As per Chapter 1 of 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think, I've now tallied up my activities for the week of 21-27 January, and to be honest, I mostly wasn't surprised. There were a few minor details that made the week a little bit out of the ordinary, but mostly it was fairly typical. I did need to work out a strategy for totalling up the hours, as I seem to multi-task quite a lot. For example, taking the tram to work + talking to Husband; working + eating; reading + eating; playing ipod games + watching TV. (Not to mention what I do when I'm on the loo!) I've tried to break these down logically, e.g. if I paid an equal amount of attention to each one, I added half that time to the tally for each. If I was mostly concentrating on one and ignoring the other, I added all of the time to the one I was concentrating on. If I thought it merited it, I added the full time to both (e.g. walking and socialising with friends, both of which I'd like a careful tally of). I'm sure the complete total probably adds up to more than 168 hours, but the book warns this might happen as it's so hard to keep track of every single minute, especially if you're multi-tasking. The book also wanted time/activities tracked in more detail than I had covered, so I had to retrospectively estimate some incidental activities (for example, things like going to the kitchen and making myself a coffee at work). Enough overview, now on to the stats!
MY 168 HOURS: OBSERVATIONS OF NOTE
* Sleeping = 60hr 30min / 8hr 30min per night - I honestly thought I slept less than this! Sometimes it takes me a while to get to sleep and/or I wake up before the alarm, but even if I minus off, say, 30-45mins per night, that's still a decent amount of sleep.
* public transport to/from work = 8hr 20min - that's quite a lot, but I spend all of that time doing other things too, e.g. reading, talking to Husband, listening to podcasts, so I don't at all view it as time wasted.
* work = 38hr 56min - this was the easiest to calculate: I just checked my flexitime timesheet! I worked 56 extra minutes this week. I also do other things while working, i.e. eating and socialising with colleagues, which I counted in those categories, too.
* preparing and eating food = 11hr 35min / ~1hr 40min per day - this seems like quite a lot, but perhaps it's normal, I don't know. Most of the time I'm also doing something else while I'm eating (e.g. working, watching the news); looking at it that way makes it seem more reasonable.
* communicating with Husband = 3hr 55min - this includes talking, and emailing him. At first this seemed very low to me, but then I remembered that it's only the time we spend specifically talking/emailing to each other. We also do lots of other enjoyable things in each other's company, like watching TV and playing Kinect.
* reading = 3hr 50min - I wish this was more.
* creative pursuits = 7hrs / 1hr per day - this included working in my art journal, writing blog posts, taking photos for blog posts, and writing in my private journal. I was pleasantly surprised to find that I spend an hour per day on average being creative. I didn't do any craft due to the hot weather being a de-motivating factor, but I think normally it would be even more. And I would like it to be even more.
* exercising = 1hr 30min - This week was hot, and I was still recovering from the flu, so normally the tally is more than this. Usually it's about 2:30 to 3hrs.
* housework = 1hr - hmmm, that really should be a lot more, I think. I'm a bit ashamed of that.
* watching TV/DVDs/recorded TV series = 21hr 5min / 3hr per day - that tally is the full amount of time I spend in front of the TV, but I often do other things at the same time, like crocheting, working in my art journal or playing ipod games.
* internet & maintaining email = 13hr 40min PLUS computer/ipod games = 13hr 5min = TOTAL 26hr 45min - I knew this would be a lot, but wow! Just, wow! Though I have to say, I'm multi-tasking a lot of the time, e.g. going to/from work, while watching TV. The amount of time I spend purely doing those things and nothing else is actually 14hr 35min (approx.). Still quite a lot, but only 2 hours a day on average, which is less time than I spend watching TV. I'm tempted to become defensive and claim that much of this time (the time on the internet anyway) is actually semi-productive, because I'm getting inspiration from reading blogs, learning by looking things up on Wikipedia, and satisfying my need to organise things by re-arranging my Pinterest boards. XP
* thinking = 1hr 10min - I spent some time just thinking about things that had happened, and about my problems and how to solve them. This wasn't time I specifically set aside, I think one instance was when I woke up half-an-hour early, and the others on the tram on the way to work. It was time well-spent though, I think.
I'm sure that was extremely boring for anyone except me, so I might take a breather for now, and next time I'll write a bit of a wrap-up.
