This is Part 3 in a series on Productivity. While this post stands on its own, please read Part 1 and Part 2 for more on the topic.

How do you spend your time?

If you live until 80, you only get 29,220 days.

That's not very many! 

That's only 4174 weeks. 

How old are you now?

I'm already 10,269 days into this one life. 35% of the way!

So - how are you spending your time? 

Do you know?

Laura Vanderkam recently published an article in the NYT: The Busy Person's Lies.

According to the article, "61 percent of working Americans said they did not have enough time to do the things they wanted to do."

We can all relate to this. 

Life IS busy.

But what exactly are we busy with?

And how much "extra time" do we actually have?

It's worth finding out - so I decided to try.

Let's break it down:

There are 168 hours in a week.

Now before you continue, take a minute to fill in the following table with all non-discretionary activities - anything you must do most weeks, no matter what.

Fill in the ideal amount of time you would like to spend on these activities based on your current lifestyle (i.e. don't change commuting to 0 if it's actually 1, but if you would like to cook more, you can factor that in here).

OK do you have your totals?

Here are mine:

When I first did this, I was shocked.

You mean I have 50.5 hours per week remaining that I can dedicate to discretionary activities?

That's 7.2 hours per day on average.

Even on weekdays, I still have 5.5 hours for discretionary activities.

OK - but what am I missing?! I sure don't feel like I have 5.5 hours of "extra" time.

Let's be conservative and add an additional 30 minutes per day for transition time - after all it's not possible to instantly transition from one activity to another. And let's throw in another 1 hour for errands, like grocery shopping, getting gas, etc. on 4 days of the week.

That still leaves with me with 43 hours per week to do whatever I want. That's 6.1 hours per day on average, and 4 hours on my busiest days. 

And those hours are in addition to sleeping 8 hours a night and spending a leisurely 1.5 hours a day cooking and eating dinner (while still allowing 30 minutes for breakfast and lunch).

Now - finally we get to the fun part. This is when we stop using "busy" as an excuse and actually decide how we want to spend our time.

So - how do YOU want to spend your discretionary hours?

Take a minute and write down your ideal activity list, and how many hours per week you'd like to spend on each of them. It's OK if it goes over the total time remaining from the previous chart.

Here's my list: 

So while you may not be able to fit all of your ideal discretionary activities into your week, it's probably closer than you think.

For me the delta is only 10.5 hours out of 168 in a week - just 6%. That means I can accomplish 94% of everything I want in any given week! (Assuming a certain amount of discipline, which of course is the hardest part).

After you make your activity list, you should literally schedule blocks on your calendar for each of your activities. If it's not on your calendar, it's not real. 

Every week can be different - I find it helpful (and freeing) not to think of my discretionary activity list as a strict to-do list but more like a menu.

Depending on the week, I can pick and choose what I want to focus on.

The point is not to limit spontaneity and freedom, but rather create more of it. And the more productive we become, the more time we can spend more on discretionary activities.

The fact is: I have 43 hours per week to do whatever I want.

One week, I could decide to use all of them on a new business idea. 

The next week, I could practice my free throws for 10 hours.

And just as important as what's on the list, is what you left off the list.

Was Instagramming on there? How about watching "breaking news" on CNN?

If it's not on there, it's not a priority for you.

And with only 29,220 days on this earth, why spend our discretionary time on things we don't really care that much about?

Granted - we all need mental and physical downtime, which is why I allotted 1 hour per day of unstructured time on my list.

The point is: At the very least we should be aware of how we spend our time.

One question people ask is 'What if  I'm not sure what should be on my list?' 

There have definitely been times when I have realized that my habits, activities and routines were simply holdovers from the past. I was doing them simply because that's what I was used to doing.

And that's not a very good reason.

Coming up in Part 4 I will share one method I use to regularly reevaluate my priorities and ensure that they match up with my actions.

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