Nicole recently posted about her time tracking and it made me start thinking about giving it another go myself. Since I’ve been traveling a lot this year, I haven’t really been in a routine. When we got home from the City to Surf race I started using a habit tracker and I thought pairing it up with a week of time tracking would help me understand where my time is being spent. I only had one full Monday-Sunday week between getting home and going back to Sydney for the marathon so that was the week I chose. Like Nicole, I have never successfully tracked a week of my time but this time I was determined. I got off to a good start and then woke up on Thursday morning with some kind of virus. I debated what to do, but remembered Laura Vanderkam always says no week is a normal week, or words to that effect, so I decided to keep going. I think overall I still got a good overview. The virus wasn’t serious enough to send me to bed but I did miss two runs, a gym session, supper with a friend, a funeral and dinner at my sister’s.
Once I’d completed the time logging I did what any nerd would do and put it all into a spreadsheet so I could slice and dice it anyway I want. So now I have some pretty pie charts for anyone who wants a stickybeak into the life of a minimally employed, (almost) empty-nester. First up I wanted to look at my activity level. I generally aim for 8 hours of sleep a night (I’ve always needed a lot of sleep), for the time tracking I included all time I was in bed with my eyes closed as sleep. 35% sleep means I definitely met my sleep goals. In terms of sedentary versus active time, I’d prefer my awake time to be more evenly split , but I think the virus maybe threw these totals out, at least that’s what I’m hoping.
Next I wanted to look at a general breakdown of the hours I was awake. For this I split the time into paid work, Ministry (volunteering), family and household tasks and everything else which I classed as personal. My paid work is casual from home, and varies in workload from week to week. There would never usually be more than 12-15 hours though. Ministry depends on the week as well, but this week I had mainly music, small group, plus small group preparation and I also included keys practice in this. My kids are all independent and the girls are living in their own apartment. Under household and family, I included the usual cleaning, gardening, food prep and shopping, looking after Riley, plus helping E look for an apartment. Personal is everything else, so things I have choice over—well maybe not things like showering, but most of them. This would have looked very different in previous years. At this stage in life I have a lot of time for myself. For the next few months the Ministry slice of time will be a bit bigger because I will be available to play in the worship band more often and G and I will also be helping to lead an Alpha course.
Next I was interested in my active time. How much was intentional targeted exercise and how much was incidental. No surprise that a large portion of my active time was spent on household tasks—cooking, cleaning and gardening. Personal care, dressing, making food for myself, and walking Riley made up the next two biggest categories. Running was only 4% of the time this week but I’d normally do 2-4 hours more of running a week. Strength included PT and the strength I do at home. This would normally have possibly another 30 mins. Mobility I should do more of because I’m now at the stage where I have old lady aches and pains. Walking Riley is good boost for my activity levels, plus G and I usually do it together so it doubles as a nice social time too.
My personal time was slightly skewed this week towards other leisure which is mainly TV because I missed a few evening outings due to the virus. I also do some daily word games which I include in this category. I’m not happy about the percentage of time this took up but I know being sick played a part in the total. G and I often watch TV together after dinner, but this category is something that is dropped if we have other things on. Overall I’m fairly happy with the breakdown here, exercise would normally take up a bigger chunk of the chart. Writing, this week was solely everything to do with this blog, and took 4.5 hours of my time.
Finally, I was curious about my reading breaks down. Almost half was online reading which I would like to change. With that in mind I went through and culled my newsletter subscriptions, but I’ll need to do a few more rounds of this. Other than that there were no surprises. Some months I have a heavier theology bent but I need to go to the theological library to borrow some books which I haven’t had a chance to do since we got back. The reading adjacent category included things like updating my Storygraph, reserving books at the library and picking up library books.
I usually find that energy levels are my limiting factor, rather than hours in the day, but I enjoyed getting these insights into how I spend my time. I feel like generally my time use lines up with the things that I say are important to me, but there are areas (online reading, activity level, low value leisure activities) that could be tweaked.
Are there activities in your life that you’d like to do more or less of? Do you need a lot of sleep? What kind of daily activity level do you aim for?
Comments
16 responses to “Time Logging August 2025”
Okay, this might be my favourite time tracking post ever! I was time tracking with Laura Vanderkam and then completely feel off the week when Birchie arrived. In my defence. Spending time with a bloggy friend beats a time tracking challenge every time, but now I’m feeling inspired to do a better job next time 😉
This was FASCINATING!
I can imagine you don’t want to interrupt the good times to write down what you are doing. I do get a bit over it while I’m doing it, but seeing the results is really helpful, and I think I’ll do it again.
I love all your graphs! I do the time tracking challenge every January. I do it all in excel and I don’t get very granular with my tracking so I can use “sumif” formulas so graph my time usage. It’s been interesting to see how things change as the kids get older. The first year I did it was 2022 when my youngest was 13 month. He had tubes inserted that week so it was definitely not a normal week!
I definitely need a lot of sleep. I so wish I needed less sleep, but I can’t change the fact that I need a good amount of sleep. In an ideal world, I would get up at 5 and exercise several times/week and that does not happen because I am not wired to get up that early. So I wedge exercise in where I can fit it, which is mostly weekends and days when I WFH.
I made good use of the SUMIF function too. I went with really granular descriptions and then used subsequent columns to break them into categories. I can imagine it would be interesting to see how things change. I would love to be able to look back at how I was spending my time when I had the three kids at home before they went to school and then throughout the years as they grew.
Thank you for using the stickybeak term again. I love that. I also require a ton of sleep. Maybe it’s my celiac disease (autoimmune disease). I shoot for 8, but often end up with 7.5 which I still count as a win. I would like to find more time to write, but that’s sort of silly – I babysit four days a week and between laundry and meal prep and watching kids’ sports and communicating with teachers or older kids or social workers for the girls’, etc. There’s not a lot of wiggle room. Always, the first thing to go is housework. I’m hosting Curly’s varsity volleyball team for a pasta party on Sunday and we’ll be gone all day Saturday. It’s not gonna be pretty, but I tackled the dining room today. That room is my catch-all and where I store high chairs. This is turning into a comment that could be as long as a post, so I’ll just say that right now I’m spending way too much time working out. I know this, but the weather will only allow for outdoor walks with babies in my awkward quad stroller for so long.
Yay for getting your dining room cleaned out in time for Curly’s basketball party; that must be a relief. I always drop the cleaning if things get busy, too, although we are in an apartment, so it is not too hard to get it in order. We are lucky that we can do outdoor exercise all year round. Temperatures in winter usually bottom out at 0C at the lowest in the early morning with tops of 10C being exceptionally low.
I love the way you’ve broken this out. I feel like we have such similar lives, Melissa – well, except that I don’t run, and I haven’t been volunteering since we moved here (shame!). I’m pretty happy with the breakdown of my days. They are always full and I don’t feel like I “waste” much time. I spend a lot of time on household things too, especially now in gardening season. In a couple months that will be different but for now, it’s a lot – but that’s a happy thing. I don’t even mind household tasks anymore, although I *am* thinking of doing a really big houseclean (walls, etc). I am travelling next month, but that might be a good November task to take on. I also want to start a new writing project but I’m in final stages with my current one and I can only really do one thing at a time!!
I really enjoyed this, Melissa – the pie charts were perfect.
Ooh, a new writing project, that’s exciting. But, yes, best to do one big thing at a time. I know your garden would take up a lot of time, but you really do get magnificent results.
I love a good pie chart (or many!) This was a fun way to reflect!
I definitely love my sleep and I spend a lot of my free time on exercising. Other hobbies have recently been put on the backburner a lot (what with the mental load of living through these crazy times here in the US). I would like to shift that though.
This year has been hard for you. I’m sure with all the exercising you do you need lots of sleep too. It can be frustrating when we don’t have the time (or bandwidth) to do some of the things we love, hopefully things will settle down for you.
Melissa, I really enjoyed your breakdown! Those charts make the week come alive.
I like how Riley walks counted as both activity and social time, that’s a win-win! And I can relate to mobility getting pushed aside.
I really need to track my week – I strongly suspect that the one thing that would jump out is how much TV sneaks into my evenings. I should read instead!
I wonder, did you track your sleep and running using a Garmin or did you do it manually?
I love my Garmin and all the data it gives me… it would be great if it tracked my sedentary activities too! 😅
I track my sleep and running all the time with my Garmin. It would have been heaps easier to do the tracking if I just pushed a button on my watch for everything else this week, but I just logged using my notes program, which has a shortcut to log the current time and then wrote what I was going to be doing. Or if it was at a time when I didn’t want to have my phone/computer, I just jotted things down on a piece of paper.
I love your nerd level! I also love the “reading adjacent” category; for some reason that tickled me. It is not a bad idea though, as I think that last time I tracked time, I tracked “phone use” as a category, and for me a lot of that phone use could be reading adjacent (looking on Libby for books, tracking on GR, reading blogs/articles about what books to read etc.) and that would make me feel better about my phone use! I have not tracked since I stopped working, and I probably should because I feel like I still want to have a certain amount of certain things (exercise, learning, reading) and make sure that just because I have more time does not mean that I spend more time doing nothing, or doing things that are not within my goals for myself.
Haha, I figured there would be a few who would enjoy this level of nerdery. Phone use could be anything, really, that’s why I didn’t use that category and just logged it with whatever other category I thought it belonged with. I don’t have social media, but if I did it would have gone into other leisure. And yes, just because we have lots of discretionary time, that doesn’t mean we don’t have aspirations and goals or don’t care where our time goes.
I was planning to do a time tracking thing as part of my 50 list project and looking at different categories. So this was really fascinating to me and how you did it. I love a good pie chart. So fun.
You really did take a granular approach. I wonder though… how much time took the time tracking though? and How did you do it? Every night? Every time you started a new task? On your phone? Pen and paper? I need to know these things to prepare my own version.
The actual tracking was pretty quick. I have a note-taking tool that has a current time shortcut, so if I had my phone or computer, I would just enter what I planned on doing each time I started a new task. I also used my notebook some of the time, so I entered the time and what I was doing. There were a few times, I didn’t log continuously so I just wrote down by memory.