How I spend my 19% free time
Tags: watercooler, webdev, devjournal
Published: 2022-01-01 05:15:24

What a year, it's been one of those that seemed to only take a month. But yet, so much has happened in that short amount of time.

Thinking about a year, it's only 365 days.
There are 8760 hours in the year.

Let's break that down for a second

![How I spend my time chart](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1640493890853/O5jYDnfvp.png)

Sleep: 3.285 hours (avg 9 hours a day)
Working days: 2088 hours of work

3387 hours left. These are generally the hours you can use for other things, but let's take some elements out that you will need to do every day.

Eating: 1,5 hours a day. This includes cleaning up and breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Totals to 547,50 hours a year.

Workout: 5 days a week 1 hour, either running, exercise, or hiking. 260 hours

Showering and self-care: (avg 1 hour a day) = 365 hours a year.

Then there are certain things we'll have to take into account, and we can average this for a year.

- shopping
- errands
- home up-keeping
- personal admin stuff

Let's say this takes 1,5 hours a day on average, totaling 547,5 hours a year.

1.667 hours a year left for all the other stuff.
This is only 19% of your time in the entire year! 🤯

Other stuff being:

- time with your friends, partner, family.
- side projects
- vacations
- weekend trips
- Netflix

This means you will have to use this time wisely.

I've written about [hacking your time](https://daily-dev-tips.com/posts/hacking-time-management/) before and will keep saying this.
It's essential to define what you want to spend your time on!

Only you can make those changes.

I love to hear people say, I don't know how you write every day. I wouldn't have the time for that.
Yet people have the time to binge-watch a complete Netflix show in a weekend.

And some weekends, that person is me, but I want my limited "free" time to be worth my while most of the time.

In 2021 I used roughly 400 hours of my free time to work on my blog.

You might think, wow, that's a lot, but it's actually less time a day than I spend on eating.

Taking that into perspective, you could form a habit, like eating or showering.
But make this new habit a productive one, like working on your side project or writing a blog.

## What did you achieve in your 19% time

I know you are all eager to find this out!
So you have 19% time left per year. What did you achieve?

Let me break this down into categories because a lot has happened in this short time frame.

![Got married this year](https://cdn.hashnode.com/res/hashnode/image/upload/v1640493002618/WeUo9MdGo.jpeg)

**Personal wins**

- Got married to the most beautiful wife ❤️
- Our puppy got 2 new dog training certificates
- Got to finally go on a holiday with my wife (and we got stuck there 😂)
- Met a lot of inspiring people

**Professional wins**

- Got a new job at [daily.dev](https://daily.dev/)!
- Learned a ton of things!
- Created some game-changing projects

**Blog wins**

- [Hit 800+ newsletter subscribers](https://twitter.com/DailyDevTips1/status/1468849867959291904)!
- 250K users on my domain
- 440K views on [dev.to](https://dev.to/dailydevtips1/)
- 6015 followers on dev.to
- Crossed 100K views on [Hashnode](https://h.daily-dev-tips.com/)
- [Won 1000$ for an open-source project](https://h.daily-dev-tips.com/8-non-technical-ways-to-contribute-to-open-source)
- Published 355 articles
- Got a lot of awesome features for my articles
- Been part of many live streams and spaces
- [Spoke as a speaker for Hashnode](https://hashnode.com/bootcamp)
- Hit 5500+ followers on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/DailyDevTips1)

I can't even tell you how much these wins mean to me, realizing this was all achieved in only 19% of my time! 🤯

I don't know about you, but I plan to use my 19% time even better in 2022.

### Thank you for reading, and let's connect!

Thank you for reading my blog. Feel free to subscribe to my email newsletter and connect on [Facebook](https://www.facebook.com/DailyDevTipsBlog) or [Twitter](https://twitter.com/DailyDevTips1)