Time Stories People Tell Themselves EP 455

00:00:09
Speaker 1: Hi.

00:00:09
Speaker 2: I'm Laura Vanderkamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker.

00:00:15
Speaker 3: And I'm Sarah hart Hunger, a mother of three, practicing physician, writer, and course creator. We are two working parents who love our careers and our families.

00:00:24
Speaker 2: Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun, from figuring out childcare to mapping out long.

00:00:33
Speaker 1: Term career goals.

00:00:34
Speaker 2: We want you to get the most out of life.

00:00:41
Speaker 1: Welcome the best of both worlds. This is Laura.

00:00:43
Speaker 2: This episode is airing in mid April of twenty twenty six. We're going to be talking about the time stories that people tell. I have found that time is very much subject to a storytelling impulse, where bits of evidence point to a conclusion. Negative moments have a tendency to stand out in the mind more than positive ones. So people often write themselves very negative stories about where the time goes. But I have found that when we track our time and see the data, we often discover that life is not nearly as bad as.

00:01:16
Speaker 1: We might have thought.

00:01:18
Speaker 3: Yeah, I love data. I think data is underrated and actually one of the things I really love about your books and we are going to be doing some more dedicated discussion of various books. But there's data in the stuff that you put out, and some of that data has to do with time stories. Exactly what we're going to talk about today, because it's so easy is to be like, oh, my life is all work or I never sleep or things like that, but without numbers, it's just kind of meaningless. So I love how you talked about this in Big Time, and just because I can't resist, I'm just to let listeners know that it is available for ordering, not even just pre orders.

00:01:54
Speaker 4: In two weeks from when the.

00:01:55
Speaker 2: Stays yes so exciting my book birthday yes is May, so another one will be out there in the world. It's so fun to see it, like we got the first boxes from the warehouse and open it and there it is.

00:02:09
Speaker 1: The book you've been working on for two years exists now like as a book that people could read.

00:02:14
Speaker 4: So I don't know, and it's so good. It's so like I don't know.

00:02:17
Speaker 3: Everything you write is always very readable, and you would think I know everything you have to say, and yet I learned things reading Big Time, So that is saying something. So even if you think you've read all of her stuff and what can she possibly offer. I think you'll still really enjoy Big Time.

00:02:31
Speaker 1: Oh well, thank you, Sarah, I appreciate it. But yeah.

00:02:34
Speaker 2: One of the this is sort of related to in the opening chapter of Big Time, which is about time tracking. I had two hundred and seventy nine people track their time for a week, and they answered questions before and after the week about how they felt about their time. And I think it's two hundred and seventy nine. It didn't double check that well, but were talking about data. Maybe my data is wrong here, but anyway, I asked them how they felt about their timevarious ways, and their sense of time satisfaction actually rose significantly over the course of the week that they had spent tracking their time, and on some of them. That might be counterintuitive because you might think that people would see where the time goes and feel bad about it, like oh, look it's spent three hours watching YouTube videos, or look at all the time I wasted or what have you.

00:03:23
Speaker 1: But I found that wasn't actually true. Like what happened?

00:03:26
Speaker 2: The agreement scores for the statement generally I have enough time for the things I want to do rose twenty five percent in a week, and some of that is people feeling more accountable for their time, but it was also that seeing where the time went changed the narrative that life is not terrible. It's probably not perfect, but a lot of problems.

00:03:45
Speaker 4: It's definitely not perfect.

00:03:46
Speaker 1: Yeah, no, no.

00:03:47
Speaker 2: But the problems that exist, many of them can be made better with small tweaks, not total lifestyle overhauls. I mean, we're talking things like people like I never exercised, and then they track their time and it's like, oh, I exercised twice this week.

00:04:02
Speaker 1: I'd like to do more, but that's like, okay, well.

00:04:04
Speaker 2: Can we find another thirty minutes somewhere in your time to exercise.

00:04:07
Speaker 1: It's a tweak.

00:04:08
Speaker 2: It's not that we need to throw everything out in a big trash bag and start over totally.

00:04:14
Speaker 3: Yeah, And I well, we're going to go through specific myths on this episode today. But I just feel like there are so many areas that are where it's very common for people to feel like they have to reinvent the wheel. And you're right, they may recognize actually, one of the most valuable things you can figure out is that you're halfway there, because it does lessen the demand to get you where you want to be.

00:04:35
Speaker 2: Absolutely so, Sarah, are you tracking your time these days you have in the recent.

00:04:39
Speaker 3: Past, Yeah, I'm not currently tracking my time. I don't do it as a continuous exercise. I really like to do it about on a seasonal basis, because seasons for me are when the time patterns in my life tend to change the most. The kids go to school, they're out of school, they're back in school, it's holiday season, et cetera. And so for me, once every season or quintile that's how I love to break up the year is how often I like to do it. And I've done it for a week or two weeks, but I don't feel the poll to do it on a continuous basis. But that said, when I do it, there's never been a time when I didn't get something out of that.

00:05:15
Speaker 4: It's not to the extent.

00:05:16
Speaker 3: Where I feel like I want to, like it's not worth it to me to do it one hundred percent of the time, but it's absolutely worth it for me to keep revisiting it again and again.

00:05:23
Speaker 2: And you tried doing it with a time app this in the recent past, right.

00:05:28
Speaker 3: Yeah, I struggled. I've done it on paper before, but I tend to fizzle out after like two days or so, and so I had more success using the toggle app on my phone that's spelled TGGL. I just used the free version. And what I like about it is like there's a widget that shows up on your home screen, So every time you pick up your phone, it's going to remind you that you are possibly behind in your time tracking, Like I tried to make it. Oh, it's a habit, and every time I change what I'm doing, I'll check my phone. But I have this backup, which is like at some point I'm going to pick up my phone and be like, oops, toggles going, and probably it hasn't been twelve hours since I picked up my phone, because unfortunately, that's the reality we live in, and so I have a reasonable amount of time that I can update, and so I found it much easier to do it this way. And you guys know I love my analog tools, so it slightly pains me to say that, but for me, I found it to be just less friction.

00:06:21
Speaker 2: And have you made any tweaks as a result of looking at your time? I mean, I know you're so conscious of where your time goes already, So I mean, there wouldn't be huge life stylo overhauls, but were there little things.

00:06:31
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:06:32
Speaker 3: I think the biggest thing is that I was sort of telling myself the story that there's not time for anything in the evenings or I'm too tired or like this like bedtime rush, and there I recognize that like a lot of times there isn't. There's often a late night pickup, but my husband does that more often than I do that. There's often like a stretch of like two and a half or three hours where I'm no longer in the chase kids around era. But your concept of what you're doing doesn't always keep up with the reality. And I'm like, oh, I could do something with this time for myself, whether it's watch a TV show or play a little bit of piano, Like it doesn't have to be something high rout. But I think I just became more aware of how things had changed and how that time was more available to me than it had been in the past.

00:07:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, and there can be a lot of time in there. I mean, I'm certainly seeing this with myself. Bedtime can still sometimes be strung out, but especially if my husband is putting Henry down, Like I can be out of there at like eight forty five. I've brushed his teeth and got him in his Jammy's and said good night. And then it's rare that I go to bed before ten forty five eleven, So there's like two hours. It's a little broken up because at ten o'clock I need to go make sure the other kids are moving toward bed. There might be things like starting the dishwasher or picking things up or small things that need to happen, but those things don't take two hours. So figuring out how to use that sort of eight forty five to ten forty five on a weekday night, and I would say a lot of it. Sometimes I get sucked into things online. I mean, it still happens, but it's a challenging thing.

00:08:07
Speaker 3: Yeah, But even just that, like it's like a meta awareness of like, Okay, not only I'm doing something, but I like I'm seeing what I'm doing and I could look back on what I did that it's odd that we don't do more of that, considering like this is our life, right, But I think I don't know for me. That's what makes it so valuable that sounded really big. But yeah, well I am still assuming. Yeah, I was gonna say, are you still tracking your time? Laura?

00:08:31
Speaker 2: I am still tracking my time eleven years in. We hit eleven years right around now in April.

00:08:39
Speaker 1: I think it was mid April. I don't know the exact date.

00:08:42
Speaker 2: I'd have to go back and look, but mid April of twenty fifteen. And my original goal had been to go for like a year, like I thought I could track my time for a year and probably write something about it, because that do something for a year is the formula a lot of I guess stunt journalism, as I call it, But so I did, and I did write about it. That was a good experience. I haven't written much about it since, like the first year, I wrote about the next ten not so much. But with that I have not found it difficult to do it. It's like so much of a habit now, and I do it for the memory keeping that I think I don't see a good reason to stop. There have been some logistical challenges with it, so I didn't bring the computer that I normally have my time log on with me to the Glopagos over Christmas, but I just emailed myself like every twelve hours or so, I would send an email or sometimes it's a little longer than that, but what I did, and then I would transferre that all to a log when I came back, and that worked reasonably well. So that's easy enough for travel. And yeah, I mean I think that there have been some changes.

00:10:00
Speaker 1: Yes, I guess eleven years is a long time. My life has changed some. I probably work less than I did at the beginning.

00:10:10
Speaker 2: I know the first year I was working about forty hours on average, and I would say it's much more in the between thirty and thirty five, depending on the.

00:10:20
Speaker 3: Season these days, which I think some people might have the inclination to say, oh, so you only work part time, But I actually think I'd be curious how many people who are in full time, especially knowledge work type jobs, that are working a similar number of hours to you.

00:10:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, thirty five basically is full time because if you take any time off for lunch, if you ever had like a dentist appointment in the week, and that tends to me an average over the whole year as well. I mean, I guess if I subtracted like four weeks of vacation or whatever, I'd be higher, right, because I work some during vacation weeks. So yes, it's like, how if I work five to ten hours on a vacation week, But then, so how would I count that?

00:11:06
Speaker 1: I don't know.

00:11:07
Speaker 2: Anyway, my average with all that is probably more like thirty five than forty. But yeah, I would say a lot of knowledge work jobs that you might call forty hour week jobs that you might think of as forty five fifty hour week jobs are probably more like thirty five if you actually log it.

00:11:23
Speaker 3: We're going to take a quick break, but I'm going to give one of your interesting tenets about people who claim to work many, many hours when we get back. All right, we are back, and interestingly, you have found that the people who claim to work the most hours tend to be off by the highest percentage.

00:11:54
Speaker 4: Is that correct.

00:11:55
Speaker 2: That's one of my favorite studies ever that was looking at overestimated work weeks.

00:11:59
Speaker 1: It's just a phenomena on that people are.

00:12:01
Speaker 2: In competitive fields, Like nobody's going to talk about like, oh, yeah, I work thirty five to forty hours a week, Like I mean, they're not going to say that. So people talk about fifty hour work weeks. Have they logged fifty hours. No, but it sounds good. Then somebody else is saying, well, I work more than that person, so clearly I'm working sixty hours. And then it goes from there like, oh, yeah, well sixty I'm working more than that person, so I must be working seventy.

00:12:26
Speaker 1: Very very few people work that much.

00:12:29
Speaker 2: When I did the time diary study for I know how she does it many years ago, the max somebody worked was sixty nine hours, and that was somebody that was an accountant that was in busy season. Most people were less. About a third of people were under forty hours a week. The average was forty four hours a week. There was only a handful of was like maybe ten fifteen women who were over sixty and for most of those there was a reason it was over sixty. Either it was right before tax deadlines, or it was that they were on a conference. For like, if you go to a weekend conference, that is going to make you have a longer work week that week, but you're probably not doing that every week. So they're only a handful that it was always going to be about that, and even so it's sixty hours is not eighty. But yeah, there's a study that people compared people's estimated work weeks with time diaries and found out that the more people estimated, the more off they were. People who are saying seventy five hour work weeks were off by about twenty five hours.

00:13:28
Speaker 3: Obviously, this is a lot, which is a whole, like almost more than half a job's worth.

00:13:33
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:13:34
Speaker 2: Now, And even with the time diary study that I did for Big Time, a lot of people found that people will be like, well, I'm doing this because I've read your work, Like the reason I got enrolled in this project is because I read your work. And yet I thought I was working seventy hours and I was working fifty three on that week. Or I'm supposed to be logging forty as part of my job, and I logged thirty one and a half. And again, there may have been other things that were a tip that week, but it does suggest that we have a tendency to perhaps view our longest days as typical, and we often overcount small chunks of work. Like if you check email six times on the weekend, that was probably not twelve hours. It may have felt like it if you didn't want to do it, but it might have been closer to thirty minutes.

00:14:25
Speaker 3: Yeah, And it's interesting because that's sort of like, oh, constant availability can be draining and feel like working more hours than you're actually or.

00:14:33
Speaker 1: Than you're actually right on.

00:14:34
Speaker 2: But it is people feel like I'm working hard and feel like I'm working long, and I'm not happy with it. But that's a different thing than the number. I found that sometimes the number is actually liberating. I mean, not that you need to share it with people if you live in a work in a competitive environment, but knowing that I generally work let's say fifty hours a week, and there are one hundred and sixty eight hours in a week. So if I'm sleeping eight hours a night, I've got sixty two hours to do other things, which is more time than I'm working. And so even if I'm not happy about how many hours I'm working, if I can keep my eye on the sixty two, then life can feel a little bit more full of possibility.

00:15:14
Speaker 3: Well, interestingly, I have found that I like to track how many times I get woken up on call because having that long term data helps me approach an incoming call week with less dread. If I know that actually, on average, maybe I sleep four nights and get woken up for three nights. I mean, it's still not fun, but actually having numbers to be like, well, this is actually the statistical average can be weirdly calming.

00:15:36
Speaker 2: Oh I love that, yeah, because yes it is the dread Like you, nobody likes to be woken up in the middle of the night with a medical emergency like that's just zero fun, even though if it's your job, obviously, but it also knowing that it will be a limited number of times most likely keeps you from telling yourself the story of like, oh gosh, I'm going into this call week and I won't sleep at all.

00:15:59
Speaker 3: Yes, and then of course they will be like that random week when you don't sleep. But then if you again, if you're keeping an average, that probably means that there's going to be a random week when you sleep every night.

00:16:07
Speaker 4: So there you go.

00:16:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, we could celebrate that one when it happens. So yeah. Yeah.

00:16:13
Speaker 2: Now a corollary to that, obviously, if people work less than they tend to think, is that many people, especially with small children, do see their families more than they think they do, because if you have small kids, someone needs to be with them most of the time and so that someone is often you, and that time tends to add up, so you definitely, like busy women in particular, might fret like, oh, I never see my kids.

00:16:40
Speaker 1: Work's been really busy. I never see my kids.

00:16:42
Speaker 2: And then you look at your time log and say, well, okay, I miss bedtime three nights this week, but there are seven nights in a week. Like we don't even just have to look Monday through Thursday and be like I'm.

00:16:55
Speaker 1: Missing all the time. It's like, well, there's seven nights.

00:16:58
Speaker 2: If you are gone three and we're home four, you are actually doing more than half of it, even during this incredibly busy week, and maybe other weeks won't be quite as bad.

00:17:08
Speaker 3: And this is part of why you are supposed to track your weekends. And I feel like so many people think time tracking and they think, I guess maybe because there used to being corporate lawyers and they're used to tracking like.

00:17:19
Speaker 4: The work days.

00:17:20
Speaker 3: But you advocate and are very specific about like not skipping the hours of Friday night to Monday morning, well.

00:17:27
Speaker 2: Because it's a lot of time, and we tell ourselves this story that Monday to Thursday, or maybe Monday to Friday at five pm is all the time there is, and so especially when people are looking at their work life balance, they are only looking at their work life balance from like Monday at seven am to Friday at five pm. But that is not all of your time. There are one hundred and sixty eight hours in a week, and so if you think about the time from let's say five pm Friday to seven am Monday morning, I think that is if I'm doing my math right, I think that's sixty two hours, which is a lot of time, right, Like that is even if you're sleeping for twenty four of that hours, that gives us to thirty eight hours where you're not sleeping.

00:18:09
Speaker 1: So what are you doing with that time?

00:18:11
Speaker 2: Hopefully some fun things go play, spending quality time with your family, but there might be time for exercise or hobbies or anything else you want to do, but you won't see that if you're only looking at life Monday through Friday.

00:18:25
Speaker 3: Yes, and speaking about a semi related topic, a lot of people will tell themselves that they are incredibly sleep deprived, and I think that partly could be from mostly looking at weekday data, because there are some of us who do like to maybe sleep a little bit more on the weekends when we have more flexible schedules. But talk about that from a numbers and data perspective, because you definitely looked at that.

00:18:47
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean, there's the popular story here like people are increasingly sleep deprived, and I don't think that's I mean, if you look at bigger studies like the American Time You survey, that is definitely not borne out by the evidence, certainly from the years I was looking at it more intensely, like from two thousand and three to like twenty twenty, when they then had some breaks with the data with COVID, but the amount of sleep that people were getting had risen by a statistically significant amount. And some of that, again is dealing with an aging population. It is dealing with health issues that sometimes have people sleeping more. But it suggests that as a population, people are not increasingly sleep different. But I've even found that people who are very busy, who have a lot going on, who are working, who are raising kids, tend to get a reasonable amount of sleep when you average it over a longer period of time, which is one reason I have people track for a week, because when we think of our typical nights, we're thinking about Tuesday night, and Tuesday night is probably not a great night, but so it might be up late for whatever reason, trying to get a little bit more work done, and then you have to get up really early on Wednesday for the whole run of show on Wednesday. But maybe later in the week you're starting to catch up on sleep, like you're crashing on the couch at night, or that Friday morning workout doesn't happen, or you're sleeping later because you're working from home. And then weekends people tend to try to catch up on sleep, and so you're getting the same amount of sleep overall that whatever it is that your body is aiming for, but you feel really tired during the week and see those nights as being very short even though they're much longer than later in the week. So you know my advice, you're always trying to get people to sleep the amount you need every night. Give yourself a bedtime, get into bed, because you're not saving time by saving up late. You're just losing part of your weekend when you're sleeping when you could have been awake for your weekend, which might have been more fun.

00:20:42
Speaker 3: Well, that's an interesting way to see it, and of course we know that, Like there are phases of life when your sleep is very interrupted and may not be the quality that you want. I wonder if it's like an also a quality over quantity issue when you are in that baby phase and you're up every two three hours and you just don't get the right ratios of different types of sleep. But I think that would require a study more in depth and time data.

00:21:01
Speaker 2: Yeah, and I mean, but the crazy thing is, like I added up my sleep totals from twenty fifteen I had a baby, twenty twenty, I had a baby, and I was still getting overall seven point three to seven point.

00:21:15
Speaker 1: Four hours a day when you averaged it over the whole year.

00:21:18
Speaker 3: But that's what I'm saying. I bet you were more tired. I think it was atuality. It wasn't as good because it was broken up.

00:21:23
Speaker 2: Yes, And I also may have substituted sleep for other activities during like the evenings or afternoons or things like that when I could nap versus now I wouldn't need to do that, so I can have that as leisure, whereas the time I was awake was tending to a baby than that, right, So it's a substitution of activities rather than a change in sleep.

00:21:46
Speaker 1: Overall, that makes sense.

00:21:49
Speaker 3: And finally, a time myth that we hear a lot, or I'm guessing you hear a lot. I'm just going to get a lot of emails actually that are like, all this sounds great, but I don't have any free time.

00:22:00
Speaker 2: Yeah. I always find this funny. I have no free time whatsoever. I was like on Instagram the other day and somebody was posting about how they have no free time whatsoever.

00:22:07
Speaker 1: I'm like, oh, come on, we're on Instagram.

00:22:10
Speaker 2: Like, if you're posting on Instagram that you have no free time whatsoever, like.

00:22:14
Speaker 1: This is the yeah, yeah, well they're an influencer. That's that's true. That could be their job. I don't think it was, but I mean I get it. I get it. When we say I have.

00:22:26
Speaker 2: No free time whatsoever, what we mean is I don't have as much free time as I want, right, And that is absolutely true. But that's a different story, right, we're talking about time stories. We tell ourselves I have no free time whatsoever. It's just kind of defeat us, like what do you do with that? And so then when you do have free time, because everyone has some discretionary time, even if it's just tiny bits of them. I've seen people in some very difficult circumstances and they don't have a lot, but they still get a little bit ten minutes, fifteen minutes here and there. And if you have a story that I have no free time whatsoever, then you won't think about what to do with.

00:23:02
Speaker 1: Those fifteen minute chunks, because why would you?

00:23:04
Speaker 2: They don't exist, So like why am I even bothering myself to ask that question?

00:23:08
Speaker 1: And so then you spend it on.

00:23:09
Speaker 2: Whatever is right in front of you, which is electronic hobbies, doom scrolling, social media. Hence the person on instat complaining about the person on instant complaining about having no free time whatsoever. Whereas if your story is I don't have as much free time as I want, that can suggest some good questions like how could I scale.

00:23:30
Speaker 1: This up over time?

00:23:31
Speaker 2: Like is there anything I can do to change my schedule to get a little bit more free time?

00:23:35
Speaker 3: Like?

00:23:35
Speaker 2: Can I quit some things? Could I minimize some things? Could I get some help with things? Those are all options that are available for many of us. Or maybe it's that no, nothing can change, But how can I make sure that the limited time I do have is spent on high quality things, so I really feel rejuvenated as opposed to spending it mindlessly. And so even if you only do have fifteen minutes here and there, you might think, well, what would I love to do. I'd love to call a friend for fifteen minutes, or I'd love to read for fifteen minutes, or I'd love to go for a walk for fifteen minutes. And to do those things will then make that time feel more like it actually happened. And knowing that some free time happened could change your entire story. Like I'm a kind of person who has time to call a friend for fifteen minutes. It has time to go for a walk for fifteen minutes, even with everything else I have going on, And.

00:24:29
Speaker 1: I just think that's a more empowering story.

00:24:31
Speaker 3: Even with housework, which we're going to talk about in a second after the break. So finally, I think one time with you hear a lot, is that any time that I do have, I am spending doing the dishes and the laundry in this particular phase of life. Have you tracked your time doing these household tours I have.

00:25:02
Speaker 2: I don't necessarily add up stuff as much anymore as I did, like in the first few years, and I know it was non zero, Like I try to get a lot of this off my plate if I can, but you can't get all of it off. But that said, it doesn't take as much time. It's like email checks on the weekend for work. Nobody wants to do it, which is why it feels like it takes a lot longer than it does. So if you spend five minutes emptying the dishwasher and then like an hour later you spend ten minutes doing the dishes on the weekend, and an hour after that spend fifteen minutes collecting laundry, starting a load, and then distributing socks back to someone's room, you haven't actually spent that much time on housework, but it might have felt like you were doing it all day, And that is, of course the story people tell themselves that, like, oh, I was spending all my time doing housework. But tracking time can help you see, well, it's some I may not enjoy it, but it's not a huge amount.

00:26:05
Speaker 1: So therefore, what do I want to do about it.

00:26:07
Speaker 2: I can either have the mindset of like, oh, this is contained and I'm going to make sure I'm enjoying the rest of my time. Or what could I do to do less? Could I get somebody else to empty the dishwasher? Could I have the kids who are over ten years old do their own laundry. There's all sorts of options that might be available.

00:26:23
Speaker 3: Yes, I will say I'm always like very impressed at how quick it is to unload the dishwasher. That's like a I can do it really fast, like five six minutes. And I'm impressed with how slow it is to fold laundry, although I don't use any of those time saving things you talk about. However, lately, I do outsource a lot of the laundry, so I don't do it on a day to day basis, but I often do it on the weekends, and I've figured out that I can just lean into that and like watch a TV show while I'm folding nice, warm laundry and just like think of it as somewhat relaxed time.

00:26:51
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, now it's it could be relaxing. I tend to do mine on Sundays and it's really fast. I mean I just throw in a load, then move it over, I pull out like the jeens and a few other things that I don't want to have dry and hang them up and then putting away the stuff in my drawers is just very quick. But I guess I'm not. I don't know, Sarah, I'm not folding my underwear. Are you folding your underwear? No?

00:27:13
Speaker 4: I don't fold my underwear. I don't know. I think part of our problems that we do combine everyone.

00:27:17
Speaker 3: So like it's like the oh this is is this Genevieve's and like at this point some of the cls, like it's very hard to tell he has Cameron's pants or Anibal's pants.

00:27:24
Speaker 4: They even have the same school uniform.

00:27:25
Speaker 1: Like, I don't even know IFBABLY.

00:27:26
Speaker 3: Spent half my time figuring out who's his who's which would be a solvable problem. But again, I only do it once a week and I'm watching a fun show. So maybe I just don't care to.

00:27:33
Speaker 4: Solve my problem.

00:27:34
Speaker 2: Yeah, and separating out individuals laundry or either doing like people who are entirely different sizes and genders. So it could be like Josh and Genevieve together right, like, because then there's no question who's this who's.

00:27:46
Speaker 3: No, that's true, No, it's all mixed. In our current system, it's all mixed.

00:27:50
Speaker 2: Okay, Well that's one way to make continue follow us for more laundry hacks.

00:27:56
Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:27:56
Speaker 2: So those are some of the time stories I see most often. Sarah, do you have any particular that you have found yourself telling yourself?

00:28:06
Speaker 4: Well, there's two things I want to say.

00:28:08
Speaker 3: Number one is I think that all this data kind of go flies in the face of that wonderful myth that we love, which is like you can only do three things in your life or four things or whatever it is, like, which I think we actually answered a question about this on a recent episode. But like, yeah, when you track your time, you probably are gonna be able to see that you can do things in multiple categories, whether it's friends, your family, your job, your kids, yourself. Like maybe it's not tons of time in each category, but there are a lot of hours in a week, and but you don't have to zeros in some of them in order to do a meaningful job or take care of your children. So that's number one, And then number two, I just like data, Like in general, I like data when it comes to like does this medical treatment work? Well, someone might have studied that, like let's actually let's actually see rather than looking at Reddit and seeing what like the random person who had a terrible side effect has to say, or like, oh, I can't figure out what's going on with my metabolism, won't track your track what you're actually eating, like look at your macros, like maybe you'll see things you don't want to see, but at least have the hard data in front of you. Or even like money, okay, like you wrote all the money in the world, but many people will talk about being frustrated about when they can retire, like do you know all the numbers? I'm super into remat cities show Money for couples recently, and it's mind boggling how many people go on his show and are like, I feel so anxious about whatever, and he's like, well, have you actually done any projections or do you know how much money you have?

00:29:31
Speaker 4: And they're like no, And it's like data guys.

00:29:34
Speaker 3: Like, I mean that sounds harsh, and I don't mean it in a harsh way, but I do think somethimes we're scared to look or we don't want to know, But sometimes the truth is that numbers are helpful.

00:29:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, and that's I mean, I will admit I don't like tracking food and I don't like tracking spending, but it's also I mean, with time, I think that it really is about the truth setting you free. Like I want people to know that looking at the data is probably going to be a helpful experience and not like a gotcha experience, like want to be like, oh, yeah, look, you thought you were drowning and you've got two hours of Netflix on there, like clearly or not, but no, like you can still feel like you're drowning, and we should look at why that is, Like why is it? Is it something specific?

00:30:18
Speaker 1: Is it?

00:30:18
Speaker 2: Because every Monday night you get stuck working late and you have this stuff you're trying to do Monday night and you can't get to it, and so you.

00:30:25
Speaker 1: Feel like you're behind.

00:30:26
Speaker 2: Well that's a problem that you can maybe solve, Like maybe you get everything out of Monday night because you know you can't do it right if this keeps happening, and maybe it's that you need more help on Monday night, or you move those things to Tuesday night, or you do something else. But rather than feel like life is out of control, we might be able to come up with solutions by looking at it where the time is actually going.

00:30:50
Speaker 4: Yes, I love it.

00:30:51
Speaker 3: Well, everyone's reading time for more on this particular topic, and don't worry, you'll be hearing more about that book to come in future episodes. But there are a lot of the lessons from the time tracking itself, and I guess I will put a plug for if you haven't tracked your time. Laura, do you have any upcoming challenges where you do it with people or not until the fall?

00:31:10
Speaker 2: Not immediately, but yeah, every January I do check my time And if you want to get any of my timelogs, just go to my website Laura vandercam dot com and then slash manage hyphen your hyphen time and that's where all the time trackers are and you can get whatever version you want. Excel, pdf, Google Sheets, fifteen minute, thirty minute. I use thirty minute Excel and that works fine for me. Just check in three times a day, write down what I've done since the last time I checked in, pretty easy. It doesn't have to be elaborate, but I think it will be helpful, so give it a shot.

00:31:42
Speaker 1: Well, this week's.

00:31:43
Speaker 2: Question comes from a listener says, we love our young toddler's daycare, but the sick days are really disruptive. Travel is ramping up at work for both of us, and so we're thinking some night and overnight coverage might be necessary.

00:31:57
Speaker 1: I've heard you talk about.

00:31:58
Speaker 2: Switching to nanny care, which sounds reasonable, but we have made a lot of friends with the other parents and kids at daycare, and I think it would be hard to walk away.

00:32:09
Speaker 1: So what do you think about the situation?

00:32:11
Speaker 3: Sarah, Yeah, I will say, I mean, it doesn't have to be one or the other. We have definitely done preschool slash nanny at the same time. And even though you're attached to your current daycare friends, I would probably hazard a guess that were you to switch centers, you would quickly make new friends.

00:32:29
Speaker 4: And so if the current.

00:32:30
Speaker 3: Daycare that you're at doesn't support kind of like a drop in or like few mornings versus like if it's an all or nothing situation, I can understand why you probably wouldn't want to pay for a full time daycare plus full time nanny coverage. But kind of a happy medium where you're probably still going to meet families and have a network, would be doing a kind of preschool plus nanny combination. That way, you have the backup childcare, but then you also have that socialization and then.

00:32:55
Speaker 4: The built in parent network of people you're going to meet.

00:32:58
Speaker 2: Yeah, I was going to say, actually, don't have to switch at all. So when we had kid number two, we did hire nanny, but we kept Jasper in his daycare and for slightly reduced hours. But I don't think we got a discount on it. But we just viewed it as sort of like early preschool, because a lot of daycare is preschool for the core hours and then just wrap around care around outside that. So we kept him inute and so we didn't have to have that switch of new friends, new parents all that. Yes, obviously there is a cost associated with it, but if you're talking about both of you being in jobs that are really ramping up, maybe this is something that you want to put some more money into. And if you like the network and like your daycare, then hire somebody in addition to that. And maybe the person that you hire is open to sort of having a general idea that they're working like thirty thirty five hours a week, but they have enough flexibility that they could ramp it up if they needed to be out of daycare for a couple of days, or if you had the need for night or overnight coverage, and so yes, some weeks you would wind up using them fewer hours because you have that, but the availability might be worth having.

00:34:16
Speaker 4: Yeah, if that's doable.

00:34:17
Speaker 3: That sounds like a very non stressful kind of situation because you almost always have a backup one way or the other.

00:34:23
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:34:24
Speaker 2: Yeah, So I mean adding the thirty thirty five hours of nanny plus having your daycare still there means you're going to miswork a lot less. I guess is how I'm going and have the coverage if one of you needs to travel or both of you need to travel, or if both of you have.

00:34:38
Speaker 1: Stuff in the evening on occasionally.

00:34:39
Speaker 2: So that might be a way to get the best of both worlds there, all right, so Sarah Love of the Week.

00:34:45
Speaker 4: Yeah, So backstory.

00:34:47
Speaker 3: I used to have like fancy sunglasses, Like I had a pair of Chanel sunglasses I was really into. But I have really really changed my ways significantly because I feel like the best sunglasses are the ones you actually have with you and can find and I don't want the stress of like possibly losing some really nice sunglasses. So I am in my era of having like ten pairs of very inexpensive sunglasses but everywhere in every bag, in every car, so that I am never without them.

00:35:13
Speaker 1: I love it.

00:35:13
Speaker 4: That's my hot tip and love of the week. What about you?

00:35:16
Speaker 2: I would say that airports that post their parking availability and like TSA weight times and custom weight times online. I mean everything is digital these days, like Disney can do it right. So Disney can tell you what the weight time is for Space Mountain, any place that you want to look at the app like, you can find that out anytime, and most of the airports do have it somewhere, although when we're recording this, things are all in flux and so some are not updating it anymore, which is too bad because this is sort of when people are nerve.

00:35:44
Speaker 1: Wrecked about how long the weight times are.

00:35:46
Speaker 2: But it's the kind of thing that more information is always good because you really don't want to have people show up at the parking lot there's no parking or people. It's nice to know that the weight time was a twenty minutes and so you could build that in rationally as opposed to worrying it might be three hours when it probably isn't, so that's the kind of thing that it's helpful.

00:36:06
Speaker 1: More information is always good.

00:36:08
Speaker 4: Love it well.

00:36:09
Speaker 1: This has been best of both worlds.

00:36:10
Speaker 2: We've been talking about time stories, people tell We will be back next week with.

00:36:15
Speaker 1: More on making work and life fit together.

00:36:18
Speaker 3: Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you can.

00:36:27
Speaker 2: Find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.