all have the same ‘time budget’: 24 hours a day, 168 hours a week. Time is one of the few commodities that does not discriminate.

So, why is it that your friends and colleagues seem to find time to exercise, while you feel like it’s an impossible feat because “I’m just too busy…”?

The answer?

• You haven’t been taught how to manage your 168 hours each week,
• Or, you like being busy and telling others just how busy you are, because it gives you a (false) sense of productivity — a feeling of accomplishment, even superiority, based on society’s flawed view that “busy people are important people.”

Here’s the truth: anyone who says they “just don’t have time” usually doesn’t have control of their time.

But I’ll assume that if you’ve read this far, you’re not the kind of person who enjoys being busy for the sake of it. Instead, you take your health seriously. You want to feel better, get fitter, and take back control — you just don’t know how to make time for it all.

Let’s change that!

How Much Time Do You Really Need?

Every government in the world recommends at least 150 minutes (2.5 hours) of moderate or 75 minutes of vigorous physical activity per week. Why? Because this small investment in time offers massive health benefits –  based on extensive evidence demonstrating the significant health benefits of physical activity, including reducing the risk of chronic diseases, improving mental health, and extending lifespan.

In fact, the NHS has shown that 2.5 hours of activity per week can lower your risk of early death by up to 30%. 

If you want to live a long, healthy life and be around to watch your grandkids grow up, then finding time to exercise isn’t optional – it’s essential. So, let’s help you find a few hours in your week…

Welcome to the Time Audit

When someone tells me, “I don’t have time to work out,” I walk them through a Time Audit. Nine times out of ten, we find 10–30 hours of unused or misused time each week.
Remember, you only need 2.5 hours — that’s less than 2% of your week. 

If, after completing this audit, you still choose not to use your available time to improve your health, that’s your choice, and perfectly fine by me. But it’s no longer fair to say that ‘time is the issue’ or ‘lack thereof’,  because it’s not – it’s something else.

“What gets measured gets managed”

…is a popular quote that states something can only be properly managed if it’s first measured. It’s true; you can only determine whether something’s successful if you know where you started from and track its progress.

When we measure, we often identify silly things we do that interfere with what we want to improve, so we naturally start doing something smarter instead. And it works in many areas of life. For example, research has discovered:

• People who track their food lose more weight, thanks to awareness from measurement (source)
• Analyzing drinking behavior reduced the amount of drinking among people who self-identified as over-drinkers (source)
• Students who recorded their study habits studied more deliberately and consistently and got better grades (source)
• People who monitor their behaviors typically have healthier habits (source)

However, when was the last time you measured your time – your most important commodity?
You can’t declare that you don’t have time for something if you don’t actually know how you spend that time – and knowing comes through measurement.

How the Average Person Spends Their Time

The largest measurement of time comes from data gathered by the OECD Time Use Survey, gathering information across seven years for people between 15 and 64.

The first thing that jumps out from this chart is that there are indeed many similarities across countries.

This is not surprising — most of us try to split our days into “work, rest, and fun”, and so there are some predictable patterns. We spend the most time working and sleeping, but as evident from this, people in the UK spend a total of 305 mins/5 hrs per day enjoying leisurely activities – watching TV, listening to the radio, catching up with friends, reading, and of course exercising.
In fact, even after time spent on socialising and TV, the average person still has 2 hours a day available.

But okay — those people aren’t you. You’re busier. So let’s turn to you and start measuring your time with a personalised audit.

Your Time Audit

Work and sleep take up most of our time, so let’s start here:

• Work – A typical working week is around 37-40 hours per week, but let’s say you have a demanding job that requires 50 hours a week.
• Sleep – The average sleep duration in the UK is 6.2 – 6.9 hours per night, but let’s say you value your sleep and get a full eight hours – total sleep for the week: 56 hours.
• Commute time – You then need time to get to and from work. Since the pandemic, most of us work from home (at least a day or two in the week), but let’s presume you don’t, so I’ll give you 5 hours a week (an hour a day) of commute time.

Currently, work, sleep, and travel take up 110 hours of your 168-hour week. You still have 58 hours available, but wait, there’s more…

• Household chores & life admin – We need to make time to keep up with the day-to-day admin of life and maintenance of our home, so let’s set aside 10.5 hours a week, giving you 90 minutes a day.
• Supermarket shopping, cooking, and eating – You need to eat, right? In the above survey, people in the UK spend 79 minutes eating, drinking, and 29 minutes doing the food shop – 12.5 hours per week. However, let’s assume you really enjoy cooking and spending more time over meals; I’ll give you an extra 5 hours a week – a total time of 17.5 hours per week or 2.5 hours per day.
• Socialising with friends and family – Spending time with friends and loved ones is just as important as staying active, so let’s set aside 7 hours a week for this.
• Netflix and chill – We all need time to unwind; what better way than catching up on our favorite series? I’ll give you 10 hours a week for this.