Tuesday again

Here's the scene from chapter 1 again. It's an example of how it might go, and I'm not promising it.

It's Tuesday, and the plan was the gym at six. The four o'clock meeting runs over and 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.

You stand in the hall and the sum runs by itself, as it always has. The gym is ten minutes each way, then there's changing and a shower. That leaves fifteen minutes. It isn't worth it.

You hear that last sentence, and you know what it means now. It means you should put your shoes on.

You don't take your coat off. You change your shoes for the pair by the door, put the oven on to warm, and go back out. You turn left, and walk five minutes out along the route you worked out a fortnight ago, fast enough that you could talk but wouldn't want to sing. For the first two minutes it's exactly as unappealing as you expected. You're tired, your legs are heavy and the day is still in your head. Somewhere around the post box that changes. By the turn you're warm. On the way back you notice you've stopped thinking about the meeting. You get in at eight minutes to seven, a little out of breath, and start the dinner.

It took twelve minutes. Under the old scoring that Tuesday was a failure, because there was no gym, no forty-five minutes and no shower. Under the new scoring it's twelve minutes on a day that would otherwise have been nought. The week is intact. On Thursday, when the time is there, you go to the gym, and it doesn't feel like starting again, because you never stopped.

By Sunday night the week adds up to one full session and three short ones, seventy-nine minutes in all. It isn't the week you planned, but it's far better than the week you'd have had.

It won't always go like that. Some Tuesdays you'll sit down, and some weeks will fall apart. But you now have an answer to the sentence that used to cancel everything. Ten minutes was always worth it, and the evidence for that is about as good as this kind of evidence gets. What held you back was a threshold that had no research behind it.

If you do one thing after closing this book, choose your three ten-minute options and put a pair of shoes by the door. Then, the next time the full session falls through, go out and do the ten minutes. It counts.