I spent last week time logging! I’ve done this in the past (2022, 2023, and 2024). I skipped last year, but I was influenced by SHU and Kae to try my hand at it again this year.
In the past, I’ve used a spreadsheet with each day broken into 15-minute increments, which is exceedingly tedious, and tallying everything up at the end of the week takes a while. This time around, I used the Toggl app to keep track, and it went so much better. While it was still a bit tedious to start and stop a timer when I did any activity (or try to remember how long I spent on a specific activity if I forgot to start a timer), it was really nice that the app does all the math for you! I still wanted to break things down by day so I could look at trends, but it was a lot easier to just pull the time from my Toggl app.
As always, time logging can be a bit difficult because it’s not often that we’re only doing one thing. For example, when I’m eating dinner, I’m usually also watching TV and coloring. When I’m on the phone with my mom, I might also be working. When I’m working through my morning routine, I’m also doing chores like tidying and emptying the dishwasher. I went with the primary activity in those instances.
Another thing I changed is that I removed working and sleeping hours entirely. For me, I’m more interested in how much free time I really have. How much time do I spend on chores in a given week vs blogging vs podcast duties? I am not someone who struggles with work/life balance, and I tend to get 7ish hours of sleep a night, so I’m not too concerned with how I’m spending that time.
So, with all of those disclaimers, let’s get into how I spent my free time last week!
Social (22% – 17 hours, 38 minutes)
Social events took up the majority of my week, and that’s because I had a much busier week than usual! I had dinner and a book event with Lynn on Wednesday, dinner and a show with friends on Friday, a long afternoon spent with my mom on Saturday, and a writing date on Sunday (which is half-social, half-novel writing). Typically, I’d probably have maybe 1-2 social events in a week.
In 2022 and 2023, my social time was much lower (by more than half!), but we were also not fully out of pandemic life, so that makes sense. In 2024, my social hours looked similar to this year, so I guess I chose another socially heavy week to document!
Cooking/Eating (10% – 7 hours, 47 minutes)
Who knew I spent so much time cooking and eating? Or maybe just under 8 hours isn’t a lot, especially for those with children, ha. This is on par with 2022 and 2023 numbers, although 2025 was a lot lower.
The days I spent the most time cooking/eating were Monday and Thursday, and that’s because I actually cooked a meal for dinner. My lowest was Friday because I had to scarf down lunch between meetings, and then my dinner was tied into social time.
Chores (9% – 6 hours, 49 minutes)
I combined cleaning tasks as well as regular tidying and organizational tasks into one big chores category. I also built my new 16-cube shelf this week, and counted that towards chores. Four out of the seven days, I spent over an hour doing chores (my highest-spend day was Tuesday at 1 hour, 44 minutes). Friday and Saturday were the days I spent the least time on chores, likely because I was much more social on those days.
This time is way, way, way above what I logged in previous years. Did I even clean my apartment then?!
Phone (8% – 6 hours, 35 minutes)
You know, I’m pretty pleased with this number! This is less than an hour a day on my phone, and that time is way down from the previous years (in 2023 and 2024, it was over 10 hours!). Phone time mainly comprises playing games (I’m a sucker for the NYT games and Happy Color), scrolling Instagram (I have a 30-minute time limit, and don’t go on the app every day), and sometimes online shopping. Granted, my screen time is much higher than this because I use my phone while watching TV or in short increments as I switch between tasks at work, which I didn’t factor in. But all in all, I’m happy my overall time spent solely on my phone has decreased dramatically.
Naps (6% – 4 hours, 56 minutes)
This is another category where my time spent went way down! I took three naps this week – one on Monday when I was feeling crummy and just needed to get away from my desk for a bit, one on Friday, and one on Sunday. The Sunday nap was the longest of them all (just over two hours), but the other naps were shorter than 90 minutes. This may seem like long naps to some of you, but trust me that this is a massive improvement. I used to have to set an alarm to make sure I didn’t nap for 4+ hours (and I can see from my time log that my weekend naps in previous years were 4 hours or longer). Now I am usually good after an hour or so, and don’t even need to set an alarm to wake up!
Reading (6% – 4 hours, 26 minutes)
I didn’t spend a ton of time reading this week, probably because my week was so busy and so was my weekend. It amounts to just over 30 minutes of reading time each day, which is usually how long I try to read every weekday, with longer reading bursts on the weekend (although I read less this weekend than usual). My biggest reading days were Monday and Tuesday (1 hour and 1 hour, 4 minutes respectively), and my lowest was Saturday (22 minutes). Audiobook listening time isn’t added to this total since I listen while doing other things.
This reading percentage follows a trend in my other time tracking logs—every year, my reading time lessens. In 2022, I spent 9.5 hours reading. In 2023, it was down by two hours to 7.5 hours of reading. And in 2024, it was down another two hours to 5.5 hours of reading. I mean, at least I only went down by an hour this year, but damn. Every year, I seem to finish fewer and fewer books, and I can see right here why that may be.
Morning Routine (5% – 3 hours, 35 minutes)
My morning routine this week was a little messed up, as I skipped it completely on two days (Monday and Saturday). Oops! And then two of the other days, my morning routine was over an hour long because I did the whole shebang—shower, morning routine, drying hair, styling hair, doing make-up, etc. My morning routine also includes things like making the bed, starting a load of laundry, emptying the dishwasher, taking my meds, etc., so some of this falls into chores/life admin, but it’s all grouped as one event.
Podcast (4% – 3 hours, 32 minutes)
I don’t spend 3.5 hours every week on podcast stuff, but this was a recording week, so it was busier than usual. This time comprises building out an outline, filling out two outlines for episodes, and the act of recording the episodes themselves. We recorded two episodes this week, which took just under two hours. Some weeks, I might spend maybe 15-20 minutes at most to create Instagram graphics. There is more I should be doing for the podcast on the weeks we’re not recording, but there are only so many hours in the day.
Mom FaceTime (4% – 3 hours, 29 minutes)
Honestly, this is probably a lot higher, but sometimes I chat with my mom while I’m working or doing other tasks, so I didn’t include those phone calls in my time log. This number is down from 2022 and 2023, but much higher than 2024. Our highest FaceTime day was Wednesday (58 minutes), and we did have a goose egg on Saturday (but that’s just because I spent five hours hanging out with her that day, ha).
TV/Coloring (4% – 3 hours, 4 minutes)
This is a new category for my time log, and it’s not a pretty one. What I do is I sit down with lunch or dinner and put on a TV show. When I’m done eating, I transition to coloring, and sometimes I will continue watching shows because I just don’t want to stop coloring. Is it a bad habit? I don’t know. It’s soothing and a little creative and fun. But it definitely cuts into the time I could be spending doing other things. My highest-spent days were Tuesday and Sunday, where I spent almost an hour coloring while watching TV.
Blogging (3% – 2 hours, 38 minutes)
This comprises four posts I wrote start-to-finish: my Wednesday post on my beige flags, my Friday TGIF post, my One Photo a Day post on Saturday, and then my Monday reading post. That averages out to spending around 40 minutes per blog post, although the photo post definitely takes less time to write. That post only took me 15 minutes, so when we take it out of the equation, it’s around 48 minutes per post. Almost an hour to write a blog post! And those were pretty easy blog posts that didn’t require a ton of editing, inserting extra photos, etc.
Reading Blogs (3% – 2 hours, 33 minutes)
I am perpetually behind on my blog reading, and that’s because I just do not devote the amount of time necessary to keep up with my feed. There were two days when I spent less than 15 minutes reading blogs, and then one day when I spent nearly an hour, and I didn’t seem to make a dent in the number of unread posts. I’m just going to be forever behind on commenting, and I hope that’s okay.
Evening Routine (3% – 2 hours, 22 minutes)
When I do my full evening routine, it can take 20-30 minutes, depending on how tired I am. But I don’t always do my full evening routine. I try to do some of it (the most important pieces like brushing my teeth and tidying up my home), but I’ll usually skip most of the skincare routine and some of the more life admin tasks like filling in my One Line a Day journal and checking on my daily goals.
Novel (3% – 2 hours, 16 minutes)
I am slowly plugging away at my novel. During my writing date, I spent 1 hour, 22 minutes writing, and then spent about an hour the rest of the week working on my story. It’s not a lot, but on a busy week where I had lots of podcast work to do, I’m happy with that!
Errands (3% – 1 hour, 58 minutes)
Some of this was grocery shopping, some of this was dealing with stupid adulting tasks like Amazon returns, and some of this was driving around to and from said errands. This total is lower than how much time I spent running errands in 2022 and 2023, but much higher than in 2024. Likely, there are just some weeks where I spend more time running errands than other weeks. (Captain Obvious over here.)
Driving (2% – 1 hour, 56 minutes)
I did a lot more driving than this, but a lot of times, I categorized that as “social” (for example, driving to an event) or errands, if I was driving to the grocery store or something like that. But some of this drive time didn’t have a specific category, so I threw it in its own category. I could probably combine this with errands if I wanted to be more pedantic about it.
Medical (2% – 1 hour, 35 minutes)
Oh man. I didn’t even have a medical category in 2022 or 2023, but it showed up on my 2024 time log thanks to annoying sciatica pain. And now it’s just a normal part of my week. I had to get bloodwork done, had to give myself my first injection (!), and spent far too much time asking ChatGPT why I’m suddenly so hot all the time and what I can do to help with relentless heartburn. Having a chronic inflammatory condition is fun!
Getting Ready (2% – 1 hours, 23 minutes)
How does getting ready differ from my morning routine? Sometimes, it does happen in the morning (like it did on Saturday), but more often than not, this is when I’m getting ready for some sort of social time. I spent a few minutes primping before meeting up with Lynn on Wednesday, and a much longer time getting ready for my dinner-and-a-show date on Friday. That one took over an hour.
Life Admin (1% – 1 hour, 5 minutes)
I was really curious about my life admin category, and I really thought I spent more time on it any given week! This category includes setting up my weekly budget, reviewing my goals, setting up the new weekly spread in my planner, etc. So I guess all of this doesn’t take as much time as I thought!
This post is getting long enough, so I’ll save all of my insights for another post. For now, I have a good idea of how I’m spending my free time and can now look to how to better optimize it for my life.
What do you think would be your highest category (minus work/sleep) if you logged your time?
