How to let go of the guilt

Figure out where the time goes and you'll feel better about your time

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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 about how to stop feeling guilty about how
you spend your time. For the responsible people listening to

(00:24):
this podcast, my guess is that tracking your time will
reveal that you are spending quite a bit of time
with your family, You are probably sleeping a reasonable amount,
and even making space for physical activity. Whatever you are
telling yourself that you never do is probably happening on

(00:46):
some occasion, so you can let go of the guilt
and just get on with your life. Today's tip, like
others this week, comes from my book I Know How
She Does It, which came out ten years ago. For
the book, I collected time diary data from one thousand
and one days in the lives of women with big

(01:07):
jobs and families. I found that in the one hundred
and sixty eight hours that make up a week, it
is possible to work, spend time with family, sleep, exercise, read,
or do anything you truly care about. Lots of people
are successfully having it all. For the book, I wanted

(01:27):
to study how people spent their time, so I had
them track their time for a week. This was straightforward enough,
but collecting the data had a surprising side effect. Most
people don't actually know how they spend their time. I
mean they have ideas. Maybe everyone at your workplace talks
about their sixty hour work weeks, or maybe people claim

(01:50):
they're lucky to get six hours of sleep. Maybe you
have heard people lament that they never see their families.
People can walk around with these stories, but the data
often show otherwise. Most of the women who track their
time for me turned out to be working reasonable hours.
The average was forty four hours a week. Some work more,

(02:12):
of course, but the nature of an average is that
many people work less too. They also turned out to
be getting a reasonable amount of sleep. It is human
nature to remember our worst nights as typical, but a
bad night tends to be followed but not so bad night.
Most people don't have infants. People slept on average fifty

(02:34):
four hours a week, which averages out to seven point
seven hours per day. Subtract forty four and fifty four
from one hundred and sixty eight and you get seventy
hours for other things. So it is not surprising that
people spent a lot of time with their families. That
is the nature of sharing a home with people. You

(02:55):
are around them most mornings and evenings, and on the
weekends and so forth. It would not be unusual for
people to be spending thirty five to forty hours a
week around their kids, even with full time work hours.
This was quite a revelation. After all, people who work
thirty five to forty hours for pay don't complain that

(03:16):
they never see their jobs. A lot of women walk
around with the story that if they're not seeing their
kids at ten am on Tuesday, it doesn't count, but
there are a lot of other hours in the week.
Seeing these numbers changed people's stories. As one woman told me,
I used to feel guilt. I don't feel guilt anymore.

(03:38):
If you are worried that you are under investing in
some area of your life, you might try tracking your
time too. My guess is that whatever you are worried about,
you will see that you are doing something at least
some amount of the time. Maybe you claim you never exercise,

(03:59):
but you do go to the gym once and went
for a walk once during the week. That is twice.
That is not nothing. If you want to do more amazing,
but there is no reason to tell yourself the never story.
And if we are worried that you are not seeing
your kids, you might track that time too. Perhaps it

(04:19):
might not be as much time as you want, but
it might be as well. Tracking time often makes people
feel better about their time. I actually know this to
be true from my time diary projects, where time satisfaction
levels rise after a week of tracking. So if you

(04:40):
want to banish the guilt, maybe you can try tracking
as well. You just might be surprised at what the
data show in the meantime. This is Laura. Thanks for listening,
and here's to making the most of our time. Thanks

(05:05):
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 is a production of iHeartMedia.
For more podcasts from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app,

(05:27):
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.