I’ve spent the last few years studying labor and time allocation—how long it takes to do tasks, where time goes, and how it flows. I have learned a couple of key lessons from my research. The first is that (and this isn’t news) it’s useless to estimate how much time something will take. We put off jobs for weeks that will only take five minutes. And getting ready for bed might take half an hour, not the ten minutes you would have guessed.

The second lesson I’ve learned is that unless you make something a priority—I mean really decide that it’s important—it will never get done.

Hell, it can be hard to get a priority done!

It seems that there’s just not enough time in the day. So how are we going to find the time to train? To get out to the crag?

This level of introspection is perhaps the scariest step: you need to assess how and where you spend your time. And really the only way to do this is to write it down and honestly audit your time.

Track where your time goes. Maybe it’s going to important things like quality time with your honey or your kids or your friends or a solid eight hours of sleep. Then again, maybe there could be room in your schedule if you cut out some activities like casual Internet surfing, watching Netflix or TV, or checking Twitter over and over.

When I audited my time I realized that I needed to make changes in the way that I spend my free time. Some of the cuts were easy, they were huge time wasters that didn’t actually support what I wanted to be doing right now. But some were more difficult, because they felt like part of who I am was.

For example, I haven’t exactly given up on yard work, but I relax my standards during peak sending season.

I’m married, spend time with the wife, work full time, maintain a home with a .62-acre yard, and still find time to train or climb three days a week. You may have more time than you think, but you won’t know for sure where it all goes until you start tracking it.

When you’re ready to start tracking it, my best advice is to try not to change a thing about your routine for the first couple weeks. This is difficult because as soon as we start observing ourselves, we automatically start changing our behavior. (This is a variation of the Hawthorne Effect, which is when an individual participating in a study improves their behavior as a result of being watched.) You’re goal at this stage is just to track reality.

Pay special attention to key transition times, like when you get home. Start to notice triggers in your afternoon and evening routines, moments that you can  eventually use to re-direct the rest of your day. (When you get home, do you sit down, have a beer, and turn on the TV and lose three hours? Could you replace that with some carrots and peanut butter as you change into your gym clothes?)

It doesn’t take much time to train when you compare it to common time-wasting activities. If you’re just starting to climb, even eight hours per week of focused training will be sufficient. If you’re looking to push your limits, 15-20 hours per week is more than enough (and that includes commute time to the gym and crag).

Change can be manageable if you identify the moment when you derail and consciously substitute a behavior that is undermining you with something that gets you on the right track. But first, you need baseline data. Take a week or two and get an honest answer to this question: How do you spend your time?