Let’s face it — chances are, you’re busy. In fact, part of living an active lifestyle involves spending a large amount of time doing pre-planned activities. What you will find, however, is in an ideal situation, you have a proper balance of time between rigid obligations and more flexible activities. If you want to make a life change and hold yourself to exercising regularly, you need to ensure it becomes habitual to the point of becoming the new norm. To learn about techniques you can employ to incite your inner creature-of-habit, read on!

Obligations vs Activities

One question you may ask is, what is the difference between an obligation and an activity? Are you on business, or leisure time? While you may have notions that state the difference as a measure of  how enjoyable or desirable an activity is, you will find you are deceiving yourself. Obligations are often held to a higher standard than what you may spend doing in your free time. Try the following guidelines to get the most out of your time, and get the results you want:

1. Treat anything important as an obligation. Create a specific time to start and end an activity  based on the duration you’d like to spend working on it. Therefore, if you have a goal of working out for 1 hour a day, select a start and end time that work well for you.
2. Put your goals in writing. Not only will you remember what you write, it will also serve as a visual reminder of your obligation. Place it in a prominent place that you are likely to see it. Just like you may leave a note under your keys, leave this somewhere it will not get lost but instead actively motivate you.
3. Divide and Conqueror. When faced with an enormous, daunting task, divide it into small sub-tasks. You will make big goals seem less intimidating and to have more points of visible progress as you complete each checkpoint. If you have limited amounts of time available, split your work into different time slots. Try to work at least for the minimum amount of time you feel you are productive; do not needlessly waste your time if your time block is nearly fully spent getting ready and wrapping up.