I’m still not blogging as much as I’d like, so I’m going to mix it up and experiment with shorter and less-polished posts. Iterate and (hopefully) improve!
Speaking of short and sweet, I regularly listen to a podcast I really enjoy, Before Breakfast with Laura Vanderkam. The daily podcast is usually only 4-6 minutes long (and I’ll add that a lot of it is ads, so it’s actually much shorter than even that) and each day is a productivity tip or new way to think about things. Listening is a great way to get a little burst of inspiration without having to consume a lot of content, and I’ve been listening for nearly a decade. Impressive that she can keep the fresh content coming for such a long time!
Anyway, a recent episode from January 15 was about how a lot of people complain about weekends going too fast, but from 5pm Friday to 9am Monday, you’ve got more than 60 hours of free time. That means even if you spend 24 hours sleeping, you’ve still got more than 36 hours of free time – almost as much as a traditional 40 hour work week. The point was that we often think about our work week as being long, and our weekends as being too short. But if you can be more intentional, there actually is a lot more free time than you think.
I absolutely love this concept. Over the last few years, I feel like I’ve started frittering a lot more time away and not intentionally deciding how I spend it. Some of that is positive lifestyle change (hanging out with my amazing husband!!!) but some of it is… not so great (scrolling satire videos from @CorporateNatalie and @AubreyGavello on Instagram 🤦🏼♀️). When I think back to times in my life when I felt like I accomplished a lot, it was when I was methodically planning every hour of my precious weekends while on Thursday Flyday trips home from a week of consulting. Of course I’m still a planner, but I like to think that I’ve mellowed out a bit and allowed more room in my life for spontaneity. The question I’m still grappling with is what’s the right balance between planned and spontaneous… and how do I stop myself from the dreaded social media scroll?
Looking back at this past weekend, I’ll break my time down as follows: 12 hours of teaching skiing, 8 hours of prepping to teach / getting to and from the mountain, 4 hours hanging out with friends, 1 hour playing cards with my mom, and 10 hours hanging out with Mike. That’s basically my 36 hours! I’m grateful that my time went toward work I enjoy, people I love, and time outdoors, and I can’t say I regret any of those activities I listed, but I do wish I had found time to exercise and time to read. Good to know for future!
I don’t think the takeaway here is that every weekend needs to be optimized or perfectly balanced. But I do like the idea of occasionally stopping to figure out where the time went, and making sure I’m happy with that decision. The hardest part of getting things done isn’t actually finding the time; it’s protecting it from disappearing in 5 minutes here, 10 minutes there. I’m still trying to figure out how to stop the social media scroll before it eats up an hour, but I like the idea of tracking what it’s actually competing with so I can make that choice on purpose. As much as I’d love more time in the week, I may not actually need it; I just need to be more intentional with the time I do have.