1000 Hours Outside Challenge – Getting Started Guide

1. Serve meals outside

The real secret to the 1000 Hours Outside Challenge is, whenever possible, head outside for meals, snacks and any food in between. This anchors everyone outside and as they finish eating they are finding things to do outside (not destroying your house). You are racking up minutes while having family dinner and before you know it, you’ve racked up another 20 minutes just wrapping up and hanging out.

Obviously, a key advantage here is your own backyard. Provided you have one, if you currently lack an outdoor dining area, put that on the top of your to do list. You’ll save money anyways by shopping for outdoor furniture in the off season. If you don’t want to make it a whole thing, all you truly need is a kid-friendly table so your child can comfortably sit and eat and/or graze. Personally, I cringe a bit spending money on specific “kid furniture” so I have a regular patio side table like this one. By looking for side tables instead of kid tables, you actually wind up with more (attractive) options and they are perfectly sized for the under-5 crowd’s kid sized chairs.

2. Don’t tell them

Make the 1000 Hours Outside Challenge just for the grownups.

Use your own judgement, as you know your kid best, but I am inclined to say that if your crew is all under….say 7ish years old, this can just be a challenge for the grown ups. The real spirit of the challenge is about giving you that extra push to get more outdoor time for your family. When you lead the littles out the door, send them messages about how great it is to just be outside; This is just what you do in life; Going outside makes you happy. Foster an outdoor-friendly mindset and support that intrinsic motivation to explore.

You don’t have to mention that you are keeping track and you certainly don’t want to tell them you “have to” get some more hours. Be outside because you want to be. As you track your hours, use that tracker just for you. Pat yourself on the back as you see the dots add up and let it be that positive feedback that makes you want to bundle up those kiddos and get back out there again tomorrow.

That said, kids are so different, I’m sure there’s a tiny toddler out there who is going to immediately be in your face asking you what that tracker is and why you are suddenly eating outside in the snow. If it makes more sense to explain it all, get them involved in managing the tracker and helping you remember to start the timer. Celebrate milestones. Talk about how more time in the sunlight makes them feel.

3. Bring a source of warmth on cold winter days

It’s not just a rechargable handwarmer, it’s a magical little mood booster.

I stumbled across this little guy on Buzzfeed and ordered it full of skepticism and low expectations (but I was very, very cold). Well, I love it. It comes out first thing every year right along with the hats and mittens. I have sent one to all my extended family members – not for a holiday, just being aggressively helpful in letting them know, “You need this in your life!” The OCOOPA handwarmer is a constant in my pocket during winter walks and adventures. Having that little source of heat is just the thing to take the edge off and keep chill from taking over.

Now to the magic part. This is so intriguing to my littles. (It was mine, I ordered it for me.) But on the lowest setting, I feel totally comfortable handing it to my toddler without worrying it is going to get too hot. On one of our first times out with it in my pocket, we were taking the dog for a walk and my 3 year old started to run out of energy. At the first little whine of “I’m cold.” I casually handed her “Mommy’s Handwarmer” to hold for a bit. Her eyes got big, there was an immediate spring in her step. This was special. This was cool. I was surprised and happy that this was just the little recharge needed to get back to a happy headspace and the dog got to sniff away!

4. Decide on your own approach for counting hours

Make the 1000 Hours Outside Challenge your own.

When it comes time to actually count your hours, you’re going to run into some questions. People have all the questions. This is the shortcut: Just do what feels right to you.

If anything you hear doesn’t feel right to you, don’t do it. Listen to what other people are doing and then do what makes sense for your own family. Make it a point to reflect a bit as you go and tweak anything that would make the process better for you. There are no rules, there’s no judge, its not a competition – we all just want to get more outside.

An important thing to be mindful of here is the mental load of tracking the hours. When my youngest was born, I had to stop tracking our time. There were too many instances where I would go nap with the baby and everyone else would head outside. I quickly decided it was not worth trying to track things that happened while I was sleeping. Anything I tried to piece together didn’t feel like real numbers so the tracker wasn’t even making me feel good about our efforts. C’est la vie. We made an effort to go outside and no one wrote down any data.

5. Come up with a strategy for logging the hours right from the start

It is a mistake to underestimate the record keeping aspect of this challenge. If you miss a few days here and there and start to feel like your tracker isn’t truly capturing your efforts, you will lose motivation and stop tracking. (That is a bit of my life story right there.) You want that tracker to be a point of pride, something that reinforces your new habits each time you see it – and a reminder to get outside today!

First, print it out and hang it in a high traffic area. If you have a pinterest-worthy home command center, that is exactly where it belongs. Hang it by the door or where you hang your keys.

Second, how good are you good with numbers? I am spectacularly not good. We could be outside for 20 minutes and I’d be out there guestimating its been about 3 hours. It also takes me a bit to figure out how long 11:45am-1:20pm is. Math is not fun for me and for me to be successful here, I needed to not have to do math.

How I track for the 1000 Hours Outside Challenge

I use an app called Baby Manager, I already had it on my phone (because, babies) and there is a handy “Walk” button. The app saves a record of the walk – and does the math for me! I tend to just start and stop however often is needed and then batch update my paper tracker every couple of days when I have a minute to get caught up.

The batch updates also make it easier to get credit for 12 minutes here, 17 minutes there – over a few days, those extra minutes that I would have otherwise rounded off add up to their own hour.

Once I capture the time on my paper tracker, I delete the entry from my phone so that I don’t accidentally record the same hours.

Any app that captures and records time like this would work!

Here are a few other ideas for systems to help inspire you and find what works best for you:

1. Take a screenshot of your phone’s lock screen to take a picture of your clock when you head out and when you come in.
2. Use the stopwatch on your phone. Just be sure to record the time right when you come in or you risk losing the information.
3. Purchase the official 1000 Hours Outside app.

6. Don’t underestimate your own backyard

When my first child was a toddler, I excitedly signed us up for a nature program. I anticipated grand adventure days out in the fresh air. The class was wonderful and I would highly recommend signing up for such things but I quickly realized that on class day, we actually got less outside time. First, our morning was focused on getting sorted and out the door. Then, the class was an hour. Lastly, my kiddo would fall asleep on the way home for a good nap. It was absolutely time well spent, but it was afternoon before we were ready to head outside to play. Most of the day had passed and only one hour went onto the tracker.

The point being: Don’t feel like you have to be going out and doing something to get outside time. It’s not the grand adventure challenge, its the Hours Outside challenge! You will clock more hours by adding the simple things to your everyday life: Go for a walk around the neighborhood after dinner. Spend the morning riding bikes just around the driveway. Bring boardgames and books and toys outside into the backyard for a relaxing afternoon. The luxury of just stepping out your door and enjoying the outside from right there is just that, quite the luxury.

7. Baby Steps: 1000 Hours Outside Challenge

When I was interested in taking on tracking for the first time as a parent of two, I didn’t set out with a goal in mind. I told myself I was going to capture the hours to see where we were at just naturally doing our thing. I felt like we spent a lot of time outside already and was curious to see how we would stack up without even trying. If you are in a similar space, I can endorse this mindset shift. It was a great help to get me going with tracking without added pressure to be pushing a goal.

If 1,000 tiny dots feels like too much to start with, just focus on the first 100 hours. I have been having a little fun and created two printables to help get you started. So what will it be – flowers or ladybugs?

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