105 Hours – Build a Timetable
I use a set of tactics and principles to manage my time. I call it 105 hours – the number of waking hours we have each week.
One of the most valuable habits around time management I have is to have a timetable: a clear idea of what you plan to do over each half-hour slot of the week, every week.
There are many nuances and questions to having a timetable you actually use over the long term, so let's go over it today.
Time is easy to waste
It is not that we have a brief length of time to live, but that we squander a great deal of that time. Life is sufficiently long, and has been granted with enough generosity for us to accomplish the greatest things, provided that in its entirety it is well invested; but when it's dissipated in extravagance and carelessness, when it is spent on no good purpose, then, compelled at last by the final necessity, we realize it has passed away without our noticing its passing.
- Seneca, On The Shortness Of Life (Oxford World's edition)
Without a timetable, we typically have a variation of these drivers for how we spend our time:
- External commitments: Work, Classes
- External requests: Family, Chores
- Our feelings: Watching TV, Social Media
We waste time not necessarily due to our lack of wanting to spend our time differently; We want to exercise, read, practice the piano, spend quality time with family, write, work on that side project – we just seem to never find the time!
The truth is that time is easy to waste and, if we're honest with ourselves, we'll realize we waste much of it. It's not hard to start a week and realize we wasted much of the prior week, only to then do it again.
An important quality of spending our time, contrary to other resources like money for example, is that we're always spending it. There's no saving time for spending it in the future, or accumulating it like we do wealth.
With time, an important way to tell whether you're spending it deliberately or wasting it is by defining how you want to spend it beforehand. You can't just store time to spend on good opportunities.
But typically, we have a set of things we define as time well spent.
Gretchen Rubin's Essential Seven
And changing our habits allows us to alter that destiny.
Generally, I’ve observed, we seek changes that fall into the “Essential Seven.” People — including me — most want to foster the habits that will allow them to:
1. Eat and drink more healthfully (give up sugar, eat more vegetables, drink less alcohol)
2. Exercise regularly
3. Save, spend, and earn wisely (save regularly, pay down debt, donate to worthy causes, stick to a budget)
4. Rest, relax, and enjoy (stop watching TV in bed, turn off a cell phone, spend time in nature, cultivate silence, get enough sleep, spend less time in the car)
5. Accomplish more, stop procrastinating (practice an instrument, work without interruption, learn a language, maintain a blog)
6. Simplify, clear, clean, and organize (make the bed, file regularly, put keys away in the same place, recycle)
7. Engage more deeply in relationships — with other people, with God, with the world (call friends, volunteer, have more sex, spend more time with family, attend religious services)
Rubin, Gretchen. Better Than Before (pp. 8-9). Kindle Edition.
Gretchen Rubin's book Better Than Before is a book about habits, but many of her "Essential Seven" require a disciplined use of our time: cooking healthy meals, exercising, time for managing our finances, not spending time on phones, practicing and learning, cleaning up, spending time with others.
Many habits carry the same lesson: the things we want to do require time and, if we don't spend the time on them, we won't do them.
And when starting a timetable, you'll be tempted to start backwards: trying to define what activity you'll do 7am, then 8am, and so on. Resist that temptation!
Instead, start by allocating your 105 hours.
First step: Allocate your 105 hours in a list
I use a spreadsheet because I'm a spreadsheet person, but you can do it in a notebook, with ChatGPT, however you like. But you must start by allocating 105 hours.
105 hours is a conservative amount of waking hours in a week, assuming 9 hours of downtime a day – going to sleep, sleeping, waking up, and getting ready to do the day's first activity.
A simple list could look something like this:
- Exercise: 5 hours
- Work: 40 hours
- Lunch & Dinner: 14 hours
- Chores: 10 hours
- Family: 14 hours
- Reading: 5 hours
- Free Time: 17 hours
- Total: 105 hours
Having a clear list of your allocated 105 hours will give you one of the most important lessons about time management: management of constraints! When you spend more time somewhere, you gotta spend less time somewhere else.
In the example above, if I wanted to better manage my finances by allocating 2 hours a week to it, I would have to remove that from somewhere: Family, Reading, my Free Time, etc.
A list is one of the most effective ways to define how you want to spend your time any given week. You're free to change your list week over week, of course – as long as you make time for it!
It's better to start with a list for two reasons:
- Managing constraints across categories is easier
- You avoid allocating time to a category just because the time to do it is convenient
Once you have a list with an allocation that's close enough to your intended way to spend time, you can work on putting it on a timetable.
Second step: Transfer your list to a timetable
Let's continue using that example:
- Exercise: 5 hours
- Work: 40 hours
- Lunch & Dinner: 14 hours
- Chores: 10 hours
- Family: 14 hours
- Reading: 5 hours
- Free Time: 17 hours
- Total: 105 hours
If we were trying to define some high-level principles for it, they could be:
- Family time before work: getting kids on school bus, breakfast together, etc.
- Work with a 1 hour lunch in the middle
- Exercise on weekdays
- Some reading before bed on weekdays
Here's what I whipped together as a first draft using a spreadsheet:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15BqtUDiMnK0AgVRZ8uNTwKE6Ci4iqw8OeIIMl4Asmwk/edit?usp=sharing (if you want to make a copy to build your timetable)
This seems simple enough, but there are some important constraints in the timetable above:
- You have to spend time with your family in the evening – no watching TV instead of spending time with the kids
- You have to spend time reading before bed on weekdays – no Social Media in bed
- You must exercise every day after work: no excuses about not having enough time to exercise
- Even with these constraints, you still have 17 hours(!) to do anything else that comes up – plenty of time
Looked at this way, it seems like, as Seneca said, we, indeed, have plenty of time – it's just that we waste much of it.
Personally, I like printing my timetable and keeping it on top of my desk so I can always easily consult it.
Summary and next steps
Time is easy to waste. Because we can't store time the same way we store other resources, one of the best ways to know we aren't wasting time is by defining how we want to spend it.
When we think about most activities we wish we did more of, we often don't do them because we don't spend time on them. Having a timetable helps us ensure we spend time where we want.
If that sounds compelling and you want to build a timetable, take these two steps (in this order!):
- Create a list of all time categories you want to spend time on within a week, adding up to 105 hours.
- Allocate those activities within your week, such as by using a spreadsheet.
Even if you don't spend all of your time precisely according to your timetable, that's OK. The important thing is that after this exercise, you should have more clarity on how you want to spend your time.
And perhaps, you'll find out that Seneca was right, and that we do indeed have much time – it's just that we waste much of it.