article

the busy persons lies

[WHAT]

1. x] by LAURA VANDERKAM @nytimes.com - Laura is a busy mom with 4 kids (including a new baby), she logs all of the tasks she completed over a 1 year period into a spreadsheet. She discovers some interesting things including ...

[WHY]

1. ] 

[WHERE]

1. ] READ THE FULL ARTICLE
1. ] http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/15/opinion/sunday/the-busy-persons-lies.html?_r=1

[WHEN]

1. ] 2016-05-13
2. ] 2016-12-04

[EXAMPLE]

1. ] . A December Gallup poll found that 61 percent of working Americans said they did not have enough time to do the things they wanted to do. Some of us feel this more acutely than others: A 2015 Pew Research Center survey found that 9 in 10 working mothers said they felt rushed all or some of the time.
2. ] In an attempt to understand this frenzy, I spent the past 12 months studying my own time during what might turn out to be the busiest year of my life.
3. ] I had another baby in January 2015, bringing my total to four under the age of 8. I published a book in June, and make a good deal of my living traveling to give talks. My husband also travels frequently for work. While we were doing pretty well with three kids and two jobs, adding a fourth, even with help from a nanny and from family, felt like courting chaos. I worried about my ability to be the ringmaster of this circus of deadlines, school projects and sippy cups. By getting some perspective on my life, I hoped I could figure out ways to make it better.
4. ] So I logged on a spreadsheet in half-hour blocks every one of the 8,784 hours that make up a leap year. I didn’t discover a way to add an extra hour to every day, but I did learn that the stories I told myself about where my time went weren’t always true. The hour-by-hour rhythm of my life was not quite as hectic as I’d thought
5. ] After hitting hour 8,784 at 5 a.m. on April 20, I started analyzing my logs and adding up the categories. If I wanted to construct a narrative of craziness, the sort professional women in particular tell one another as we compete in the Misery Olympics, I had moments that would qualify.
6. ]  but there was plenty of evidence of a calmer life. I got eight massages. I went for long weekend runs (constituting some of the 232.75 hours I spent exercising). I went out to dinner with friends. I spent evenings after the kids went to bed sitting out on the porch, reading fashion or gossip magazines. (My reading total: 327 hours flat. It could have been “War and Peace.” It wasn’t.) 
7. ] This wasn’t my first time analyzing time logs. I write about time management. While researching my books, I have asked hundreds of people, mostly in white-collar jobs, salaried and freelance, to record how they spend their time for a week. I know that professionals tend to overestimate work hours; we remember our busiest weeks as typical. This is partly because negative experiences stand out in the mind more than positive ones, and partly because we all like to see ourselves as hard-working. 
8. ] I thought I would be more rational about this, but I, too, exaggerated when I guessed I worked 45 to 50 hours a week. I clocked 1,955.75 hours for the year, an average of 37.4 hours per week. Subtract the four vacation weeks when I worked much less than usual, and that rises to about 40 hours a week.
9. ] I slept 51.81 hours per week — not amazing, but not awful either, at just a little under seven-and-a-half hours per day.  
10. ] There are 168 hours in a week. If I worked 37.40 and slept 51.81, this left 78.79 hours for other things. This is a lot of space.

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ID: 5447

NAME: the-busy-persons-lies

DESCRIPTION: ] the-busy-persons-lies - ] by LAURA VANDERKAM @nytimes.com - Laura is a busy mom with 4 kids (including a new baby), she logs all of the tasks she completed over a 1 year period into a spreadsheet. She discovers some interesting things including ...

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STATUS: Write

PRIORITY: -5

OWNER ID: 75

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