Twenty-five minutes on a Tuesday

It's Tuesday, and the plan was the gym at six.

You pay thirty-four pounds a month for the gym. Your bag has been packed and sitting in the hall since Sunday night. The plan, which is a good one, is Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday morning. Forty-five minutes each time, a bit of everything.

The four o'clock meeting runs until ten past five. There's a problem on the trains. You get home at twenty to seven, and dinner has to be on the table by half past because someone has to be somewhere at eight. You stand in the hall and do the sum. The gym is ten minutes each way. Then there's changing and a shower after. That leaves perhaps fifteen minutes of actual exercise, twenty if you skip the shower and eat in your kit.

Fifteen minutes. You wouldn't even be warm. It would hardly be worth getting changed for. You step over the bag and go and start the dinner. You'll go on Thursday, and you'll do a full hour to make up.

On Thursday it's pouring and you've a headache. On Saturday morning you sleep in, because it's been a long week, and by the time you're up there are errands. On Sunday night the bag is still in the hall, and you look at it with a familiar mixture of guilt and resolve. Next week, properly.

I'd like you to notice something about that Tuesday. You had twenty-five minutes. They were real and free minutes, in which you could have moved your body. You could have walked fast round the block a few times, or gone up and down the stairs, or done something on the living-room floor. At twenty to seven you didn't weigh up twenty-five minutes of something against nothing. As you saw it, the choice was between a proper session and a failed one. A failed session felt worse than none, and none is what you chose.

So the week's total was nought minutes. That wasn't for lack of time. The week had several slots of fifteen or twenty minutes in it. None of them was big enough to hold the thing you'd decided exercise had to be.

I'll use a few terms throughout. The full session is your picture of proper exercise, whatever it is for you. The threshold is the line below which exercise, in your mind, doesn't count. For most people with this habit it sits somewhere around thirty minutes. A zero is a day when you'd meant to exercise and did none. The floor is a term I'll bring in later, for the smallest amount you'll accept on a bad day.

The habit has some regular features. This list is my own observation and not a research finding.

The decision is made quickly, by a sum. You count the available minutes, set them against the threshold, find them short, and that's that.

The alternative is never a shorter session. It's always nothing. People who'd scoff at fifteen minutes of walking as pointless will spend the same fifteen minutes on their phone without a thought.

It comes with a promise to make up for it, usually with an even longer session later. The promise raises the bar for the next attempt.

And it defers to a future week that's expected to be less busy. That week hasn't arrived yet.

Before chapter 2, if you're willing, look back over the last four weeks. Write down how many full sessions you'd planned, and how many you did. Then, for each one you missed, ask whether you had ten free minutes at some point that day. The point isn't guilt. You're finding out whether you were short of time or only short of time for the full session.