Image by simpologist via Flickr
Boredom is a foreign – even alien – concept for me. I honestly don’t think I can say I have been bored since early high school.
(Okay, that may not be strictly true. I do get bored when things are slow at work, for example. But I’m still technically at work, so I class that as being occupied.)
BF, on the other hand, is bored far too often. I ascribe this to two things: he doesn’t really like being alone, and doesn’t really have any hobbies.
Me? I have far too many and not enough time. At least, that’s how it feels. Hence why I decided to keep a time log last week.
Freelancing – 3 hours
Work – 41 hours
Commuting – 4.5 hours (includes actual time on the bus, waiting at the bus stop, walking to and from it; some also doubles as reading time)
Chores – 4 hours (includes laundry, floors, bathroom, kitchen and the like – and of course a lot of dishwashing. We like to cook, we like to eat, and we don’t have a lot of kitchenware or space for it to pile up in).
Cooking/baking – 4 hours (T was on dinner duty for three nights as well. Doesn’t include time spent waiting for stuff in the oven!)
Internet – 6 hours (email, blogging, news, social networking)
Guitar – 3 hours
Social – 2.5 hours
Exercise – 2 hours 15 min
TV and movies/DVDs – 12 hours
Reading – 2 hours
Date night – 4.5 hours
Sleep – 61.5 hours
As for the rest, I’m guessing I spent about 5 hours on showers, etc, and getting ready in the mornings. And as for the other lost hours…well, we spent an hour grocery shopping, but the rest probably fell to general lounging around. Disappointing, as I thought I did a pretty good job of tracking, but I do feel like I wasted less time just being more aware. After all, I’ve been known to fritter away most of a day off online, between house cleaning, cooking and a run if I’m lucky.
Still, we spent a hell of a lot of time watching TV this week, most of that being movies. No kidding, we literally watched one basically every night. (Highlights were Short Circuit, The Thomas Crown Affair, The Men Who Stare at Goats, and catching up on Boardwalk Empire). And as much as I’d like to say our couple time consists of, I don’t know, working out together? It doesn’t. We did go on one evening walk, but he’s generally knackered after a day’s hard work (while I on the other hand often want to get active after a day on my butt). No, our cuddling and couple time revolves around food and film…and TV also sometimes doubles as exercise/guitar time.
I would like to have got more guitar time in, and to have gotten out to the park to play around with my camera. And that means not succumbing to screen time with T so often – I don’t tend to watch anything by myself, where he turns on the TV once he gets home and falls asleep to it.
And that is apparently a week in the life of me. What would yours look like?
I should do that sometime. It’d be interesting to really see where my time goes, which I ~think~ I have an idea but, may be different…
Oooh I like the idea of keeping a time log. This is cool! How did you track it??
It was a little painful…just scribbling down notes on my phone or in my notebook every so often. Rough but I couldn’t think of an easier way!
My husband and I had the day off yesterday but the kids were in daycare and it was so nice. We worked at my mom’s some and did a whole variety of things both productive and fun. We both declared if we had the money we could quit our jobs and be occupied for years with backlogged projects.
I’m never bored either, but you seem to squeeze a lot more variety into your week.
Maybe I should log my hours…..
I tend to have the same schedule:
Mon > Fri
Wake up at 5 or 6 am.
Get ready for work.
@ Work for 7 hours.
Come home.
Do whatever I want — go out to take a Starbucks, do stuff on blogs, go through papers, read, watch TV
Skype with BF.
Sleep around 9am or so.
Sat/Sun
Wake up at 6am or 7am (“sleeping in”)
Laze around and do whatever I want
Go out grocery shopping
Come back, eat lunch
Laze around some more
…… I’m a bum.
Hmm… I’m intrigued by the idea of this. I only work like 20 hours a week, so theoretically I should have a ton of free time, and yet I always feel like I don’t actually have any at all! I may be stealing this, m’dear. (And by may, I mean definitely will.)
Wow – I have a feeling if I did that, especially while I’m in-between jobs, I’d find that I’m quite a bum myself!
By the way, The Men Who Stare at Goats is freakin’ hilarious!
I should totally do a time audit one of these days…
[…] finding time for yourself? Read this post by Dumb Little Man (I did what they call a time-audit awhile ago, but I think it’d look different […]