In my "Resolution" post from this summer, I said I was going to try to kick the habit of considering my time as my own:
Previously, I tried to deal with the visible problem in ways that actually worsened the underlying cause. When I dieted to lose weight, I became MORE obsessed with food, and especially with "getting enough nutrition" and "getting enough to feel satisfied." When I have wrangled with time in the past, I have tried to do it through ever-more-finely-divided scheduling: Not enough time with the kids? Put them in another block on the schedule! Some scheduling is necessary, obviously, just as nutrition is necessary for the dieter, but a schedule is not going to solve the problem of undue attachment to control over my time. If anything it feeds the notion that I CAN control and own time that "belongs" to me.
But I still think it's a good idea to know how I'm spending my time; a basic axiom of my personal philosophy is Data is good. (Gathering data isn't always time well spent, of course, but the data itself is a good thing to have.)
I recently read a somewhat-fluffy book with one good central idea: 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think by Laura Vanderkam. The author has, I think, bought a little too much into the anyone-can-have-it-all fallacy, and accepts a bit too unquestioningly the way time-use researchers classify home parenting activities (is "child care" really only the hours we spend feeding, dressing, and playing with our kids? how about cleaning and cooking and gardening alongside them?) She also suggests a little too blithely that the problem of the time crunch can best be solved by paying hired help, e.g., by sending out laundry. (I recognize that it's a matter of figuring out what your time is worth and outsourcing the things that make financial sense; but still, that's going to rankle people who could never afford that kind of outlay.)
But she's still written a fairly interesting book around this core concept: Measure how you spend your time, on the scale of hours-in-a-week, and then you can look at how you're spending it and decide if you're spending it the way you want.
I've thought about making a time log for a number of years, and have always been kind of intimidated by the prospect. But this book got me into the mood to try it for a week. So I printed up seven spreadsheets marked out in fifteen-minute increments, and started writing down what I was doing periodically through the day. I started at 3 pm on a Monday, and I stopped at 3 pm the following Monday.
(My recommendation if you try this, by the way: I found that by far the easiest way to get most of it written down was to go make a record on the page every time I finished doing something. Also, not to sweat the plus-or-minus-a-few-minutes, and not to worry if it doesn't all add up because of multitasking.)
Then, on a morning with a cranky teething baby in need of lots of rocking, I sat down with a spreadsheet program and added it all up.
Next post: what I found out.
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