The decision

Up to now I've asked you to notice things and count things. This chapter asks you to decide something. It comes this late on purpose. If I'd opened with "just do ten minutes", you'd have heard it as one more piece of cheerful advice and answered, correctly, that ten minutes doesn't count. You now have reason to think it does.

The decision is this. On any day I meant to exercise and can't do the full session, I do ten minutes, and it counts.

It has five parts.

Keep the plan. If you have a plan for full sessions, keep it. The gym on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday is still the intention. Nothing here asks you to aim lower on the days that go well.

Set the floor. Ten minutes is the floor. On a planned day, when the block of time has gone, the choice is no longer between the full session and nothing. It's between the full session and ten minutes. You've taken nothing off the list of options for the day. If you'd like to go further and do ten minutes on the unplanned days too, so much the better, and chapter 11's anchors will help. But the rule only requires it on days you'd already meant to exercise.

Choose your three. Decide today what your ten-minute options are. Pick one for outdoors, one for indoors and one that includes some strength, and write them down. At the moment of decision you should be choosing from that list, without having to invent anything.

Count minutes, not sessions. At the end of each week, add up the total minutes you moved, in any form. Stop scoring yourself on whether you did the three sessions. A week of one gym visit and four ten-minute walks is eighty-five minutes. Under the old scoring that was a failed week, one out of three. Under the new scoring it's eighty-five minutes, which sits on a good part of the curve in chapter 3. The way you score yourself changes how the week feels, and chapter 8 showed how much that matters.

No making up. A missed day isn't a debt. You don't owe a double session on Thursday. The next session is whatever it was going to be.

Plans in the form "when this happens, then I'll do that" are well supported by research. Peter Gollwitzer and Paschal Sheeran pooled 94 tests and found that such plans made people a good deal more likely to follow through. Here are three, and you can change the wording to suit yourself.

When I see that the full session can't happen today, then I'll pick one of my three and start within five minutes.

When I hear myself think "it's not worth it for ten minutes", then I'll take that as the cue to put my shoes on.

When I've had a zero, or a week of them, then the next session is today and it's ten minutes.

The second plan matters most. "It's not worth it" is the threshold talking, and it's the thought that has cancelled more of your exercise than any meeting or train. You can't stop it arriving. You can decide in advance what it means. From now on it means you should put your shoes on.

Here's what to expect, and I'll be careful because I can't promise you an outcome. The first few ten-minute sessions will feel slightly silly. You'll be back in the house almost before you've left it, with a voice in your head saying that didn't count. It did count, as chapters 3 and 4 showed. Within a couple of weeks I'd expect your weekly minutes to be higher than they've been for a long time, even if you haven't done a single extra full session. I'd expect you to find that ten minutes becomes fifteen or twenty fairly often, without effort. I'd also expect the full sessions to become a bit more frequent, because you're no longer restarting from cold every time. I can't promise any particular change in your fitness, weight or health. That depends on far more than this book covers. What I'm fairly confident of is that you'll have fewer zeros.