That’s how many hours we all have in one week, and it’s the title of the book I’m currently reading about time management by Laura Vanderkam.

I heard about the book through the healthy living blog Healthy Tipping Point.  You can read her posts about the book here and here.

I was interested in reading 168 hours because Andrew and I are working hard to figure out how to accomplish all of the things we want to do: personal time, couple time, family time, household duties, work time (for Andrew), and fitness time.  We are finding that we aren’t putting as much time as we’d like into a lot of those areas, so we are browsing ’168 Hours’ for some guidance.

The first step in the book is to track how you spend your time for at least one week.  You can track it any way you like – I used an app called 168 hours (which is not affiliated with the book, to my knowledge).

I like the app because you can set as many categories as you want (mine include baby care, exercise, household duties, internet browsing, blogging, reading, etc.).  When you start doing an activity that falls under a certain category, you just tap that category and the app starts tracking your time.  When you transition into a different activity, you tap the next category, and so on.  You can save your log at any point, and e-mail it to yourself, which gives you a detailed summary of what time of day and how long you engaged in certain activities.

Here’s a breakdown of how I spent my week, roughly:

• Sleep: 55.5 hours
• Time with Alma (baby care, outings, play): 46.7 hours
• Personal Time (reading, journaling, personal care, time during naps, etc.): 34.3 hours
• Housework (cooking/cleaning/errands): 16.6 hours
• Time with Andrew (quality time when Alma is sleeping): 4.7 hours
• Social activities: 4.5 hours
• Exercise: 1.7 hours
• Misc: 4 hours (these are the ‘lost’ hours – errors in tracking, etc.)

In a day, this works out to be (rounded) 8 hours of sleep, 6.75 hours caring for/playing with Alma, 5 hours of personal time, 2.25 hours of housework, 45 minutes of quality time with Andrew, 15 minutes of exercise (although I’ve actually been working out for 30 minutes 3-4 days a week), and the remainder is hard-to-categorize misc. time.

It’s been an illuminating experience to analyze how I’m spending my time.  I’ve realized a few key things after looking at a week’s worth of data:

• I have more free time than I thought (when Alma naps well, that is)
• I spend way too much time on the internet (it took up almost half of how I spend my personal time)
• I spend less time taking care of Alma and the house than I thought (I think I overestimated it in my mind since I do little tasks all day long, making it feel like I’m constantly “on”)
• I reallyreallyreally need to fit in more time for exercise

I plan on making a few changes to how I spend my time.  These include:

• Less time on the internet.  More time reading/journaling.
• Fit in one more 30 minute exercise slot.  Eventually, I want to work up to 30 minutes, 5x a week.
• Find some more quality time with Andrew.  I’d like to bump up the quality time to average one hour a day.  Even if we can’t find some extra time together, I’ll take 15 minutes out of my personal time each day to write Andrew a love note, read about strengthening marriages, or journal about whatever challenges we may be working on.

Other than that, I’m pretty happy with the balance of my time.  Things will get tricky when I go back to school/work, so I want to make sure that I’m managing my time well now when I have less on my plate.  That way I can put good habits in place before our lives get busier.

The next part of the book involves making a list of 100 life goals, which I’m currently working on, so I’ll post some of those soon.  So far I’ve got 50!