Fun fact, I’ve continued time tracking! And specifically, I’ve continued tallying up my category totals.
I had tracked my time in an informal, ‘journaly’ way for a long time in the past, but had never categorized my time before.
After I did a week, I was like, Ooh, this is interesting! But then I felt like I wanted to see more data, because… 1 week seems like a small sample size.
So I just kept going. For me it’s so easy, because I work at a computer. I just leave the spreadsheet open and fill it out a couple times per day. I am also very good at being able to fill in blanks later, though I don’t often need to. (Tip- if you do have blank spaces to retrospectively fill in and you can’t remember exactly what you did, check for time stamps on any photos you took, time stamps on text messages or phone calls, etc. to help re-build the scaffolding of your day! This helps me a lot.)
I now have 4 FULL weeks of time tracking data. And pie charts and breakdowns of daily totals, averages per day, and average % per week. 🙂
Some of it is not super interesting and/or expected- I already had a good feel for how much I was sleeping, working and walking Charlie, etc.
But some areas weren’t as clear. Let’s look at a few.
*A couple of disclaimers:
- My mom was here for most of Week 3, which skewed some of the numbers greatly from “normal”.
- The averages are just that- AVERAGES over the whole week. So actual time spent per day can vary wildly. I did find it interesting how one day I might have 0 hours of something, and another day I might have 7!
- Some categories are kind of a mish-mash. For example, “Ivan” time is time just spent with him, but “Family” time would be with kids or other family (and Ivan too, sometimes). There can be overlap between Household or Personal Time, too.
Household
This is a pretty significant chunk of the week, actually. Not totally surprising, but nice to see my feelings validated on paper that yes, I DO indeed spend a good amount of time each week taking care of our household! 🙃
I feel this is a slightly low estimate, too, because some household time may be counted as “family” if I was multi-tasking (e.g. hanging out and talking with a kid but also loading the dishwasher).
Examples of things included here:
- straightening house
- finances/ Monarch updates
- cleaning the house
- dishes
- meal planning/ grocery shopping
- cooking
- phone calls/ pharmacy/ dr stuff
- travel planning
- yard work
- decluttering
Most weeks I averaged between 14-20 hours per week, or between 8-12% of my time. (*The week my mom was here, I flat out did less, or she did some of my normal things, OR I counted the time as “family” because I was visiting with her while doing household tasks.)
This is definitely a category with big peaks and valleys depending on the day.
Exercise
This is one where I was actually a bit surprised.
Observations:
- My daily average (about ~45 min a day) is lower than it sometimes ‘feels’. I think in the past I’ve told myself stories that exercise takes up “so much time”. But it’s really only ~3% of my week.
- I’m very consistent here! This is good.
- On my 3 gym days I tend to spend 1-1.5 hours (total) exercising, my 3 home/ cardio days are about 0.5 hours, and rest days have 0 hours. Dog walks (usually another ~0.5 hours/ day) are not counted here.
Not to toot my own horn, but I feel like I’m in pretty excellent physical shape right now overall. Like, I have muscle definition, I’m feeling pretty strong and lean, I’m generally happy with my physique (is any woman ever totally happy with her physique?).
This feels like evidence that I do not, in fact, NEED to spend “hours upon hours” exercising in order to get good results.
I’m really satisfied with my current routine. It feels kind of like the epitome of ‘work smarter, not harder‘. 3 days full body heavy strength (gym), 3 days HIIT/cardio/supplemental strength (home), 1 day rest which is supposed to be yoga but I haven’t done it lately, so usually that day is pure rest. 😆 (And, truthfully, I sometimes miss 1 of the cardio days, too. So those weeks it’s 2 rest days.)
Spending about 5-5.75 hours/ week exercising seems very reasonable and doable.
Personal Misc.
This one is kind of a crapshoot. Tracking my time helped me see that there really IS a lot of random misc. time in my days!
Think things like:
- transitions between activities
- random puttering around the house -> there is a lot of this!
- looking at random article on phone
- eating (by myself)
- laying in bed, awake, after my alarm goes off
- talking to an acquaintance outside the gym for 15 min
- looking something up online
- getting home from gym and putting gym bag away, filling dog water bowl, etc.
- running to the gas station to buy an iced tea. (What IS that time?? It’s not “household”… I don’t consider that “leisure”…so it goes into Personal Misc.)
Basically anything that doesn’t fit neatly into another category goes in here. Ha.
And it’s a lot!! Apparently around 6-8% of my life is spent doing “random stuff”. lol.
Looking at the logs, it’s mostly little 15-30 min. snips of time. However, I did count a few longer stretches, like researching and buying my Garth Brooks tickets, looking at sheet music online, church, etc.
I tend to count any scrolling or texting in here, too. (But since I’ve been using Opal, my Facebook time has become very minimal! I want Opal for soda so I can moderate it as well! 😩) I have quite a few entries though that say “phone/misc.” which could be like, standing in the kitchen reading/answering texts, quickly checking a blog, maybe checking my email, etc. I guess this could maybe be considered “leisure”, but it feels more… “misc.” in these cases.
Family
I’ve been feeling sad sometimes about lack of time with the boys lately, as they’re older. It’s nice to see that this time is NOT actually zero, however!
While I might wish it were even more, I’m spending over an hour per day, on average, with family. (This does not count solo time with Ivan.) This is definitely another category with big peaks and valleys.
Week 3 is super high because my parents were here and I literally logged 15.75 hours with “family” on a Saturday, plus another 8 Friday and 8 Sunday.
Ivan
I’m definitely in the era where I’m getting a lot more time with Ivan again.
Some days it’s very low, but most days I have logged at least 1-2.5 hours with Ivan. (Ignore Week 3- he was present at much of that time, too, but I counted it as Family because my parents were there.)
This time tends to be walks together, watching a show, eating at a restaurant -> this is a big one!, going to a movie, hanging out and talking, etc.
It’s nice to see that we’re consistently spending a lot of quality time together! 🙂
I’ll stop there.
I have some other categories, too, to account for solo leisure (average about ~1-1.5 hours/day- mostly during my morning routine time), blog stuff, Charlie (not as much as I thought!), driving (so LOW right now compared to past), work, personal care (-> this one is interesting- consistently ~1.25 hours per day, total, every week, between a.m. + p.m.), sleep, etc.
It’s pretty fascinating to track time and get ACTUAL DATA. I do think it’s true that we (people) tell ourselves lots of stories about our time that might not actually be accurate if we examined the data. (“I don’t have time for xyz!!” or “I never have time with my husband!” or “I spend ALL my time working/ doing chores/ fill in the blank”.)
Then again, doing this can help validate areas where we DO in fact spend a lot of time, and we need to be realistic about it. Maybe it just is what it is and we need to allow for it (like my personal care time!), or maybe there’s opportunity to trim some down, if desired, or use the time more wisely/ intentionally.
Daily Gratitude:
I am grateful that Charlie did well yesterday! He had to have his teeth deep cleaned under general anesthesia, so he was at the vet all day. (His breed is prone to teeth issues and he will NOT let me brush his teeth…). He had quite a lot of tartar build up, but fortunately no need for any extractions, all looked good on x-rays! He did great. The vet assistant handed me this adorable bag with his anti-inflammatory meds in it when I picked him up, hand drawn by one of the staff:
GRATEFUL KAE 