Laura Vanderkam asks, "Are you as busy as you think?":
"I told people I worked 60 hours a week. I claimed to sleep six hours a night. As I lamented to anyone stuck next to me at parties, I was basically too busy to breathe. Me time? Ha! Now I work 45 hours a week and sleep close to eight hours a night. But I'm not getting any less done. I started keeping track of how I spent my time, logging how many hours and minutes I devoted to different activities such as work, sleep and chores. I soon realized I'd been lying to myself about where the time was going. What I thought was a 60-hour workweek wasn't even close."
Thanks Laura. I also tell people I work 60 hours a week, because...it's on my fucking timesheet. I don't know what the fuck kind of job you had that didn't require you to keep track of your work hours, but I've had to record all my hours at every job I've ever held in my entire life. If your work involved writing articles from bed and you've never once had to fill out a timesheet, it may just be time to pry the silver spoon out of your ass.
"Ask yourself what you'd like to do with your time. Claiming to be busy relieves us of the burden of choice. But if you're working 50 hours a week, and sleeping eight hours a night (56 per week) that leaves 62 hours for other things. That's plenty of hours for a family life and a personal life -- exercising, volunteering, sitting on the porch with the paper, plus watching TV if you like. Set goals -- maybe three hours of exercise and swapping out two hours of TV for reading -- and see where in your 168 hours you could make that happen."
Let's break this one down. Working 50 hours a week is 10 hours per day, let's say 8:00 to 6:00. Starting from the top: You've got to wake up at 5:30 am to rub the crusty shit out of your eyes, shower, eat breakfast, and get dressed. You've got to leave your house at 7:00 am to account for commute time. You work until 6, and then sit in traffic for another hour. You get home at 7 and prepare and eat dinner by 8. To get Laura's eight hours of sleep, you have to be in bed by 9:30 pm, leaving you...1.5 hours per workday! Yes, you have the weekend. But you need to spend those hours running all the errands you can't do during the weekday. Volunteer? Really? They need somebody to work the 8-9:30 shift at the Ronald McDonald House? Fuck you.
It's easy to exercise and volunteer and read on the porch and all that shit when your job is flying in and giving one speech. And when you have a porch.
