Second Cup: Full time doesn't mean all of the time

of the worst culprits. Full time implies the full amount of your time, but in many cases, a full time job amounts to approximately thirty five to forty hours a week. I remember when I first did the math and realized that a week has one hundred sixty eight hours. If you sleep eight hours a night, so that is fifty six hours per week, and subtract fifty six and forty from one hundred sixty eight, you get seventy two hours left over. Now, some folks do work more than forty

hours a week, but not that many. The tail on this normal distribution gets thin really quickly. People go around saying things like you spend the majority of your waking hours at work, but for the vast majority of people that is not true. At all. Unfortunately, using the word full to describe thirty five to forty hours per week

of work causes all sorts of issues. For instance, some folks assume that they should work part time because they have a family, and because they don't want work to get the full amount of their time, they want their families to get part time too. But if full time work isn't actually full time, this story gets less clear cut. Working forty hours and having seventy two hours for other

things is already tilted more toward life than work. It's unclear what would be more balanced about working twenty hours and having ninety two hours for other things. There may be reasons for this, but it isn't more balanced. The other problem with the word full is that folks who do work full time often assume they have no time for other things. I mean, how could they work is consuming the full amount of their time, except that it isn't.

In seventy two waking non working hours, it is quite possible to find three to four hours to exercise or two to three hours to vuluntier, in addition to spending lots of time with family members and friends. If you have never tracked your time before, I suggest trying it. One of the first things people see is how much time they have outside of work, even if they are

working full time hours. If you are home from work at five thirty pm and go to bed at ten thirty pm, that is five hours each day Monday to Friday to attend to the rest of your life. Plus there's likely some time in the morning too. If you are up at six thirty am and leave for work at eight, that's another ninety minutes that can be acknowledged as existing. You probably don't spend all of it in

the shower. And then there's weekends. There are thirty six waking hours between six pm Friday and six am Monday. That is almost the equivalent of a full time job right there. Once you recognize that full time work still leaves a lot of time for other things, this opens up possibilities. Instead of assuming you have no time, you can start to assume that you do have time, and you can start asking what you'd like to do with it. Personally,

I think this is a much more useful mindset. You start to see that it might be possible to get up and run for thirty minutes two mornings a week and read for forty five minutes at night most nights. You might be able to go play in a pickleball league on Tuesdays and still have space for lots of just hanging out. Full time isn't full time at all. It is some amount of time, but generally there is space for everything else in the meantime. This is Laura.

Thanks for listening, and here's to making the most of our time. Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback, you can reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.