The Productivity Wheel: How to Manage Your Time to Accomplish Your Dreams

I often ask myself this: if I had 2 more hours in a day, would I get more done? Would I cross off more bucket list items?

Truth is, most of us have time, somewhere in a day, to accomplish something on our bucket lists. Case in point? To read the entire bible in year—a 1,500+ word document—you only need to read it for about 7 minutes a day (assuming you read the average adult reading speed of one page every 2 minutes; if it takes you twice that long, you’d still only need 15 minutes a day to read the entire bible).

The crazy thing is, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the average American has roughly five hours a day of flexible time—time where they’re not at work, eating, sleeping, caring for children, or doing household chores. For some, that may sound like a stretch, but remember: that’s an average, including weekends. Most people will find, if they truly calculate their time, that they have, on average, at least a few hours a day of flexible time and up to 20 – 35 hours per week where they have the flexibility to choose what to do.

Imagine what you could do if you chose to harness those 5 hours a day (or even 1 or 2) into meaningful time working toward bucket-list accomplishments.

To help you check off your next bucket list item, I created a Productivity Wheel. Based on the Time Use Survey data, in combination with expert data from a variety of different fields, the Wheel shows you what you can do with 15 minutes a day up to 5 hours a day. Quite shocking (and exciting!), the Wheel shows that if you actually used a full five hours a day on bucket-list items, you could read the entire bible, run a marathon, write a book, manage a blog, record a journal, learn the piano, learn a language, and even earn half a graduate degree in one year! If you want to a

Scroll over the image below to see up close where you can carve out time to accomplish more. Or, read further below for some insights I’ve learned as I’ve studied the data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey along with information from experts about how much time it takes to accomplish some of the most common sought after goals and dreams.

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You Have More Free Time than You May Think

Four years ago, Laura Vanderkam of CBSNews.com wrote an article that suggested most Americans have more free at their disposal than they may realize. I reviewed the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (2015 is the latest report) and, sure enough, the average working adult ages 25 – 54 has roughly 5 hours per day of what BLS calls “leisure and sports” time (note that the BLS Time Use Survey is one of the most respected and thoroughly researched data collections on how Americans use time). That’s five hours per day when you’re not sleeping, eating, cleaning your house, taking care of kids, or working.

Now, granted, if you have kids, that “leisure time” dips a bit, but the data suggests that childcare tasks somehow merge into other aspects of your life–maybe during the household activities portion or the sleep portion or the work portion you take care of the kiddos–but even adults with small children have somewhere in the vicinity of four to five hours per day of “leisure” time. (Remember that this is an average, and it does include weekends.)

If you simplify the BLS data into smoothed-out, hourly increments per day (on average), your day likely looks something like this:

Second, It’s Is Not that Simple…But Time Management Is Also Not Real Complicated

When you look at the chart above, I know what you’re saying: “yeah, right! Where does taking care of my kids fall on that list?” Or “but…it takes me an hour just to cook dinner–what about that?” or even, “who actually gets eight hours of sleep anymore?”

Well, you’re right. Simplifying a typical day isn’t as easy as saying “9 hours for work, 8 hours for sleep, and one hour for personal care,” and it certainly doesn’t all happen in continuous, segmented blocks like that. Most of us eat three to four times per day at different times per day. If you’re watching kids, you’re likely helping them while you’re helping yourself (and you may very well get less than eight hours of sleep).

But we have to remember that these are averages over an entire day as determined by research that was evaluating an entire average week. When BLS does their interviews, they don’t ask people to fill out a chart of how many hours they spend doing each activity (most people would be wrong if they tried to do that). Rather, BLS asks people (thousands and thousands of people) what they did the day before, walking them through the entire day’s activities. So the collected data is a compilation of working adults recalling their minute-by-minute schedule for a real day. Then the data is collected for the various days of the week and averaged out in time segments for a seven-day period, weekends included.

The reality of time management, as we know, is nuanced and idiosyncratic. We’re usually doing more than one thing at once–like watching TV while cleaning the house (is that “leisure” or is that “household activities”)?  And…our days are all chopped up. We may eat for 14 minutes in the morning, 27 minutes at lunch, and 42 minutes at dinner. But…lunch happens while we’re at work and dinner doesn’t actually take 42 minutes to eat (maybe 20 with some socializing and some cleaning.)

All that said, though, the data is clear that there are times when we do pause to do other things outside of sleep, work, and chores–we read, we watch TV, we play on Facebook, we relax. It may not be all at the same time, but it is consistent. On average, during a week, we have somewhere around 5 hours per day on average where we’re doing “leisurely” things. Some of that time may be “thinking” while in the shower (if you take long showers), some of that time may be surfing the news or Facebook on your phone, some of that time may be chilling with your spouse on the couch, but by the end of the day, you’ve spent roughly five hours of time in “leisure” mode.

If we can just compartmentalize how much time we spend in each leisurely activity, we can see the areas where we could, should we choose to, do other things.

Again, if you simplify those five hours of free time–into 15-minute time blocks–on average your daily leisure time likely looks something like this:

Third, We Spend a Lot of Time Watching TV

You’ve heard the statistics before and you’ve probably heard a lot of statistics about time spent on social media and smart phones. It’s difficult to quantify it all because we often use social media while we’re at dinner or even while we’re watching TV or while we’re at work. The BLS quantified “computer games” but that could be anything you might poke around on on your cell phone other than, say, the news, which might fall more under “reading.” Regardless, whether it’s watching TV or playing games or sending a SnapChat or Instragram, we’re in front of a screen for the majority of our free time.

The BLS suggests that 45 minutes per day are socializing, but many people do that online, too. With the exception of the green, red, purple, and pink sections noted above (reading, exercise, thinking, and “other), about 80% of our free time is with TV, computers, and socializing.

Fourth, Some Components of “Leisure Time” Are Non-Negotiable and That’s Okay

While we may look at that chart and see nearly three hours of TV per day and say, “okay, I could cut some TV,” we shouldn’t look at that chart and say, “I should cut out my socializing or my exercise or my reading.” Those are good, quality things that make us happy, healthy, and smart. But don’t worry–you can still do all those good things (and even watch a little TV) and still accomplish your dreams.

Fifth, Most Dreams and Goals Can Be Accomplished by Cutting Out Only Some TV and Computer Time

Many of us have dreams and goals and most of us may think we don’t have the time to accomplish them. We want to run a marathon or write a book or start a blog or learn a musical instrument. But then we mutter to ourselves, “But when am I ever gonna find the time for that?”

While it’s true that time is tricky and can be difficult to segment, you might be surprised at how little of an adjustment you would have to make to your leisure time to accomplish a fairly big goal. In researching a variety of expert commentary on topics like running a marathon, learning the piano, and writing a book, I discovered that most major significant goals can be accomplished or developed within a year and no goal requires more than 2-1/2 hours per day (many only take 15 – 45 minutes per day to accomplish.) Did you know, for example, that if your long-time goal has been to read the entire Bible, you would only need to devote 7 minutes per day for year to accomplish that?

This is the amazing thing: you could write a book or start a master’s degree or run a marathon, and you would still have time to watch TV everyday, have time to socialize, and have time to exercise. Most goals are very doable if we just compartmentalize the time and do them every day. If you carve time out of your leisure activities each day to insert time for your goals, you can accomplish a lot in a year.

Do What Works for You, but You Can Do This!

As you look at the Productivity Wheel, you can see the bright red squares where you would block out your time (in 15-minute intervals) to accomplish your goal. In more than half of the common goals listed above, experts suggest that you only need 45 minutes per day to accomplish the dream. In the chart, I’ve typically inserted the goal time in place of TV time, but you could modify the chart to work for you. And, in goals like running a marathon or getting a master’s degree, I’ve removed exercise from the former and reading from the latter because, obviously, you’d be doing those things anyway with your new goal time.

Don’t get me wrong, here: managing your time differently takes discipline. Running a marathon or writing a book or learning the piano isn’t exactly easy–that’s why so many people never end up doing those things. But when you realize how much time you may be inadvertently losing each day to “leisure” activities and when you see how little time it actually takes to accomplish major goals, maybe a tiny little spark inside will tell your goal-setting self, “Wow. I can do this.”

I, for one, believe in you. You can do amazing things!

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RESOURCES
Bureau of Labor Statistics Time Use Survey: https://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.t11.htm
Washington Post (on time to read Bible): https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2015/05/01/you-could-read-the-bible-twice-in-the-time-it-takes-to-read-game-of-thrones/?utm_term=.5a0e778ac440
Daily Writing Tips (on writing in journal):  http://www.dailywritingtips.com/how-to-write-every-day-and-why-you-should/
Daily Writing Tips (on starting a blog): http://www.dailyblogtips.com/poll-how-many-hours-per-week-do-you-work-on-your-blog/
REI (on running a marathon): https://www.rei.com/learn/expert-advice/training-for-your-first-marathon.html
Piano Teachers Federation (on learning the piano): http://pianoteachersfederation.org/how-much-practice-is-required-to-learn-piano-at-different-levels
Effective Language Learning (on learning languages: http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com/language-guide/language-difficulty
FFeathers (on writing a book): https://ffeathers.wordpress.com/2012/04/29/how-long-does-it-take-to-write-a-book/