How much time do we really have?
There are 168 hours in a week. Perhaps you’ve heard that before.
On average, you need to spend 8 hours per night sleeping. But I also spend a bit of time in bed before falling asleep, and a bit of time laying in bed after my alarm goes off before I get up. So, I spend about 63 hours in bed each week.
You also have to spend a lot of time feeding yourself.
Whether you go out or cook for yourself, you spend at least 1 hour on each meal. If you order delivery, this might be a bit less, and you might also multitask while you eat. But, at three meals per day and variable times averaging one hour, I’d say I spend 21 hours per week on eating
Together, that is 84 hours, or exactly half of my week, spent on sleeping and eating.
Then, I have some more basics to account for. I quite like to shower daily, and also wash my face and brush my teeth and engage in some other activities, like a bit of yoga, that might fall into the category of self-care. That’s probably going to average out to 2 hours per day most likely, so we’ll say self-care is a 14 hour investment each week.
And, if you’re a proper adult, you also have a whole swipe of chores you need to do to keep your life generally functioning smoothly. This includes doing the dishes, taking care of trash, tidying after yourself, and also grocery trips and paying your credit card bills and doing your taxes and visiting the bank or post office. Together these chores and errands take up perhaps one hour per day, or 7 hours per week.
Now, we are up to 105 out of those 168 hours eaten up. That’s 60%.
Now, we get to the juicy stuff. Personally, I am a full time college student, and that alone can be roughly translated to an average 40 hour work week.
But, then, I also have to actually do work that I am paid for, which adds another 10 hours of employment to my load.
At this point, I have filled up 155 hours. That is almost all of them, in fact I have just 13 hours to spend as I please, according to these rough estimates. And, those hours have to include all the time I spend distracted, on YouTube, Netflix, or Facebook, in addition to any personal projects I might want to pursue.
You might be looking at my numbers and think that I am being to generous, and surely you don’t really need that long to do these things. But, humans are notorious for under-estimating time. We think we can bounce around and immediately dive into a new activity after finishing one, but that’s not how we really work. We move slowly, we take time to pause, we zone out and have to refocus. So, it’s better to try to overestimate the time it’ll take you to do anything. Then, you’re less likely to run out of it.
Really makes you wonder whether you really want to be reading this right now, huh?
But, by these accounts, I’d say I probably have just 8 hours per week that I ought to be dedicating to my personal projects, which include writing here on Medium, making YouTube videos, writing for my student newspaper, and more. It’s easy to see how it can become tempting to skip a meal or exercise, to stay up just one more hour, or to order takeout to buy just a couple more moments of time. Yet, I prefer to feel like I have my basics under control so I don’t crumble under the stress of things that Have To be done, which I am ignoring.
So, I challenge you: do the math. Where is your time going? How many hours are not strictly occupied each week? Then, you get the joy of deciding what to do with them. A realistic schedule, I’ve found, makes me feel much better about how much I do accomplish, as opposed to disappointed in myself for all the things I haven’t had time to do.
