I’ve been doing some reflecting on how I use my time.
First, I started thinking about why I seem to have so little time to spend on “my own things” (mostly hobbies – sewing, gardening and the like – but also reading, thinking and writing). I sat down and said: right, there are 168 hours in a week, and then did the maths on how many hours are spent sleeping, working, doing chores, shopping, spending time with other people. I found that it seemed that there were 30 disposable hours left over after doing all that.
And yet, it really does not feel like I have 30 hours to do as I please. I concluded three things: first, that there must be a fair amount of invisible time spent on just living that is hard to account for. Second, that there are many small slots of spare time, typically at the end of the working day, where it’s hard to start on a big thing, or where it’s just not practical (ie too dark to go in the garden) or where my energy levels are just too low.
Third, and most crucially, when I do have a long stretch of unfilled time, I am so overwhelmed by the long list of things that I want do to, and which have gone undone for so long, that I get overwhelmed and retreat to long stretches of reading books (yes, a pleasure, but for me this has always been a way of hiding and escaping).
My thinking is to decide at the start of each weekend which activity I am going to take out and do, and then just do it. Last Sunday I spent the day making preserves. I still felt as though there was a nagging list of other things I could be doing, but there was also satisfaction in having got something done.
I’ve also been looking (less intensively) at how I spend my working hours. I feel at the end of every day that I didn’t quite get everything done, and I think that’s because my routine of many years underwent a drastic change at the end of 2023. I still haven’t found an even keel that aids productivity. Next week, I am going to try something different by moving my marketing activities to earlier in the day. Let’s see how that goes.
Main picture: Hsu Wei Ho, Unsplash
