Published on August 24, 2024 1:50 PM GMT
Every so often (2022,2017, more 2017, 2015, 2011) Julia and will track how we spendour time for a week. This is useful for seeing whether how we'respending our time matches how we think we're spending it (and how wewould like to be spending it) while also avoiding a pattern where oneof us ends up putting in substantially more hours on childcare orother shared responsibilities without us noticing.
We tracked one week, starting the morning of Saturday August 3rd.We'd tried to pick a relatively normal week: neither of us wastraveling for work or gigs, we had childcare all five weekdays, no bighouse projects, etc. There are always some unusual things, though:
Some of the kids and I attended a board games party on Saturday.
Julia took the older two kids to a dentist appointment Thursdaymorning.
I worked moderately late on Thursday evening.
We used the same categories aslast time, except that last time we did something complicated with"family" vs "childcare", where we tried to count it as "family" if itwas relaxing and fun, and "childcare" if it felt like a chore. Thistime we did a simpler thing and just counted any time where one of uswas responsible for at least one kid as "childcare" and time whenJulia and I were both hanging out with the kids as "family". As thekids have gotten older the fraction of time when they need"childcare", narrowly construed, has decreased a lot.
Thoughts:
Julia sleeps more than I do, which is some combination of herneeding more sleep and me tending to wake up slightly earlier than Iwish I would. This means I overall have an average of 1hr45 more timeavailable for everything.
The "work" category includes commuting, and I have a commutewhile Julia doesn't. My commute averaged 55min, which is 27min eachway (the Red Line is a lotbetter but still has aways to go), and if we exclude it then it's 44:00 vs 41:11.
If we look at where my extra 12.5hr/wk from less sleeping goes,the biggest chunk is commuting (4.5hr), followed by time with kids(3.5hr), work (2.5hr), and personal (2hr).
There is also work that mostly takes attention and not time,which isn't something we're capturing here. Some things Julia isresponsible for include planning the kids medical care, interfacingwith the school, and hiring and managing childcareproviders. Similarly I'm responsible for tracking what maintenance thehouse needs, coordinating with contractors, and handling issues fromour tenants. I don't know how these kinds of mental overhead tasksshake out since we don't track them.
Overall we're pretty happy with our divisions, and aren't planning tochange allocations in response to what we learned with this round oftime tracking.
I also wanted to look back and see how my time allocation has changedover the past nine years:
Notes:
The decrease in "sleep" is misleading: because this categorycounts from lights out until waking for the day, it misses that in2015 and 2017 I was often being woken up by one-year-olds (Lily, thenAnna). This was less of an issue (for me, as the non-feeding parent)with a eight-month-old (Nora) in 2022 because we more successfully prioritized parental sleep,primarily by tradingrooms so Nora would only wake one of us at once. At this pointI'm primary for night wakings, but it only comes up every few monthswhen someone is sick.
The increase in "work" is likely real. I'm very excited aboutthe NAO and a lot of eveningtime that in past years might have gone into blogging or otherprojects is now work. Which is also why this blog post is a coupleweeks after we finished the time tracking.
The increase in "childcare" vs "family" relative to 2022 is acoding change, and isn't meaningful: in 2022 I coded a bunch of timethat today would be "childcare" as "family". Less sure about earlier.
The increase in "personal" relative to 2015 and 2017 is real: Idefinitely have more time for doing whatever I want than I did whenthe kids were littler.
The decrease in "housework" mostly represents that the house ispretty close to how we want it, and I'm not putting large amounts ofmy non-work time into fixing it.
The no Jeff+Julia time in 2015 is another coding thing: Ididn't break that out separately from "personal" then. But I thinkthere was still very little time for just the two of us because wewere still working shifted schedules tohandle childcare with a tricky kid. The lots of Jeff+Julia time in2017 was us happening to pick an unusual week to track.
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