The 168-Hour Reset: How to Rebuild Your Week and Take Your Health Back

Every year starts the same way. You tell yourself this is the year you will finally feel better, move more, take better care of your body, and get back into a routine that actually supports your life. And every year, most of those changes fade within a few weeks.

Not because you do not care. Not because you are lazy. Not because you lack motivation.

They fade because most people never start with a plan that fits their real life.

They stack new habits on top of an already full schedule, overcommit early, burn out quickly, and quietly return to the routines that put them there in the first place. At EVO, we take a different approach. Before we talk about workouts, nutrition, or recovery tools, we sit down and audit how your time is actually being used, because everyone has the same 168 hours in a week, and how you use them will ultimately dictate whether change sticks or fades.

Step One: Account for Your Non-Negotiables

Every meaningful change starts with honesty. Before you add a single new habit to your life, you need to understand what your week already requires from you. Start with your 168 available hours and subtract the time that is already spoken for by essential daily functions.

Begin by listing the things you do every single day regardless of how motivated or busy you feel. These are the anchors of your schedule. Sleep is the first place to start. If you aim for eight hours per night, that alone accounts for 56 hours of your week. Then consider personal care such as getting ready, showering, and winding down at night. Add in meals, including the time spent preparing food, eating, and cleaning up. Finally, include work or school hours and commute time, being realistic rather than optimistic about how much of your week those responsibilities truly take.

When you add these together, most people are surprised by how much of their week is already allocated before they even think about exercise, family time, or personal goals. This step is not about restriction. It is about clarity. Until you clearly see how your baseline time is being used, it is impossible to design a routine that fits into your real life rather than the life you wish you had.

Action Step: Write out your full week, assign realistic time values to your daily non-negotiables, subtract that total from 168, and record the number that remains.

Step Two: Audit Your Flexible Time

Once your non-negotiables are accounted for, what remains is the part of your week that truly determines your lifestyle. These hours are filled with routines and patterns that feel normal but are rarely questioned, such as phone use, television, social media, errands, extra work, late nights, and even well-intentioned commitments that no longer serve your priorities.

Some of these activities support your goals. Others quietly compete with them. The purpose of this step is not to judge how you spend your time, but to see it clearly. When your week is written out in front of you, patterns begin to emerge, and you often find pockets of time that are being spent out of habit rather than intention. These are your greatest opportunities for change.

Action Step: List every recurring activity that fills your remaining weekly hours, then mark whether each one moves your health forward, keeps it the same, or quietly pulls it backward.

Step Three: Design the Habits You Want to Build

Now that you can clearly see how your time is being used, you are finally in a position to make real change. This step is about defining the habits you want to introduce into your life. That might mean exercising three days per week, walking daily, improving your sleep routine, starting a nutrition program, reducing screen time, or creating more intentional family time.

The most important part of this step is realism. Do not just account for the habit itself. Account for everything that comes with it. A workout is not just the session itself. It also includes driving to the gym, parking, a buffer in case things run long, driving home, showering, and recovery. What feels like a short commitment can easily become a much larger block of your week.

Action Step: Write out the habits you want to build and assign a realistic weekly time requirement to each, including preparation, travel, and recovery.

Step Four: Set Your Priorities

Trying to change everything at once is the fastest way to change nothing at all. Choose the single habit that would create the biggest positive ripple effect in your life right now. This becomes your foundation habit. The remaining habits are not forgotten. They are simply scheduled for later phases once your foundation routine feels stable.

Action Step: Circle the one habit you will focus on for the next 30 days.

Step Five: Rebuild Your Flexible Schedule

Return to your flexible activities and begin replacing low-impact habits with high-impact ones. Rewrite your weekly schedule until your priorities have a real place in your life. When you are finished, your week should once again total 168 hours. Nothing is missing. Nothing is assumed. Everything has a place.

Action Step: Rewrite your weekly schedule with your new habits included and confirm that your total still equals 168 hours.

How We Help You Take Back Control of Your Health

This process is exactly how we begin with every person who walks through our doors. We start with your real life, not an ideal version of it, because the goal is not to give you a perfect plan.

The goal is to build a plan that fits your life well enough to actually stick. When your habits have a real place in your week, your energy improves, your body feels better, and progress becomes predictable instead of fragile.

Your Next Step

You now have clarity around your time, your routines, and where real change can finally live.

The next step is implementation.

At EVO, we help you take what you have built on paper and turn it into a living routine that fits your body, your schedule, and your real life.

If this feels like the year you are ready to stop guessing and start building momentum that actually lasts, we would love to help you take the next step.

Click here to book a Discovery Call to learn more.