168

The number of hours in a week.  Hours we probably aren't - if we are honest with ourselves- using as productively as we could.  A few years ago Laura Vanderkam wrote a time management book focused on being aware of how we spend each of our 168 hours* and identifying inefficiencies and time-wasters that we can dump to free up more hours to do the things we want and need to do.

[source]

Inspired by a few other bloggers, as well as my desire to try to maintain some kind of work-life balance after the baby is born, I decided to conduct my own time audit this week.  It's kind of a weird week to do it because of the Thanksgiving holiday, but I decided not to track Thursday and just use the data from a representative weekday like Tuesday or Wednesday twice to make everything add up.

Some activities are harder to track than others because you can do multiple things at the same time, but my plan is to assign a label based on what I'm primarily doing at the time.  If I'm watching TV but every once in awhile I run up and down stairs to deal with the laundry, I'm watching TV.  If I'm working on my Christmas ornaments and I put on some music or turn on the TV for background noise, then I'm doing Christmas ornaments.  Not exactly scientific, but I think it'll work.

I'll report back next week on the results.  Not that I don't know where I waste time (spoiler alert - after dinner), but I'm hoping that being more aware of what I'm doing will help me make better use of my time - especially after the baby comes.  


*Not 186 hours, which must have something to do with a horror movie because I got some really weird images when I Googled that by accident.