How Do You Spend Your Time Each Week?

I know this is a hard question to accurately answer sometimes, as a lot of it depends on time of the year and however things work at your individual job, but I was talking to a couple of friends last night, and the subject came up. How many hours do you work per week?

Some of this probably boils down to what you define as “work”. For the purposes of this post, let’s say “time spent at your job, away from home and family.” So if you eat lunch at work, I’ll count that as work, even though you might technically be on a lunch break. You’re not at home with your family. Likewise, if you work at home, then it would count time in your office working, not spent with your family.

Let’s also not include things like doing chores around the home, doing your taxes, or other “cost of having a life” sort of things. Maybe I need more stipulations, but that seems like a good outline to start from.

At my library job, I’m physically at work from 6:45am to 4:00pm, Monday through Friday. So that’s 9.25 hours/day. About 46 hours/week. In addition to that, I often have to do some work at home from time to time during the week, checking emails, responding to requests, etc. I’d say that takes a couple of hours each week. So for the library side of my work, it’s around 48 hours away from my family.

Then there’s the writing side of things. I’d estimate I spend on average an hour a day with that. 6 hours/week. Some times it’s definitely much more, however. Deadlines are a real thing.

All told, that means I’m doing work around 54 hours each week. Add to that my commute of about 15 minutes total each day, and that’s another hour or so, which brings me to 55 hours/week. That includes two separate jobs, however. (I supposed if you wanted to count time I spend on my church calling (since it’s away from my family), that would add another 5 hours each week, on average.)

I know that’s much less than a lot of people. Certainly speaking to my friends last night, it made me very grateful that I don’t have to work the long hours they’re expected to. Part of me feels really guilty actually for posting this. It’s not meant as a brag. I’d just like to have a better understanding of what other people are going through compared to what I’m going through. I thought it would be helpful for other people to see the same thing.

Of course, none of this really encapsulates the “work on household chores” side of things, does it? So let’s throw that in here as well. I’d estimate I spend around 10 hours/week on that. I know Denisa spends much more than that, though I’m not sure how much. I’m not including “time spent watching the kids,” because that’s hard to quantify, and I’d really like to avoid having hours overlap. Each hour can only be counted for one thing.

But why stop there? There are 168 hours in a week. How about I try to account for all of them? Each night, I sleep around 7.5 hours. That’s 52.5 hours total. Each week, I get together with Tomas and some friends to play Magic the Gathering for about 4 hours. I usually watch media with Denisa and/or the kids for 2 hours/day. 14 hours. I read for about 8 hours/week. I get ready for 40 minutes each morning (showering, eating breakfast, etc.). 5 hours total. I eat dinner each day. Call that another 5 hours total per week. Time each day to get ready for bed. Call that 2 hours per week. I’m at church 4 hours each week(including travel time). That leaves me with about 3 hours of miscellaneous time each week.

So my grand total on an average week is broken down as follows:

• 48 hours at work
• 1 hour commuting
• 6 hours writing
• 5 hours for church calling (High Council)
• 10 hours chores
• 53 hours sleeping
• 4 hours Magic: the Gathering
• 14 hours watching media
• 8 hours reading
• 5 hours getting ready
• 5 hours eating dinner
• 2 hours getting ready for bed
• 4 hours at church
• 3 hours miscellaneous

Is it precise? No. There’s some generalizations in there, but that probably represents a standard snapshot of my week.

So what does yours look like? I’d be interested in finding out.

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