Last week I talked about tracking your schedule to get a sense of how it breaks down and how to use your free time most effectively. Today, I’m going to give you a look at my schedule before we move on to further posts about scheduling and how we can leverage the 168 hours of each week.

When I’m looking at my weekly schedule, I start by looking at the macro level, plugging in the basic building blocks of the week. My weekly schedule starts with a basic framework of sleep, work, and self-maintenance.

About 80% of my time each week goes to these very basic items. My climbing and training schedule sits on top of this fairly predictable foundation.

For me, a non-climbing work day usually looks something like this:

5:00 a.m.             Wake up, morning routine (make coffee, breakfast, get ready for work)        5:45 a.m.             Leave for work                                                                                                              6:00 a.m.             Start work                                                                                                                     2:30 p.m.             Finish work, commute home                                                                                          2:45 p.m.             Arrive home, change clothes, snack                                                                        3:00 p.m.             Afternoon activity (working on blog posts, mowing the lawn, etc.)                  6:00 p.m.             Prepare dinner, eat dinner, tidy kitchen                                                                  8:30 p.m.             End of day routine (brush, floss, change, etc.)                                                      9:00 p.m.             Try to be in bed

It takes me an hour and a half to get from home to my primary training gym in Seattle. It also takes me an hour and half to get to the crag.

If I budget for a six-hour training block, three of those hours are commute time.

If you have a training facility closer, or at home, and have the discipline to do the work, do it.

My work day/training day afternoon looks something like this:

3:00 p.m.             Change and snack                                                                                                        3:30 p.m.             Drive to gym (in Tacoma) or catch bus to gym (in Seattle)                                 5:00 p.m.             Warm up                                                                                                                      6:00 p.m.             Focused training                                                                                                           7:00 p.m.             Supplemental weight training                                                                                   7:30 p.m.             Head home                                                                                                                 10:00 p.m.           Get home, eat, get ready for bed                                                                           10:30 p.m.           Try to be in bed

When I’m training at home, I cut the commute time and save three hours, which the wife loves. For the month that I focus on strength training and primarily do hangboard workouts at home, a work day/training day looks about like this:

4:00 p.m.             Warm up                                                                                                                      5:00 p.m.             Hangboard workout                                                                                                   6:30 p.m.             Supplemental weights                                                                                               7:00 p.m.             Dinner

Three hours. It’s an incredibly condensed session, which is attractive if you’re in a time crunch, but it’s also incredibly difficult to maintain the psych when you’re training alone.

You have to do what you have to do to live, work, take good care of yourself, and hang out with the family. But I believe that if you are committed to training, you’ll find the time. You’ll make the time.

**If you’re the kind of person that wants to track the data and see where all your time goes, here’s an Excel sheet you can print out and use to take notes as you audit your schedule blocks. This is a three-page document with the days broken down into 30-minute chunks. Because I made this for myself, it starts at 4:30 a.m., but use it in the way that makes the most sense to you. I recommend doing this for a week at a time. A seasonal check-in might be good idea as you go from the gym to the crag and from watching TV to trying to get the yard under control. Just write down what you do, don’t try to look cool to yourself by acting unnaturally, because that data will be useless for our purposes. At the end of the week you’ll have a good idea of where your time is going and maybe you’ll even start to see where you can fit in a trip to the gym.**