For the second year in a row, I participated in Laura Vanderkam's time tracking challenge. She's been tracking her time for something like 7+ years straight. I have no desire to do this on an ongoing basis, but it's fun to track it once a year. I do this for informational/observational purposes only. She offers to review your time log but I didn't send it to her because I don't really feel like anything necessarily needs to change. I'm pretty happy with all that I get done over the course of a week, especially in this stage of life when I have little kids that demand a lot of attention and care!
So here is how it shaped up. Last year, I used %s in the graph but I switched to hours this year. With spending, I use percentages because I am not comfortable sharing dollar amounts. But we all have 168 hours in every week so why anonymize how I spent my time!
I won't delve into each category but will call out a few.
Sleep: 60 hours, which averages to about 8.5 hours per night probably seems ridiculously high to many. But after wearing a FitBit for over 5 years, I've learned that I need to be in bed for 8.5 hours to get 7-7.5 hours of sleep/night. I typically turn my lights off at 9:30 and get up around 5:45-6. I also recognize that I have higher/different sleep needs than the average person thanks to having RA. It was helpful for me to see several people with autoimmune disorders comment on their higher sleep needs on a recent
post by Laura about setting a bedtime. I wish I needed less sleep - it would make fitting exercise in much easier. But I can't control the fact that I have a crappy autoimmune disorder. Getting enough sleep is unfortunately a big part of managing my disease.
Social time: The week of January 9th had SO MANY SOCIAL PLANS!! This is not a typical week for me, but Laura is known to say there is no typical week. That week, I brought lunch to a friend that had a baby in late October, had dinner plus a fun post-dinner activity to celebrate a friend's birthday, a zoom with a far away friend around lunch time on a weekday, and a family social gathering on Saturday evening. It was probably a little too much for one week - and that's even with one thing got cancelled due to freezing rain! I usually limit myself to 2 social gatherings/week, but this week I had to break that rule. But how wonderful is it that I can actually see people again after not being able to for years during the pandemic? Even though I am an introvert, I really value connecting with people in person!
Work: The number of hours at work is on the light side, but I took 2 hours out of the day on Monday to bring my friend lunch, and then took a couple of hours off on Tuesday of that week to get my hair cut/colored. My hair person has 3 young kids so only cuts hair during work hours - which I totally understand! But gone are the days of a weeknight evening haircut. Now I take time off to get my hair done but usually only see her 2-3 times/year. And then on Friday, I took an hour to catch up with a friend over zoom. I think my number of hours at work is probably closer to 38-42 typically. Luckily, I do not work a TON of hours. That was not always the case as I used to work 7a-5:30 or later when I worked in a different part of the asset management industry.
Kids: Whoa, we spend a lot of time with our kids. Yes, I spend less time with my kids than I would if I was a stay-at-home-mom, but 36 hours is not an insignificant amount of time! And a lot of those hours are very hands-on, like going to gymnastics, reading books, going to the library, etc.
Couple time: This number probably seems a bit low. But Phil and I commute to work together when I go to the office, so we have that time together, too, although he is not a morning person so our rides in are very quiet and I usually spend that time playing Spelling Bee and Wordle! A bit chunk of the kid time is spent with him, too. I usually watch something with him for 30-45 minutes after the boys are in bed and then head up to bed to read.
Admin: This is a catch-all category that covers things like meal prep and laundry. I tried to make my time log as general as possible so I could use countif formulas in excel to create a handy dandy graph. Can you tell I am a finance nerd?
Year-over-year changes
I thought it would be interesting to look at how my use of time changed year-over-year since I tracked the exact same week in 2022.
Well, that week in 2022 ended up being a very weird week. Will got tubes on Monday morning and then came down with a virus that sent us back to the doctor later that week - hence the higher number of hours spent at the doctor that week and the very low amount of working hours. I do wonder how many hours a year I spend at the doctor, though!!
Social time was a lot lower then, too. But Will was still nursing at bedtime so I did not make plans that required me to miss bedtime. Plus we didn't eat inside restaurants until late Feb 2022 to protect me from getting covid. Now that I don't HAVE to be there for bedtime, it gives me the freedom to go to dinners and things like that.
Interesting, reading was only different by an hour. I spent 8.5 hours reading in 2022 and 7.5 in 2023. I shouldn't be too surprised as I always make time for reading no matter what is going on in life! I know this will get more challenging when the boys bed times are later so I am enjoying having a solid block of time to ourselves while we can!
Lastly, I am happy to see exercise was higher in 2023. I was home with a sick kid for much of that week so fitting workouts in was clearly challenging. But I'm glad 2023 Lisa was healthy and able to workouts for 4.5 hours total. That total does include walks taken to hit my daily goal of being outside for 23 minutes/day. I don't really think of that as "exercise" but for time tracking, that is how I classified that time.
You may be wondering where blogging fits into all of this? I used a 30 minutes time blocking excel spreadsheet and there wasn't a 30 minute block I dedicated to blogging/reading blogs. I fit blogging in during the day when I'm waiting for a database to refresh or a file to save, etc etc. I was not granular enough with my time tracking to highlight things like reading/commenting on blogs.
Have you ever tracked your time?
15 comments:
This is fascinating!
I also need what I consider to be "more" sleep (8 hours a night) and I've spent years trying to somehow reduce it or feeling resentment towards it... but it is what it is. Now I just accept that 10pm is my bedtime, I'm not a late night person, and I'd much rather go to sleep early and wake up at 6am for that quiet house time.
I also have a higher sleep need. My Garmin tracks my sleep and I average 8.5 pretty consistently. I would probably sleep 9 hours a night if my schedule allowed. I think the catch-22 is that I need to sleep more because I exercise so much, but sleeping more cuts into exercise time. My other issue is that my sleep each night is super variable - 6.5 hours if I have to get up super early, 10+ hours Saturday night into Sunday. It's one of those things that's not super ideal but, on balance, it's the best I can do right tnow.
I have tried to track my time but I have too many overlaps and I guess I could do a math problem to extract the data but I do not feel like it. For example, your couple time consists of commuting and watching TV, so I had a hard time deciding if I want to see how much TV I watch, how much time I spend commuting, OR how much time I spend having couple time. I also very often will listen to an audiobook while riding, running, doing housework, commuting etc. So...is that reading or commuting or...? What is Laura's advice on that?
PS I love the COUNTIF and of course SUMIF and really use the TEXT formula and the & sign a lot to create and fill in phrases that I use over and over.
I have done the time tracking twice with Laura and, like you, each time something seems very atypical, but I think that's true of almost every week if we actually stopped to track our time.
I did the 15-minute increment spreadsheet and was VERY granular, but found that lots of times I had the same thing spread over an hour or two so could just copy and paste the activity. It was a lot of fun and more insightful than I was expecting that particular week...but I also don't think I'll do it again until next January!
Is that a lot of sleep? That seems about right to me. I try to get eight hours a night and that means I'm in bed for 8.5-9 hours and I don't have children OR a chronic illness. I don't think that seems excessive at all. You need sleep to be able to productive in every other aspect of your life!
I think our "couple time" would be very low. It's rare that we're just hanging out together and one or both of us isn't doing something else. For instance, my husband might watch tv while I read, but I would categorize that as time spent reading, not time together. I agree with Kyria that it would be hard for me to categorize some activities (is it walking the dog or listening to an audiobook?), but I think these time studies are fun to look at!
@NGS - I must read blogs of a lot of people with low/lower sleep needs. I know of several that go to bed after me, and get up earlier. I would run myself into the ground if I did that!!
OOOOOH this is fascinating!! I am generally pretty happy with how I spend my time (except for stupid social media use, which is much lower since I started commenting more frequently on my own blog comments and on other blogs-- and the blog interaction is time better spent, I think) BUT I really need to sleep more. Right now, I am luck to get anything over 6 hours/night, and I would like to be much closer to 8. It;s really hard to stay up late with teens (but essential because they are only happy,bubbly fun people post-9:30pm AND ALSO get up early enough to be done exercising before Minnie wakes up in the 6's. The hour I spend exercising every AM and the 30 or so minutes Ben and I spend together after the teens go downstairs in the ONLY TIME ALL DAY that I am kid-free unless it's a day I work from campus. YIKES.
I have never tracked my time, not consistently. Every time I think I should try it, I get bored of doing it within a day or two. But maybe I should, I found your numbers so interesting!
Wow. How interesting. The only time I've ever tracked time -- at least in a written way -- is when I'm either working hourly (like a painting commission) or back when I was doing project work, especially for grant reporting, that had to be documented. I think I'd be freaked to track it now. I'd have way too much online time!
I love this time-tracking exercise! I'm going to do mine in March and I've been looking forward to it, haha. It will be interesting to see how much time compares to 2022.
I think it's AWESOME that you prioritize sleep! I am trying to get better about that because I know my mental health does better when I'm getting at least 8 hours of sleep. Last year, I averaged 6.5 hours and that is not enough sleep for me!
This is so fascinating, and I love that you compared this year to last year. I have never tracked my time, except for in my first job when I tracked my time down to the quarter hour.
I really wanted to join this time but just forget to track on day 1 so I gave up. it's so interesting that the way you spent your time didn't change that much.
I am guessing I'll have 60+ sleep time too as I don't always still right away, probably 10+ hours exercising (luxury), 30+ hrs working, maybe 5-7 hours reading, and then kids, will also be low in couples time.
maybe I should really do it once to know the exact number. any tip how to remember to track?
I was also going to do this, and then... didn't. Every time I time track, I get frustrated with so many fragmented chunks of time where I'm like, eating and working at the same time. Or cleaning up the house and also talking to the kids or helping with homework. Etc. I know you don't worry about the granularity of some of that, but I tend to feel like if I don't account for some of that stuff, then it really isn't accurate... but it's impossible to be totally accurate, I know! But I think about how the time adds up that I spend on my phone. I can have HOURS on my phone, yet I NEVER just sit and like, scroll my phone for 3 hours straight. Or even 30 minutes. It's crazy how those little seconds can add up. I guess I wish I could a better picture of all the totals. Even like if I say I'm working, but like you, I take 5 minutes to read and comment on a blog- how many times in a week or year do I do that? What's the total? You know? It would be nice to know how that adds up. :) But this is great- and I also love that you compared to last year! SO smart to do the same week! I do a little recap in my journal where I list in shorthand sentences what I did the whole day before, so it's kind of a mini time tracker- I can't see total hours, but I can see how I spent my days, anyway.
Wow, it's really interesting to see everything broken down like this. I'm very impressed by your sleep hours! Sleep is something I'm working on right now. It's SO important for health, and it's good you make it a priority. It's also interested how much kid time you had- more than work time, in this particular week at least. I know you love your time with your kids, but it is also work. So it's kind of like you have two full-time jobs.
i can see why you wouldn't want to track your time all the time, but it does seem like a worthwhile exercise every once in a while.
These posts are so interesting. I tracked my time last year and was all set up to go and do it again this year, but then fell off the bandwagon halfway through the week. Woomp.
I love that you're making sleep a priority, because I think it really is so important to our wellbeing.
Post a Comment