I spent last week time logging, and I really enjoyed the project! I downloaded Laura Vanderkam’s 168 Hours time management worksheet to log my time. I chose the worksheet that was broken down into 15-minute increments and while that made it very, very tedious to log my time, I think it allowed me to dig into the nitty-gritty of my week. I kept the worksheet up on my laptop so I could easily log my time during the day. When I was away from my computer, I made simple notes in my Notes app. I also tried to keep track in my head as I was doing things. (i.e., “OK, you woke up at 6:15,” or “You started reading at 3:00.”) It really wasn’t that difficult and I also didn’t put too much pressure on myself to get everything exactly perfect. I am not a perfectionist when it comes to stuff like this, so it helped me just enjoy the process and not take it too seriously.
One thing to note is that I tend to dual-task throughout my day, but this week, I tried to not do that just to make categorization easier. Plus, since I was working in 15-minute increments, that was the right amount of time to do one task before moving onto something else. (For example, 15 minutes of cleaning and then 15 minutes of computer time.) There were times when I did dual-task (like eating dinner while watching TV) but I would categorize the time as my main task. For example, if I watched TV while eating dinner, eating would be the category since I was watching TV because I had dinner in front of me.
All in all, it was a very rewarding process and think it would be a really fun exercise to do on an annual basis. My goal is to log the same week every year and to see how things change (or don’t change).
Here’s how my week broke down in categories:
I won’t go through every single category since most of them are self-explanatory. Instead, I’ll give you guys some big picture thoughts:
I spent 37% of my week unconscious.
Between my nighttime sleeping and my near-daily naps, I spent over a third of my week asleep. What can I say? I love to sleep! I regularly logged around 7 hours of sleep a night, and also logged many afternoon naps. There were some cat naps during the workday (45 minutes, on average) and then some really long naps on the weekend (4 hours). And no, taking a 4-hour nap during the day does not affect my sleep at night. I think I must be part-cat, with how much sleep I need! If I don’t set an alarm during my weekend nap, I will sleep for a really long time. Hence why I spent so much of my week unconscious!
I spent 21% of my week on my hobbies (reading, computer time, playing on my phone, blogging, watching TV, watching ASMR videos).
I broke down my hobbies into a few categories:
- Reading – The hobby that got the most attention this week. Yay!
- Playing on my phone – Most of this is playing Happy Color or phone games while listening to a podcast.
- Computer time – Reading blogs, reading Reddit, reading emails (I subscribe to a lot of e-newsletters), responding to blog comments, working on my blog recategorization project, etc.
- Blogging – I only worked on two blog posts last week (one published on Thursday, the other the following Monday) but it still amounted to 5 hours of my week!
- Watching TV – Just over 4 hours of TV watching this week. That’s probably lower than average.
- Watching ASMR videos – I spent about 30 minutes almost every night watching ASMR videos before going to sleep. They calm me down so much! (The exception was Saturday as I was exhausted when I went to bed and didn’t need any help falling asleep!)
It’s fun that I was able to devote almost a quarter of my week to my hobbies! The benefit of being single and childless, haha.
I spent 4 hours total on the phone with my mom.
I was curious as to how much time I spent talking to my mom on the phone on a typical week. We FaceTime each other constantly, usually a few times a day just to catch up. (Keep in mind: We live near each other and I also see her in person multiple times a week.) This week, it was 4 full hours of random chats throughout the week.
I spent 10 hours being social.
It was a big week for being social! I don’t think I normally spend 6% of my week being social, so this is likely an anomaly. It will be interesting to compare this category from year to year. There was lots of mom time, game night with my brother and nephews, and a reading date with a friend.
I spent 4% of my week on my morning/nighttime routines.
It was surprising to me how much time I spent on my morning/nighttime routines. Obviously, I know it takes me a while to get through my nighttime routine, but my morning routine can be just as long. It was definitely eye-opening to see how long these routines take me, and to give myself a friggin break!
All in all, this was quite a fun exercise for me. I enjoyed detailing out my time in this way and learning how much time I spend in certain areas of my life. This was a pretty normal week in my life, although it was a week when my workload was much lower than usual and when I had more social plans than usual, but nothing will be 100% normal during any week, will it? It will be fun to compare this week to the same week in 2023!
Are you a napper?
I love that you have a category for puttering!
And I am astonished that blogging took up so little time. Your posts are always so well-thought out, and not short, and usually have photos. I would have thought you spent much more time on it than 5 hours. You must be extremely efficient in your blogging-time management.
This is such a sweet comment, thank you! I think it helped that I only wrote two posts during this time period—and one of those was already partly written when I sat down to finish it. So that helped! I felt like 5 hours was such a long time, haha, but maybe in the grand scheme of things, it’s not.
This is a fun exercise and I plan on doing it sometime in the next quarter. I guess I’m still trying to figure out the logistics of the dual-activity times. I am not sure I can prioritize what the “main thing” is, but I guess I should give it a go. Like you, I think it’s more of an art than a precise science, so maybe I’ll just wing it.
I sometimes nap, but I realized long ago that napping is a coping mechanism I use for me to deal with depression and anxiety and if I feel like a nap now, I try to get up and a) drink a glass of water and b) do a physical activity like walk the dog or ten minutes of yoga. If I still feel like a nap is necessary after those two things, I take one! I love sleep.
When Lisa did her time-logging, she had a category for dual activities so maybe that’s an option for you! I just tried not to do it, but maybe next year I will just count those times as dual activities rather than trying to change my ways.
I’ve wondered about my napping habits and if they are a coping mechanism. I don’t think they are, but it’s definitely something I need to be mindful of. I’m trying to have one weekend day per week where I don’t take a nap because I started noticing that I get so much less done on my weekends since I’m napping so much. But man, there’s truly nothing I look forward to more than a long afternoon with no plans—just napping for as long as I please.
I had to pull up my time tracking to do a comparison! This is very interesting! I used the 30-minute spreadsheet and ended up mostly taking notes in my planner and then updating the spreadsheet. But I tracked during a very weird week – Will got tubes on Monday then he got a virus and was home for the last 2 days of the week. So I did not work much. For my post, I combined all the dual-tasking into one category but it was mostly car/kids which = driving places with the kids, but mostly to/from school.
I would like to do this on an annual basis, too. I think next year should look much different as hopefully I won’t be home for 3 days w/ a sick kid! But who knows!
As far as naps, I was a hard no before getting pregnant. now they are totally necessary for me. I usually only take 1/week and it’s a max of 1-1.5 hours. I for sure would not be able to sleep at night if I took a 4 hour nap!! If Will can start to sleep later, naps will be less necessary. I’d like to use the time when Will is napping to do a big kid activity with Paul, like go to a book store or the library or something. But these days I need the rest so we let him have screen time in his room while us parents rest!
LOL, I had my thryoid levels checked at one point when I was consistently taking 4-hour naps and still sleeping 7ish hours at night. I was convinced there was something going on. Who needs that much sleep?! Me, apparently. Thryoid levels are normal.
I may combine dual-tasking into one category next year. I didn’t think to do that so I just tried NOT to dual task, which isn’t my norm! That’s a very good idea!
Oh, time logging. I think that would be helpful for me too. The more you see where you really put your time the more conscious you become of what you do. I wonder what my result would be. My sleep has been irregular lately so I take naps whenever I can.
It is really interesting to see where one’s time goes with an exercise like this! It was very eye-opening for me.
I tracked my time for a few weeks back when I started reading Vanderkam’s book a few years ago, and it was pretty illuminating. I would be super curious to see how things would shake out now since quite a bit has changed in the 4ish years since I’ve done it last! Maybe I’ll take a leaf out of your book and do it yearly 🙂
I definitely go through periods of time when I nap more than others. Lately I just haven’t been able to make the time, no matter how much I may want to, but once the craziness of spring planting and such is over, I should be able to slow down *just* a tad and maybe squeeze in some 20-minute catnaps here and there!
I imagine a LOT will be different this time around if you do another time log. More kids, a new business, a new city! Ahh! So much! I, personally, would love to see how much time you spend towards different parts of your life, between the flower farm, raising kids, tending house, etc. Would be very interesting!
OK, this is fascinating! You spent your time doing things you value, I think! Reading, sleeping, and talking to your mom. 🙂 All good things!
I am NOT a napper. Not unless I am sick/run down, which has happened a bit recently. But it’s usually unplanned dozing on the couch, and never for more than 15 minutes. I sleep about 5.5 hours/night, which works for me! People are all so different, aren’t they?
Not sure if I would do this to this level of detail but it’s an interesting exercise…maybe, someday? Ha!
I wish I could get better about taking those 15-20 minute cat naps! Sometimes I feel like it has to be at least an hour to be “worth it,” but that’s simply not true. (And the short cat naps are way better for us overall, too!)
I definitely think you can adjust how detailed you want to be with your time log, even if you just want to do it hourly. But it’s also not an exercise that you need to do, unless you’d find it interesting! 🙂
I saw the original post on Lisa’s blog and decided that I wanted to do this exercise myself as well (I tracked last week, so I’ll be posting the results soon).
This is so interesting and eye-opening to me. I love that spent 4 hours with your mom on the phone – until I realized that you also see her regularly, haha), but I was like, I totally spend more than 4 hours with my parents on FaceTime during the week!
I didn’t use to be a napper, but I’ve started enjoying a nap here and there more frequently. It’s either age or the pandemic LOL
I can’t wait to see how your time broke down during your time-logged week. It’s fascinating to see how everyone spends their time because we all spend it so differently, it seems!