Every so often ( 2022, 2017, more 2017, 2015, 2011) Julia and will track how we spend our time for a week. This is useful for seeing whether how we're spending our time matches how we think we're spending it (and how we would like to be spending it) while also avoiding a pattern where one of us ends up putting in substantially more hours on childcare or other shared responsibilities without us noticing.
We tracked one week, starting the morning of Saturday August 3rd. We'd tried to pick a relatively normal week: neither of us was traveling for work or gigs, we had childcare all five weekdays, no big house projects, etc. There are always some unusual things, though:
Some of the kids and I attended a board games party on Saturday.
Julia took the older two kids to a dentist appointment Thursday morning.
I worked moderately late on Thursday evening.
We used the same categories as last time, except that last time we did something complicated with "family" vs "childcare", where we tried to count it as "family" if it was relaxing and fun, and "childcare" if it felt like a chore. This time we did a simpler thing and just counted any time where one of us was responsible for at least one kid as "childcare" and time when Julia and I were both hanging out with the kids as "family". As the kids have gotten older the fraction of time when they need "childcare", narrowly construed, has decreased a lot.
Thoughts:
Julia sleeps more than I do, which is some combination of her needing more sleep and me tending to wake up slightly earlier than I wish I would. This means I overall have an average of 1hr45 more time available for everything.
The "work" category includes commuting, and I have a commute while Julia doesn't. My commute averaged 55min, which is 27min each way (the Red Line is a lot better but still has a ways to go), and if we exclude it then it's 44:00 vs 41:11.
If we look at where my extra 12.5hr/wk from less sleeping goes, the biggest chunk is commuting (4.5hr), followed by time with kids (3.5hr), work (2.5hr), and personal (2hr).
There is also work that mostly takes attention and not time, which isn't something we're capturing here. Some things Julia is responsible for include planning the kids medical care, interfacing with the school, and hiring and managing childcare providers. Similarly I'm responsible for tracking what maintenance the house needs, coordinating with contractors, and handling issues from our tenants. I don't know how these kinds of mental overhead tasks shake out since we don't track them.
Overall we're pretty happy with our divisions, and aren't planning to change allocations in response to what we learned with this round of time tracking.
I also wanted to look back and see how my time allocation has changed over the past nine years:
Notes:
The decrease in "sleep" is misleading: because this category counts from lights out until waking for the day, it misses that in 2015 and 2017 I was often being woken up by one-year-olds (Lily, then Anna). This was less of an issue (for me, as the non-feeding parent) with a eight-month-old (Nora) in 2022 because we more successfully prioritized parental sleep, primarily by trading rooms so Nora would only wake one of us at once. At this point I'm primary for night wakings, but it only comes up every few months when someone is sick.
The increase in "work" is likely real. I'm very excited about the NAO and a lot of evening time that in past years might have gone into blogging or other projects is now work. Which is also why this blog post is a couple weeks after we finished the time tracking.
The increase in "childcare" vs "family" relative to 2022 is a coding change, and isn't meaningful: in 2022 I coded a bunch of time that today would be "childcare" as "family". Less sure about earlier.
The increase in "personal" relative to 2015 and 2017 is real: I definitely have more time for doing whatever I want than I did when the kids were littler.
The decrease in "housework" mostly represents that the house is pretty close to how we want it, and I'm not putting large amounts of my non-work time into fixing it.
The no Jeff+Julia time in 2015 is another coding thing: I didn't break that out separately from "personal" then. But I think there was still very little time for just the two of us because we were still working shifted schedules to handle childcare with a tricky kid. The lots of Jeff+Julia time in 2017 was us happening to pick an unusual week to track.