You Have More Time Than You Think
By: Laura Vanderkam
Tags: Self Improvement, Productivity, Personal Growth, Goals, Time Management

Let’s do a little math to find out how much free time we really have.

There are 24 hours in a day, 168 hours in a week, 8,760 hours in a year.

Some of those hours are spoken for. If you need eight hours of sleep a night, that’s 2,920 of the 8,760. If you work 40 hours a week for 49 weeks (so, excluding holidays and two weeks’ vacation), you’re working 1,960 hours.

Subtracting all this takes us down to 3,880 waking, nonworking hours. Of course, people have vastly different levels of caregiving or chore responsibilities, and some people work more or fewer hours for day. But we could imagine that just about everyone has somewhere between 1,000 to 2,000 discretionary hours per year. (The American Time Use Survey pegs the population average at 5.19 hours of leisure per day, or 1,894.35 hours per year. The busiest segment — working mothers of children under age six — tend to have about 3.15 hours of discretionary time per day, or 1,149.75 per year.)

When you put it that way, it’s not such a small number, is it? You can do a lot in 1,000 to 2,000 hours.

Here’s how to make those hours work for you

I know everyone feels busy and like they don’t have enough time to tackle those big goals. But take an honest look at how you spend your time. A few minutes here and there spent scrolling around on the phone doesn’t seem like much, nor does an evening routine of Hallmark movie devouring. But if it’s a regular habit, it adds up. Two hours a day of screen time is 730 hours in the year — or 73% of a busy person’s discretionary budget. This is necessarily going to preclude other things. When you understand how much time might reasonably be available, you can make smarter resolutions that stand a greater chance of happening.

Let’s look at some goals people tend to set: learning a new language, training for a marathon, and writing a novel.

According to the State Department’s foreign service language training program, English speakers can reach general professional fluency in related languages such as French, Spanish, or Danish in 600 to 750 hours.

Training for a marathon requires about 10 hours a week for 16 weeks, assuming you do one three-to-four hour long run each week, plus three other one-to-two hour runs and some cross-training. That’s 160 hours total.

People who participate in National Novel Writing Month each November — writing a 50,000-word novel in 30 days — often devote about three hours a day to this pursuit. That means someone could crank out a very rough first draft of a book in about 90 hours — even if editing would more than double that.

Now, of course all these activities take time to start up and stop, and logistical planning to fit in. Most people aren’t going to be able to do their weekly long run from 8 p.m. to 11 p.m. on a Tuesday night, even if those hours are technically free.

But, theoretically, even a very busy person could learn a foreign language to proficiency in those 1,000 discretionary hours. A very busy person could train for a marathon and write a draft of a novel.

However, this busy person could not learn a foreign language, train for three marathons, and write a book. Big goals require focus. Look at the year ahead, and think about how you want to spend all those hours.