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I don’t add up my categories regularly anymore, but since last week was the official 2023 Time Tracking Challenge I went ahead and pulled some totals and observations from my previous 168 hours.
I worked 37.5 hours. This is reasonably typical. Monday was the longest (8.5) but many other days wind up being more in the 6-7 hour range. I generally work while my 8- and 3-year-old are out of the house (8:45 a.m. to 3:45 p.m.) and if I break for lunch or exercise, that gives me about 6 hours, or a base of roughly 30 hours during a 5-day week (also not a given). It’s hard to guarantee any particular hours outside of that, so I generally don’t schedule calls/meetings outside that window, but I often do some work at night or the weekends (I almost always do at least some work on each weekend day — I don’t mind it at all. This week was a little heavier on that front just because I was posting time logs for this challenge!)
I slept 52.75 hours. This comes out to just a wee bit north of 7.5 hours a day. I didn’t subtract middle-of-the-night bathroom trips, but if you figure those in, you’d get somewhere around 7.4 hours/day, which is my long-term average. Notably, my sleep is a lot more orderly than it has been on past logs! I went to bed around 11 p.m. on the four weeknights, and woke up with my alarm at 6:30 a.m. on those mornings. On weekends I shifted by less than an hour, and generally woke up at or by 7:30 a.m. This is 100 percent a function of no longer having a baby who wakes up in the middle of the night or ridiculously early. I love it! Looking at those orderly open spaces (I don’t write “sleep” in every sleep cell) makes me incredibly happy.
I exercised five times. I ran on four days (around 3 miles each time) and then went to the gym once on Saturday morning for weight lifting + elliptical. I probably could do more on the exercise front but…it’s cold and windy out. And that was about as much as I could prioritize this week. I practiced the piano three times, and sang on those three occasions as well. I then sang at choir practice Thursday night and for the church service Sunday morning, so that’s five times. (In the singing-adjacent category: going to my daughter’s choir concert and signing my 15-year-old up for voice lessons.)
I’m trying to build more couple time into my schedule. My husband and I ate lunch together on Monday and Tuesday when we were both working from home. We also had a date night on Sunday, going to the Matisse exhibit at the art museum, and out for dinner afterwards. I will admit that I arranged this partly because I knew I’d be posting my logs and I wanted to have something fun planned into my weekend!
I read approximately 70 pages of Jane Austen’s juvenalia (part of my year-long reading project) and I wrote a sonnet — some musings on the effort that goes into creating music that sounds ethereal. Sometimes my Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday self is not kind to my Monday, Wednesday, and Friday self (who has to match the rhyming scheme). I wrote “Do angel choirs start by singing scales?” and then had to deal with that mess. I read to a child (usually the 3-year-old, but sometimes the 8-year-old) all seven nights. I read my Otherlands book five of seven nights before bed. We are now back in the Carboniferous times. I count 2.5 hours of Legos with the kids, and a whopping 4.75 hours on my puzzle. So that is a reasonable amount of effortful fun, though I’m sure my screen totals are not small either (it winds up interspersed with everything else to a degree.)
We didn’t have any huge adventures this week, though the family trip to the arcade was at least reasonably adventurous (and perhaps Matisse could be my little adventure). There were four Starbucks trips, one Wawa trip, and one McDonalds trip. We are three family meals (Friday night, Saturday night, and Sunday lunch).
I hope your week went well! Let me know what you discovered. For those who participated in the Challenge, your last email has a link to a survey you could fill out if you’d like. The information will help me with my time use research. It is completely anonymous. Thank you!
If you enjoyed this challenge, you might consider signing up for the Tranquility by Tuesday Challenge, which starts this Friday. We’ll work through the nine TBT rules, one at a time, for nine weeks. You’ll get two emails each week with planning and reflection questions. Here’s the link to sign up. Thanks for considering it!
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