After posting last night, I gave the 3-year-old a bath and made sure others were taking showers. I read the 3-year-old a story, and put him to bed (he was pretty tired again). I was done with that by 9:30 p.m., at which point I read to the 7-year-old, who I think really wanted some more mommy time. He had come in earlier to listen to the story with the 3-year-old too…sometimes this is the challenge of many kids. Anyway, I read a Dog Man graphic novel out loud for a bit. Then I finished the Lego Friends Art School with my daughter, and turned the kids’ lights out at 10.

At this point I started the dishwasher and then got to enjoy 30 minutes of free time, during which I did my puzzle. The Shakespearean insults puzzle is coming along, though each piece is something of a battle. Since it’s all text I can’t just say oh, all these red pieces go here and sort that way. I puzzled through the puzzle until 10:45, then went up, got ready for bed, and turned the lights out at 11. (I vaguely remember a bathroom visit at 5 a.m.).

At 6:30, the alarm went off, as it does. I got the boys up — checking to be sure they were up! — then took my shower. I was on driving duty this morning, and dropped the 15-year-old at school (7:10) and the 13-year-old at jazz band (7:20). I came back (7:30), helped with the 3-year-old, and then drove the 11-year-old to school at 7:50, retracing the route I had driven 30 minutes earlier. The 3-year-old asked to come along so he joined me for the route. Anyway, after coming home at 8:20 a.m., I was able to eat some cereal, and then get started on work.

I worked pretty much straight from 8:20 a.m. – 11:40 a.m. I turned in my essay, and recorded ads and Before Breakfast episodes (I’m now an extra week ahead!), and then was interviewed by a reporter for a piece on layoff anxiety. At 11:40 I went up to do my hair (to look pretty for Zoom…) but was interrupted by the door bell – a utility person was here to inspect the gas meter, and he couldn’t find it. This not really being my area of expertise, I had to confess that I didn’t know where it was either. So I gave him some ideas, he came back 5 minutes later to tell me had found it, and then I raced to get ready for the 12:00 Best of Both Worlds Patreon meet-up.

This was fun– an hour discussing healthy habits, and where we succeed and go awry. If you’d like to watch the recording and participate in our discussions, come join us! At 1:00 p.m. I answered some emails, then had lunch (eggs + spinach), and then played the piano for 20 minutes and worked through my songs for choir. At 2:00 I then did another hour of work, answering emails and sending in my sound files for various ads and episodes. Right before 3:00 I realized I was not going to make it to the gym, as I had vaguely intended, but I needed to “move by 3 p.m.” So I walked outside and fetched the trash cans from the bottom of the driveway, then walked around the street for a bit (until 3:20). While doing so, I bumped into the 15-year-old who must have taken the regular bus home.

Now I am writing this before heading off for another round of kid shuttling (Thursday is a pretty full day for that). Then there is choir — the way I mark the beginning of the second half of the week! I hope your first half of the week has gone well.

Anyway, here in the first half of the week things are chugging along. Last night after I posted here I took the 3-year-old up, read him stories, gave him his “baba milk” and waited while he fell asleep. This took longer than I would have liked as another child decided to start singing outside the door. The singing was perfectly lovely…but not when I’m trying to get a kid to sleep. As a result I got sucked into some Twitter arguments. Ah…

Anyway, he was down at 9:30 p.m. and I did Legos with my daughter, and then read to the 7-year-old. I turned everyone’s lights out and answered emails until 10:30. At that point I went upstairs to read but could not focus and wound up scrolling more (see the Twitter argument before…). A little voice in my head tried to convince me I could stay up later (somebody is wrong on Twitter! How could I go to bed?), but I told it to be quiet and I turned off my light by 11 p.m.

This morning I got up at 6:30 a.m. as usual, made sure the 15-year-old was up, showered, and was attempting to put my contacts in when the 3-year-old started screaming for me. Naturally, it then took twice as long to get my contacts in, and I was getting flustered. The upside is that the 3-year-old then came with me to bring the 15-year-old to school (I woke the middle school kids up before heading out the door). We came home, I confirmed that the 13-year-old and 11-year-old were mostly ready, and they got out the door for the bus. Our nanny came at 8 again, and I got some things done (10 pages of Jane, 2 lines of the sonnet, a blog post that I then forgot to hit publish on) before I needed to leave at 9 a.m. for a doctor’s appointment.

Theoretically this was only 12 minutes away, but I left 25 minutes early and it was good I did because there was so much construction on the way, plus a 10-car line-up trying to get in the parking garage, and I walked in the waiting room right at 9:30. Fortunately, getting there took longer than the appointment. I was back in my car at 10 and home 10:20. At this point, as I sat down at my desk, I noticed a gentleman waving at me through the window. It was the furniture delivery people, who I guess had knocked but not rang the doorbell (our nanny was waiting for the delivery while I was gone but no one could hear the knock). Anyway, they delivered the end tables, and I sat back down at my desk and noticed my husband had called so I called him back and was glad to learn his crew of folks hadn’t been affected by the two hour ground stop of all domestic air travel. Oh my goodness, I can’t even imagine the havoc that wreaked on people today. If your time log has that I am so so sorry.

Anyway, I finally got to work after that and did about 90 minutes of editing and such until 12:15 when I ate a quick lunch. I then played the piano and sang for 20 minutes, then had a 45 minute call to help onboard my new virtual assistant! (1-1:45). This is very exciting — she and I met with the team that’s been helping me on newsletters and such for many years (but are transitioning to other things).

After, I put on my running clothes and ran for 32 minutes, covering 2.7 miles according to my phone step counter (I feel like it was a little more but who knows, because that seems pretty slow). I then did more work, including an email triage for 2 hours from 2:45-4:45 p.m.

At that point, the 3-year-old was yelling for me, so I came out of my office to talk with him. He decided to come with me to go pick the 15-year-old up at school (5:00 pick up). I had said no Starbucks today, but as soon as the 15-year-old got in the van, the 3-year-old started asking “Starbucks? Starbucks?” My eldest noted that he’d be totally fine with that, and the 3-year-old kept asking (he likes cake pops) until I agreed. So we were back there again for more strawberry acai lemonades (an update on that — I drank half mine at home, the 3-year-old demanded it, so I gave it to him and he promptly spilled it all over the floor).

Upon returning home at 5:20 p.m. I worked for another 25 minutes until the 13-year-old needed a device for his virtual alto sax lesson. I set him up in my office, grabbed my other computer, and headed over to the garage to chat with a group in Connecticut about Tranquility by Tuesday (6-7 p.m.). Why the garage? Because the sound of the alto sax was noticeably loud in the house proper…

I came back at 7 p.m., nanny left, I ate dinner (eggs and bacon leftover from what the kids had already eaten). I hung out with the 3-year-old doing Play-doh until he started throwing it, at which point I put it up on a shelf and we shall see if it ever comes out again. I hate Play-doh, but Santa brought it so what can I do.

At 7:25 p.m. my daughter took over babysitting duties and the 13-year-old, 7-year-old and I took the trash and recycling out. This is cardboard night, and since we missed cardboard night over Christmas there is A LOT of cardboard. We took some. (The 15-year-old had math tutoring). It was a cold and crisp night, so not terrible, but I always feel on these trash nights like my driveway is really long.

Anyway, now I am posting this. I’ll bring the 3-year-old up shortly for a bath. He’s been on the computer watching Octonauts (and working on a diaper…) while I write this…

After, I came home and worked on various things until 12:30 p.m., when my husband and I ate lunch together (leftovers for me, sandwich for him again). I did a podcast-related call at 1 p.m., did various random things (it was that kind of day) then got in my running clothes for another 3 mile run (1:35-2:10 or so). Not far, not fast, but it wasn’t that cold, so it was fine.

I then proceeded to not work for much of the rest of the afternoon. My husband left for the rest of the day, so I had the house to myself, so I decided to play the piano for a bit (I wouldn’t do this while he was working from home and on calls…). Then I practiced some vocal exercises, then decided to sing through the Agnus Dei from Bach’s B-Minor Mass (also not good as an accompaniment to someone else’s Zooms). It’s a goal to practice singing more (three times a week is a habit!) so I’m glad I did that, but then I found it hard to get focused again. It’s unclear what I did with this time. Work/admin/etc. I know I did my puzzle for a few minutes, then kids started coming home, and I chatted with my daughter for a bit. I did manage to get back to my desk from 4:15-4:45 p.m. or so, at which point I fetched my 13-year-old from the bottom of the hill where the activity bus had dropped him, then went to get the 15-year-old from school.

He really wanted Starbucks, and it probably won’t happen later this week, so I took him. It’s one way to get a teenager to talk to you…The Starbucks parking lot is much easier to navigate if you have two people — one to go in, one to stay with the car (there are places you can idle but can’t park…). He got our strawberry acai lemonade refreshers, and then we drove home. Our nanny and the two little ones got home from karate shortly thereafter so we threw together dinner (tomato soup + grilled cheese mostly), and ate (5:50-6:10) and then I got ready to drive my daughter to her choir concert.

I had wanted some of the older boys to go but…they didn’t want to, and I didn’t feel like a fight, so I went by myself. She had to be dropped off 6:30 p.m., but it didn’t start until 7 p.m., so I read an interesting article in the Princeton Alumni Weekly about the conservative movement at Princeton. Then the kids sang. They were great! The songs were upbeat, and everyone was cheerful and the program was also short. We were out by 7:45, and home by 8 p.m.

Now I am writing this while the 3-year-old watches some Cookie Monster video on YouTube Kids. Everyone needs to be in their rooms by 9, and lights out by 10 and then everything starts over again!

I hope your second day of tracking went well. Let me know if you’re observing anything interesting!

From 12-1 p.m. I edited Before Breakfast scripts and practiced reading them. I checked email again, and then realized that the house was quiet enough — I think the 3-year-old was watching a movie upstairs with our nanny — that I could record. This is always a gamble, because it’s annoying to stop in the middle, but I decided to go for broke.

So from 1:15-1:50 p.m. or so, I recorded five episodes of Before Breakfast back to back.* The first four were good on the first take (no sound edits). That’s why I practice!** The fifth I had to repeat phrases twice, so I made a note of that.

After finishing, I went upstairs and changed into my running clothes. I was out on the driveway when I bumped into the arborist who monitors our trees (our historic house turns out to have some very old trees that we hope don’t fall on us…). Turns out she was in London after Christmas too so we chatted about that and I didn’t start running until about 2:20. Then I ran 3 miles and was home 2:55 or so. I sent in my Before Breakfast sound files (listening to the one with the edits to catch when they were so I could note them for the producer). I got a snack and spent a while texting with various people (including setting up some math tutoring).

Then I worked on various random stuff as kids started coming home. I never assume I will get time to work after 4:00 p.m. though I often do. I left at 4:20 to pick up the 15-year-old from an after school activity. Right around when I got home my 11-year-old had a trumpet lesson, which she tends to use my office for. So I did some idea generation at the kitchen table before leaving at 5:10 with the 7-year-old to go to his Ninja Warrior class. We chatted in the car there, arriving right as class started at 5:30. I checked in with the front desk about his upcoming birthday party, then worked at a table in the gym area for the hour-long class. I wrote much of this post and then worked on future Before Breakfast episodes (I try to be a few weeks ahead but I lost much of my buffer over the holidays. So I need to make up some time.).

At 6:30 p.m. I went into the class where my kid was climbing up slides and dangling on rings and otherwise didn’t want to leave. But they cleared them out by 6:40 (and I said hello to another parent I know) and then we drove home.

Everyone else had already eaten when we got there at 7 so I put together a plate of things he’d eat,*** and then I had the pasta everyone else had. I scrolled while eating, then the dog was whining so I took him out. It was very dark and cold out! I’m glad this is normally my husband’s job.

Now it is 7:30 and I am posting this. I’ll likely go find the toddler soon (he’s with my husband) but I know he took a late nap so who knows when he’ll go to bed. Well, I guess we’ll all know tomorrow when I post my time log!

I hope your first day of time-tracking has gone well!

*For any new folks joining us, Before Breakfast is a very short podcast — about 5 minutes per episode. Each episode features a tip designed to take your day from great to awesome!

** I don’t know why I care so much about this, but I don’t like doing multiple repeat takes if I can avoid it. When I recorded the audio book for Tranquility by Tuesday the producer called me “One Take Vanderkam” — not because I would naturally read things right the first time but because I’d read the book aloud as I’d written it, so nothing was new.

***You tell me — how can a child have the personality to take massive physical risks, darting up to the top of the climbing walls, throwing himself through an obstacle course, but not want to eat unfamiliar foods?

I woke up briefly at 5:30 a.m. this morning for the bathroom, but then went back to sleep until 6:30 a.m. when my alarm went off. I went down the hall to make sure the 15-year-old was getting up, then returned to my room to shower, get dressed, and do my make-up (I’m trying to do this most days, since even if I work from home I’d like to be reasonably presentable). I was downstairs by 6:50 a.m. to make my coffee, pull out ingredients for a chicken sandwich (what the 15-year-old eats in the car on the way to school) and to make a lunch for the 7-year-old.

At 7 a.m. I went back upstairs to get the 13-year-old and 11-year-old up as my husband and 15-year-old were headed out the door (we drive him to school as a way to score a few more minutes of sleep in the AMs). The 11-year-old wanted eggs for breakfast, so I scrambled some for her (and made extra for my husband and me). The 13-year-old had cereal. As I was eating the eggs and drinking my coffee, I heard the 3-year-old calling for me, so I went up to get him (around 7:20 a.m.). He was coughing enough that I realized he probably should stay home from his various activities, so I made a note to tell our nanny to just have him play here. This is the reason we employ a full-time nanny, even though the 3-year-old is in preschool part-time. When we used daycare for our first two years of parenthood, it was always a question of whether the kid could go, and if I’d be able to squeeze in work during naps if he couldn’t… Of course these days my husband is working from home at least part of the time too. There have been many changes over 15 years.

Anyway, by 7:30 my husband was home, but the 3-year-old wanted to come on the brief van drive down to the end of the street, where I dropped the 13-year-old and 11-year-old to wait for the bus. Then, while he was in the van, he screamed that he didn’t want to be in the van, he wanted to be home with Daddy. Toddlers!

My husband and I chatted some as the 3-year-old watched Catie’s Classroom, and we cleaned up the kitchen, and our nanny started work at 8, though I still did some on and off orange juice fetching for the 3-year-old over the next 30 minutes. I concurrently did my “morning rituals” — reading 10 pages in Jane Austen (currently: Love and Friendship, an early novella), and writing 2 lines in my sonnets. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays are the harder days in that I have to match the rhyming scheme I came up with on the previous day. I scratched my head for a while on why I ended a line with “first” before remembering I did that on purpose to allow myself the use of “rehearsed.” Then I began work on an essay I’m writing, doing that pretty much straight from 8:30-10:30. The good news is I now have a draft that I can revise over the next few days. (For alert readers remembering there is another child to be accounted for: I nudged my 7-year-old downstairs for breakfast right at 8, and our nanny drove him to school.) I made sure to start with the essay writing, since it needed to get done, and I’m pretty sure that the 3-year-old will track me down at some point, since he is home, and the day will be more interrupted.

Now I am posting this! I’ll check back in this evening with a recap of the rest of the day. I’m hoping to get a run in (likely when the temperature reaches a balmy 44 this afternoon…) and I’ll be taking the 7-year-old to a new Ninja/obstacle course class. And hoping the 3-year-old feels better soon…

Anyway, I can see on my time logs that it has been 168 hours since I got home from London with my three older kids. This week wasn’t as intense as London, for sure, but we did a lot. I celebrated my 3-year-old’s birthday at his school (during an uncommonly warm day, so we could eat our cupcakes outside!). I went to my choir’s Twelfth Night party. My husband and I had a hot date to Wegmans supermarket. Yep, we went with no kids and when you’ve been married 18+ years and have five children, any solo time feels memorable.

And my little adventure for the week? Going to the local Christmas Tree Burn. An Episcopal church in my neighborhood collected trees, and brought in the local fire department to create a bonfire. (Kind of fitting, not just since the fire department could manage a bonfire safely, but they sell Christmas trees as a fundraiser, so I’m guessing 90 percent of the trees in the fire started in their sale lot…) It was quite the sight — and a novel way to end the weekend.

I will be back tomorrow with my time logs (my time log week starts Monday at 5 a.m.). It should be a fairly normal workday, but as many time-trackers will discover, there are no typical weeks. We take life as it comes! Here’s to seeing where the next 168 hours go.

People often tell me (particularly at this time of year) that they’d like to spend their time better. If that’s the case, I always suggest keeping a time log for a week. After all, if you don’t know where the time is going now, how do you know if you’re changing the right thing? Maybe something you thought was a problem really isn’t. Maybe something you haven’t considered is taking more time than you imagined.

You want to be sure you are working from good data. The best way to get that data is to keep track of your time. A few days can work, but a week is better because a week is the cycle of life as we actually live it. Tuesday and Saturday both occur just as often, but if you track your time on one day vs. another you’ll have a very different impression of life. Best to get a holistic picture.

The 2023 Time Tracking Challenge will run from January 9-15. My time logs start on Monday morning at 5 a.m. You can download a log here (in Excel, PDF, or Google sheets, and in 30-minute or 15-minute increments. I use the 30-minute Excel version in case anyone wants to replicate my experience.). If you sign up for the challenge, you’ll get motivational emails each day from me, though obviously you can track without those too! I’ll be posting narrative versions of my time logs here as well.

One interesting aspect of knowing I will be posting my logs is that I’m thinking of more entertaining things I can do next week. If you plan to track time, perhaps that accountability will nudge you to think through the week too. I usually plan my weeks on Fridays (that’s Tranquility by Tuesday Rule #2) and I highly recommend the practice.

Anyway, I hope you’ll consider playing along! I find time tracking incredibly useful, even after 7+ years. I hope you’ll find 7 days transformative as well. Here’s the link to sign up. And here is the link to all my time trackers. Thanks for considering it.

Photo: From the British Museum, quite possibly my favorite clock ever. I think the cannons on this ship actually fired, which would be a really cool dinner party trick. 

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…

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

This seems like it could be quite a conundrum, but on some level it doesn’t have to be. Figuring out categories that are “mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive” only matters if you are trying to create a cool pie chart that adds up exactly to 168 hours. If you are doing that, then you can create separate categories for “reading/driving” vs. “driving” or “reading.”

This can be fun though it can also be really challenging. In many cases, all we really want to know is how many hours we are spending on categories of interest. So, if you are interested in how much time you spend reading, and you note that some reading time was “just” reading and other time was listening to audiobooks while doing something else, you can count it all as reading and congratulate yourself on that number. If you are interested in physical activity, you can note time spent on “pure” exercise and also the walking meetings you set up. You can give yourself credit for all those hours, even though the walking meetings are obviously going to count as work hours too. If you added it all up, it might be more than 168 hours, but it’s OK.

The reason to track specific multi-tasking time is if you feel like this is something you’d like to change. If you’re spending a lot of time working while also supervising children, and it is feeling not terribly efficient, that might be worth tracking, so you can figure out any potential solutions.

What time most often winds up multi-tasked for you?

Photo: From a wintry sunset walk. No multi-tasking on this one! Well, unless you count taking photos for my blog as work…