Hi friends! If you’ve ever worried, like I do, about being a time waster, or if you’ve ever thought to yourself, “I do not have time for this,” you may be interested in this Life Experiment. Very simply, in the month of June 2022, I tracked how I spent virtually every minute of every day.

Many people, though certainly not me, make budgets for their money and track how they spend every dollar, but it’s rare to do the same with time. While it’s at least possible to make more money to replenish what you spent, no one can make more time, and unlike money, nobody knows for sure how many days or hours they have in their account. It would make sense to track time for a week or a month as a way to use it more wisely.

I did it for a few reasons. A friend of mine had died, and thinking about what an original and joyful life she’d led made me wonder how I was spending my own. I knew I wanted to write more. And I wanted to work only eight hours a day at my publishing job. On Fridays, I was trying to work less than eight hours. My company has “summer Fridays” with Friday afternoons off, at least in theory. For the past four years, I worked many evenings and most weekends. I didn’t have summer Saturdays or Sundays.

This job was hardly the first time in my life I’d worked a lot. For most of my high school junior year and all of my senior year, I worked thirty-two hours a week at the local library to save money for college, and I was still a National Merit Scholar. In college, I worked several late shifts at a bar and grill every week in addition to modeling for life drawing classes, and even added early morning shifts at a bakery for a while, until I was understandably fired for irregularly sized muffins.

But in my publishing job, I felt I was constantly angering and disappointing people as I tried to run a business without enough help. The long hours meant I had little relief from the overwhelming feelings of hopelessness and shame. I’ve always cultivated positivity and optimism as a remedy against depression and anxiety, but in this job it was starting to fail me, the way Tylenol will cure some headaches but will only help a bit with a broken leg.

Writing about sadness is embarrassing, and maybe others in my position wouldn’t have been so affected. We’re all built differently.

Quitting my job didn’t seem like an option, and not only because the book business had been my idea in the first place. I’m the main breadwinner in my family and the one who carries the health insurance. For my international readers: in the United States, if you don’t have health insurance through an employer, the high costs of a medical emergency or serious illness can bankrupt you.

My husband had been laid off from his job soon after the publishing division started up, and because of the chaos of my work life, he became a freelance editor and took over cleaning, errands, and other household responsibilities. The upside of this is obvious from the pie chart below. The downside was that I felt stuck.

I’d tried over and over to cut back on my hours. “I’m pulling an all-nighter tonight, but I am never doing it again,” I told a friend early in the year. She said, “I love you, but you’ve probably said that to me twenty times.”

That’s how I wound up tracking my work time. I only counted actual time spent on my job and not breaks for the Internet, for making a cup of tea, and so on. And I tracked my writing time. While I was at it, I figured I might as well track all the other time, too, to see what was happening in my life. There are a lot of time organization apps out there, and I used a time tracking app called Eternity, which I liked pretty well.

Here’s a pie chart of how I spent my time in June.

What I Learned

There Are No “Normal Months.”

Several times, I considered abandoning my time tracking experiment and trying it again later, because I thought June was atypical.

“Medical” became a category because I’ve started physical therapy for a severe Achilles tendon injury. It mostly involves a man rubbing my legs and feet with cocoa butter and then scraping them with special tools. It hurts and it’s working.

“Finance” became a category because, in the middle of the month, over $22,000—most of our savings—disappeared from our bank account. It turned out that the Kansas department of revenue had taken it, though we’d received no warning. In 2018, our tax preparer failed to file in Kansas, where we lived for five months. (Bank of America also charged us a $125 penalty because of Kansas’s withdrawal.) As it turns out, we actually owe Kansas $499, and someone from the department of revenue told us it would take about twenty weeks for our now-filed return to be processed. Our tax preparer is legally bound to pay all the interests and penalties.

I traveled out of town for my friend’s “celebration of life” after finding a glittery dress to wear. Her dress code called for costumes, sparkles, or both; her husband wore a red sequined jacket and a top hat, like a rock and roll ringleader. That meant a lot more time with friends and family than usual, while reminding me that I always want more time there.

“Gaming” became a category because I took up an ancient computer game, SimCity. I became especially obsessed with trying to build a successful community on the site of a nuclear meltdown, naming it “Comeback City.”

When I thought more about it, I suspected that none of us actually ever have a normal month. Things come up all the time. Trips, hassles, medical procedures, obsessions, life.

2. My husband and I spend huge amounts of time together.

I created a category called “time with G.” as a catchall for all the time I spent with him. This turned out to be a big tracking mistake because it’s too broad of a category. I’d underestimated how often we do things together.

These hours don’t include driving places with him or watching TV with him (those are under “travel/driving” and “TV,”), but they include all our meals together, having sex, having a stupid argument, spending an afternoon at Sears Tower, and just sitting around talking. We’ve been married a very long time, since I was twenty-three and he was twenty-five, but we still find one another interesting.

3. For me, too much aimless social media in the morning is a disaster.

I have two separate categories—“content creation” for blog posts, answering blog comments, Instagram carousels, scheduled tweets, and so on, which I do to some extent to market my books but mostly as a creative hobby, and “aimless Internet,” which includes scrolling and random interacting on social media.

I love being able to connect with people I can’t see in person—to tell them their cat or their child is cute, or to say I hope they feel better soon. I like being able to encourage and congratulate strangers on Twitter. But sometimes, the only one benefitting from my being online is Google, Twitter, and Facebook, all selling my attention as a product to advertisers. I often don’t feel better or more relaxed afterward.

Some people joke about not being able to set foot in certain stores without dropping a hundred dollars. “Aimless Internet,” as a category, is the time equivalent. I Google a fact or glance at Twitter, one thing leads to another, and twenty minutes are gone. and obviously, if I hadn’t been tracking, I would’ve spent way more time on Aimless Internet.

For me, the first thing in the morning is the worst for aimless Internet. When I start my morning with prayer and meditation, I feel centered. When I start my morning with aimless Internet, I feel (and this was particularly true in June) reasonably appalled at the state of the world. Expressing despair and rage on social media and soaking in on other’s despair and rage has proven itself to be ineffective as a means of political change, if not actually counterproductive, but it’s very effective at ruining my day.

4. Radical Change Can Be Possible In an Ordinary Life

Before I started the publishing company, I’d been in the same town, the same house, and more or less the same job for over ten years. I was itching for something new. One of my good friends pointed out that I could change my life without changing any of these things.

Some people have virtually no free time, but by cutting back on my hours, I was no longer one of them. I had several hours not claimed by work or sleep, and more on the weekends and some Fridays. Just by changing how I spend that time, I could change my life. Even more: I could fundamentally change who I was.

It’s always been easy for me to get caught up in grand plans of what I will do someday…and even what I’ll do next week! “I’ll get back into writing more regularly once things settle down.” “I’ll start weight training on Monday.”

I’m thinking more now about how I’ll spend the actual day that I’m in. It’s already making a big change in my life.

So, What Do You Think?

Do you have thoughts about how you spend your time? Have you ever tried to track it? Let me know in the comments! Thanks so much for reading, and have a good week!

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