I have long been resistant to suggestions (mainly coming from my much more time-aware husband) that I track what I do all day: how much I work, how much I sleep, and the rest of life’s daily shuffle. Why didn’t I want to know this possibly helpful information? Well, I like to take my time, I hate feeling rushed, and I want to feel like my days have room for the unexpected. But as every other parent knows, this isn’t really possible during the “rush hour years” of having babies and raising small children. Time becomes a precious resource, at least the time that you hope to have to yourself. So by the time I read Laura Vanderkam’s 2016 New York Times article, “The Busy Person’s Lies,” I was more receptive to time tracking.
Still, as you can see if you do the math, it’s taken me two years to actually implement this strategy in my own life (after a few false starts and stops that summer). Like I said, I move slowly. Plus, it took me that long to realize I could use Vanderkam’s weekly spreadsheet (sign up for her email list to get it) on my phone with the Google Sheets app instead of the clumsier process of turning to my laptop to record my day in half hour brackets. For the past two weeks I’ve logged my time, though my focus is on sleeping, driving, and working, as those are the areas of my life I’m least aware of and could benefit the most from tweaking. I’ll start sharing some of my insights here, in case it’s helpful to anyone else.
Week One (3/26-4/1): Our routine was a little off due to my kids’ spring break from preschool. I didn’t work as much as I normally would on Monday and Tuesday. Still, I was shocked to discover I’d only spent about 21 hours on income-generating work tasks. (I receive a stipend for the classes I teach as an adjunct, so I count all teaching related hours from class prep to classroom time and grading. But for my freelance writing I try to be stricter in only counting the time I’m writing, not miscellaneous email/admin tasks, for example.) Just as Vanderkam’s article illustrates, I felt busy, but a 20-hour work week is nothing to complain about.
Right now I’m teaching four days/week at two different campuses, each about a 50 minute drive from my house. And my kids’ school, which they attend two days/week, is a 30 minute drive from home, adding more time to my teaching-related commutes on those days. Luckily, the obscene amount of driving I’m doing will come to an end later this month and I’ll be smarter about scheduling in the future now that I can see the hours in black and white. (Sure, I’m breezing through the audiobook version of Trevor Noah’s Born A Crime, but that still doesn’t make the great expense and time suck of two-plus hours/day of driving worth it.)
With my new realizations from Week One, I focused on finding more working time in Week Two. This had mixed results: overall I increased my work time by ten hours, but often at the expense of exercising and getting to bed early enough. Plus I’m just slow and error prone when I try to write at night. And as soon as I let go of my commitment to self-care, I started to feel very unhappy, which manifests as snapping at my kids and so on. The most successful part of the week was working for six hours on Saturday while my husband took the kids on an outing. So in the future I’ll look to the weekend to make up time instead of trying to work after the kids are asleep.
Do you track your time? Even if you don’t, I’d love to hear about your daily routines and tricks for finding more time in the week to do certain tasks. I geek out on other people’s time diaries and now I’m enjoying keeping my own.
Freelance Financial Writer 