You choose how much free time you have.

 

Will you buy a house or rent? Live close to work or further away?

Do you want a pet? Multiple pets? What kinds?

What about a child, or multiple kids? Will you wait until you're in a stable relationship to get pregnant?

Will you see friends or family every week? Less often? Not at all?

How many hobbies will you have, and how much time will you spend on them?

We don't usually think of it this way, but when we make these decisions we are deciding how much free time we will have. You get to choose!

 

What inspired this post is the vibrant debate in the personal finance community about whether it makes sense to hire a housecleaner. Some are violently opposed. Obviously, being time-rich makes it easier to make choices on principle, whether it's cleaning your own house, living with one or no cars, or cooking your own meals. The time-poor have less slack, due to their choices.

Some choices are more easily reversible than others. Once you've decided to have three kids, two dogs, and live in a big house an hour from work, it's going to be hard to impossible to get back to having more free time. 

Are those bad choices? Eh. Everything's a tradeoff.

The more I write about this, the better the analogy between time and money seems.

“But I can't sell my house, I'd lose a fortune. And I can't give away my dogs! And of course I can't abandon my kids.”

Actually, you can. People make these choices every day. They don't make them without cost, or effort, but they make them.

Now don't confuse the statement that you CAN do something with the statement that you SHOULD do something. Of course you shouldn't abandon your kids, or give away your pets (exception for vicious dogs). But making that mental step from thinking of your life as your fate, to thinking of it as your choice, is crucial.

An upside to sleep deprivation?

I've spent the past week complaining about the effect sleep deprivation has on my mood, concentration ability, IQ, energy, and memory--but now I think there may be an upside. I am more creative. I suppose some of the aforementioned factors--fatigue, lack of focus and IQ--weaken my usual obsessive grip on What Needs to be Done and my rigid ideas about What Ought Not to be Done. As a result, I've been less productive and done things like eat French fries and take the elevator rather than the stairs--but I also find my mind expanding. I think more, rather than constantly seeking something on the agenda to do. New ideas are occurring to me. Suddenly I have half a dozen blog posts to write.

Life tracking after school

Activity	Average time spent per week (hours: minutes)
Sleeping	8.08 (per day)
Reading	17.10
Homework	15.50
Class	15.15
Getting ready	10.13
Exercise	9.28
Socializing with significant other	7.13
Internet	6.45
Lunch talks	6.15
Food	5.43
Socializing with others	4.30
Watching movies	4.08
Errands	2.55
Cleaning and organizing	2.40
Travel by bus or car	1.57
Walking	1.15
Relaxation	0:25
Hedonism	0:23
Wasted time	0:13

 Compared to when I was working, there has been an increase in time spent

• sleeping
• exercising
• working
• internet
• getting ready

While there has been a decrease in time spent

• reading
• socializing with my significant other
• watching movies
• wasted time
• travel by bus or walking
• errands
• cleaning
  
  No change in time spent
• socializing with others
• cooking and eating
• hedonism
• relaxation

There's been a dramatic increase in working time, from 20 hours to 31 hours. A dramatic (but unsurprising) decrease in travel time from 6 1/2 hours to 3 hours. Time spent on errands decreased from 6.23 to 2.55.

Most of the predictions I made about my schedule before going back to school were true, with the exception that, while I thought internet and "getting ready" or transitional time would decrease, the former actually increased by about an hour, while the latter doubled! There are some real possibilities for improvement here. For instance, when I get home from class, it's common for an hour or two to disappear in what I've been calling transitional time, but much of which is wasted.

Probably the biggest surprise is that, after moving in with my fiance, time spent focused on him actually decreased by about two hours. Guess that's a function of not having weekends anymore.

Life tracking

During two recent weeks, I recorded what I did with my time. I find this fascinating and hope you will too.

I took notes every hour, which means this is more of a big-picture view. For instance, if I spent an hour training a new person at work, that is counted as an hour of work and not as socializing, even though I spent some time chatting with her about non-work topics. And the lunch eaten in front of my computer is counted as Internet time, not food. I would also suspect that the “wasted time” category would be a lot bigger if I were examining my time at the five-minute level.

Activity	Average time spent per week: Hours.minutes
Sleeping	53.45 or 7.41 per day
Reading	23.33
Working	19.42
Socializing with significant other	9.30
Socializing with others	7.15
Watching movies or TV	6.30
Travel by Metro, car or walking	6.25
Exercise	6.25
Errands	6.23
Food	6.00
Internet	5.55
Getting ready	5.13
Cleaning/showering	3.25
Computer science class	2.15
Driving practice	1.15
Wasted time	1.15
Hedonism (leisure activities not otherwise specified)	0:45
Napping/relaxation	0:30

Overall, I wouldn’t have thought I spent so much time sleeping and socializing. Very pleased that I read more than I work. I was also pleasantly surprised to see that the wasted time/hedonism category was kept pretty low.

The working category looks low because a) these were slow weeks for the company and I got more time off than usual and b) I excluded everything one might normally think of as part of the work day that fell under another category, like traveling from job to job, chatting with coworkers, or surfing the Internet while waiting for work to appear.

Watching movies and travel were almost always done multitasking; listening to podcasts while I walk or folding laundry, planning, or sewing while a movie plays. The exercise number dropped radically from 10 hours on Week 1 to 2.5 hours on Week 2, reflecting the fact that my gym membership ended.

Seems like there is a lot of leeway in my schedule. In my future life in Chicago, commuting and "getting ready" time will be down, and I could cut way down on movies and Internet and moderately down on reading without any pain.