There are no typical days

Laura describes a “typical” day, and yesterday, and explains why they’re never quite the same.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Good morning, This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.
Every weekday morning, I'll be sharing a strategy to help
you take your day from great too awesome. In future
episodes will dive right into the tips, but in these
first few episodes, I'm introducing myself and I wanted to
share a little bit about how I spend my time.

(00:23):
You might call it a typical day or a day
in the life of Laura with this caveat. I've spent
the past ten years studying people's schedules, and one of
the first things I learned is that there are no
typical days. When we describe a day is typical, what
we're really saying is that this is how we'd like
to see ourselves. This is the picture we wish to

(00:45):
share of our lives. It's often not an actual hour
by our reality. Just as an example, when you ask
people to describe a typical day, almost no one describes
a weekend day, even though Saturday and Monday constitute of
our days. A few people describe Friday either, even though

(01:05):
this gets us up to our time. I guess typical
days only happen Monday through Thursday, even though this is
barely more than half the week. When we think of typical,
we think of routine. It's just easier to describe something
we do repeatedly, even if that repetition happens less frequently

(01:26):
than you might imagine. That turns out to often be
the case. Indeed, Big time diary studies often find that
more than half of respondents say the day they tracked
was not typical. But this can't be true for the
majority of people, or we need to change the definition
of the word typical. It's kind of funny, but what

(01:46):
this means in practice is that any study that asks
people how much work they do on a typical day
or how much they sleep on a typical day is
going to be misleading. That's why I often ask people
to describe yesterday, not a typical day Yesterday. Maybe yesterday
wasn't typical for some reason or another, but it was

(02:07):
a real day. It really happened, and we can learn
a lot from that. So I'll give you both versions
of my life. Just as an exercise, on a typical day,
which by definition seems to be Monday through Thursday, I
set my alarm for six am, I get up in shower,
and then my husband and I spend seven to seven

(02:27):
fifty having family breakfast and getting kids ready for school.
At seven fifty are nanny shows up and I drive
my oldest child to middle school. I come back around
I check email or do administrative work, and at I
get the middle two kids out to the bus stop
by Our nanny is fully on with our littlest kid,

(02:49):
getting him ready for preschool, taking him, picking him up,
doing activities with him, and I'm in my home office
to start my work day. I am to do deep
work projects first, like writing an at NG. Then I
deal with emails and phone calls. I grabbed lunch somewhere
around noon, usually eating at my desk. Then I work
until two thirty or so, at which point I go

(03:10):
run outside. My goal is three point one miles. That's
a five K for any runners out there. I come back,
change and work until four PM, at which point kids
start getting off buses. I chat with them and then
drive to some kid activity or another. We often eat
dinner somewhere between five and six, depending on the activity

(03:30):
schedule for the evening. I'm often doing emails or work reading.
In the middle of all this, my husband comes home
and hear if he's not traveling. The little guy goes
to bed between seven thirty and eight. The seven year
old gets her stories at eight forty five. The big
boys go up around nine pm to read in the room.
I may read or work, shut the house, turn the
boys lights off at ten, and I am to be

(03:51):
in bed myself before eleven. So that's a typical day.
Now I'll describe yesterday, which, since I wrote the script
on a Tuesday, was a Monday. My husband had flown
to Europe on Sunday night, so he wasn't in the picture.
I set my alarm for sixty five am, but my
four year old woke up at five thirty. I was

(04:12):
definitely not prepared to deal with the day at this point,
so I got him a snack and let him watch
YouTube videos from five forty five to sixty five so
I could go back to sleep. I got up at
six forty five and spent the next two hours playing
with kids, getting them breakfast, and doing random household tasks
that I can't really remember. It was our neighbor's turn
to drive the car pool to middle school, so there's

(04:33):
a little extra time in here. I finally got my
own breakfast at eight fifteen and wolfed it down before
the bus stop. Fun At eight thirty five, I went
for a run in my neighborhood since I wasn't sure
it could happen later. I did not hit three point
one miles. I came back, got myself cleaned up, and
did an hour of work before going to my youngest
child's preschool to celebrate his fourth birthday. I read a

(04:54):
story and brought snack, and helped everyone get in boots
and coats to play on the snowy playground. After I
came home and worked until three, at which point I
packed my bags and drove to the airport to travel
to Houston for a speech. I had been told to
be early because of some potential T s A issues,
which turned out to be nothing that's good, But then
I had an hour to kill in the airport. I

(05:16):
never spend time at the airport well. I got a snack,
not a virtuous one, and scrolled aimlessly before getting on
my flight. On the plane, I intended to write something,
but I wound up reading a magazine for the first hour.
Then I ate dinner. I read a book I was
reviewing for the Wall Street Journal, so at least that
was work, and I listened to a podcast for the

(05:36):
last half hour while paging through Hemispheres magazine, reading stories
about United's customer service team. We landed around nine pm
Eastern time eight pm Central time. I walked through the airport,
met my driver, and stared out the window at the
Houston Strip malls as we drove downtown. I checked into
my room and pretty much crashed, well not really. I

(05:57):
lay in bed for forty five minutes reading snarky comments
on Twitter before falling asleep at eleven pm Eastern, which
was ten pm Central. So there are some similarities between
a typical day and yesterday, there are also some differences.
Adding it up, I only did about five hours of
work yesterday, whereas my description of a typical day easily

(06:18):
clocks nine or more. Looking at Instagram for an hour
in the airport isn't work, nor is looking at a
magazine on the plane. Looking at Twitter in my hotel
room also isn't work. My description of a typical day
did not include three hours of low quality leisure time,
but they happened. On the plus side, visiting my son's

(06:40):
preschool for an hour isn't typical either, but it happened.
A typical doesn't mean good or bad. It is what
it is, just like time itself. This might be an
interesting exercise for you too. Describe what you think of
as a typical day and compare it to yesterday. By
the way, I know exactly how I spent the day

(07:00):
I just reported because I tracked my time, and I've
been doing so for the past four years. We'll talk
more about that in a future episode. But by comparing
a typical day and a real day, I think you
can learn a lot about yourself, your life, and what
matters to you in the meantime. This is Laura. Thanks

(07:21):
for listening, and here's to making the most of our time. Hey,
everybody got a tip or a question. You can share
them with me on Twitter, Facebook or Instagram at Before

(07:42):
Breakfast Pod. That's be the number four then Breakfast p
o D. You can also email me at Before Breakfast
Podcast at iHeart Media dot com for the email to
spell those words out. I look forward to connecting and
learning how you make the most of your time.