How to Train a Dog When You Work Full Time

Fifteen minutes a day, split into three five minute blocks, beats one hour on Saturday. Not by a little, by a lot. Dogs learn through frequent short repetition with sleep in between, and a five minute session before work will do more for your dog than a marathon weekend session where he checks out after twelve minutes. If you work full time, you have enough time. You probably do not have the schedule.

The other half of the answer is that most of your training does not need to be training sessions at all. It needs to be built into things you are already doing, which costs you no additional minutes.

The three block weekday schedule

• Block one, five minutes before you leave. Feed his breakfast as training. Every piece of kibble is a rep. Sit, down, place, come, hand touch. Nothing new, just reps on what he knows. This block also drains a little energy before the alone time.
• Block two, ten minutes when you get home. This is the one that matters most and it should happen before you sit down, because once you sit down it is not happening. Leash on, out front, work the walk. Loose leash, sits at curbs, three or four recalls on a long line in the yard.
• Block three, five minutes in the evening. In front of the TV. Place command with duration while you watch something. This is free training, because you were going to sit there anyway.

That is twenty minutes of real work on a weekday and most of it is layered onto things you already do. Skip a block when life happens. Four out of seven days with this structure will get you a well trained dog inside four months.

Train inside the routine, not beside it

This is the concept that changes everything for busy owners. Every daily transition in your dog's life is a free training rep, and there are maybe thirty of them a day.

• Food bowl. He sits and waits, bowl goes down, he eats on a release word. That is a two second impulse control rep, twice a day, seven days a week.
• Doors. He sits before any door opens. Front door, back door, car door. Ten reps a day without trying.
• Leash on. He lies on his bed while it clips. Covered in detail in my post on the leash going on.
• Coming inside. He waits at the threshold and comes in on your word rather than barreling past you.
• Stairs, if you have them. He waits at the top or bottom until released.

None of these take extra time. They take remembering, which is harder, but a week of deliberate effort and they become how your house runs.

Solve the eight hour hole in the middle of the day

Training is the easy part of a full time schedule. The hard part is what happens between nine and five, and no amount of good obedience makes up for a dog with nine hours of nothing. Pick at least one.

1. A midday walk. A neighbor, a family member, a teenager down the street, or a paid walker. Thirty minutes at the halfway point solves the majority of the problem.
2. A frozen food toy given as you walk out the door. Twenty to forty minutes of licking and chewing puts most dogs to sleep for the morning. Cheap, easy, and genuinely effective.
3. Daycare two or three days a week if your dog actually enjoys it. Watch him at pickup, not at drop off. Some dogs come home wrecked and worse behaved, and those dogs should not go.
4. A dog door to a secure yard for a housebroken adult dog.

Weekends are for proofing, not for catching up

Do not try to bank training on Saturday. Use the weekend for the thing weekdays cannot give you: new locations. One new environment a week, thirty minutes, running the same commands your dog already does perfectly at home. A parking lot, a hardware store, the far end of a park, a friend's driveway.

That is how the obedience becomes real. A dog who only performs in the kitchen has kitchen obedience, and going to five new places over five weekends is worth more than five extra hours of drilling at home.

What to expect and what to cut

On this schedule a normal adult dog gets solid house manners and reliable basics in three to four months. A puppy takes longer because you are also housebreaking and the sessions have to be shorter. Do not try to work on everything at once. Pick two goals for the month, run them in the blocks above, and ignore the rest. Owners who try to fix pulling, jumping, recall, crate crying, and counter surfing simultaneously make no progress on any of them.

If you are behind on housebreaking or crate training, those come first, before any obedience, because they are the ones that make the eight hour day survivable.

One honest thing about your schedule

There is a version of this where the schedule does not work, and it is worth saying. A young, high drive working breed, alone for nine or ten hours with no midday break, will not be fixed by fifteen minutes of training. That is a mismatch between the dog and the hours available, and the answer is more coverage during the day rather than more obedience at night. If that is your situation, spend your money on a walker before you spend it on a trainer.

For everyone else, the limiting factor is almost never the clock. It is having a plan when you clip the leash on, and a dog with an off switch when you sit down at the end of the day. My free Calmer Dog blueprint gives you both, with sessions built for exactly this kind of schedule. Download the Calmer Dog blueprint

Ready to train your dog?

Every drill in this article comes from the WorldWide K9 Academy course library. If you want the full step by step system, start with the $5 intro course.