Cheshire Bookkeeper Pedometer Exercise!

Spurred on by the BBC headline:

Inactivity ‘kills more than obesity’ www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-30812439 made me analyse just how sedentary our work as bookkeepers and personal assistants in an admin business really is.

It is very easy when the workload is busy to crack the whip, start early, finish late and work through lunch.  The result is sitting in one chair busily working away with little physical activity.

At the same time as the BBC headline an article appeared on the Buffer Twitter feed by Carolyn Kapprasch, Chief Happiness Officer at Buffer www.carokopp.com/post/107273061758/steps-30-day-challenge about trying to complete 10,000 steps per day.

So, I set about my own challenge.  As the owner of Knutsford Admin and someone who spends more time than I should sitting I set about doing 10,000 steps a day throughout February 2015.

However, this had to very quickly change from being a goal to being an observational pedometer analysis to see how many steps I actually did a day.

Working as a bookkeeper, life is already full of deadlines, so putting the pressure on every day of achieving 10,000 steps very quickly became yet another stress!  It joined the camp of belonging to a book club and the reality that trying to finish the book in time for each meeting becomes a burden!!

Chatting about my mini challenge with a dietitian friend she pointed out that it would be easy to make the effort to move around for 10 minutes in every hour.  This sounds simple enough to do too.  When you think though that each day can be made up of 7.5 chargeable hours, then 10 minutes out of every 7.5 hours is 450 minutes reduced by 75 minutes, this is 16% of the day, which, if costs are critical to a business these 10 minutes per hour can be hard to find.  Though of course, the business is nothing without a member of staff or owner who is unable to work based on bad health or worse …

Below is a highlight of just some of the days in February.  It has certainly been an interesting exercise and has really shown just how ‘sedentary’ being in a sedentary job is, some days were shocking where the steps taken were less than 1,000, this made me sit up and take notice.

In conclusion I do way too few steps and need to ensure that on busy days I find the energy to exercise outside of work.  It is also important to me as an employer to check that others who work at Knutsford Admin are getting opportunities to get out of their chair and are encouraged to at lunch times and are taking exercise outside of the workplace too.

The result of this exercise for me is that I have been putting more walking into my daily routine and swimming much more frequently than I was before and have noticed that slowly I am toning up, I am less out of puff, and, the same as for Carolyn Kpoorasch I am definitely sleeping better.

If you have a sedentary job – count your steps it is worth seeing what the results are.