Really depressing. Between work, long commute, gym, and part-time grad school, I have 18 free hours a week out of 168. Makes me wonder what the hell I am doing when I have other hobbies that I would love to be pursuing. Most of the time I simply don't have the mental energy to pursue much of anything in my 18 free hours. Sometimes I just need to turn my brain off.
I find myself to lash out in weird ways when I am particularly stressed. For example, I am much more likely to spend a lot of money on something that seems like it has the potential to make me happy or book a vacation spontaneously. It seems like keeping my head on straight requires so much willpower that I can't save any for other aspects of my life. Who knew life was hard?
I’m in the middle of a four day weekend. I’ll probably get absolutely nothing extraordinary done in it. Despite there being plenty of things I could be doing. The 40 hour work week is tyrannical.
If you are stating this seriously, I often wonder why there isn’t a great movement toward a reduction in working days/hours in the modern workplace.
It’s kind of mind boggling to me why we have to trade most of our waking hours for the majority of the prime of our life to make a living wage. Modern society should be solving for this.
What else do you think you could be doing with your time?
I used to feel the same way up until the point when I clarified my goals and broke them down into small accumulative chunks, and ignored any goals which obviously couldn't be dealt with before the others. I feel like I'm getting plenty done at that point even though the marginal increment of effort every day looks more modest.
"Tyrannical" is an absurd way to frame the 40-hour workweek.
The vast majority of people in the world aren't tech workers where productivity and time spent have a nonlinear relationship. Having been on both sides of the coin, calling a 40-hour work week "tyrannical" screams "ivory tower". Those of us in law and medicine (not to mention numerous people in early-stage startups) would get a great laugh out out of that characterization.
i got similar numbers and thought, wow, 16 hours is actually quite a lot of time. that's two work days worth.
seriously how much time do you spend on your hobbies? i have several casual hobbies that only take a few hours a week each. if i'd spend 2 hours each day on a hobby i'd call that intensive and i'd think that spending that much time is unusual unless it's maybe a music instrument you are learning.
I am always somewhat puzzled by the focus on free time without taking into account the energy balance of a person.
I find often that when someone says “I don’t have the time”, what they really mean is that they don’t have energy left to take on something else.
In my case, I find that there’s often enough hours, but I don’t always have the energy to be active 100% of that time and just end up taking some rest.
"The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part."
The trick seems to be to identify your various different out-of-energy states and what activity is consistently restorative for each. Then, get experience with those activities when you’re fresh so that you have less of a hurdle to jump over when you really need them.
The biggest issue, of course, is that it requires you to experiment with new things when you’re dead tired in order to figure out what helps in the first place. A more subtle problem is that some activities help at first and then cause problems later- Television/YouTube is like this for me; sometimes, it’s the most effective way of resting but if I’m not careful I’ll go straight through energetic into a different, harder to escape lethargy.
I think there are two problems. Tiredness and boredom. TV's sweet spot is when you are mildly bored and pretty tired. It tires you even more but alleviates boredom a bit.
I had after-school routine. When I was comming back from school I was bored and tired but too bored and not tired enough to go to sleep immediately. So I watched TV for an hour or two becomming slightly less bored and completely tired. After that I slept for few hours and after that wake up and be semi-funtional human again, able to do homework or enjoy myself for a bit.
The problem was I got addicted to TV and I watched it even if I wasn't that tired and theoretically had energy to entertain myself with something that had better joy/effort ratio than TV. Instead I always defaulted to TV which costed me too much energy for enjoyment provided.
Eventually I had to ask my mom to put a parental lock on TV and even then after school I was lying in front of turned on TV that showed no channel (due to parental lock) pushing buttons at random trying to unlock it. I even managed to unlock it once (3 digit code) but couldn't repeat it.
Eventually my dumb brain learned that lying in front of a TV no longer gives me any joy (because I can't turn the channels on) and I shook the addiction.
This is largely effected by the nutrition / mental / health state of the individual. I personally spend a lot of time (cooking, sports, spend time researching mineral/vitamin/other supplements), and it took me around 4 years to find the things my body needs. I am now very rarely "energy exhausted" and mentally clear the whole day, having more energy than 10 years ago.
The message here is that one can spend time and pick up habits that make the body function better, with a good chance that the efforts will pay off one day.
Ah well, being fit certainly helps, and I'm pleased you found what works for you! But so does being early twenties instead of in your forties (not assuming anything here, just stating age is one of many factors). If only aging could be solved by taking a multivitamin :)
And while I agree that taking care of one self is important, I want to touch upon a more fundamental point. I am perfectly OK with taking rest from time to time, or taking it easy, or just sitting back with my feet up enjoying a good book, or a glass of wine with my wife.
There's in my opinion little need to always be on 100% and it's perfectly OK if people aren't.
I know this opinion is like cursing in church on this forum, but many people would do well being nice to themselves a little more.
The formula needs to account for the reality that with young children your "parental duties" expands to occupy all free time when kids are awake. And also shifts other chores into any free time slots when kids are asleep.
Kids are asleep. Time to clean the kitchen, do the dishes, switch the laundry, cut some veggies for tomorrow's dinner, and then find somewhere softer than last night to pass out.
I try to make it a point to do all the chores when the kids are awake. When they are asleep is time to relax; not do mundane tasks
I don't feel it's my duty to entertain my kinds every waking hour, so if they have to settle with watching me fold the laundry or unload the dishwasher, so be it.
This probably won't win me the father-of-the-year award, and it is parenting-style me and my girlfriend don't always agree about, but I refuse to sacrifice all my free time for my children.
People often ask my wife and I how we manage to raise our 4 daughters, and homeschool the 3 school-aged ones. The assumption is that it must be a ton of work.
The key to making this work is our parenting style. We promote autonomy _a lot_. For example, my youngest was eating on her own at ~10-11 months. Sure, she was making a mess at first, but now she's 1.5 yrs and she's pretty good at this. Then you see the "exhausted-parent" type spoon-feeding their 3yo toddler, and wondering how we manage.
This translates to a lot of other areas (dressing up, housekeeping, hygiene, schoolwork), and while it's still a ton of work, it's much more manageable. The bonus is that we're raising confident, independent women as a result (because they know they can do it themselves).
I believe the current trend of helicopter-parenting / parents as slaves to their children is actually harmful to society, and that we're currently raising a generation of children who won't know what / how to do anything on their own. People don't magically become independent at 18; it's a process that starts at a very young age.
Try talking to your girlfriend along these lines, you might manage to convince her. And for what it's worth, showing the kids that the laundry doesn't fold itself _is_ father-of-the-year material in my opinion.
At least to me this is completely normal. It’d be weird to put off chores. Kids are perfectly capable of entertaining themselves with occasional wrangling whilst things are getting done.
It's really not about entertaining my kids constantly. It's that a baby and a toddler are a lot of work even if they do spend hours entertaining themselves.
Yeah, as a dad of 2 kids under 4, I ended up having negative free hours. I put 54 hours of parenting a week, because it is non stop on the weekends for about 12 hours a day, and 5 hours or so on weekdays (getting them up and ready for daycare in the morning, then playing, feeding and putting them down at night.)
I do get some chores done during that time, which is probably how I am able to exist with what ends up being negative free time (doubled up on some of hours)
Man I can't wait for them to get old enough to play on their own without requiring my full attention.
Parenting, except in the case of unwanted pregnancies, is a hobby. Culturally it has a sort of special status but in the end it's another hobby that one decides to commit to. It's a choice made that this is going to be your mostly exlusive hobby for the next several years.
It's less a hobby and more of a deeply ingrained evolutionary trait. I don't think people who lack the trait can ever grok what it feels like. For me it's up there with eating and breathing.
I spent several years working toward the goal of maximizing my Free Time, and hit a point a couple years ago where I'm effectively as Retired as I want to be, at any given moment. The SaaS businesses tick away in the background and seldom require my intervention apart from a quick customer service email sweep every couple days.
I'd recommend this path over the VC + Co-Founders "Startup" life that gets promoted here so often, since I've never seen an outcome from that track that appears to me to be relaxing and enjoyable.
Anyway, regarding the calculator submitted here, it seems to use a bunch of the things I do in (what I consider) my Free Time to deduct from the amount of (what it considers) my Free Time. When I have the chance, I go out Bouldering (which it counts as fitness) or play with my kids if they're off school (which it dings as parenting).
Every hour you're not working for somebody else in exchange for money aught to be considered "you" time. All the other things on that list seem like perfectly fine ways of spending that time.
This is what I'm trying to achieve. Do you have any tips on how you managed to do it? Did you have to change your lifestyle to e.g. reduce living cost, etc.?
I think commute time should count two or three times. I sit in the car for 80 minutes a day and I am totally shot in the evening so I get nothing done even if I have time. . On the days I work from home I work the same amount. After work I relax for half an hour and can do things after. Commuting is a real soul killer in my view.
You just made me realize how lucky I am. I'm commuting 2x 55min per day. I always think it's too much, but it's mostly by train. There is about a 50% chance of me getting 2x 35min uninterrupted reading time out of it (depending on the crowd).
Man, I ride my motorbike to work every day and it usually takes 15 minutes each way on average. Yet I wonder what it'd be like to jump cities and double my income. comments like yours and the OP really make me understand and value my free time substantially.
I was doing 2 to 3 hours each way depending on traffic. I did that for 6 or 7 years. Now I work from home. It is really nice, but I still feel like I have no time.
Depends entirely on the content of your commute, no? 70min in hectic traffic navigating poorly designed freeway interchanges is going to be way more exhausting than a cruise in the country with some good music.
Nice thought provoking presentation. I once billed 150 hours in a 7 day period, and they were honest hours, too. Since then I've stopped working and raised a daughter; and parenting was harder work than the insane "i have no life" schedule I used to push.
Bit over a decade into the family thing, it's certainly more rewarding. Other people would find other choices rewarding and that's great too.
We're all too apt to forget that in the end, this time is all we have. Are we really using it like we want to?
Doing what? Just curious. I could only image doing something like that if the job was extremely lax - like a toll booth operator in a slow town, or something.
IT consulting for nonprofits. "we've spent $50k and the contractor delivered a mockup. Our customer expects us to deliver next week. Build the system."
Was to be an integrated Web / IVR phone bot "hotel room reservation" thing built on like the second public release of Asterix; which I'd never heard of before (nor had anyone else).
Of course I later found out a cow orker had pocketed the majority of that money and never paid the first contractor for more than the mockup in the first place, something like 3 months ago.
They'd bought a domain name and begun planning this more than a year earlier. They'd printed 10,000 high grade outdoor signs which were to be the physical token of subscription to this service. Comes the day and the domain name has expired and been snapped up by someone else. So the launch was delayed by a week so they could print up stickers to put over the signs. In the 3 months the system was up, there were i think 5 attempts to use it.
The shafting I got on that one was a big inflection point for me, where it hit me that I wasn't using my time the way I intended, and I wasn't receiving enough reward to justify that. I wish I'd had the thought sooner.
I can't speak for the GP (as I am not they), but can say I pulled a 118 hour work week once doing s/w development. Four 20 hour days for one client and the other 38 for another.
what is "free time"?
I consider doing most of those things on my "free time".
When I go excercise, I have no obligation do to so, I do it on my "free time". If I had kid, I'd consider spending time with them as "free time with my kids".
I dont like this pessimistic perception of time, and it's not mine.
The only non free time I have, is the one I "owe" to my employer. And this time, I freely give it to him, and If I wasn't contractually require to do so, I'd probably do the very same thing (I teach and research at uni).
> If I had kid, I'd consider spending time with them as "free time with my kids"
It's really not, though. Before parenthood I had all these romantic 'Swallows and Amazons' ideas about lazy summer days on riverbanks and meadows.
In reality time with young kids is about mundane things like making meals, doing homework, playing what they want to play, trying to coax them to help with chores that you need to get done, finding craft activities to deflect them from screen-time etc etc
It's not in the slightest bit free-choice or frankly enjoyable. I've just got up on Saturday to find that it's raining heavily, my heart sank. Now to find 14 hours of indoor child-oriented activities...
it gets easier as the kids get older. it also helps to have interesting hobbies yourself that you can involve your kids in.
so instead of asking: how am i going to entertain this bunch on rainy weekends, ask: what hobby might i like to pick up that i can get my kids interested in.
i have been struggling with that too. i am considering things like learning an instrument, programming, playing board-games.
i found a simplified version of DnD, made it even easier and combined it with using lego to build the environment (including treasure boxes)
and when it's not raining there are plenty of outdoor activities to choose from.
> In reality time with young kids is about mundane things like making meals, doing homework, playing what they want to play, trying to coax them to help with chores that you need to get done, finding craft activities to deflect them from screen-time etc etc
There is little evidence that any of those helps your kid, you do it because you want to not because it is needed.
It's still a conscious choice you made at the time. Maybe uninformed about the kind of commitment it was but still a choice to spend your free time for several years this way rather than learn to sculpt wood or build model cars or whatever.
So you think the only non-free time you have is when you're working, and possibly commuting? Nobody is paying you to sleep, so it should count as free time too, right?
It's pretty clear what the tool means by "free time". It's time not otherwise spent on activities that are either required or recommended for a healthy life.
Not everyone considers physical activity interesting, or anything but a means to an end - healthy body and healthy mind. For me, any form of exercise is definitely work.
i like your perspective on this. made me think. i'd just like to add that for an introvert free time can be considered alone time. you can get that at night after the kids are asleep if you can get it at all.
I know it's not intentional, but when I scrolled down and saw "parental duties" at the bottom of the list I laughed and said to myself "that's not how this works!". Move that one to the top, above sleep even, when the kids are young.
Feature request for the calculator: if you say you have kids, it asks you what time they are in bed and asleep by and what time you try to go to bed: this window of time is now your chores/maintain relationship with spouse/gym/relax/hobbies/whatever time.
To be fair, a "lifehack" is that once the kids are old enough (~1? 2? Depends on the kid and the couple) at least one night a week should be a solo night for a parent, while the other one gets the night off. Bonus points for having a weekly babysitter (or grandparent) for date night.
Kids from elementary school onward have homework, friends, books, games, TV, etc occupying several hours of most nights. It’s not like they’re interacting with both parents continuously for every moment between work/school and sleep.
for a first grader in a country where schools are very intensive, it takes 100% parental involvement for every minute of homework. have more than one kid, and both parents are busy...
I have a three-year old. He comes home from daycare at 3pm and is asleep by 7:30, and I don't have to be in bed until 10pm to get my beauty sleep. You double-up on 'parenting time' and things like cleaning up and cooking dinner, but even if you didn't it's not hard to see how two people could divide the time between 3pm and 7:30 with uninterrupted 'parenting time' and still have lots of time left over to take care of obligations and yourself.
And that still leaves 2.5 hours after he goes to bed that you get to spend however you like.
I filled the form in and it tells me I have 11 hours of free time per week, that's with accounting for three hours of parenting per day (i.e not counting it double-booked with any other time, which is how you're really spending it).
People generally have more time available to them than they think, especially if they try to make more effective use of their time.
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I find myself to lash out in weird ways when I am particularly stressed. For example, I am much more likely to spend a lot of money on something that seems like it has the potential to make me happy or book a vacation spontaneously. It seems like keeping my head on straight requires so much willpower that I can't save any for other aspects of my life. Who knew life was hard?
If you are stating this seriously, I often wonder why there isn’t a great movement toward a reduction in working days/hours in the modern workplace.
It’s kind of mind boggling to me why we have to trade most of our waking hours for the majority of the prime of our life to make a living wage. Modern society should be solving for this.
I used to feel the same way up until the point when I clarified my goals and broke them down into small accumulative chunks, and ignored any goals which obviously couldn't be dealt with before the others. I feel like I'm getting plenty done at that point even though the marginal increment of effort every day looks more modest.
The vast majority of people in the world aren't tech workers where productivity and time spent have a nonlinear relationship. Having been on both sides of the coin, calling a 40-hour work week "tyrannical" screams "ivory tower". Those of us in law and medicine (not to mention numerous people in early-stage startups) would get a great laugh out out of that characterization.
seriously how much time do you spend on your hobbies? i have several casual hobbies that only take a few hours a week each. if i'd spend 2 hours each day on a hobby i'd call that intensive and i'd think that spending that much time is unusual unless it's maybe a music instrument you are learning.
if you spend 5 years in a job, then that's 2 years worth of free time. imagine what you can do with all of that.
I find often that when someone says “I don’t have the time”, what they really mean is that they don’t have energy left to take on something else.
In my case, I find that there’s often enough hours, but I don’t always have the energy to be active 100% of that time and just end up taking some rest.
-- Bertrand Russell, http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
The biggest issue, of course, is that it requires you to experiment with new things when you’re dead tired in order to figure out what helps in the first place. A more subtle problem is that some activities help at first and then cause problems later- Television/YouTube is like this for me; sometimes, it’s the most effective way of resting but if I’m not careful I’ll go straight through energetic into a different, harder to escape lethargy.
I had after-school routine. When I was comming back from school I was bored and tired but too bored and not tired enough to go to sleep immediately. So I watched TV for an hour or two becomming slightly less bored and completely tired. After that I slept for few hours and after that wake up and be semi-funtional human again, able to do homework or enjoy myself for a bit.
The problem was I got addicted to TV and I watched it even if I wasn't that tired and theoretically had energy to entertain myself with something that had better joy/effort ratio than TV. Instead I always defaulted to TV which costed me too much energy for enjoyment provided.
Eventually I had to ask my mom to put a parental lock on TV and even then after school I was lying in front of turned on TV that showed no channel (due to parental lock) pushing buttons at random trying to unlock it. I even managed to unlock it once (3 digit code) but couldn't repeat it.
Eventually my dumb brain learned that lying in front of a TV no longer gives me any joy (because I can't turn the channels on) and I shook the addiction.
And while I agree that taking care of one self is important, I want to touch upon a more fundamental point. I am perfectly OK with taking rest from time to time, or taking it easy, or just sitting back with my feet up enjoying a good book, or a glass of wine with my wife. There's in my opinion little need to always be on 100% and it's perfectly OK if people aren't. I know this opinion is like cursing in church on this forum, but many people would do well being nice to themselves a little more.
The formula needs to account for the reality that with young children your "parental duties" expands to occupy all free time when kids are awake. And also shifts other chores into any free time slots when kids are asleep.
Kids are asleep. Time to clean the kitchen, do the dishes, switch the laundry, cut some veggies for tomorrow's dinner, and then find somewhere softer than last night to pass out.
I don't feel it's my duty to entertain my kinds every waking hour, so if they have to settle with watching me fold the laundry or unload the dishwasher, so be it.
This probably won't win me the father-of-the-year award, and it is parenting-style me and my girlfriend don't always agree about, but I refuse to sacrifice all my free time for my children.
The key to making this work is our parenting style. We promote autonomy _a lot_. For example, my youngest was eating on her own at ~10-11 months. Sure, she was making a mess at first, but now she's 1.5 yrs and she's pretty good at this. Then you see the "exhausted-parent" type spoon-feeding their 3yo toddler, and wondering how we manage.
This translates to a lot of other areas (dressing up, housekeeping, hygiene, schoolwork), and while it's still a ton of work, it's much more manageable. The bonus is that we're raising confident, independent women as a result (because they know they can do it themselves).
I believe the current trend of helicopter-parenting / parents as slaves to their children is actually harmful to society, and that we're currently raising a generation of children who won't know what / how to do anything on their own. People don't magically become independent at 18; it's a process that starts at a very young age.
Try talking to your girlfriend along these lines, you might manage to convince her. And for what it's worth, showing the kids that the laundry doesn't fold itself _is_ father-of-the-year material in my opinion.
Would you still think you'd made the right choice, or would you regret prioritising laundry over your children?
I do get some chores done during that time, which is probably how I am able to exist with what ends up being negative free time (doubled up on some of hours)
Man I can't wait for them to get old enough to play on their own without requiring my full attention.
Maybe it's not a better way (though I suspect it is), but it is certainly easier (assuming you don't have 8 children like most people here though).
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/06/09/6169288...
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/09/01/6412662...
I'd recommend this path over the VC + Co-Founders "Startup" life that gets promoted here so often, since I've never seen an outcome from that track that appears to me to be relaxing and enjoyable.
Anyway, regarding the calculator submitted here, it seems to use a bunch of the things I do in (what I consider) my Free Time to deduct from the amount of (what it considers) my Free Time. When I have the chance, I go out Bouldering (which it counts as fitness) or play with my kids if they're off school (which it dings as parenting).
Every hour you're not working for somebody else in exchange for money aught to be considered "you" time. All the other things on that list seem like perfectly fine ways of spending that time.
Still trying to find a way to do it since I don't want to work for a salary all my life.
I think counting it once makes sense.
Bit over a decade into the family thing, it's certainly more rewarding. Other people would find other choices rewarding and that's great too.
We're all too apt to forget that in the end, this time is all we have. Are we really using it like we want to?
Doing what? Just curious. I could only image doing something like that if the job was extremely lax - like a toll booth operator in a slow town, or something.
Was to be an integrated Web / IVR phone bot "hotel room reservation" thing built on like the second public release of Asterix; which I'd never heard of before (nor had anyone else).
Of course I later found out a cow orker had pocketed the majority of that money and never paid the first contractor for more than the mockup in the first place, something like 3 months ago.
They'd bought a domain name and begun planning this more than a year earlier. They'd printed 10,000 high grade outdoor signs which were to be the physical token of subscription to this service. Comes the day and the domain name has expired and been snapped up by someone else. So the launch was delayed by a week so they could print up stickers to put over the signs. In the 3 months the system was up, there were i think 5 attempts to use it.
The shafting I got on that one was a big inflection point for me, where it hit me that I wasn't using my time the way I intended, and I wasn't receiving enough reward to justify that. I wish I'd had the thought sooner.
> Doing what? Just curious.
I can't speak for the GP (as I am not they), but can say I pulled a 118 hour work week once doing s/w development. Four 20 hour days for one client and the other 38 for another.
Suffice to say it was not a fun week.
It's really not, though. Before parenthood I had all these romantic 'Swallows and Amazons' ideas about lazy summer days on riverbanks and meadows.
In reality time with young kids is about mundane things like making meals, doing homework, playing what they want to play, trying to coax them to help with chores that you need to get done, finding craft activities to deflect them from screen-time etc etc
It's not in the slightest bit free-choice or frankly enjoyable. I've just got up on Saturday to find that it's raining heavily, my heart sank. Now to find 14 hours of indoor child-oriented activities...
so instead of asking: how am i going to entertain this bunch on rainy weekends, ask: what hobby might i like to pick up that i can get my kids interested in.
i have been struggling with that too. i am considering things like learning an instrument, programming, playing board-games.
i found a simplified version of DnD, made it even easier and combined it with using lego to build the environment (including treasure boxes)
and when it's not raining there are plenty of outdoor activities to choose from.
There is little evidence that any of those helps your kid, you do it because you want to not because it is needed.
It's pretty clear what the tool means by "free time". It's time not otherwise spent on activities that are either required or recommended for a healthy life.
Feature request for the calculator: if you say you have kids, it asks you what time they are in bed and asleep by and what time you try to go to bed: this window of time is now your chores/maintain relationship with spouse/gym/relax/hobbies/whatever time.
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That's with a 40-hour work week, a 3-minute commute, and none of that gym/fitness time.
And that still leaves 2.5 hours after he goes to bed that you get to spend however you like.
I filled the form in and it tells me I have 11 hours of free time per week, that's with accounting for three hours of parenting per day (i.e not counting it double-booked with any other time, which is how you're really spending it).
People generally have more time available to them than they think, especially if they try to make more effective use of their time.
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