How long are your evenings?

Understanding the landscape can help you make the most of your schedule

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's
tip is to figure out how long your weekday evenings
are so you can make the most of them. One

(00:24):
of my core beliefs of time management is that evenings
are a real time of day. Whenever you leave work,
and even if you have a commute, you probably have
at least a few hours before bedtime. Sure, that time
may need to include meal prep and clean up, bathing
kids and putting them to bed, and chores like laundry,

(00:45):
but the evening is still a significant chunk of time.
Desires can exist alongside requirements, and so it pays to
be intentional about where that time is going. I am
convinced that almost everyone can build in meaningful time for
relationships and hobbies in the evenings with a little planning.

(01:08):
For many people, the first step in the process of
enjoying their evenings more is figuring out how much time.
We are actually talking about. How long are your evenings?
This might seem like a straightforward question, but I am
guessing that you have not really counted this out. Consider
when you typically finish work and when you typically go

(01:30):
to bed, then do some math. How many hours do
you have in a typical evening. If you end work
at five o'clock and go to bed at ten thirty,
that is five and a half hours. If you end
work at eight and go to bed at eleven, that
is still three hours. Now, when I do these calculations,

(01:51):
one of the first objections people have is, well, what
about the commute. The good news is that the average
commute is less than half an hour. It doesn't actually
change the calculations all that much. I also think that
commuting time is real time that can be used for
personal pursuits if you want, but that is a different topic.

(02:12):
So if you are generally commuting, let's go ahead and
subtract that time from your evenings. If you finish work
at five thirty and have an hour long commute and
go to bed at ten thirty, your evenings are four
hours long. Once you know the average length of a
weekday evening for you, you can figure out how much time
you have each week. There are four weekday evenings Monday

(02:36):
through Thursday, so if your evenings are four hours long,
then each week you are clocking sixteen evening hours. If
you work forty nine weeks per year. We are looking
at seven hundred and eighty four hours, and I can
tell you that in my time diary projects, many people's
weekday evenings are longer than that. For many people, we

(02:58):
might be talking almost one thousand hours a year. It
is a fair chunk of time. Knowing the cumulative number
can nudge us to start thinking about how we would
like to use this time. Yes, there are half to dos,
but probably not seven hundred to one thousand hours worth
of half to dos. When we are looking at this

(03:21):
block of time, we can become intentional about our choices.
Probably there is space to plan in fun things and
develop some hobbies beyond the electronic hobbies that I know
feel a lot of this time. What would you like
to do? Maybe you can schedule an outing with friends
on occasion and find something like puzzles or art to

(03:43):
do quietly at home. You can have good books available
to make this time pleasant as well, and honestly, even
the have to do is don't have to be terrible.
You might think through pain points. If you don't like cooking,
maybe you can make meal prep quicker and easier. Or
if you do like cooking, maybe you can arrange to

(04:04):
be undistracted some nights so you can really relish it,
read stories to your kids that you like too. But
all that happens after figuring out the volume of time
we are working with. Many people assume that in the
busyness of weekday life, there is no space at all.
It is true that when we get to the evenings

(04:26):
we are often tired, but that doesn't mean that the
time isn't there. So figure out how long your evenings are.
Figure out how much time you have each week over
the course of the year. I think seeing these numbers
will nudge you to be intentional with this time and
a little more present during these hours. In the meantime,

(04:51):
this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's to making
the most of our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast.
If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach
me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast

(05:20):
is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia,
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listen to your favorite shows.