A few observations…maybe for 2025 I will do more real-time analysis so I don’t have to do it all at the end of the year. Any given week doesn’t take that much time, but doing 52 weeks (plus 2 days) takes a lot of time. Theoretically using spreadsheets means you can just sum the cells with a certain entry but…due to some choices I made early on in time tracking that are now habits this doesn’t really work. So there was a lot of manual tallying. Oh well.

I do not work that much. Well, on some days I do. On a “normal” workday I’m at my desk at 7:45 a.m. and end the work day at 5 p.m., or later, and often do 30-60 minutes at night. But for various reasons I don’t get a lot of normal workdays. On Monday this week, for instance, I stopped at 3:30 to pick up the 10-year-old and take him to the pediatrician. Then he really wanted to go to his ninja class, so I drove him out there to meet B (nanny), who was there with the 5-year-old for an earlier class. I got home at 5:30. Those would have been work hours — I had childcare — but with 5 kids there is often something. It is what it is, but I need to be careful about protecting longer stretches of deep work time when I can get it. I averaged about 32 hours/week for the year. For what it’s worth, Tuesday was my longest average workday, but I think this is skewed by Monday being more likely to be a holiday.

My sleep was absolutely consistent with what it has been for the last decade. 7.33 hours/day. Every year I’ve tracked has been 7.3-7.4. Guess this is my set point! No surprise that I slept more on weekends than weekdays, but curiously Sat and Sun were both 7.68 hours apiece. (Tuesday was my lowest — 7.08.)

Choir, as a hobby, turns out to be very seasonal. I was in choir practices, or practicing music on my own, for 31.5 hours in December, and did about 6 hours of performances that month. My total for July was 0!

I spent 128.25 hours on puzzles. I worked out with my trainer 44 times. I ran 122 times. That feels a little low, but my logs reminded me that there were 7 weeks of 0s there after my back incident. I biked 9 times as an actual bike ride (there were a lot of other “bikes with kids in driveway” kind of rides). I did yoga exactly once — on the beach as part of BLP live. That may be all I do it in 2025 too. Oh well!

One manifestation of this is, of course, doing some work on vacation (hence the August news hook). This tends to get frowned upon, and I’m certainly not a fan of required work — though for certain sorts of jobs, my sense is that doing a little work on vacation can enable more vacation time. Another manifestation is doing work at nights or on weekends — but sometimes this enables mini-vacations during the work day, or at least family flexibility during work hours. Or at least it should. I think if folks are on the phone with a team from Asia at 9 p.m. it makes a lot of sense to sometimes not be working at 9 a.m. if you don’t need to.

Anyway, if you are working very flexibly, moving time around — doing work things at not-work hours and not-work things during work hours and want to talk about it, please let me know! Especially if you have more of a “conventional” job. As always, you can reach me at laura at lauravanderkam dot com. Thank you!

There are always the usual stunners. People sleep a reasonable amount. In 2021, the average person slept 8.95 hours per day. Since the ATUS covers people over age 15, that number includes teens and retirees. However, even very busy folks do sleep. The average employed woman with kids under age 6 slept 8.61 hours/day, with employed fathers of young kids sleeping 8.42 hours. How is this possible? While there is probably some time spent falling asleep or being up in the middle of the night, that’s not going to be 2 hours per day for most people (and long stretches of time awake would be picked up in the way the survey is done). Instead, to think about this, it might help to multiply these numbers by 7 to obtain a weekly tally — probably people don’t sleep 8.61 hours on a Tuesday, but add in weekend sleep, holiday sleep, naps, crashing on the couch, sleeping through an alarm or hitting snooze, etc., and the number will be higher than the general mental picture of a typical day.

The ATUS picks up big societal shifts — and one of the biggest in the past few years is the rise of remote work. In 2021, on the days they worked, 38 percent of employed people did some or all of their work at home, and 68 percent did some or all of their work at their workplace. In 2019, these numbers were 24 percent and 82 percent, respectively. That’s a 14 percentage point shift in people completely leaving the office on whatever workday they were surveyed.

Now maybe 14 percentage points doesn’t sound so huge, but keep in mind that some jobs need to be done at a workplace. It is hard to drive a truck from home, or be a waitress from home. Since those categories of work couldn’t see a huge shift, the shift is concentrated in other categories. And sure enough, this has been an uneven revolution. The ATUS reports that on the days they worked, 59 percent of those in management, business and financial operations occupations, and 57 percent of those in professional and related occupations did some or all of their work at home. Among people with an advanced degree, 67 percent did some or all of their work at home, vs. 19 percent of those with a high school diploma.

There’s lots to unpack in the data, which looks at how men and women spend their time, and how people who have kids at home and do not have kids at home spend their time, and how being employed affects how people spend their time. The American Time Use Survey is one of the big things that drove my initial interest in time. At first, I wanted to write about various shifts in time use for various demographics, but the wiser marketing advice was to write about time management. Still…I find the numbers fascinating!