I remember reading your book I Know How She Does It back in 2015… there was an observation made on how much time was spent on cleaning; (to which I subconsciously may have chosen to not focus time on since 😆). Beginning time challenge and cleaning or de-cluttering…making space for more of what matters seems to go together…for me at least and hopefully for those you had interviewed for your book. Don’t get me wrong, cleaning is a good thing. But I think we would all be over at FlyLady’s sight if we knew it was enough. That’s why I really appreciate your attitude of cultivating a relationship with time. At least that is the sense I got when I read your blog post from yesterday. Thank you for sharing the 15 minute piano playing…I read it as a time transition. I often find myself slip up in these moments with my time log attempts…in the sense of discrediting them and telling myself I am “distracted” because I am not focused on my to do list and therefore “wasting time.” Forgive if you’ve covered this myth in other books.

This week is going to have a very outsized amount of time in the “social” category. I brought a friend with a baby lunch yesterday, I have a HH tomorrow, a friend’s bday dinner on Thurday, a zoom catch up with a friend on Friday, and then a get together with friends on Saturday. My social bucket total for this week in 2022 was 2.5 hours! It will be like 4-5 times that this year! But I was still being very careful last January as the delta variant was circulating and my kids weren’t vaccinated! So it is nice to see a return to a full social schedule. I feel like I’m doing a month’s worth of stuff in a week but that’s how it works sometimes.

@Jess – I am hoping that by age 10 things get better. We shall see!

@Meaghan – glad you’re planning to do it this year! Yep, an all-or-nothing mindset tends not to be helpful. A few times a week is great for many many things.

@Meaghan so you would think! But for my particularly kid apparently cheese first then olive oil is the ONLY way to do it.

For context, I’ve wanted to participate in this challenge for about 5 years, but inevitably life things got in the way. But this year, #timetrackingchalenge is very important to me!

I’m nearly finished with TBT (it’s taken me about 3 months to complete it), but I’m sticking with it because, as you say, 3 times a week is a habit, so that’s seeping into a lot of things I do and honestly, it makes me feel like less of a failure about incorporating more things into my life that I thought I didn’t have time for because I’d miss one day and it would throw me off. I did have that “all or nothing” mindset before. Now, that’s out the window!

Seems obvious to me that the olive oil going on first, toss the pasta to coat, then when you put the cheese on, it’ll stick to all the pasta that has the oil on it. Same goes for salads – put the oil/dressing on first, toss to coat, then put the crunchies on and toss again.

Anyway, Laura, this is the first year I’m following through with your time tracking challenge. I made it through the whole day tracking by the half hour. I even created my own spreadsheet in Google docs!