How to let go of the guilt
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Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good morning. This is Laura.

Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's tip is about how to stop feeling guilty about how you spend your time. For the responsible people listening to this podcast, my guess is that tracking your time will reveal that you are spending quite a bit of time with your family. You are probably sleeping a reasonable amount and even making space for physical activity. Whatever you are telling yourself that you never do,

is probably happening on some occasion. So you can let go of the guilt and just get on with your life. Today's tip, like others this week, comes from my book, I Know How She Does It, which came out 10 years ago this month. For the book, I collected time diary data from 1,001 days in the lives of women with big jobs and families. I found that in the 168 hours that make up a week, it is possible to work,

spend time with family, sleep, exercise, read, or do anything you truly care about. Lots of people are successfully having it all. For the book, I wanted to study how people spent their time, so I had them track their time for a week. This was straightforward enough, but collecting the data had a surprising side effect. Most people don't actually know how they spend their time. I mean, they have ideas,

Maybe everyone at your workplace talks about their 60-hour work weeks. Or maybe people claim they're lucky to get six hours of sleep. Maybe you have heard people lament that they never see their families. People can walk around with these stories, but the data often show otherwise. Most of the women who tracked their time for me turned out to be working reasonable hours. The average was 44 hours a week. Some worked more, of course, but the nature of an average is that many people worked less, too.

They also turned out to be getting a reasonable amount of sleep. It is human nature to remember our worst nights as typical, but a bad night tends to be followed by a not-so-bad night. Most people don't have infants. People slept on average 54 hours a week, which averages out to 7.7 hours per day. Subtract 44 and 54 from 168, and you get 70 hours for other things.

So it is not surprising that people spent a lot of time with their families. That is the nature of sharing a home with people. You are around them most mornings and evenings and on the weekends and so forth. It would not be unusual for people to be spending 35 to 40 hours a week around their kids, even with full-time work hours. This was quite a revelation.

After all, people who work 35 to 40 hours for pay don't complain that they never see their jobs. A lot of women walk around with the story that if they're not seeing their kids at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, it doesn't count. But there are a lot of other hours in the week. Seeing these numbers changed people's stories. As one woman told me, I used to feel guilt. I don't feel guilt anymore. If you are worried that you are under-investing in some area of your life,

you might try tracking your time too. My guess is that whatever you are worried about, you will see that you are doing something at least some amount of the time. Maybe you claim you never exercise, but you did go to the gym once and went for a walk once during the week. That is twice. That is not nothing. If you want to do more, amazing. But there is no reason to tell yourself the never story.

And if you're worried that you are not seeing your kids, you might track that time too. Perhaps it might not be as much time as you want, but it might be as well. Tracking time often makes people feel better about their time. I actually know this to be true from my Time Diary projects, where time satisfaction levels rise after a week of tracking. So if you want to banish the guilt, maybe you can try tracking as well. You just might be surprised.

Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at laura at lauravandercam.com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia.

For more podcasts from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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