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…

As I look at how we spent this past weekend, I saw that this was our approach. On Friday night, my husband took our four kids (and a friend) to a showing of The Polar Express at our church. I used this time with no one else in the house making noise to record 10 episodes of Before Breakfast. I recognize that this is not technically me-time (it’s part of my job) but I identified this as a time when none of my neighbors would be making noise with construction or leaf blowing, and I got some me-time during the work day during the week (a pre-natal massage on Monday, runs during the work day on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday). So it seemed like a good trade-off to extend my work day to 7:30 p.m. on Friday, given my ability to move time around.

On Saturday morning, I took the kids because my husband ran the Philadelphia half-marathon. He left the house around 7 a.m. and returned at noon. During this time, I took the two littler kids to karate (The older ones stayed home — a benefit of older kids! My 12-year-old now dutifully texts me every hour or so to report on the situation. We had to hash this out as a policy, but it works.) We had family lunch, all sitting down together for a meal, and then my husband took the four kids to a ski shop to rent skis for the winter season. I used this time to run, read, and practice playing Linus and Lucy on the piano. (Listening to the recording, I’m realizing I should probably enlist the 10-year-old to play percussion to accompany me if I’m going to get this right).

Upon my husband’s return, we traded off again, with him going to Costco. As with my Friday evening recording session, this might not sound like me-time but…trust me, in our household, going shopping all by yourself with no children falls in this category. He really seems to love bulk buying peanut butter and tortillas and he started on some of our Christmas shopping too.

We had family dinner when he came back, then did our family activity of going to the Philadelphia Zoo’s LumiNature light show. (Ok, not entirely the whole family — the 12-year-old decided to go to a friend’s party instead — but most of the family!). Somewhat oddly, the animal exhibits were all closed, which was kind of disappointing, but the lights were pretty, and it’s always nice to have a reason to be outside together at night.

I didn’t sleep well Saturday night (hopefully only about 7 weeks or so to go of this…). Waking at 3:45 a.m. and being unable to go back to sleep resulted in some me-time, which I used to run on the treadmill and work, but it’s not my favorite form of it. In any case, after church my husband took the four kids to Frozen 2. I used the time to nap. Later in the afternoon, I stayed with the kids and he went to the gym to lift weights (well, with the 12-year-old, but he works out on his own).

Then we had another family dinner (Costco finds: surf and turf, corn…) and had a calendar meeting to figure out how we can continue to make our schedules work!

The truth is, most of us do have some leisure time. But with work and family demands, we tend not to plan for it, and so we don’t spend it in ways that consciously register as me time. Or else we fill what could be discretionary time with other things — not seeing that it could be redeployed.

That was the challenge facing Jennifer Toller, who tracked her time as part of the Tranquility by Tuesday project. Jennifer manages the Child Nutrition Services for an elementary school district in the Bay area. While her hours are contained to roughly 40 a week, she has to be in the office for them (generally 7:30 a.m. – 4:00 p.m. with a lunch break). She commutes 30-50 minutes on top of that. She has two children, ages 6 and 19 months. The 6-year-old goes to school by her family’s home, so her husband manages that pick-up/drop-off. The baby goes to Jennifer’s school district daycare, so she handles drop-off/pick-up for her.

With two young kids, a full-time job, and a commute, Jennifer noted that “I feel like my days are very full on the weekdays and do find myself falling into that ‘I’m so busy, I have no time for myself’ trap.” She was excited to have a reason to keep a time log, and so she got to work on it.

Her log was fun for me to see — Jennifer wrote of listening to Before Breakfast in the car most mornings, and to Best of Both Worlds on Tuesdays! I heartily endorse this use of time. But between getting on the road around 6:30 a.m. most mornings, getting home around 5 p.m. and then cooking family dinner (a passion for a professional nutritionist), and getting the kids to bed, there wasn’t a whole lot of open time until 8:30/8:45 p.m., at which point Jennifer was spent. She was admirably good about turning the lights out at 9:30 p.m. in order to rise at 5:30 a.m. On weekends she and her husband tended to spend time doing chores and errands, or with the kids, with discretionary time taking the form of TV after they went to bed.

In other words, while Jennifer did have some time for herself, it didn’t feel like a lot, nor did it feel all that usable.

So I suggested one of my favorite time management mantras: give yourself one night off.

With seven nights in a week, devoting one to personal pursuits still leaves six for family responsibilities. But that one night can be the difference between feeling squeezed, and feeling like we do have time for our personal passions.

In two parent families where each partner has relatively predictable hours — which was the case for Jennifer and her husband — the most obvious way to do this is to give each parent one night off. The other party covers, knowing that he or she will get another night covered in turn. In households where schedules are less predictable (such as mine), or in a single-parent household, this tends to involve childcare, but I still believe it is one of the best financial investments a busy parent can make. We go from feeling like we have no time for fun to being the sort of person who can sing in a choir, or play in a softball league, or go to a regular Thursday girls night.

Jennifer was open to this idea, and began brainstorming what she and her husband might do with their nights off. One complication was that because of where each parent worked, and where their children spent their days, Jennifer really did have to pick up her daughter (using your employer’s daycare will ensure that). Her husband really had to get their son. So this limited everyone’s ability to do something right after work. She needed to think about that, and promised to talk with her husband, track her time, and report back.

Then we hit a snag. Her husband was not on board with the one-weeknight-off idea.

Fortunately, Jennifer quickly realized that this was not because he didn’t want her to have me time! It was because their transportation logistics and the nature of the activities each parent wanted to do made weekday evenings less than ideal. But they reached a compromise that worked just as well, if not better, so all was good.

First, the problems. Their division of labor on the pick-ups definitely put a damper on their evening energy. By the time a parent would bring their child back to the house for the hand-off, it was going to be hard to get motivated to go out again. Second, Jennifer noted that her husband’s job was more flexible than hers. He was able to get to the gym during the day sometimes, so that removed an obvious evening-off activity. What he did really want to do and had been missing: hunting and fishing. Alas, these hobbies don’t fit well into a 6:30 – 8:30 p.m. weeknight time slot.

As Jennifer thought about what she’d want to do with her evenings, she realized that what she wanted space for was to hang out with friends, have quiet time to read, and time to pursue cooking/baking projects. “For me, these things are all better accomplished on a weekend day,” she told me. “Friends usually have way more flexibility to grab coffee, brunch, or a drink on a weekend,” she said, because “Bay Area traffic on a weeknight kind of eliminates me hanging out with anyone not within 10 minutes of me on a weeknight!” For cooking projects she needed the house to herself for a few hours. She was interested in taking a yoga class, but as a morning person, she realized that a 7 p.m. one wasn’t nearly as appealing as a 7 a.m. one. Since 7 a.m. could not happen on weekdays with her work schedule, she was looking at Saturday or Sunday for that.

So she and her husband decided to change “give yourself one night off” to “give yourself several weekend hours off.” They began looking at their weekends ahead of time and mapping out when each could get a longer chunk of personal time. Using weekends meant that he could go fishing, or she could do a major project while he took the kids elsewhere.

When she tracked her time again, this is exactly what they did. Her husband got his outdoor excursion, and she made plans to meet friends for a Sunday evening cocktail hour. Alas, then the California wildfires struck, with PG&E blackouts through big chunks of the Bay Area. Jennifer still had power, but most of her friends did not. They decided to postpone their cocktails. However, “While I was disappointed, the nice thing was since it was my off time, I didn’t feel like my plans were canceled and now I am just in mom mode this evening,” she wrote. She and her husband had an agreement: he’d had his time, she was entitled to hers. So, instead, she went to a local cafe that was still open, called a girlfriend, and enjoyed a nice long chat with her. She did some long term planning (Christmas lists!) and “it was very pleasant and nice to have that time blocked out for myself regardless of set plans.”

She and her husband really liked this approach — mostly because it was “going to help us be more intentional overall with how we spend our weekend,” Jennifer wrote. “By having to block out our off time it makes us sit and think about what else we want to do, which will help us plan more adventures big and small. And help me not let chores/errands extend throughout the whole weekend!”

A weekend night off is certainly as good as a weekday night off, so I give a big stamp of approval to this modification.

Do you give yourself one weeknight (or a handful of weekend hours) “off”?