How to go outside more often

Make the first step tiny

The size of the outing is not the obstacle. The first minute is. So shrink the commitment to something that can't reasonably be refused and let it grow on its own.

1. Round the block, nothing else Six minutes, a quarter mile, back to the door. If you want to keep going, keep going. If not, it still counted.
2. Ten minutes sitting outside Not walking. A step, a bench, a balcony. Doing nothing, outdoors, for ten minutes. On the hardest days this is the whole thing.
3. Shoes on, no plan Put your shoes on and step outside without knowing where to. The direction gets decided on the sidewalk, not the couch.
4. Start the day outside Walk a quarter mile before you eat anything. It works because nothing else has happened yet to get in the way.

Attach it to something that already happens

New habits that need their own slot in the day lose to everything else. The ones that stick are stapled to something you already do.

1. Leave ten minutes earlier For work, for the store, for anything. Spend the ten minutes walking a longer way there.
2. The long way, deliberately Pick one journey you make every day and take the longer route for it. Not all of them, one.
3. The outside entrance Where a building has a second door, an outside staircase or a way round the block to the other entrance, take that one. It's a minute of outdoors you weren't going to get.
4. Eat one meal outdoors Lunch on a bench, breakfast on the step. The meal was going to happen anyway; only the location changed.
5. Pick someone up Between four and six, meet a partner, a friend or a kid partway and walk the rest of the way home together. The walk is the pretext.

Remove the deciding

Deciding at the moment of action is what fails. Decide earlier, or hand it to someone else.

1. Decide the night before Where, when, how long, written down. Tomorrow's job is to follow instructions, not to make a choice.
2. Give the walk a job Mail a letter, return a book, photograph one red thing, find a street you've never walked. A task you can finish is far easier to start than a walk you can only end.
3. Fix the time, not the mood Seven to nine in the morning, or five to seven in the evening. Be outside somewhere in that window, however briefly. A window beats a feeling.
4. Walk with a neighbor An evening lap between six and eight with someone from your street. Once it's a standing arrangement, skipping it means letting someone down, and most people won't.

Count something, but be honest about streaks

Keeping a count works. A tally of days out, a step counter, a streak. The danger is that the first missed day feels like the end, and a lot of people stop entirely at that point. Treat the streak as a tool, not a judge: a broken streak means you got some number of days in a row, which is more than zero, and the new one starts tomorrow. If a count makes you feel worse rather than better, count something else: distance, new streets, photos of blue things. Anything that goes up.

The usual excuses and what works

Where an app fits, and where it doesn't

An app can't make you want to go outside. What it can do is take the deciding off your plate. RLQuest hands you three to ten quests every morning from a library of more than 2,700, fitted to your age, interests, the weather, the season and how long you've said you've got. On a bad day one of them is small: ten minutes sitting outside, a short walk before breakfast, one new map tile. You go, the app checks the route, your steps or the photo, and the hexagon map of where you've been grows by a tile or two. There are streaks, and they break like anyone else's.

It's free to download for iPhone and Android; a Premium subscription adds more quests per day. The tactics above cost nothing and need no download. The app is for the evenings when even the deciding feels like too much.