168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think

by Laura Vanderkam

I am going to argue something a bit controversial in this chapter. I think time is too precious for us to be totally leisurely about leisure.

:fire_emoji: sounds like a Hot Take™

Because we don’t think through our leisure time, we often don’t even recognize when it’s appearing, and so we wind up spending big chunks of it in the most frictionless way possible: in front of the television.

This is why I cancelled cable YEARS AGO and felt only the slightest twinge dumping my TV altogether before leaving Bellingham.

or playing sports, which turns out to be almost as good as sex, at 9.2.

The similarity? PHYSICAL EXERTION (also human connection/interaction … and MAYBE a little competition?) [sex @ 9.3 -- these scores both on the 1985 “Americans’ Use of Time Project” enjoyment scale of 1-10]

For good health, exercise is nonnegotiable, and in a sense it’s a core competency. You definitely can’t outsource it. The Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s minimum guideline for lowering the risks of the worst consequences of inactivity is 150 minutes—2.5 hours—of moderate activity each week.

If you work at an office, eat lunch at your desk 2 or 3 days a week and exercise when other people drift down to the cafeteria.

So… YES and I do this (…am guilty of…) BUT can we ack that this can also be a pathology?

You want to strike a balance because there’s no reason to plan every minute. Weekends are great for spending downtime reading a good book on the porch or sitting in the park if the weather’s lovely, or even just enjoying your house if you don’t see it often during the workweek. Weekends are also great times for doing the longer family activities that even the most efficient full-time workers won’t have time for Monday to Friday. After talking to people who get a lot out of their weekends, I’ve found that they have a few principles in common.

First, they spend at least a few minutes thinking about what they’d like to do, and getting input from other family members as well.

Second, weekend masters know that extracurricular activities aren’t just for kids. Adults are entitled to their fun, too.

Yes, I know that working on weekends and vacation days is a work-life-balance faux pas, but to me, work-life balance means actually balancing the two; a day lacking contact with the printed word feels as strange as a day of working around the clock.

Or we don’t appreciate how well we are doing, and so we feel squeezed and claustrophobic in our own lives.

Right -- be gentle with yourself; stop and reflect!

Obviously, people’s schedules change from week to week. But after seeing enough of these logs, I’ve realized that no one ever thinks one particular set of 168 hours was typical. We tend to have mental pictures of our lives and so every log comes with a caveat.