2018 – Make the days, hours & minutes count

Happy New Year! For the past 2 weeks, my kids have been on holiday break from school. During this time, we have had an opportunity to spend a lot of time together as a family. From going to see movies out to teaching them about how economics work and even having them help out on a home renovation project, it’s been really awesome. As we kick-off 2018, the past 2 weeks have been a great reminder to make the days, hours & minutes count. In 2018, we have 365 days, 8,760 hours & 525,600 minutes.

At first glance, 525,600 minutes seems like a lot of time. However, when you drill into it, you realize that 5 days a week are spent at school for the kids and work for the adults. Another 8-10 hours per night is spent sleeping. According to a recent Nielsen study, the average American watches 5 hours and 4 minutes of television/day. The US census bureau has been tracking commute times for the American worker and found that average time to travel to work is 26 minutes each way which is ~1 hour for the round trip. Another activity that we spend a lot of time on is – household activities (cooking, cleaning) – which is about 1-2 hours/day. If you want to get a complete overview of how Americans spend their time, there is a great overview here along with amazing graphs based on a study done by the Labor Department.

If you don’t know what you are spending your money on, it’s really difficult to achieve your financial goals. Similarly, if you don’t know how your time is being spent, it’s going to be a challenge to ensure you are getting the most of each day, hour and minute. One thing my family and I are going to experiment with is budgeting our time to make sure we are spending it on activities that enable us to collectively maximize our time together and then similar to tracking a stock portfolio - checking in our performance on a monthly and quarterly basis.  A tool that I’ve found especially useful as an input to this exercise is the Moment app – it helps keep track of how much time each family member spends on their personal electronic devices. In addition, we are going to continue to make sure that we carve out time to enjoy dinner together as a family every evening. And, we are going to remain diligent on limiting our kid’s extracurricular activities so that they can develop depth in a few key areas while ensuring that more time isn’t spent driving them to and from. 

What are some suggestions that you have found useful to make the days, hours and minutes count with your family?