Time & Capacity
How to Track Your Time as a Working Parent
I thought I had our family schedule pretty much figured out.
I'm a planner.
I have an Excel spreadsheet mapping out the next fifty years of my life, so you can probably imagine what my weekly schedule looks like.
When we had children, I approached our time in much the same way.
Work, exercise, studies and other commitments all had their place.
And whatever time remained, I wanted us to spend together as a family.
All four of us.
After all, with two working parents and two small children, family time is precious.
Why wouldn't we want to maximise it?
I thought we had a pretty good arrangement.
Until my husband made a suggestion.
What if we didn't spend all our free time together?
He asked whether we could occasionally have an afternoon or a weekend morning when only one of us looked after the children.
That way, the other person could have some time to themselves.
Not to work.
Not to exercise.
Not to study.
Just to have some time when nobody needed anything from them.
And then we'd swap.
It was a perfectly reasonable suggestion.
But it made me realise something about the way I had been organising our time.
I had planned for us to fulfil our responsibilities, pursue our individual goals and spend time together as a family. But I hadn't really planned for us to simply be individuals.
Sometimes the problem isn't how you manage your time.
It's how you've decided to allocate it.
This is something I find fascinating about time management.
We tend to focus on efficiency.
How can we get more done? How can we combine activities? How can we make better use of the hours available?
But what if we're already using our time efficiently?
What if the schedule works exactly as designed, but the design itself needs reconsidering?
This is one of the ideas behind The Time Framework.
Instead of immediately trying to change our routines, we first need to understand how our time is actually distributed.
Work and professional development.
Time with children, partners, family and friends.
Exercise, leisure and personal care.
Household administration, commuting and errands.
And sleep, of course.
Tracking our activities over a week or two can help us understand whether our time allocation reflects what we and the people around us actually need.
Time is finite. Activities are flexible.
Sometimes you'll discover an activity that can be delegated.
Sometimes you'll find an opportunity to rearrange your schedule.
And sometimes, like me, you'll discover that you've become so good at organising your family's time that you've forgotten to leave a little time for the people who make up that family.
Including yourself.
Because time management isn't about fitting the maximum possible number of activities into the week.
It's about making room for the things that matter.
And sometimes, that means making room for absolutely nothing.