Do You Lack the Time or the Energy?

We’ve all said it before. Things like, 

“I was going to work out, but I ran out of time.”

“I would cook more at home but I just don’t have the time.”

“Once I’m done with this project I’ll have more time.”

The problem with all of these phrases, as I’m sure you can guess is that they are simply not true. We all use ‘I don’t have time’ as a placeholder to mean, ‘it wasn’t important enough for me to do’.

Ain’t nobody got time for that.

Coaches recognize this and preach to clients: Priorities! Effort! Commitment! But I think this misses the mark as well. To make a change to your training, your diet or your life, it’s not simply about wanting it more. You have to ask yourself the question, do you really not have the Time or do you not have the Energy? 

Requirements: Lots of time, zero energy

I’ll explain it this way. Have you ever had a crazy day at work.. You’re driving home and you’re exhausted. There’s food at the house, but you’ll have to make it and that’s just a bridge too far after the day you’ve had. You order food on your phone and sit in a heap without changing clothes while you wait for it. 30 to 45 minutes later it’s at your door and you eat it without tasting any of it.. Now someone with your health in mind would say, “why didn’t you just cook dinner? It probably would’ve been healthier and would’ve taken the same amount of time.” What this person fails to realize is that while you did have the time, you didn’t have the Energy to whip up a meal when you were already running on fumes. So you have to carve out not just the time, but the energy to make sure to get in your training. 

Here’s an example in the opposite direction. Say you’re having the same stressful day at work and you get a phone call saying your family member is in the hospital. Do you say, “oh I’m sorry I’m really busy I don’t have time?” Hell no, you get in your car with a burst of energy and get there as fast as you can. You create the time and spend your energy on the things that are really important to you. When you care a lot, you can summon a surprising amount of energy at a moment’s notice. 

So how do you maximize creating energy when you need it, and saving it for the stuff you care about? Part of it is scheduling your day, and protecting your workout time, but I don’t find what’s holding most people back to be simply a scheduling issue. It certainly helps, but I don’t think it’s the whole game. To me the question becomes: How do you create the Energy?

You know who doesn’t like to workout sometimes? Everybody.

Energy in a day is an expendable resource, but the secret is you can build more of it over time. That means that you have to get started, get over the inertia to start the process of building a bigger well to draw from later. The alternative is that your well gets smaller and smaller, and you find yourself with more stress, less energy, and certainly less exercise. The key to unlocking this negative cycle is to train the first few times even when you don’t have the energy. Tell yourself your family member is in the hospital. Summon it, make it happen. It will suck the first few times probably, but you’ll get over it. Then something magical happens. It gets easier and you find the other tasks of your day becoming easier. That way you flip the script and you just might find more time in a day than you thought there was. So ask yourself, do you not have the time or the energy? Do you spend them both on what matters?