How I Spend My 10 Hours a Day of Free Time

 

 

The pandemic, while upending the whole world and mine, has strangely lent a bit of consistency to my schedule.  Pre-COVID, I didn't travel all the time, but enough that it kept me on my toes to have to figure out how to handle my work and home responsibilities in light of going away for hours or days at a time.  And during those days, while I wasn't out every night, increasingly I'd have a work meeting here and a networking event there that scrambled my ability to be home for dinner and bedtime.

Far less nowadays.  So there's less that knocks me off my usual routine and responsibilities.  The one main piece, which everything is built around, is our littlest one.  Asher is usually up by 6am, and I leave him after bedtime stories a little after 8pm.  In between, those 14 hours are basically either work, Asher, chores, or errands, and quite often more than one of those things at a time, and quite often at breakneck speed.  Seven days a week, almost without fail.  (Kid-free long weekends with Amy once or twice a year have been a blessed relief.)

Of course, that leaves 10 hours a day, and in fact nowadays it is somewhat unusual (not totally rare) for one or more of those other things to intrude on the 8pm to 6am time block.  So the time is all mine, and for posterity's sake I would like to record how I spend that discretionary time at this exact stage in my life.  

I wish I could say I used seven or even eight of those hours to sleep, but honestly it's closer to six, generally from 10pm to 4am.  Which breaks the remaining free time into two two-hour blocks: the two hours before I go to bed, and the two hours after I wake up.  

The evening block, I'll have to walk back a previous statement, in that work more often than not is the first use of that ten-hour span, since I almost always have to catch up on work emails I didn't get to during the day, which on most days means just about all emails.  And/or I knock out random chores around the house that piled up during the day or over multiple days, like picking up from the whirlwind that is each day in our household and tending to a semi-urgent house fix.  But at a certain point, I have to call it a night even if there are still emails to answer and house detritus to put away, and I'm usually pretty good about setting that limit (except of course on days when an impending work deadline means I can't).  

That leaves a good chunk of time, usually about an hour, for leisure reading.  This year I've been back into physical books, which I read before I get into bed, but when I read on my phone I read in bed.  Either way, reading is such a rejuvenating activity for this introvert who has had to act extroverted all day: a quiet and private moment to be completely in my own head in the form of a good read.  What a luxurious feeling.  Then it's light's out, metaphorically and literally, and I rarely take more than a few minutes to completely conk out.

The morning hours are similarly serene albeit packed.  Prayer, Bible, email, social, blogging, planning out the day - all in the stillness of the morning before anyone else is up.  The only stressful things might be if a landlord-related issue has come up that I have to figure out how to deal with.  Other than that, it's all good.

I wish I had more time for those things, but soon enough it's out of the house for another necessary self-care habit, which is exercise.  I alternate between running and then ending up at the Y to lift, or biking to the Y to lift and then swim.  Then it's back home to shower, put on clothes, and await the start of my Asher shift as indicated by him calling for me to come help him with his clothes.  Once I hear that howl, I know it's another 14 hours until I get my next 10-hour block of free time again.  Such is my life right now.