Pack a lunch to eat healthier and save time.

Most people who say they don't have time to exercise aren't lying. They also aren't out of time. The hour is in there. It's just spread across the day in pieces small enough that nobody notices them.

Here's where to find it, and what to do with it once you have.

1. Kill your notifications.

This is the biggest one on the list by a wide margin.

Research from Gloria Mark at UC Irvine found it takes an average of 23 minutes to fully return to a task after an interruption. Not five, not ten. Twenty-three. Her later work found the average time we spend on one screen before switching has fallen to about 47 seconds.

You don't need five interruptions a day to lose an hour. You need three.

Unless responding instantly is literally your job, turn off notifications for email, social media and group texts. Then pick two or three times a day to handle all of it at once. On an iPhone this lives under Settings, then Focus. On Android it's Do Not Disturb in your quick settings.

You can still let the important people through. On an iPhone, open the contact, tap Edit, then Ringtone, then switch on Emergency Bypass. On Android, add them to your priority contacts under Do Not Disturb.

2. Schedule the workout like it's an appointment.

Everything else on this list makes time. This is the step where you claim it.

Put it on the calendar with a start time. Not "sometime after work." Time that isn't assigned to something specific gets absorbed by whatever shows up.

And lower the bar. You don't need an hour. Twenty or thirty minutes counts, and two fifteen-minute blocks count. The idea that a workout has to be an hour to matter is the single most common reason people skip it entirely.

3. Cook once, eat several times.

Spend 30 minutes on the weekend planning the week's meals. Pick two or three you can make in double or triple batches and freeze what you don't eat.

You'll spend a half hour on Sunday and save 20 to 30 minutes on most weeknights. That's the trade that funds most of the rest of this list.

4. Stop going to the grocery store.

Pickup and delivery didn't exist in a useful form ten years ago. Now a weekly order takes about ten minutes to place and eliminates the drive, the parking, the aisles and the checkout line entirely.

If you'd rather shop in person, at least consolidate. Every separate trip costs you the getting there and getting back, whatever the store visit itself takes.

5. Pack a lunch.

Cheaper, usually healthier, and it gives you back the walk, the line and the wait. On a lot of days that's twenty or thirty minutes.

Then use some of it. A ten-minute walk after eating is the easiest exercise you'll ever get, and it does more for your blood sugar than the same walk at any other time of day.

6. Set out tomorrow's clothes and gear tonight.

Two minutes at night, ten minutes of decisions saved in the morning.

If you're exercising in the morning, this is the tip that determines whether it happens. Clothes out, shoes by the door, bag packed. The whole point is to remove every decision between waking up and starting.

7. Watch on purpose.

However you watch television, watch what you chose to watch and stop when it's over.

Turn off autoplay so the next episode doesn't start itself. If you watch enough to justify it, the ad-free tier of whatever service you use pays for itself in time. Broadcast hour-long shows carry roughly 18 to 22 minutes of commercials.

8. Shut it down an hour before bed.

Screens do make it harder to fall asleep, though probably not for the reason you've heard. The evidence for blue light specifically has gotten weaker. A 2023 Cochrane review of 17 trials found no clear sleep benefit from blue-light-filtering lenses.

What keeps you up is what's on the screen. A work email or a good show engages you, and engaged is the opposite of falling asleep. So it's less about a filter and more about stopping.

If you use your phone as an alarm, airplane mode holds the messages until morning. The alarm still goes off.

---

Reference Links:

The Cost of Interrupted Work: More Speed and Stress

Gloria Mark, Daniela Gudith and Ulrich Klocke
Department of Informatics , Published April 8, 2008

Click Here for the Study: https://ics.uci.edu/~gmark/chi08-mark.pdf

 

Blue‐light filtering spectacle lenses for visual performance, sleep, and macular health in adults

Sumeer Singh, Peter R Keller, Ljoudmila Busija, Patrick McMillan, Eve Makrai, John G Lawrenson, Christopher C Hull, Laura E Downie
Cochrane Database of Systematic reviews, Published 18 August 2023

Click Here for the Study: https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD013244.pub2

 

Call for a FREE Consultation (305) 296-3434
CAUTION: Check with your doctor before
beginning any diet or exercise program.

12/30/2017
Updated 8/30/2026