Juggle Struggle blog

Never have ‘enough time’? Map out your week and see… 

How many times have you heard (or said) the phrase “I just don’t have the time”? I hear this a lot from other working parents (especially ones with very young children) who are trying to juggle all the moving parts of family, life and work. I’ve absolutely said it (and meant it) myself. 

Time is a funny thing, isn’t it. It’s one of the easiest things to measure and yet I find that how people experience it is very different! 

We all have the same amount of hours in a day. That is a fact. A day is 24 hours long; you can’t put more hours into it, and you can’t take hours away from it. 24 is the number. 

However, what you spend your 24 hours doing might look very different to someone else’s 24 hours. And this might not sound like it’s true; but you do have an element of choice over what you do with your hours. 

Back when I first returned to work after maternity leave and was trying to figure out how to get a grip on everything, I did a really useful exercise prompted by reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done. I’ve been re-reminded of it more recently by reading I Know How She Does It by Laura Vanderkam. 

The exercise is basically this: 

Step 1: 

Write down your ‘normal’ week (or as close to normal as it gets!) and how you spend your time. 

I did this on a simple spreadsheet with the days at the top and half hour time slots from 6am (roughly when I get up) to 10pm (roughly when I go to bed) down the side. 

The key with step 1 is to be as honest as possible. Get real with yourself. Zero judgement. If you spend 45 minutes in the shower every morning, get that down. If you spend 2 hours watching TikTok on a Thursday night, get that down too. For Laura Vanderkam’s book, she asked her research subjects to map out their weeks as they went along – if you find it hard to remember everything you do in a week, you could take this approach too. 

Once you’ve got a week’s worth of honest how-I-spent-my-time data down on paper, take a goooooooooooood look. 

Ask yourself this question: “Is this actually how I want to be spending my time?” 

There are some things that you probably won’t be able to move, like your working hours for example (unless you’re lucky enough to work for yourself). But looking at the rest of the time that you can play around with, are you doing what you really want with it? 

Do you have more free time than you thought?! 

Step 2

Now that you have your mapped-out week staring you in the face in black and white, you can start to see and measure how much available ‘free’ time you really have. This will enable you to make some informed choices about how you want to use that time. 

You might notice that you’re doing 3 hours of housework every evening after the kids have gone to bed. Is that really what you want to do? Or could you re-use some of that time for some me-time, like reading a book or having a bath? 

Or perhaps you’ve been avoiding signing up to those jujitsu classes you’ve always wanted to start because you “don’t have the time.” Your week map might expose a time slot that actually could be free for that if you shuffled some other things around. 

Get creative here – but also do continue to be realistic. Don’t forget to factor in things like travel time or ‘setup’ time for activities. 

My week map was an eye opener for me. I realised that I was spending chunks of time on things that were pretty low priority for me when I was really honest with myself. Now I spend that time working on things that I care more about (like blogs like this!). 

By mapping out your week and taking control of where you spend your time, you can turn the phrase “I just don’t have the time,” into “I do have the time, but that isn’t a priority for me.” and I find that there is so much power and freedom in that.