This allowed for a natural experiment. What would change in my life if I didn’t put social media back on my phone?

I have not looked at Instagram or Facebook since June 3rd. I decided to go back on Twitter (mostly in a lurking capacity) this past weekend because it really is a good source for breaking news.

(I occasionally look at LinkedIn, and my business is still posting content there, but I don’t think anyone views LinkedIn as being an addictive sort of social media.)

So, what did change in my life? Well, my screen time tallies did not go down. My new iPhone is shinier and faster than my last one! What can I say — it’s more fun to use.

I quickly realized that I have a strong desire to scroll through something. In the absence of social media, this wound up being comments at the New York Times and on blogs. In the absence of Instagram and Facebook, I wound up looking through my own old photos a lot (which Apple assists with — its slideshow widget is quite good). I did more online shopping. Seriously. I spent a lot of time scrolling at Amazon, Nic + Zoe, NYDJ, Kut from the Kloth, etc.

Now, there is an argument to be made that the comments on blogs and the New York Times are more wholesome than those on Twitter, though I’m not sure that’s true. My own photos are less problematic than social media ones in terms of comparison, though again, not entirely. I wish I had appreciated how un-wrinkly I was in 2016 at the time. Shopping is…shopping.

So where does this leave us? Basically, reminding me that most of us waste some amount of time. The human desire to avoid boredom during time that is not otherwise spoken for is strong. Getting off social media mostly just changed how I wasted time. I don’t have a huge desire to get back on Insta/FB right now, and I may sign out of Twitter if the news calms down (if only) but I have not become massively more productive, much as I might wish that were true. Oh well!

In other news: Here’s a round-up of this week’s content!

Over at Vanderhacks I wrote about how we should “Choose how much news to consume,” perhaps “Take a spending pause” during the Prime day sales, and behind the paywall I wrote about how “Nothing is fun for the whole family” — but there are some things you can do to have adventures with a varied crew. If you’d like a daily dose of life strategies, please consider a free or paid subscription!

In the Before Breakfast podcast I talked about how “Magic happens in the mushy middle” and that “You can go a long way in a weekend.” Someone wrote me that she listened to that episode and booked a weekend away — excellent.

Over at the Best of Both Worlds Patreon community site, we’ve been covering advice for parents sending kids to sleep-away camp for the first time. This week’s episode was a mailbag one (recorded together in person!). Please give it a listen, and as always we welcome ratings and reviews.

With one driver gone Friday to Sunday I wound up doing a LOT of driving. Because there was a lot of other stuff on this high-opportunity-cost June weekend too. A birthday party, tennis lessons, basketball, soccer, and a music recital. The 12-year-old made it back from the canoeing trip to play Amazing Grace on his alto sax, and the 10-year-old played “Sea Shanty” on her trumpet. She also dressed as a pirate because she loves any opportunity to be in costume.

I did manage to fit in one “Summer Fun List” item — something that I was looking forward to amid all the driving. I took the three younger kids to go strawberry picking at nearby Maple Acres Farm. This is a smallish farm that’s only about 20 minutes away, and is more manageable than some of the bigger commercial pick-your-own operations. We hunted through the plants for the bright red berries and filled two containers. The 2-year-old has really enjoyed eating “his” strawberries. I’ll just note here that the 7-year-old also really had fun picking them, and there is a trope of parenting/food personal essays that when you get kids involved in picking (or growing, or preparing) produce they will more gladly try it. Nope. The 7-year-old was happy to pick them but made it clear he was picking them for *us* to eat. It is a reminder to me that a lot of personal essays are just…personal. There’s nothing universal about them.

We ended the weekend with a dinner of ribs I ordered from Blue Smoke for my husband’s birthday (the kids tried some but no one loved it…sigh…). The rest of the family ate the Jeni’s Ice Cream I also ordered for dessert. I ate my non-dairy Phish Food.

Anyway, here’s this past week’s Tranquility by Tuesday scorecard (in which I look over my time log and see how I did on the 9 TBT rules).

Give yourself a bedtime. It’s been creeping later. I have been craving more downtime and so it’s been 11:15/11:30. Given that the alarm goes off at 6:30 every weekday morning I need to be more disciplined about this. (Well, or not. The camp schedule won’t be as early, though the toddler might still wake up.) On Wednesday night the toddler woke up howling right as I was going to sleep at 11 and I wound up awake with him (and reading on my Kindle) until midnight.

Plan on Fridays. Done, though I really need to start planning the activity schedule on Fridays too. That was a source of some stress on Sunday night as I tried to sort driving. And because I knew the stress was coming up Sunday night that affected the rest of my Sunday. I am better about this with work — I put finishing something big first thing Monday morning because I didn’t feel capable of dealing with it Friday. That made me feel better about it all weekend, even though it wasn’t done. I knew when I would do it.

Move by 3 p.m. Mostly OK, though not perfect. I did not move much on Monday when we were in the car all day (more on that below) though I ran in the evening on Monday with my 15-year-old. I did take a few early afternoon walks in my yard during the week. Sunday I walked laps with my daughter during the 7-year-old’s basketball practice. On Saturday I did no purposeful movement whatsoever though I somehow managed to get 12,000 steps in. It was that kind of day.

Three times a week is a habit. I am constantly revising my list of things I want to do three times a week, but right now I’m focused on running, practicing the piano, and eating family meals. Each of these did happen three times. I ran three times — twice with my 15-year-old and once solo. I played the piano on Wednesday morning when I had the house to myself (!), on Friday afternoon before the little kids returned from gymnastics, and then on Sunday when I had a little time after the music recital and before we needed to pick up the toddler. We ate family dinner on Monday night, on Wednesday night, and on Sunday (the Blue Smoke birthday dinner).

Create a back-up slot. I generally aim to leave Friday open, though weirdly it wound up more crowded then Wednesday. I had a few things cancel Wednesday and so that day was suddenly completely open. I got ahead on a few things as a result. One place I did actively choose to build in space was on Sunday during the rushed driving. Theoretically we could have made it to the recital after a full soccer game. My daughter’s team practiced at 1, and then the game was supposed to be 1:30 to 2:30, and the recital was at 3 p.m., about 25 minutes away. But we decided if it was OK with her coach she would leave at half time. This did make the whole experience more calm.

One big adventure, one little adventure. Monday was Memorial Day so we packed up everyone in the minivan — which will be crossing 100k miles in the next week or two — and went to the National Aquarium in Baltimore. We had a great time looking at the fish. Everyone in the family likes looking at fish. Very few things are fun for the whole family, so yay. As for the travel…Baltimore is supposed to be about an hour and 45 minutes from our house but not on Memorial Day. The trip home took 3-plus hours due to traffic, and it was so frustrating. On the trip there the traffic was better, but the tire pressure light came on and started blinking so we kept trying to find an air machine at gas stations but at multiple places along the highway the machines were out of order. We eventually found one that worked and filled the tires (which were low I guess) but then the pressure light came on again and we checked again (with a separate gauge) and they were fine so it’s the sensor that’s broken. Also, all the kids have to get out on one side because the door sensor keeps malfunctioning. In other news, we are thinking of entering the market for a new minivan.

As for the little adventure, I’ll say strawberry picking, though I could also choose my virtual make-up session — that was different and memorable for me!

Take one night for you. I sang with my choir on Sunday morning — not logistically easy with my husband off canoeing, but I made it work. We took advantage of rehearsals being done for the season on Thursday nights to go out for a date night Mexican dinner. I like weekday margaritas.

Batch the little things. I did batch the little things on Friday morning but oh my goodness there were a lot of little things this week. There were so many things that I actually did a batching session on Thursday afternoon too (which included taking a kid tux in to get dry cleaned…)

Effortful before effortless. I did better here because I’ve read 3.25 books in the last 10 days or so. I finished Love and Saffron, and I’m currently working on Under the Whispering Door. I am a little bogged down but still making progress and I assume I will finish it this week.

So, for instance, Monday morning I drove the teenager to school with the 2-year-old in tow. I woke up the 12- and 10-year-old before leaving. They were in charge, and needed to get themselves ready. I came home, woke up the 7-year-old, and then loaded all of them in the car to drop the 12-year-old at school and the 10-year-old at a before school activity. Then I came home for 20 minutes before driving the 7-year-old to school (with the toddler). Then the toddler and I hung out together until he could go to his care. In the afternoon I picked the 10- and 7-year-old up at school, brought them home, left 30 minutes later with the 12-year-old for fencing (leaving the 14-year-old in charge), dropped him off, drove to get the toddler from his care, drove back to fencing, picked the 12-year-old up and drove home. I put on the Dinosaur Train “Classic in the Jurassic” in the minivan DVD player and we managed to get through the entire DVD on Monday.

The big kids have helped out. For instance, I was able to leave the toddler with the 14-year-old for about 50 minutes so he didn’t have to go to the 10-year-old’s karate belt testing. But the poor little guy has had to go to a lot. He came to the 7-year-old’s parkour class last night (7:15 to 8:15 p.m., a great time for a toddler!) and we colored the picture that is accompanying this post. Drawing each circle and then letting him color it in (I did some of the coloring too, as you can probably guess…) took about 30 seconds apiece, and enough of them fills an hour…

On the work front, I managed to get done what I needed to get done in the compressed hours — but it was very much an intense push. I guess there are just some days where hours need to give whatever you ask of them. I was glad for little things, like that my daughter’s karate class got out early last night, so I was home at 6:20 instead of 6:30, which made cranking out grilled cheese sandwiches for the whole crew a slightly less rushed enterprise before I was back in the car at 6:55.

There’s no real larger point to this post. Potentially we need some more driving and logistical support, but given that the older 2 kids can stay home with younger siblings, it is doable. I did get about 5.75 focused hours each day to do things. And theoretically there shouldn’t be too many days like these. They just aren’t so fun while they’re happening…

I ran the Frostbite 5-miler, and while my time was not spectacular (10:57 min/miles) it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was in the middle. I also went (by myself!) to a chamber orchestra concert in downtown Philadelphia on Sunday afternoon. Some other combinations of people went to a movie on Friday night. We had some friends over at one point, there was night skiing, the 14-year-old got to meet up with friends at the mall AND he cashed in his Christmas present to go see Wicked in NYC. He and I got tickets, and then my husband and two other older children came in to go see the American Museum of Natural History. We ate lunch at the Carnegie Diner and did a lot of reminiscing as we walked through Central Park. Wicked was pretty fun — a good Broadway musical to bring kids to. I forget how close the city is (1 hour and 50 minutes with no traffic, which there really wasn’t on the way there). Now that some of the kids are older we should probably go in more often.

But perhaps not with the toddler. My most vivid memory of the weekend may be taking my 2-year-old to the grocery store on Saturday. I have five kids, so I’ve had a reasonable number of grocery-store-with-toddler experiences, but this one was one for the books. I’m talking throwing bottles of mustard off the shelves, lying down in the middle of the aisle and screaming. Wow! I just had to laugh because it was so ridiculous.

Photo: From lunch at the Carnegie Diner & Cafe

And the legacy system is…interesting. Most notably: It starts beeping on the minute, every minute, three times per day. Those times are 8:00 a.m., 6:00 p.m., and 9:00 p.m. (Well, to be precise, according to my phone, 7:59 a.m., 5:59 p.m., and 8:59 p.m., but the system thinks it is on the hour). It is simple enough to turn it off when it starts beeping, but it does not appear to be a simple matter to turn off those 3x day alerts.

I have gone through various states of mind about this. At first I was confused — thinking the beeping was just random. Then, once I realized it was happening every day at the same times, I was incensed (9:00 p.m. is often less than 30 minutes after I have gotten the baby down and when the big kids are going to their beds and an every-minute-on-the-minute beeping is not exactly a welcome addition to that situation).

Of late, I have become more resigned. I view it as a way to mark the hours, much as the medieval monks had a certain schedule of chants and services. Lauds. Complines. Vespers. They provide structure to the day. By 8 a.m., the day should be ready to start (even on weekends). At 6 p.m. the workday is done and dinner should be in process. At 9 p.m. people should be drifting toward in-room quiet time if they are not actually asleep. I could be doing something else, but then I will hear the chime, and realize what time of day it is. Oh yes. It is 6 p.m. again. Time to go do my little ceremony of turning off the beeping. I usually get it before the third beep.

(Interestingly, the other two adults who might be in the house at some of those times are not nearly as bothered by a once-a-minute beep as me, nor are the kids. On the days when I have been out at one of those times, I will come home and occasionally find at, say, 6:15 p.m. that the beep is still happening every minute and everyone is just happily going about their lives.)

Anyway, there is no larger point of this little essay, though I’m sure we all have certain markers we put in the day. In the deepest days of lockdowns, this could actually be a coping strategy. Lunch precisely at noon, outside time at 4:00, dinner precisely at 6:30 to keep the day from being a complete wash of space, inviting existential angst.

As it is, I will be happy not to have the beeping soon. But I have made my peace with it (mostly) for now.

My husband took the big kids skiing later Saturday. They only made it through three runs because it was cold — guess that wind chill factor is on to something — but we have a season pass to a local mountain so it was OK. I am trying not to think too hard about the fact that it took longer for me to corral everyone’s ski things and make sure they were in them than they probably spent skiing.

I took some of the children ice skating at an outdoor rink on Sunday in near perfect sunny 25 degree weather, and went sledding with the 7-year-old, thus crossing another item off the Winter Fun List. This was fun for me, but he was sitting in front of me on the sled, meaning he was the shield for flying powder and took some in the face on our fourth run. This ended the fun for him, but he cheered me on as I did two more runs.

I do not love winter. I have found myself thinking, lately, that in 2 months the flowers will be budding. Winter cannot last forever. But I also do not like the idea of wishing time away, and so I am trying to enjoy those things that are only possible in winter. A snowy weekend provides an opportunity to experience several of those things — and some stunning snowy sunsets and fires in the fireplace too.

The aftermath of this disaster consumed seven hours of what was already an incredibly busy week. Seven hours is an interesting number, because it is the equivalent of “finding an extra hour in the day!” — a promise I have read on a great many magazine covers. And yet, if we had sat down at the beginning of the week, and tried to find seven hours for something like training for a triathlon or setting up a new mentoring program, I imagine we all would have struggled.

So what happened? Basically, time is elastic. When we decide that we need to do something, we find the time to do it. Other stuff either doesn’t happen, or it takes less time, or it gets punted forward. Much other stuff turns out to be more malleable than we might have imagined. And so, of course, the key to time management is treating the things we *want* to do with the urgency of the things we *need* to do. We make time for them first, and let everything else take the hit.

Easier said than done, to be sure. But I keep trying. This week, for instance, has turned out to have more time-consuming stuff in it, mostly personally though some professionally, than I planned. Such is life. I also had planned to take Thursday afternoon “off” for some little adventures from my winter fun list (visiting a greenhouse, seeing wintry scenes at an art museum). When I lost big chunks of focused time on Wednesday with the delivery window fiascos, Thursday was an obvious back up spot.

But I decided that time is elastic. I would probably feel behind one way or the other, whether I did my adventures or not. Better to have the adventures in this time I’d allotted and trust I’d figure something out.

So I did. Nothing life changing. A 30-minute stroll through the Brandywine museum looking at Andrew Wyeth paintings. About 90 minutes at Longwood looking at orchids and wintry meadows. Home in time to log another hour of work before dinner. But Thursday felt a little more memorable than it would if I’d stayed at my desk. I’m sure everything will fit one way or another.

Photo: Scarlet-plume from the Longwood greenhouse

Ever wondered where the time really goes? How about finding out? You can sign up for my free 2022 time-tracking challenge here!

Here’s how it works: Starting on Sunday January 9th, I’ll send you a series of emails guiding you through the process. You start tracking time on Monday, January 10th, at 5:00 a.m. (You do not have to be awake then! I hope I won’t be….)

Write down what you’re doing, checking in 3-4 times a day or so. It’s fine to approximate. I don’t track how many times I go to the bathroom or grab a drink of water. If I’m hanging out with the kids, I’ll just write “kids” rather than trying to describe the mess of playing with toys, cleaning up someone’s spill, changing a diaper, etc. It doesn’t have to be perfect. You just want to get a reasonable picture of where the time goes.

Then you keep going for 168 hours — until Monday January 17th at 4:30 a.m. (It’s fine to declare yourself “done” on Sunday night when you go to bed if you want). I’m hoping to recruit a few folks for time-makeovers for the blog, so if you are interested in that, please be sure to participate.

It should be fun. I know that over 3000 people are signed up so far…hopefully a few more will join us! When we know where the time goes, we can make wise choices based on reality, rather than stories. I promise it will be helpful. So why not give it a shot? I’ll also be posting my time logs here next week! There is going to be a lot of unpacking….

(I love this picture of the 6-year-old holding up the toddler so he can get a better view…)

I also took the two older boys to the Pennsylvania Ballet’s performance of The Nutcracker on Sunday. It was probably not quite as exciting as Spiderman (which they saw Friday night) but I think they enjoyed it. I certainly did! I love the snowflake dance in particular, though sadly this year they didn’t have the boy choir accompanying it. I did get a bonus musical festive moment on Sunday though: at church the music director played Bach’s Wachet Auf as the prelude. This is my favorite piece of organ Christmas music, and it’s always a treat to hear it.

This morning I looked back on my 2021 holiday fun list, and I think I’ve basically hit everything at this point. We saw several holiday displays, including LumiNature at the Philadelphia Zoo, Longwood Christmas, the Morris Arboretum Garden Railway, the Brandywine River Museum’s holiday train show, and then the get-up at the aquarium. (We also went ice skating downtown, and that was decorated for Christmas.) My husband and I went to his office holiday party, and I managed to make some of my existing clothes work. We went out for dinner for my birthday. I’ve been playing lots of Christmas carols on the piano. The 12-year-old and 10-year-old and I constructed the “Visit from Santa” Lego display, and we’re about a quarter of the way through the Elf Clubhouse. Will we finish by Christmas? We shall see!

I have not bought a whole lot of holiday flowers for the house, though we do have a poinsettia, which we bought at the 14-year-old’s holiday choir concert. We also have two amaryllis plants which are sprouting and budding rapidly. I have been reading some Christmas stories with the 6-year-old, though he has now graduated to reading by himself, and has really gotten into the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series, so he’s been hustling me along to get through the Christmas stories so he can read. Oh well. I think the (now almost) 2-year-old might be willing to sit through the stories next year!

All that’s left to do is go to the Christmas Eve stuff: the live nativity at church, and the service of lessons and carols. Well, and some more wrapping. But I’m happy looking back at how many festivities we’ve managed to fit into the last 6 weeks or so. That’s a lot of memories — which is the point of these seasonal fun lists, and why I keep making them.

One of my favorites? In “O God, Our Help in Ages Past” a later verse contains these two images: “Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons away. They fly, forgotten, as a dream dies at the opening day.”

(Note: Some modern hymnals change the “sons” language to “bears all our years away,” which I think gets at the point even better!)

The more I study time, the more apt I find these two comparisons to be. Time is like moving water. Moving water moves you along with it. It keeps moving no matter what you do. Because of that, it is easy to spend time mindlessly, focused only on the particular rock or eddy hurtling you around at the moment. It is hard to even fathom the water behind you, what is now water under the bridge as they say. This brings up the second image — of fleeting memories no longer quite in our grasps. I dreamed some interesting things last night. Those plots and intrigues are now nothing more than shadows. Same with a great many hours and days that are now in the past.

No one can stop time. No one can even slow it down. But being mindful of those hours as the ever-rolling stream moves along can change the experience of daily life. Documenting hours can also make memories more accessible. They are no longer quite so forgotten.

This brings me to the subject of tracking time. I first began suggesting people track their time when I was writing 168 Hours, my first time management book. I tried tracking my time as well. It was an eye-opening experience — partly because, before writing the book, I didn’t even know there were 168 hours in a week. Most people don’t. We live our lives in a repeating cycle of weeks, estimating proportions without even knowing the denominator. Seeing where those 168 hours went gave me a much more holistic perspective on my time. And while, yes, there were some cringe moments (we all waste time…a lot of time), I found the experience fairly comforting. In 168 hours I generally was making time for a great many things that were important to me. Knowing the size and shape of the canvas, I could experiment more, and make something even more satisfying.

I found time-tracking useful enough that I decided to start tracking my time continuously in April 2015. I’m still at it, now, in November 2021. Those 6.5 years were going to pass anyway, on that ever-rolling stream, but they are not quite as forgotten as my dreams anymore. I can look at a random Tuesday. I can look at the context. A few more specific memories can come to mind.

I don’t expect anyone else to track their time continuously for years (though if you want to, I promise it’s not much of a burden! Three minutes a day, more or less. Like brushing my teeth). But I do think anyone can benefit from tracking a week. You can download the spreadsheet I use (30 minute version), or use an app, or a notebook. Just write down what you’re doing, as often as you remember, in as much detail as you think will be helpful for you. As an example, I record some life-maintenance stuff (like showering/getting ready) but do not record every bathroom trip or snack. If I’m mostly supervising children, I’ll just write “kids, etc.” or something along those lines. There needs to be a balance between detail and feasibility. Being a little more vague has allowed me to keep going for years, which creates a more comprehensive picture of life than if I aimed for perfection…and stopped.

If you’re not in the habit, you’ll probably need to create reminders to check in. It’s pretty easy to remember a few hours during the day, so maybe set 4-5 alarms during a day to stop and record the previous few hours. If you keep going after a week you won’t need to do this, as it becomes a habit and you get better at recollection (I can now record 24 hours in pretty good detail if I want, but I still generally check in three times a day). Weekends tend to be harder than weekdays for new time trackers, but they are definitely worth tracking. This is real time that really happens and it is impossible to get an accurate sense of life without the weekend data too.

After a week, take some time to reflect on your log. If you’d like, you can add up the major categories. How much time did you spend sleeping? Working? In the car or in transit? With family? Doing housework or errands? Watching TV or other screen time? Hobbies? Exercise? Reading? Volunteering? I’d note that unless you’re really intent on creating pie charts, all these categories don’t have to be mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive. If you’re listening to audio books while exercising you can just pat yourself on the back and count these hours as both. If you’re into the pie charts, you’d need to create a category of multi-tasked exercise/reading.

The more important question is how you feel about your time. As you reflect on the week, what did you like? What is working in your life? Celebrate this! You can ask what you’d like to spend more time doing. And, of course, you can figure out what you’d like to spend less time doing as well — with the data in hand to make smart choices. In general, if you want to spend time better, you need to know where it is going now, which is exactly what time-tracking ensures.

Becoming more mindful of time makes time feel more rich and full. The years still roll on. They always do. But since life is lived in hours, being more aware of those hours allows us to be wiser stewards of whatever time we’ve been given. That might seem like a big ask for a spreadsheet, but I promise it is possible!

You can start tracking at any point, but if anyone is looking for a good option, I’ll be hosting my annual time-tracking challenge from January 10-16, 2022 (2023 update: I’ll be hosting my annual time-tracking challenge from January 9-15, 2023). I’ll post my time logs here and if you sign up, you can get daily motivational emails from me during that week. Something to mark on the calendar! It’s only a week and I promise it will be useful. So why not give it a whirl?

Photo: A metaphor for time…