Earlier this month I finished the book I Know How She Does it for a second time. I enjoy this book because I find it uplifting being reminded that you have 24 hours in every day. Assuming you sleep 8 hours a night, that gives you 112 hours every week to do whatever you'd like.
Why does this inspire me? The book analyzes schedules of what they consider to be successful women. They define this as women making at least $100,000 a year. It may be an entrepreneur, an Etsy shop owner, or a CEO at a huge company....the book looks at all women who are making what our society would consider a good amount of money.
My biggest takeaways from this book are:
1. We all have a lot of hours that we aren't working. You can use these hours doing whatever non-work things you want
2. We should look at time spent over a week, rather than in daily increments to get a good picture of how we spend out time. Some days you may not see your kids as much, but when you look at how you spend your time over a week it is a much better picture of what you are doing in their lives overall.
3. The vast majority of women don't spend as much time working as even they think (if someone says they work 70 hours a week, they are really working about 45 hours according to the data pulled for this book).
4. We can find creative ways to get in more family time.
This time around I challenged myself to look at my own life and my schedule. I started tracking the day I began reading this book. As the book reminds us, there is no "typical" week, so even though I was hard pressed to say with the Labor Day Holiday weekend....this wasn't a normal week...there are a lot of holidays each year, so I'm calling it normal.
Why should this inspire you? If you think you are too busy for a side hustle (a way to bring in money apart from your "regular" job) try doing this and see where you could creatively find ways to fit in time to make money. Or perhaps you are a working mom who feels like you never see your kids? Try this and see where you are actually spending some great quality time with your kids. Use this to make changes in your life, try to find a way to work earlier in the morning or later at night not to take time away from your little ones.
So here is my schedule.
A few things to point out:
1. My daughter really does love to read that much. Lorelai's love language is reading. If you want my daughter to like you, offer to read her a book. She would read 24/7 if we had the time. And she often sneaks off into a corner and we find her reading a book.
1. My daughter really does love to read that much. Lorelai's love language is reading. If you want my daughter to like you, offer to read her a book. She would read 24/7 if we had the time. And she often sneaks off into a corner and we find her reading a book.
2. I feel that I do a lot of photography (my side hustle) but in an overall week, I do a lot less than I thought. Plus you'll note that I tried to put when Lorelai was asleep vs. awake for photo sessions. I only spent 5 or so hours that week doing photo sessions while she was awake.
3. I'm pregnant, so yes I mark when I go to the bathroom at night (some days are not marked since it was between 11pm-4am) I did this because it was time I didn't spend sleeping. I wanted to see how much sleep I was actually getting.
4. I love multitasking. So a drive to work may include an audiobook or a phone call. I also carry a book with me everywhere so there was no time I can't sit and read for a minute or two.
5. I did a lot of shopping this week. That was my goal for the holiday weekend though, was to get a lot of needed shopping out of the way for photo props and the new baby's bedroom.
6. I had a lot of family time this week. In part because of the holiday weekend, but it is probably more normal than I think that we see family that much.
7. This isn't news to me, but I'm not big into sitting around time. At night, Kevin and I do watch 2 episodes of Scrubs right now to wind down and allow us to work on emails with clients. I should probably cut back a bit on that as I need a little more sleep each night.
8. Kevin picks up a lot of slack. I may start laundry, and he finishes or with the potatoes I made for Lorelai on Sunday, I peeled, cut and boiled and he took them out and made the mashed potatoes. He does the dishes most of the week and is always the one to mow. You may see things missing from my schedule that are on yours, but it likely is because Kevin was doing it.
The book mentioned that after women tried this exercise, some decided to go back to work, change jobs, hire a cleaning service or nanny...think outside the box. Consider where you are most productive. For us, we've found that many of the handyman jobs that we could do ourselves, is more productive if I simply book a few more photo sessions (doing something I love) and hire professionals to do the handyman work. We also know that online grocery shopping with drive through pickup saves us a ton of time, and that amazon prime is well worth the annual fee for our family. What isn't worth fees? Cable T.V is something we've never prioritized, we've let some of our memberships expire without renewing since we don't use them often enough...you can learn a lot about how scheduling works best for you trying this exercise.
Want to try it? I challenge you to try this to gain perspective into your time priorities! You can be as detailed as you'd like in your chart. For example, I debated between how detailed I would be with my work time, sometimes I mentioned meetings, other times I just put that I was at work (or working from home).
Here is the excel spreadsheet I used.
The book mentioned that after women tried this exercise, some decided to go back to work, change jobs, hire a cleaning service or nanny...think outside the box. Consider where you are most productive. For us, we've found that many of the handyman jobs that we could do ourselves, is more productive if I simply book a few more photo sessions (doing something I love) and hire professionals to do the handyman work. We also know that online grocery shopping with drive through pickup saves us a ton of time, and that amazon prime is well worth the annual fee for our family. What isn't worth fees? Cable T.V is something we've never prioritized, we've let some of our memberships expire without renewing since we don't use them often enough...you can learn a lot about how scheduling works best for you trying this exercise.
Want to try it? I challenge you to try this to gain perspective into your time priorities! You can be as detailed as you'd like in your chart. For example, I debated between how detailed I would be with my work time, sometimes I mentioned meetings, other times I just put that I was at work (or working from home).
Here is the excel spreadsheet I used.
Comments