In this week’s episode of Best of Both Worlds, Sarah and I look at how to find quality time with partners, kids, and with yourself during the busy years. The good news is that something tends to go a long way — it doesn’t have to be much to matter.

In the Q&A we tackle the time cost of home ownership. A listener is thinking of buying her first home but has heard from friends about how they’re spending all their time dealing with house projects. Is there any way to limit that?

Please give the episode a listen! As always, we welcome ratings and reviews. We are also happy to report that the “explicit” rating from Apple has now been removed — we are (and always have been) a “clean” podcast. So feel free to listen in the car while driving other people around!

Now that Best of Both Worlds is part of iHeartMedia, you can also listen through their channels.

A few folks pointed out that this question seems surprisingly similar to a Real Simple article I have talked about for years. Back in 2007 or so, the magazine asked busy readers to write in about what they’d do if they found an extra 15 minutes in their day. My favorite response was from a woman who wrote that 15 minutes of uninterrupted writing time would be a priceless gift. This left me wondering where she found 15 minutes to read Real Simple and write in a letter about this elusive dream.

(Fun fact: This person later picked up a copy of 168 Hours, found reading my joke about her letter a bit jarring, but still reviewed the book nicely!)

The truth is, even the busiest folks have some free time. It might be hard to predict, and sometimes we might need to take an extra logistical step or two to open up possibilities, but the time is most likely there.

However, many of us have a hard time seizing available time for high quality pursuits. The upside of this question — what you would do if an hour opened up on a Tuesday afternoon — is that it nudges people to zero in on exactly what they enjoy doing, and may do some, but feel like they don’t do often enough.

(Well, except for the very honest commenters who noted that they would probably work more or scroll around online!)

So, if you’ve come up with a non-laundry, non-Facebook response to this question, there is a logical next step: Figure out how you can actually take an extra hour for this pursuit!

I’m posting this on a Monday, so tomorrow is Tuesday. Can you plan your afternoon tomorrow to spend an hour doing whatever you chose? What would need to happen for you to make this happen?

Some of us with work flexibility might be able to pull this off without too much trouble, especially if the chosen activity was something like going for a walk, sewing, or reading (or taking a nap!). If the activity involves someone else, that might be more challenging, but if you wanted to call a friend, and you texted her tonight to ask when tomorrow afternoon might work, you might find a mutually agreeable time.

Some people are no doubt booked up solid tomorrow afternoon, or have jobs that don’t allow for moving things around. Some other readers are probably caring for small kids tomorrow afternoon, and so can’t necessarily high-tail it, solo, to the beach. But as you look forward to the next week or so, is there a time you could make this happen? What logistics would you need to work out? If not in the next week, how about the next month?

Hopefully folks will make time soon for whatever they’d do when an hour opened up on Tuesday afternoon. And once you make it happen, that can feel good enough that you become motivated to make it a regular part of your life. And that can feel very good indeed!

TBT Scorecard: As mentioned last week, in advance of Tranquility by Tuesday coming out this fall, I’m grading myself on how I did on the nine TBT rules. I probably won’t post this scorecard every week but it provides a fun rubric for analyzing my time logs.

Last week (April 25-May 1), I was in bed by 11 p.m. six out of the seven nights. On Saturday night I didn’t get into bed until 12:30 a.m. because my high schooler had been traveling to the state Science Olympiad, and his bus got into the high school parking lot at midnight. My husband normally takes on late night teen/pre-teen pick-ups (he keeps later hours than me) but he was running the Broad Street 10-miler on Sunday morning and needed to get up around 6:30 a.m. So I took one for the team there.

I planned on Friday as always. I walked or ran before 3 p.m. every day (mostly walking — I ran on the 2 weekend days, but I’m trying to bump this number up this week as my legs are feeling better). I played the piano three times a week, but sang zero! Choir practice was canceled Thursday and then I didn’t wind up going to church Sunday AM because I had to drive everyone around with my husband gone at Broad Street. Also, I only ran twice. We sort of had two family meals — it was a busy week. If you count meals minus the high schooler (who was gone all Friday and Saturday), then we had more.

(I tend to leave Friday mostly open as my back-up slot and that was true this week too.)

I definitely had one big adventure and one little adventure. Maybe more! On Monday, I took a solo trip to Holland Ridge Farms to pick tulips. It was fun to go with the kids two weeks ago, but we kind of zoomed in and out. Since I had bought a pack of flex tickets, I could go whenever, so I went on my own. I was gone about 3.5 hours. I practiced my speech in the car both ways, so 2 of those hours were, in fact, work time. The tulips were beautiful and it was nice to go when the place wasn’t crowded. Second adventure: I went into NYC on Wednesday-Thursday. I took the train and stayed at a hotel like pre-Covid times! I met a friend for dinner at a French restaurant on Wednesday night and then gave a speech for an event at the Harvard Club in mid-town on Thursday morning. As for little adventures, there were many potential things — a few social get-togethers (we had two different families over to our house this weekend at different times), and my husband and I went to the fundraising gala for the preschool where we will be sending our FIFTH KID next year.

Continuing…I normally consider choir practice to fulfill the “Take one night for you” rule, but since that was canceled, we could count other things, like my dinner in NYC. I ran with a friend on Saturday morning. My husband and I also decided to explicitly divvy up the weekend hours when we were in charge of the 2-year-old, but I mostly used that for work.

I batched the little things on Friday; like planning, my Friday punch list is a habit at this point. As for effortful before effortless…this is still a work in progress. So much scrolling around… In my defense, a lot of my “reading” mental energy was taken up with proofreading the current layout of TBT. Plus finishing Hamlet. I did listen to Appalachian Spring in the car several times instead of random stuff. Maybe I need to go dig a 1000-piece puzzle out of the garage. Or buy a spring one…

Sometimes in a busy life, we need to get creative to fit things in. So I wanted to share one intriguing strategy I saw on a log that I think other folks might consider trying.

Reader Nicole is a lawyer who is also the mother of a 3-year-old girl. She is currently remodeling her house which, I can report from experience, is a time-consuming activity. The week she logged featured the usual component of schedule busting events, both bad (an emergency vet visit) and good (getting a rather long night out when some extended family in town offered to take the 3-year-old).

Amid all this, she maintained a regular exercise routine and spent a lot of time with friends. How? With what she calls the “5 a.m. club.”

Basically, as I saw on her log, on three mornings each week at 5 a.m., she meets a few friends who live in the neighborhood. They walk 2.7 miles in about 45 minutes each time. (Nicole’s sleeping husband can be at home with the 3-year-old.)

As Nicole explains, “No one has anything else on their calendar at 5am so unless one of us is out of town, we meet now on MWF and walk our neighborhood loop. This then gives 2 of us another hour before kids and partners wake up to have that cup of hot coffee and I (like Sarah) play with my planner and read. The other two start getting middle schoolers ready.”

To be sure, waking up at 4:40 a.m. three times a week requires going to bed on time. But I’d note for anyone attempting this that a bedtime of 9:30/9:45 p.m. wouldn’t be so ridiculous (particularly if you have young kids who go to bed relatively early). Nicole also sleeps a little later on the other mornings, since she doesn’t have to be at work at a particularly early time. She averaged about 7.2 hours/day over the whole week.

But with this one habit, she manages to exercise and see friends at least three times a week. I am pretty sure she enjoys it enough that she finds it worth it (she even got up on the morning after she was at the vet quite late with her dog! The dog is OK now.).

So if you have neighborhood friends you’d like to see, and a busy schedule after 6 a.m., this might be worth pondering as a strategy. Or maybe it could be a 6 a.m. club if you’re busy after 7. Or even an 8 p.m. club if that’s the time of day that works for neighborhood friends with little kids who go to bed early. Wear headlamps or stay on the side walks if you have them.

But combining exercise and social time, and doing so multiple times per week, can really make life feel good. Nicole notes that “[I] love my friends I walk with and it is a joy to see them.” She says that “Walking feels like nothing but on a day I miss I am grumpy so I know it helps to move.”

It does. Now I need to go run (just not at 5 a.m.! Did I mention I’m not really a morning person…?)

Photo: Come home from an early walk to enjoy this…