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 have done this every day since January 1st, which was 215 days ago. I did do some push-ups yesterday. But I did not do the reading or writing.

I have spent quite a while today pondering why that was. There was no real time reason. I had time; it only takes a few minutes in any case. I was at my desk — fewer hours than on a “typical” Tuesday, but still there, with my copy of War and Peace next to me and my laptop available, and indeed, in use.

The honest truth is that I forgot. There was a brain blip of some sort, influenced by slight changes in schedule and work on other things. On weekdays, I often do my rituals in the morning as kids are getting ready for school or camp. But yesterday my husband left early for something, and I was driving a kid downtown. Our nanny gets to work at 8:00 a.m. I needed to finish getting ready, and we left at 8:20, but there was a lot of traffic and I didn’t get back to my desk until around 9:30. At that point, I decided to dive right into book writing, rather than doing my rituals. I think I figured I’d do them during a break. Then I got really into the writing, and kept at it without much of a break until I wound up with the baby for a while as other camp runs were happening. Those camp runs were delayed with other traffic, and I had to race out as soon as a kid got back to go to a planned afternoon adventure. This involved the Cousins Maine Lobster truck (see picture), which was parked at a nearby mall for the day, and then this indoor trampoline thing a handful of children had been begging to do.

This all took longer than expected (there was a wait for the trampoline) and we got home around 6:15 p.m. We ate dinner, there was a showdown over fruit eating, I put the baby to bed and then didn’t make it back into my home office until late. At that point I wasn’t even thinking about the rituals, because I have almost universally done them in the morning. I had more or less forgotten that I hadn’t done them.

Until this morning when I walked into my office, picked up War and Peace and said…wait. I didn’t read this yesterday! It’s somewhat amazing to me that I could do something for 215 days in a row and then forget, but there we go. At least it was easy enough to pick back up. I read two chapters and wrote two separate 100-word bits in the free writing file. We’ll see if I forget again before the end of the year!

By Nancy Rielle

Greetings, 168ers! I’m Nancy Rielle, Co-founder of the ecard site, VerveCards.com, and winner of September’s 168 Hours Time Log Challenge Makeover. While I loved 168 Hours and found the 168- vs. 24-hour paradigm shift to be game changing, I noticed that there wasn’t anybody like me profiled in the book. I’m a single entrepreneur with a home office, so my days are a clean slate — no office hours or boss to answer to, no commute, and no kids or spouse to look after. As you can imagine, having zero built-in time constraints creates time management challenges of a different sort.

I found that Laura’s pre-meeting questions really cut to the chase, so I’ll share them here, together with my responses:

1. What do you like most about your schedule? Freedom to synch my schedule with my natural rhythms.

2. What do you want to do more of with your time? Have focused, prioritized work time and guilt-free personal time. Get rid of the Gray Zone where work just bleeds into everything — or I’m taking care of personal stuff and feeling guilty about not working.

3. What do you want to get off your plate? Housekeeping/errands/personal upkeep. (Also, my place is always a mess. It drags me down and impacts my productivity and peace of mind.)

4. Fill in the blank: “I spend way too much time on___!”: Metaphorically standing at a 4-way intersection spinning my head around not knowing which direction to take next.” Also, setting up schedules, then not adhering to them.

Ironically, the week’s time log that we dissected was comically atypical – and made me feel like a bit of a liar, as there was no shortage of “non-business pursuits” in this particular slice of my life! I did zero work over the weekend, which is not my norm. (Saturday was taken up by an out-of-town memorial, and Sunday was, horror of horrors, all about fun – a performance and late lunch for a friend’s birthday, followed by a first date for drinks, which turned into dinner – and two other dates later in the week!)

Yes, after a year of being single, suddenly I have a non-business pursuit who’s about 5’11, 180 lbs. and a lot more fun than being glued to my computer! So, now he’ll be vying for some of my 168 hours, as well. Hmmmm, where to slot him in?

Despite the abnormal log, certain patterns and areas for improvement emerged that we were able to work with:

– Make lists doable, not daunting – Monday mornings I do make a prioritized work To Do List for the week, but it’s so friggin’ huge that there’s no way I could possibly plow through it. Laura pointed out that this is just self-defeating and suggested a few tweaks here:

• Use Sunday night, instead of Monday morning, to reflect on the question, “What would make this a good week?”
• Set personal goals that are as ambitious and engaging as your work goals, and weave them into a good mix of professional and pleasurable items for the week. A combo of 3 professional and 2 personal goals per day – with one of the personals being exercise – is a good place to start. And, of course, the List of 100 Dreams is fertile hunting ground for the other pleasurable items.
• Daily To Do Lists should be set the night ahead, as well, instead of the morning of. The ideal time is when you’re wrapping up the prior work day — when you’re clearest on where you’ve left off and where you need to pick up the following day.

– Stay on top of housekeeping in manageable increments – Provided your home is basically clean, which mine is (I’d eat gruel before giving up my couple hours of every-other-week cleaning help), Laura suggested this minimalist approach to taming clutter and mess:

• One hour of housekeeping on Sunday to start the week with an orderly home and office.
• 15 minutes a day for basic tidying up to keep all Hell from breaking loose.
• Keep horizontal surfaces clutter free — even if the drawers look maniacal.

I found that list making beforehand – Sunday night for the week ahead and the night prior for the next day – really helped me hit the ground running each morning with clear intention. Setting beginning and end times for the work day (8:00 a.m. at my desk and 5:00 pm off to the gym or power walking) bookended that part of my life in a definitive way, too. I’m still not Martha Stewart on the homemaking front by any stretch, but I made some headway with the incremental tidying up.

In the same way that food tracking has become second nature to me through WeightWatchers, my aim is to integrate time tracking as a way of life, as well. Both are simple ways to stay mindful — and it’s just too easy to mindlessly shove food into your mouth — or fritter away time — unless there’s some accountability (for me, anyway).

I learned that I’m way more non-linear than I even suspected — and that having the week blocked out beforehand, then tracking against that, is a great way to stay on course. Besides, writing everything down in a table really appeals to my process-oriented inner Rainman!

Thanks, Laura, for this opportunity to tear apart and put back anew a part of my life that needed a serious overhaul – my relationship to time!

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Her problem? “I haven’t ever had that job I love.” Since having children, this Princeton grad and Harvard MBA (who blogs at ADesignSoVast, including about 168 Hours) has always worked part-time as a way to pursue that ever-elusive goal of balance. “The thing that haunts me is this: In being unwilling to give up either world, did I end up doing a poor job in both?” she asks.

I would say no on the mom front, since her two children sound quite charming from her blog posts! (Many of us use our blogs to complain about the rugrats). But on the work front, she feels “frustrated by what feels like wasted years, spent only partially engaged in jobs that, in retrospect, did not mean very much to me. To keep the flexibility I prize so highly I have chosen roles that are often peripheral, not core to a company’s function, and I have been an individual contributor rather than a member of a team. This has eroded both my sense of making a real contribution and of feeling part of a cohesive group. What was the point of having missed hours with my babies for something that feels so insubstantial and inconsequential now?”

Of course, as she points out, she doubts she actually would have wanted to be with her kids every second. Still, it’s kind of a depressing essay, and she even floats the idea that she wasted her Princeton and Harvard educations, and let down her parents and teachers, which seems a little silly. Jeff Skilling probably let down his HBS profs. Not Lindsey. But she does raise several points that I think are worth addressing.

First, people have this idea that part-time work would be the best of both worlds between working and staying home with kids. In reality, as she has discovered, it is sometimes the worst of both worlds. You still have work stress, often a commute and work expenses, you may need childcare, and yet you aren’t working enough to get the full benefit of it — that is, working to the point of diminishing returns. And so you earn far less per hour, often don’t get benefits, and your career may not advance to the point where the work is fun. Or where you have the autonomy that would actually bring a better work-life fit. Sure, some people love their part-time jobs. But they are not a universal solution to work-life woes.

My main beef with the essay, though, is the idea that by fully committing to one’s professional life, you “give up” motherhood, even if you have kids. This is the kind of false choice that I wrote 168 Hours to combat. There are 168 hours in a week. If you work 40 and sleep 56, that leaves 72 hours for other things.

Now, you can point out that many of the jobs that HBS grads pursue are not 40-hour/week jobs. But I’ve seen several time logs now of big firm lawyers, executives, management consultants and so forth, and they were not working 80-hour weeks. Yes, they were sometimes 55-65. But this still leaves many hours for a family life if you choose, and I was gratified to see how often they did choose family. And not just at 7pm on weekdays and on weekends, either. Mead was not “willing to give up the flexibility to spend time with my children, during the week, during the day.” Neither were some of them (I enjoyed the Wednesday 10AM school birthday party entry on a particularly hard-charging mom’s time log).

The key for many people is professional situations where we get to be grown-ups. That is, if you want to be at a school event at 10AM, you make the work up at 10PM. In many cases, you get to that grown-up stage by devoting enough hours to your craft to get somewhere. Yes, sometimes the key to work-life “balance” is working more.

In other 168 Hours news:

• Kimberly Wilson’s Tranquility du Jour runs a podcast on 168 Hours
• Men with Pens runs a guest post from me on why you should write that Christmas letter now (and is co-hosting a webinar with me on Free Agent Time Management on Oct 14!)
• Wandering Scientist writes what she discovered during the 168 Hours Challenge, and in good scientific fashion, gives us the daily averages, plus the maximum and minimums. Good stuff!
• Laughing at Chaos rounds up her week and discovers she multi-tasks All. The. Time.
• Light and Momentary discovers that she hates logging her time — but it does keep her accountable.
• The Soap Dish vows to remember moments of family fun that thread through her 168 hours.
• And many more time logs coming in (this is just a smattering – plus some that wish to be anonymous). Everyone finds this a learning experience. Though sometimes not in the ways we envisioned.

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First, it was a great week, professionally and personally. Because I knew my logs would be public, I planned to make it a great week. And so it was. Key take-away: planning out big goals for our 168 hours makes it more likely that they will happen. Some highlights of things that went well:

• 168 Hours publicity: One of my major goals for 2010 is to bring this book to a wide audience. During this 168 hours, I did 3 radio interviews, 2 print interviews (Our Sunday Visitor and the Chicago Tribune), and was featured on several blogs, including Men with Pens, The Happiness Project, and The Huffington Post (the latter being my own post). I also gave a speech at In Good Company.
• Getting another book deal: A second major goal for 2010. Done! And after a bit of trepidation about what I thought was the project’s direction, it is now clarified, and I am quite excited about it. The idea is to do for money what 168 Hours does for time.
• Novel writing: Last Sunday, pre-challenge, I had dug a manuscript out of that metaphorical drawer (actually, it was on my computer) and read it. After 5 years, you see things with fresh eyes. The manuscript needs some work, but I carved out a few of my 168 hours to work on it, and I feel confident that I will be able to show people the manuscript by the end of the year (my third major professional goal for 2010).
• Running: I ran five times. I also signed up for a half-marathon in Philly in November to give me the motivation to run longer distances (and it worked, I ran 5 miles for the first time in a month on Saturday). I did rather long walks on the days I didn’t run.
• Choir: I had rehearsal this week, and have been helping with the transition to a new leadership team (which included attending a meeting post-rehearsal).
• Family: In my Happiness Project interview, I noted that I too often play it safe with the kids, hanging out in the house rather than going somewhere and risking an art museum melt-down or a subway diaper explosion. This week I tried to be better about this. I took the kids to our building end-of-summer party on Thursday, and they liked getting balloon animals, even if we weren’t there long. I took Sam to the art museum on Friday. We went apple picking and to the zoo this weekend. I walked Jasper to school in the mornings, and tried to spend time playing.

Looking back on this, it seems like a busy week, though the funny part is that there were still many open spaces. There were long patches during my workdays when I wasn’t particularly focused, and I probably could have fit more in if I wished. Or maybe I need this indolent time (though I should get better about recognizing it for what it is). There were also some challenges:

• I get distracted very easily during my work hours. Partly this is the availability of email/web distractions. I am more focused if I shut down my browser and turn off my iPhone and force myself to stick with the task at hand.
• Bedtime is a battle. With both children. They just don’t need as much sleep as many children their age, and so I have very little personal time in the evenings. I also need to get to bed on time, as they wake up early. I am not a morning person. While my time logs show I get 7-8 hours of sleep per night, I would really prefer to go to bed later and wake up later.
• Very little adult time with my husband. Partly this is because he was gone most of the week, which is its own challenge.
• Blocks of time: My nanny starts work at 8, and Jasper has to be at school at 9. Unfortunately, it is hard to do something meaningful in the 45-minute block I have from 8:00-8:45. I did run some mornings, but it makes for a rushed time, and so I may have to rethink this.

I’m curious to learn what other people discovered through this exercise of logging time. Did you discover habits that you like or don’t like? Did being aware of your time help you make space for things that have been lingering on the to-do list for too long? Did you fill your 168 hours with things you enjoyed? Please let me know!

Links to other days:

168 Hours Challenge Day 1

168 Hours Challenge Day 2

168 Hours Challenge Day 3

168 Hours Challenge Day 4

168 Hours Challenge Day 5

168 Hours Challenge Weekend Thread

168 Hours Challenge Wrap-up Thread

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I’ll be posting my time logs here from Sept 13-Sept 19. You can join me and take the 168 Hours Challenge by down-loading a time log here. (You can also just keep a time log in a little notebook or in a word doc if you prefer). I will be giving away a book a day during the week for people who do one of several things:

• Post a comment here with their time log (or a summary)
• Post a comment on Facebook (either at the 168 Hours fan page, or on your own feed – just tag the book or me so I see it)
• Post a comment on Twitter (#168Hours)
• Email me (lvanderkam@yahoo.com) about how the time log is going.
• Post your time log on your own website (email me for a heads-up)

At the end of the week, I’ll also choose one participant for a time make-over (similar to the three in Chapter 9 of 168 Hours). Email me if you’re interested in being considered for that. We’ll strategize some ideas, and then later this month, you’ll write a guest post about how it’s going. In exchange for the guest post (because hey, your time is valuable!), you’ll get a $100 Amazon gift card.

Keeping a time log is not complicated, but it does require a bit of commitment. Doing this together will keep us accountable to each other. I hope you’ll join me, and please spread the word.

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