How much free time do you have? | Hacker News Reader

How much free time do you have?

erikrood.com

247 pointsdeegles220 comments

Really depressing. Between work, long commute, gym, and part-time grad school, I have 18 free hours a week out of 168. Makes me wonder what the hell I am doing when I have other hobbies that I would love to be pursuing. Most of the time I simply don't have the mental energy to pursue much of anything in my 18 free hours. Sometimes I just need to turn my brain off.

I find myself to lash out in weird ways when I am particularly stressed. For example, I am much more likely to spend a lot of money on something that seems like it has the potential to make me happy or book a vacation spontaneously. It seems like keeping my head on straight requires so much willpower that I can't save any for other aspects of my life. Who knew life was hard?

I’m in the middle of a four day weekend. I’ll probably get absolutely nothing extraordinary done in it. Despite there being plenty of things I could be doing. The 40 hour work week is tyrannical.

Why do you have to "get something extraordinary done" on your time off? You don't have to be productive any waking moment.

If you're not productive on your four-day weekends, and if you think your job isn't worth anything in the ultimate sense, you will wake up one day and be 79 without having done much of anything.

Enjoying 79 stress-free years sounds better than having things to brag about on your gravestone.

Stress is orthogonal here.

Many humans[0] naturally want to create, build and improve things around them. A typical job is a nearly insurmountable obstacle to that, especially if fruits of the labour only ever manifest as paycheck - hence the desire to do that in whatever free time that's left.

[0] - I'd argue, all.

> [0] - I'd argue, all.

Nope! I take no joy and have no interest in creating, building, and improving things. I like buying stuff, watching TV, scrolling through the Internet, and that’s more or less it.

Just passing time until I die.

79 years making stuff _I care about_ would be heaven, though.

This. If you feel your dayjob is a pointless waste of effort, then the after-work time is all you have to do anything meaningful with your life. And I don't know if it's reality, or just artifact of society talking more about it at scale, but it seems to me that increasing amount of jobs is pointless, with neutral to net-negative impact on society. Including, or maybe especially in, our industry.

Your accomplishments don't mean anything in the ultimate sense anyway. Nothing is permanent. The universe will eventually cook itself to death.

When it's your turn to go, how you feel about the matter will make no difference. So I say enjoy the 4 days off.

Who cares about having done "anything"? I'll be dead anyway. What matters is that at 79 I've spent as much time as possible having fun by doing activities I find to be fun.

A four day weekend is very extraordinary in itself. Perhaps you need not do anything special to get the most out of it.

> The 40 hour work week is tyrannical.

If you are stating this seriously, I often wonder why there isn’t a great movement toward a reduction in working days/hours in the modern workplace.

It’s kind of mind boggling to me why we have to trade most of our waking hours for the majority of the prime of our life to make a living wage. Modern society should be solving for this.

> I often wonder why there isn’t a great movement toward a reduction in working days/hours in the modern workplace.

There are voices saying that. You can find some on almost every HN thread about work. This is a tricky topic, though, because our society has a deeply ingrained sense of deriving one's self-worth and status from the job they perform. A sentiment that was once critical to our survival - now, arguably, less so.

> Modern society should be solving for this.

There are attempts. 4-hour workweek. People (like myself) switching to remote work to reclaim time spent commuting. Individuals seeking FU money. Proposals of UBI. Regulations around paid vacations and parental leave. It's messy and slow-going, and things probably won't change until there is a cultural shift in our relationship with work we do.

When you say "our society", do you mean USA? I know the approach to work in France where I live is vastly different. Most people I talk with consider work to be a means to an end, and life being much more about the things you do besides your job.

Well the discussions here are not exactly from a random sampling of individuals. Many people in HN are programmers, meaning that their productivity does not scale linearly with time. That is, you may get a considerable amount of work done in 4 hours, and the proceeding 4 hours may yield hardly any progress at all. Any knowledge worker can relate. But in a lot of industries, there is a lower bound of hours that need to be worked.

I used to work in the medical device industry, and hospitals, and also have some real estate company experience. I can assure you in my experience, a 40-hour workweek was by no means unreasonable in these industries. If you're working in Semiconductors or Finance or Law or most industries out there, you really do need to be physically present and working 6-8 hour days.

It is solved. Everybody can choose a job where they works less hours or become a freelancer and work as many hours as they want. This doesn't work on a global scale, but as an individual, that choice is possible.

The problem is that people want to buy more than they can afford from doing less work.

There is no way to resolve this. As long as there are status goods like sneakers for $1000, people will have to work the hours needed to afford them. You can only have fewer hours if everything is standardized to the point that machines do all the work. But who wants to live in such a world of uniformity?

I don't agree, humans worked for 80 hours a week and then together reduced to 40 hours a week. I don't see why they could not reduce it to 30 or 20 hours a week.

Everyone worked on a Saturday then suddenly most of the people stopped working on the Saturday, I don't see why it would be impossible for most of the people in the society to stop working on Friday too.

Exactly! Weekends only exist because workers unionized and forced them to be a thing.

In the US, the government is supposed to create and reinforce individual liberties and property rights. That means creating a legal framework around personal property. It should be protective of peoples’ time as well.

Because 40 hours a week are, if you remove vacations, holidays and sick leaves, on average roughly 4 hours per day. That's the amount tribal people work per day. There is no inherent human need to reduce that time further.

As I said, people can already work for 30 or 20 hours per week. Why is it not enough for you if you stop working on Friday?

Do you want 30 or 20 hours per week with equal pay? Then indeed you have to reduce the supply of work to rise hourly wages. But then, less is produced, the supply of goods is reduced and thus things cost more, most likely disproportionally more than the increase in wages.

> But then, less is produced

That is obviously not true because of two things:

1. Machines take over and do work and create goods

2. Humans are more productive than they were before

Here is a handy graph which I found googling https://www.researchgate.net/figure/A-graphical-representati...

Machines only compensate for humans to a certain extend because they are already used as much as possible. If humans work less then there is not the same output because there are no hidden opportunities where machines can do more work. I stick with my original point: If humans work less then there is less output.

We are more productive now, but that surplus is used to put a supercomputer into the hand of every person and new clothes to wear every other month. If people wouldn't buy that, then the increase in productivity could lead to less working hours.

Btw, as far as I understand your graph, it is not telling that we are more productive but that farms are more productive if they are bigger.

As far as I know, Western workers are just more productive because they assemble pre-made parts and the final value of the product is ascribed to them when in reality, they just profit from wage differences. That's not sustainable.

If that wage difference is ever closed then people will even get less for the same amount of work.

> Because 40 hours a week are, if you remove vacations, holidays and sick leaves, on average roughly 4 hours per day.

I'm sorry, but who told you this?

The median amount of PTO in American companies is 10 days + 8 days of Federal holidays. That 18 days vs 260 weekdays, or 7% of the work year, meaning the average American works 7.5 hours a day, not 4.

Tribal people don't have weekends. It's 2*52 days + 18 days = 122 days out of 365. That's 5.3h per day. To me, that is close enough to 4 hours that people don't feel stressed to the point that there is a desire for change.

In comparision, people spend 3 hours on average watching TV.

> You can only have fewer hours if everything is standardized to the point that machines do all the work. But who wants to live in such a world of uniformity?

Sounds great to me. I don’t want a choice in most things anyway. I hate it when I find myself dithering in a shop over whether to pick this brand or that when they probably come from the same factory anyway. Let me work less AND expend less effort making choices!

There are a couple other good answers here, and I think the ideas you’re suggesting are growing in the public consciousness. But I think it’s interesting to reflect on the idea of the job, in the US at least. Our entire economy and government and our social identity rests on the deeply ingrained idea of everyone going to work every day. Our healthcare system is still very heavily job centric, since most people who have health insurance get it through work. Banks and credit all evaluate risk via job income and type. The idea of being a productive member of society still pervades the American consciousness.

There’s a lot of hand-wringing over UBI and other suggestions because the economy will change dramatically if a lot of people suddenly work less. As much as I agree that it seems like we shouldn’t need to be working this much, I have to admit that when I think about how completely fixed into our core the ideas of work and jobs are, I feel like reducing them quickly could have massive and unintended consequences for our economy.

Those memes could be reduced by an equally conscious awareness of the value of the other parts of life. Health relies on good sleep, good diet, good social interactions, etc. work often hinders those.

Sure, you’re absolutely right. They could. And in small ways, that’s already happening. Lots of people on Facebook and Instagram post their food & vacations & friends. Work chatter on social networks is there but (perhaps?) not as prominent as pics and stories from work.

That said, I think it’s a mistake to underestimate how deeply ingrained work is in our culture, or to underestimate how hard it will be to change. People judge each other’s status by work and wealth, the education system is designed for careers both private and academic. The extremely pervasive beliefs that struggle and hard work are required for people to learn things well, and that competition is required for survival and optimal markets, and that good financial management skills only come from earned money, and that expertise only comes from years of experience, these are all part of the big burrito that jobs are part of. It’s a burrito that will be hard to take apart. Not impossible, but very hard. Jobs aren’t required for those ideas to be true, but today they are tightly wrapped together.

I have 168 free hours a week at the moment and I am still somehow getting nothing extraordinary done :)

"Tyrannical" is an absurd way to frame the 40-hour workweek.

The vast majority of people in the world aren't tech workers where productivity and time spent have a nonlinear relationship. Having been on both sides of the coin, calling a 40-hour work week "tyrannical" screams "ivory tower". Those of us in law and medicine (not to mention numerous people in early-stage startups) would get a great laugh out out of that characterization.

What else do you think you could be doing with your time?

I used to feel the same way up until the point when I clarified my goals and broke them down into small accumulative chunks, and ignored any goals which obviously couldn't be dealt with before the others. I feel like I'm getting plenty done at that point even though the marginal increment of effort every day looks more modest.

i got similar numbers and thought, wow, 16 hours is actually quite a lot of time. that's two work days worth.

seriously how much time do you spend on your hobbies? i have several casual hobbies that only take a few hours a week each. if i'd spend 2 hours each day on a hobby i'd call that intensive and i'd think that spending that much time is unusual unless it's maybe a music instrument you are learning.

another way to look at it is that 2 days of free time is 2/5th of your worktime. that's almost half a job worth.

if you spend 5 years in a job, then that's 2 years worth of free time. imagine what you can do with all of that.

Build a burnout and depression cause you lack downtime.

18 hours per week for showering, shopping, cleaning, catching up with friends, eating, cooking and reading is not that extraordinary much.

oh yes, burnout and depression, also procrastination can really eat up your time. and worst of all, you don't really know where the time is going. it just disappears.

Onr of the recurring points I saw here was people with 60+minute commutes bring the most jaded - would you consider moving?

As soon as you get kids, moving gets to be more complicated. I don't want to uproot my child when she's rooted so well at this school.

That's a very fair point - I don't have kids and didn't consider that. Another option to consider would be changing job to reduce the commute? There seems to be a link between commute time and general unhappiness in this thread, and nobody seems to consider shortening their commutes really.

Yeah, something has to be done about commuting. Personally, I start really early and avoid the worst of the traffic jams. Plus, I can work in my own office, close to home. I don't have to be at the client their office every day of the week.

I am always somewhat puzzled by the focus on free time without taking into account the energy balance of a person.

I find often that when someone says “I don’t have the time”, what they really mean is that they don’t have energy left to take on something else.

In my case, I find that there’s often enough hours, but I don’t always have the energy to be active 100% of that time and just end up taking some rest.

This is largely effected by the nutrition / mental / health state of the individual. I personally spend a lot of time (cooking, sports, spend time researching mineral/vitamin/other supplements), and it took me around 4 years to find the things my body needs. I am now very rarely "energy exhausted" and mentally clear the whole day, having more energy than 10 years ago. The message here is that one can spend time and pick up habits that make the body function better, with a good chance that the efforts will pay off one day.

Ah well, being fit certainly helps, and I'm pleased you found what works for you! But so does being early twenties instead of in your forties (not assuming anything here, just stating age is one of many factors). If only aging could be solved by taking a multivitamin :)

And while I agree that taking care of one self is important, I want to touch upon a more fundamental point. I am perfectly OK with taking rest from time to time, or taking it easy, or just sitting back with my feet up enjoying a good book, or a glass of wine with my wife. There's in my opinion little need to always be on 100% and it's perfectly OK if people aren't. I know this opinion is like cursing in church on this forum, but many people would do well being nice to themselves a little more.

I think the point of this calculator is to show people that there's time to take those breaks. I filled it in and over-estimated a bunch of areas and it still said I have 11 hours of free time each week. That's a whole lot of books and wine that I can enjoy and still meet all of my existing priorities including spending time with my kid.

That's freeing in a way, it tells me that when I feel pressed for time it's really all in my head and taking an hour to read a book shouldn't be a problem if I just take a few minutes and prioritize my time.

Also it's probably useful for some people to see how much time is spent on work and commuting relative to other parts of their life. If they truly have no time to read a book but work+commute is eating up more than 50% of their days, maybe it's time to do something about that and fix one or both parts of that equation (move closer to work or change jobs to get closer to home, and work fewer hours)?

Do you have any reading materials that you can recommend that helped you to figure this out?

One important one is http://lynnefarrow.net/book.html

Then there is (on top of above) the vitamins / minerals category, in which I was shocked to find that most supplements out there are in a form that doesn't get used by the body. Sorry, no english doc here :(

Addressing my various food intolerances - it's very personal and it's more about the process. Experimenting with avoiding gluten, milk, egg (for me). Try-and-repeat. Be consistent (this was the hardest for me).

And fighting my constant virus load - again, very personal, but these ones that work for me, using in combination: lactoferrin, grapefruit seed extract, ganoderma lucidum mushroom, propolis drops, and one I won't write down on HN because I get downvoted for it... :)

The trick seems to be to identify your various different out-of-energy states and what activity is consistently restorative for each. Then, get experience with those activities when you’re fresh so that you have less of a hurdle to jump over when you really need them.

The biggest issue, of course, is that it requires you to experiment with new things when you’re dead tired in order to figure out what helps in the first place. A more subtle problem is that some activities help at first and then cause problems later- Television/YouTube is like this for me; sometimes, it’s the most effective way of resting but if I’m not careful I’ll go straight through energetic into a different, harder to escape lethargy.

I think the benefits of active versus passive leisure time is an interesting area to explore.

I think there are two problems. Tiredness and boredom. TV's sweet spot is when you are mildly bored and pretty tired. It tires you even more but alleviates boredom a bit.

I had after-school routine. When I was comming back from school I was bored and tired but too bored and not tired enough to go to sleep immediately. So I watched TV for an hour or two becomming slightly less bored and completely tired. After that I slept for few hours and after that wake up and be semi-funtional human again, able to do homework or enjoy myself for a bit.

The problem was I got addicted to TV and I watched it even if I wasn't that tired and theoretically had energy to entertain myself with something that had better joy/effort ratio than TV. Instead I always defaulted to TV which costed me too much energy for enjoyment provided.

Eventually I had to ask my mom to put a parental lock on TV and even then after school I was lying in front of turned on TV that showed no channel (due to parental lock) pushing buttons at random trying to unlock it. I even managed to unlock it once (3 digit code) but couldn't repeat it.

Eventually my dumb brain learned that lying in front of a TV no longer gives me any joy (because I can't turn the channels on) and I shook the addiction.

In my experience, there are a lot more than two sliders but the general idea seems right. By choosing the right program, television can help fulfill all sorts of emotional needs: social, excitement, creativity, escapism, curiosity, etc.

The problem is that it’s effective for such a large range of needs, it promotes the illusion that, if you only found the right thing to watch, it can fix anything. So you end up channel surfing, wondering why you can’t find anything you’re interested in, when what you really need is a stroll outside.

> television can help fulfill all sorts of emotional needs: social, excitement, creativity, escapism, curiosity, etc.

Yes. I totalle agree. I think social was most important for me. The problem with TV is that it fulfills those needs but very inefficiently. It takes a lot of time of lying inert in front of TV to get any significant fulfillment. And the insidious part is that because people are lying down they think they are resting. But that's rarely true. Lying down especially for hours tires you even more.

So TV provides you with versatile fulfillment but at very slow rate and at a significant cost that's not easy to notice.

Spot on.

My last year was terrible, and I had developed the habit of watching video as way to self-soothe. I wasn't really enjoying it or getting anything out of it, so when my major source of stress ended, I decided to kick the TV/Netflix/Prime habit. For all of June, I eliminated it and video games.

It was hard at first, but it has been great. When June ended I was curious to see if I'd pick those back up. So far, nothing. It turns out if I let myself be bored, it will drive me to do something more interesting.

Being tired ("I don't have the mental or physical energy to do engaging things") and sleepy ("I want to sleep") are completely different things.

"The pleasures of urban populations have become mainly passive: seeing cinemas, watching football matches, listening to the radio, and so on. This results from the fact that their active energies are fully taken up with work; if they had more leisure, they would again enjoy pleasures in which they took an active part."

-- Bertrand Russell, http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html

Damn, and it was written in 1932.

I've heard the terms "bandwidth" and "cycles" be used in exchange with 'time'.

That's a good way of thinking about it, I've added this to my notes on the subject.

Some feedback about the formula from a parent:

The formula needs to account for the reality that with young children your "parental duties" expands to occupy all free time when kids are awake. And also shifts other chores into any free time slots when kids are asleep.

Kids are asleep. Time to clean the kitchen, do the dishes, switch the laundry, cut some veggies for tomorrow's dinner, and then find somewhere softer than last night to pass out.

Yeah, as a dad of 2 kids under 4, I ended up having negative free hours. I put 54 hours of parenting a week, because it is non stop on the weekends for about 12 hours a day, and 5 hours or so on weekdays (getting them up and ready for daycare in the morning, then playing, feeding and putting them down at night.)

I do get some chores done during that time, which is probably how I am able to exist with what ends up being negative free time (doubled up on some of hours)

Man I can't wait for them to get old enough to play on their own without requiring my full attention.

I live in Tanzania and here any kid that is above the age of 2 has free rein to go wherever they want.

Maybe it's not a better way (though I suspect it is), but it is certainly easier (assuming you don't have 8 children like most people here though).

I think it boils down to the trade off between convenience, cost, and safety.

I'm convinced that kids in the developed world are so safe and so likely to see adulthood that in order to move the needle on safety even the slightest, we have to dump a huge amount of time and money into it.

Okay so the infant mortality rate in Canada is at about 4 per 1000 (about 38 per 1000 in Tanzania). How do we improve that? Well let's dump an insane amount of stress and panic on parents about which way their children are facing when they sleep. That's one of thousands of examples I could come up with if pressed. We are way way way into diminishing returns here. We have so few problems that we are obsessing over error margins worth of added safety at the cost of exponential parenting efforts.

I asked my dad how they let my brothers and I wander the suburb on our own as kids. Weren't they afraid we'd be kidnapped or hit by a car or drown in the river? My dad said they never knew they were supposed to be worried. It just didn't really register as a thing. It sure as hell was a far safer place to grow up than where they did.

There's also another possible angle to consider. Imagine if I got all the parents in town together and said, "so we have concluded that a healthy childhood is one full of risk and freedom and adventure. We need everyone to take the proverbial training wheels off and let your kids be kids. However this will mean that some of your children aren't going to make it to adulthood. It's just the nature of this kind of upbringing."

Thanks for this comment. I always react the same whenever someone proposes to do thing the old way, eg people saying we live in an overly protective society with people wearing helmets while skiing.

> I asked my dad how they let my brothers and I wanted the suburb on our own as kids.

When I was 6, my parents took us to Mexico and let me and my two younger siblings wander around on our own. They also barely registered any idea of possible danger. The closest they got was when my little brother was petting a horse from behind more than a mile from home and got lightly kicked in the head. They told us to be more careful and watch out for each other, and we were wandering around the next day. It could have gone bad, but it didn’t, we survived. Other memories of my childhood include things like bouncing around in the back seat of their Buick without seatbelts.

My wife had a hard time letting our own two boys wander around on their own in safe middle class neighborhoods until they were both over 12. I was pushing for more autonomy, but I have to admit I’d never have given my kids as much autonomy as I got.

> It could have gone bad, but it didn’t, we survived.

I mean, this is literally survivorship bias. The kids that died being out on their own aren't posting about it

It’s just survivorship, without the bias. I’m pointing out that I was lucky, not concluding that my odds were any better than they were or better than anyone else’s. I literally said it could have gone bad, I’m aware childhood mortality rates were higher in the past.

It would be better in some ways, but it does lead to a higher infant mortality rate (as the other commenter pointed out). I don't think I am willing to make that trade off (even if I could... I would be arrested if I let my 3 year old wonder down the street alone)

I imagine there must be some middle ground. Yes, don't let your 3 year old wander around the street on their own, but also don't make them completely reliant on your attention - just let then play on their own. If they get bored then they get bored, it's not your problem(until you make it yours of course).

We try this. The amount of dangerous and destructive things a 3 year old can do is crazy

In Zambia, and I suspect in Tanzania, too, four-year old siblings also already play a role in taking care of their smaller siblings.

Which they're wholly not capable of doing. They just do it because there's little alternative available yet.

I’m sorry for a stupid question but do you have streets and cars there?

I imagine the community dynamic is entirely different there, as well as the physical dangers. I cannot let my 3 year old run around Manhattan on her own; she'd get hit by a car or a bike, or get on a bus and disappear somewhere into Brooklyn, or fall into the subway tracks.

Parenting, except in the case of unwanted pregnancies, is a hobby. Culturally it has a sort of special status but in the end it's another hobby that one decides to commit to. It's a choice made that this is going to be your mostly exlusive hobby for the next several years.

You don’t think it’s important for society and the future economy?

I don't think the world is particularly short of people. We've got lots of people. Some might say "too many".

I've chosen not to take up the hobby (as GP fairly described) but for every one of me, there are ten others who participate. Not everyone needs to bear children.

Right but we do actually need some people to have kids and a declining population is pretty bad for the way society is currently organized.

It's great you've decided not to have kids but denigrating others choices to have them by calling it a hobby is not cool.

It's less a hobby and more of a deeply ingrained evolutionary trait. I don't think people who lack the trait can ever grok what it feels like. For me it's up there with eating and breathing.

I try to make it a point to do all the chores when the kids are awake. When they are asleep is time to relax; not do mundane tasks

I don't feel it's my duty to entertain my kinds every waking hour, so if they have to settle with watching me fold the laundry or unload the dishwasher, so be it.

This probably won't win me the father-of-the-year award, and it is parenting-style me and my girlfriend don't always agree about, but I refuse to sacrifice all my free time for my children.

How would you feel about this choice if one of your children died of cancer?

Would you still think you'd made the right choice, or would you regret prioritising laundry over your children?

Literally nothing will prepare you for that. No amount of time is enough. Living your life in abject fear of that morbid possibility is crippling.

"spending time with my kids" is not "living in crippling fear of them dying".

It sounded like you were opposed to doing mundane daily chores or otherwise not giving 100% of your free time to them while they're awake for fear that you might regret that choice if they died young of cancer. That doesn't seem that far apart to this reader.

Honestly, I think it depends on how it goes. As a young kid, I watched my dad write emails through Hotmail over HyperTerminal (I think) to other doctors discussing surgical procedures.

Honestly, I quite enjoyed it. He just wrote the emails and I just sat there and read what he wrote and understood some tiny fraction. Thoroughly enjoyable.

At least to me this is completely normal. It’d be weird to put off chores. Kids are perfectly capable of entertaining themselves with occasional wrangling whilst things are getting done.

This sounds a pretty good attitude actually ... within reason you can even involve the kids in doing the chores.

Mine too.

When he was one my son used to try to push a broom around, having seen me do it almost every day of his life (wooden floors make sweeping common - especially due to his habit of throwing food around).

By the time he was 2/2.5 he was actually capable of sweeping the floor but he's been the same with a lot of simple tasks. He obviously tried to copy me, before he was able to do so.

There's a temptation to not let children help, because it does make all jobs take three/four times as long. But it's worth resisting, they can do jobs, and they should be encouraged to treat them as normal activities not "chores" done under protest, solely for financial reward.

It's really not about entertaining my kids constantly. It's that a baby and a toddler are a lot of work even if they do spend hours entertaining themselves.

A baby and toddler is different from a kid, which is different from a teen.

There are parents who live life to serve their kids needs, perceived needs, future needs and every fantasy they project on their kids.

People often ask my wife and I how we manage to raise our 4 daughters, and homeschool the 3 school-aged ones. The assumption is that it must be a ton of work.

The key to making this work is our parenting style. We promote autonomy _a lot_. For example, my youngest was eating on her own at ~10-11 months. Sure, she was making a mess at first, but now she's 1.5 yrs and she's pretty good at this. Then you see the "exhausted-parent" type spoon-feeding their 3yo toddler, and wondering how we manage.

This translates to a lot of other areas (dressing up, housekeeping, hygiene, schoolwork), and while it's still a ton of work, it's much more manageable. The bonus is that we're raising confident, independent women as a result (because they know they can do it themselves).

I believe the current trend of helicopter-parenting / parents as slaves to their children is actually harmful to society, and that we're currently raising a generation of children who won't know what / how to do anything on their own. People don't magically become independent at 18; it's a process that starts at a very young age.

Try talking to your girlfriend along these lines, you might manage to convince her. And for what it's worth, showing the kids that the laundry doesn't fold itself _is_ father-of-the-year material in my opinion.

Is there a book or reference for that kind of parenting?

Not sure if this is exactly what you are looking for, but there was a hackernews discussion related to this a while back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17905657

If there is, I haven't read it. It's not that hard, really. Kids want to do things on their own. If they're having a hard time, help them but don't do it for them. If they don't know how or do it wrong, show them the right way, they'll pick it up faster than you think. Kids are very smart, let them surprise you.

That's not really inevitable. It's a cultural norm that can be changed.

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/06/09/6169288...

https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/09/01/6412662...

I spent several years working toward the goal of maximizing my Free Time, and hit a point a couple years ago where I'm effectively as Retired as I want to be, at any given moment. The SaaS businesses tick away in the background and seldom require my intervention apart from a quick customer service email sweep every couple days.

I'd recommend this path over the VC + Co-Founders "Startup" life that gets promoted here so often, since I've never seen an outcome from that track that appears to me to be relaxing and enjoyable.

Anyway, regarding the calculator submitted here, it seems to use a bunch of the things I do in (what I consider) my Free Time to deduct from the amount of (what it considers) my Free Time. When I have the chance, I go out Bouldering (which it counts as fitness) or play with my kids if they're off school (which it dings as parenting).

Every hour you're not working for somebody else in exchange for money aught to be considered "you" time. All the other things on that list seem like perfectly fine ways of spending that time.

I'm currently learning Django to do exactly this. How did you handle monetization and marketing, if you don't mind me asking?

The hard part is actually finding a viable business, not technical chops.

Still trying to find a way to do it since I don't want to work for a salary all my life.

This is what I'm trying to achieve. Do you have any tips on how you managed to do it? Did you have to change your lifestyle to e.g. reduce living cost, etc.?

I think commute time should count two or three times. I sit in the car for 80 minutes a day and I am totally shot in the evening so I get nothing done even if I have time. . On the days I work from home I work the same amount. After work I relax for half an hour and can do things after. Commuting is a real soul killer in my view.

Eh, I do ~70min each way (in a shitbox with no A/C no less) and I still manage to do stuff in the evening.

I think counting it once makes sense.

Depends entirely on the content of your commute, no? 70min in hectic traffic navigating poorly designed freeway interchanges is going to be way more exhausting than a cruise in the country with some good music.

But then you might as well count the “quality” of all of the activities. Is your job knowledge work, food service, industrial, etc? Did you count your development for fun as work? What about your research for fun? Is your parenting duties time doing homework with your kids or playing board games?

I was doing 2 to 3 hours each way depending on traffic. I did that for 6 or 7 years. Now I work from home. It is really nice, but I still feel like I have no time.

You just made me realize how lucky I am. I'm commuting 2x 55min per day. I always think it's too much, but it's mostly by train. There is about a 50% chance of me getting 2x 35min uninterrupted reading time out of it (depending on the crowd).

Man, I ride my motorbike to work every day and it usually takes 15 minutes each way on average. Yet I wonder what it'd be like to jump cities and double my income. comments like yours and the OP really make me understand and value my free time substantially.

Nice thought provoking presentation. I once billed 150 hours in a 7 day period, and they were honest hours, too. Since then I've stopped working and raised a daughter; and parenting was harder work than the insane "i have no life" schedule I used to push.

Bit over a decade into the family thing, it's certainly more rewarding. Other people would find other choices rewarding and that's great too.

We're all too apt to forget that in the end, this time is all we have. Are we really using it like we want to?

>150 hours in a 7 day period

Doing what? Just curious. I could only image doing something like that if the job was extremely lax - like a toll booth operator in a slow town, or something.

>> 150 hours in a 7 day period

> Doing what? Just curious.

I can't speak for the GP (as I am not they), but can say I pulled a 118 hour work week once doing s/w development. Four 20 hour days for one client and the other 38 for another.

Suffice to say it was not a fun week.

At that point, wouldn't it have made more sense to set expectations that their 1-week turnaround is realistically a 3-week ask, instead of working 20 hour days?

That's a difficult argument to make when you're contracting or a consultant and are expected to deliver X and not work Z hour.

I know, and I've been there.

There, meaning working absurd extra hours in order to deliver to the client as reneging would mean I have to own up to the client the fact that I totally fucked up the scoping (usually it's scope creep or changing requirements, but you can't really blame them even if it's their fault).

I've done that before, and perhaps other people here are getting paid more to consult than I, but it's not worth it IMO to sacrifice your life for the client.

> There, meaning working absurd extra hours in order to deliver to the client as reneging would mean I have to own up to the client the fact that I totally fucked up the scoping (usually it's scope creep or changing requirements, but you can't really blame them even if it's their fault).

The client for which I did the four 20 hour days had a project manager that committed to a milestone delivery with their client and did not run it past the dev team. So I did everything possible in order to deliver for the client.

Were it that I underestimated the scope of work (which I have done many times), I definitely would have conveyed that.

IT consulting for nonprofits. "we've spent $50k and the contractor delivered a mockup. Our customer expects us to deliver next week. Build the system."

Was to be an integrated Web / IVR phone bot "hotel room reservation" thing built on like the second public release of Asterix; which I'd never heard of before (nor had anyone else).

Of course I later found out a cow orker had pocketed the majority of that money and never paid the first contractor for more than the mockup in the first place, something like 3 months ago.

They'd bought a domain name and begun planning this more than a year earlier. They'd printed 10,000 high grade outdoor signs which were to be the physical token of subscription to this service. Comes the day and the domain name has expired and been snapped up by someone else. So the launch was delayed by a week so they could print up stickers to put over the signs. In the 3 months the system was up, there were i think 5 attempts to use it.

The shafting I got on that one was a big inflection point for me, where it hit me that I wasn't using my time the way I intended, and I wasn't receiving enough reward to justify that. I wish I'd had the thought sooner.

what is "free time"? I consider doing most of those things on my "free time". When I go excercise, I have no obligation do to so, I do it on my "free time". If I had kid, I'd consider spending time with them as "free time with my kids". I dont like this pessimistic perception of time, and it's not mine. The only non free time I have, is the one I "owe" to my employer. And this time, I freely give it to him, and If I wasn't contractually require to do so, I'd probably do the very same thing (I teach and research at uni).

Couldn't agree more. I also work on my side project in my free time.

> If I had kid, I'd consider spending time with them as "free time with my kids"

It's really not, though. Before parenthood I had all these romantic 'Swallows and Amazons' ideas about lazy summer days on riverbanks and meadows.

In reality time with young kids is about mundane things like making meals, doing homework, playing what they want to play, trying to coax them to help with chores that you need to get done, finding craft activities to deflect them from screen-time etc etc

It's not in the slightest bit free-choice or frankly enjoyable. I've just got up on Saturday to find that it's raining heavily, my heart sank. Now to find 14 hours of indoor child-oriented activities...

it gets easier as the kids get older. it also helps to have interesting hobbies yourself that you can involve your kids in.

so instead of asking: how am i going to entertain this bunch on rainy weekends, ask: what hobby might i like to pick up that i can get my kids interested in.

i have been struggling with that too. i am considering things like learning an instrument, programming, playing board-games.

i found a simplified version of DnD, made it even easier and combined it with using lego to build the environment (including treasure boxes)

and when it's not raining there are plenty of outdoor activities to choose from.

what hobby might i like to pick up that i can get my kids interested in

i'd actually like to rephrase that a bit. kids are naturally interested in everything their parents do. so the question is not whether i can get the kids interested, but rather, whether is is something that is interesting for me, yet suitable for kids.

> In reality time with young kids is about mundane things like making meals, doing homework, playing what they want to play, trying to coax them to help with chores that you need to get done, finding craft activities to deflect them from screen-time etc etc

There is little evidence that any of those helps your kid, you do it because you want to not because it is needed.

There is little evidence that feeding and activating your kid is helping them? Homework? There's little evidence that your kid ought to do their homework?

Or did you zero in on the screen-time statement and really meant that there's not much evidence as to how damaging screen-time is for a kid?

Making meals for the kids can be done at the same time as making meals for yourself, no extra time spent there unless you make exceptions for them. No need to activate the kid, kids can entertain themselves if you let them. Helping them with homework is not important, no, you can tell them to do their homework but that doesn't take a lot of time to do.

The thing is that you as a parent has extremely small influence on your kid. Your goal should be to provide a stress free environment they can feel safe in, you do that by not stressing about all of these things, everything else you do for your kid is for your own sake. Every hour you force feed them information and activities is an hour they don't get to discover and experience things on their own. Both are valuable, so picking one over the other doesn't really change much.

Do you have kids? This all sounds like it's written by someone who's read articles about how to parent and nodded along, without any practical experience. Specifically, by someone who envisions the "happy path" of parenting, without considering that sometimes kids throw tantrums, sometimes they're not content to entertain themselves, that sometimes you cannot make them the same meal you make for yourself.

> Your goal should be to provide a stress free environment they can feel safe in, you do that by not stressing about all of these things, everything else you do for your kid is for your own sake.

This is a huge load of baloney. This zen "let the kids discover things on their own!" maybe works fine for high school students, but my toddler is fascinated by many things about the world, and my wife and I are a vast source of information about it, and rightfully so. Kids are chock full of questions because they're trying to learn about the world, and many of their questions cannot be answered sufficiently with a "go find out".

It's still a conscious choice you made at the time. Maybe uninformed about the kind of commitment it was but still a choice to spend your free time for several years this way rather than learn to sculpt wood or build model cars or whatever.

i like your perspective on this. made me think. i'd just like to add that for an introvert free time can be considered alone time. you can get that at night after the kids are asleep if you can get it at all.

I have an infant and going to the gym or a run is about as free as it gets these days. It's a hobby so I don't understand how is that not "free time".

Not everyone considers physical activity interesting, or anything but a means to an end - healthy body and healthy mind. For me, any form of exercise is definitely work.

So you think the only non-free time you have is when you're working, and possibly commuting? Nobody is paying you to sleep, so it should count as free time too, right?

It's pretty clear what the tool means by "free time". It's time not otherwise spent on activities that are either required or recommended for a healthy life.

I don't know if that's how free time works once you have kids. "Parental duties" takes the free time. You get some time when the kids sleep.

I know it's not intentional, but when I scrolled down and saw "parental duties" at the bottom of the list I laughed and said to myself "that's not how this works!". Move that one to the top, above sleep even, when the kids are young.

Feature request for the calculator: if you say you have kids, it asks you what time they are in bed and asleep by and what time you try to go to bed: this window of time is now your chores/maintain relationship with spouse/gym/relax/hobbies/whatever time.

To be fair, a "lifehack" is that once the kids are old enough (~1? 2? Depends on the kid and the couple) at least one night a week should be a solo night for a parent, while the other one gets the night off. Bonus points for having a weekly babysitter (or grandparent) for date night.

In addition your own sleep tend to decrease as you "reclaim" some of that play time you're missing for yourself.

Yep. It's hard to resist. I have 12 kids. I sure want time for random stuff... and then I realize the Sun is rising and I haven't slept.

That's with a 40-hour work week, a 3-minute commute, and none of that gym/fitness time.

Did you make all 12 with your S.O. or are you like those guardian-angel foster parents from _Shazam!_?

It's 100% natural with 1 wife. Homeschooling takes time.

I almost bought a house that had been used as a foster home. It was disturbing. Everything everywhere had locks. Even the drawers in the kitchen had individual key-based locks. You needed a key to open the drawer. There were camera feeds all across the house. The windows were secured against exit.

That’s sounds like a wonderful life.

Planning on having any more?

I think I just read a post from the owner of that house on Quora. Still can't decide whether she was rational or not.

https://www.quora.com/How-do-you-make-children-not-eat-all-o...

Good job man, 12 kids is a worthy use of time.

That’s incredible...what is your food budget?

about $4000 per month

You kind of chose that life with complete impudence, internet stranger. No one trips while walking and finds themselves with twelve kids.

...You're not the person that decided to have so many kids because of a fear that having only a few, and then all of them dying of some sort of one in a million chance catastrophe would leave you distraught, were you?

This comment bothers me on a few levels.

1. Is there some rule that people are only allowed to make decisions that make them personally and continually happy? There are any number of good and pure reasons to choose a difficult life and also remain human and be able to communicate the difficulties of that life.

2. Why the general disdain for people with more than the normal number of kids? This person that you have admitted do not know is very different from you, certainly, but does not deserve the negative undertones given here.

I say these things as a father of 4 adopted children that are both the biggest challenge and blessing in my and my wife’s life.

I think he's being more critical about complaining about it than about the decision itself.

I would agree if it weren’t a thread to talk about free time and if the OP was actually complaining and not simply describing reality.

Genuinely curious as to why you chose to have 12 kids. I don't have any and have no plans to father any either (you've had my quota for me, thanks!) but I can vaguely see the appeal of one or two but 12? That sounds incredibly difficult physically, mentally and financially.

Kids from elementary school onward have homework, friends, books, games, TV, etc occupying several hours of most nights. It’s not like they’re interacting with both parents continuously for every moment between work/school and sleep.

for a first grader in a country where schools are very intensive, it takes 100% parental involvement for every minute of homework. have more than one kid, and both parents are busy...

I have a three-year old. He comes home from daycare at 3pm and is asleep by 7:30, and I don't have to be in bed until 10pm to get my beauty sleep. You double-up on 'parenting time' and things like cleaning up and cooking dinner, but even if you didn't it's not hard to see how two people could divide the time between 3pm and 7:30 with uninterrupted 'parenting time' and still have lots of time left over to take care of obligations and yourself.

And that still leaves 2.5 hours after he goes to bed that you get to spend however you like.

I filled the form in and it tells me I have 11 hours of free time per week, that's with accounting for three hours of parenting per day (i.e not counting it double-booked with any other time, which is how you're really spending it).

People generally have more time available to them than they think, especially if they try to make more effective use of their time.

While I think it's good to take stock of "where does my time go??", the calculations here are pretty misleading IMO. For example, I think, for most people, if you had absolutely no other external obligations (e.g. you are independently wealthy, no kids, etc.) and you had exactly 5 years left to live, I think most people would consider that you have "5 years of free time left". By taking out things like sleep, eating, grooming, chores, and even discretionary things like "going to the gym", and then converting the remaining hours back to years by dividing by 24/7/365, you're left with some really misleading numbers.

Yup. If I retired right now, I'd show as 20 free years and 17 busy years. But I would feel like I had 32 free years.

One thing that everyone needs to take into consideration is that it is not a static thing. When I was younger (30's) I had 0 free time probably, but now I am semi-retired and work out of my home freelance which I do mostly for something to do. Which means I have tons o free time, more than 60 hours a week easily. I think it is good to work hard earlier in life so you can enjoy more free time later on.

Working remote at a company with good culture, 0 commute, no children, and minimal housing upkeep. At 32yo I have never had more free time in my life.

I spend very significant amounts of time in the gym (which I love), and in the outdoors. Rarely bored. I sometimes dream of having the 40 hours I work in a week free too.

I'm 46 with a 3 year old I spend a lot of time with (21-24 hours a week). I love that time but it's a little depressing to only have 5 years of free time left.

Pretty eye opening to see it as a total number.

If you enjoy the time with your kid, you're probably okay :)

> with a 3 year old

This was my first thought. The calculator is fine, but not all free time is equal. If the kid's having a not-great night, and is _finally_ asleep by 10pm, I theoretically have an hour before I have to go to sleep, but I'm tired and realistically I'm just going to click around for awhile before going to bed. Ditto if I'm up at 6:30; I theoretically have 30 minutes, but who knows when the kid'll wake up. Maybe I have 30 minutes, maybe I have zero.

It's as if free time had a half-life.

I put 40 for a 2 year old. About 3-4 hours after work each day and full days on weekends.

I’m 42 with 2 babies under 2. It seems I have 3 years free time left.

Hmm too bad I can’t get the 3 years in a single stretch. :-).

~70 hours free time/week or 10 per day, wohooo...freelancing all the way baby!

what do you do with your free time?

Enjoying life my friend. Wife and kids, they are there to make your life fulfilled, not to be a nuisance or chores, as the tool had one of the fields - I put there 0, I don't have any chores to do in my life.

No other people are there to make your life fulfilled, including your kids. And if you treat them (and yourself) that way, everyone is going to have a bad time.

I like your mindset.

No chores? Don't you have to do cleaning and cooking? Groceries?

No. I pay other people to do chores. That's why I make money. As for groceries I don't consider this part of "chores". I usually do groceries with my kids, whenever my wife will let me do it, since every time we just fool around and buy a lot of unnecessary stuff just for the fun - which my wife hates it. Like I said, enjoying life with my family.

I don't really consider sleeping, eating or fitness wasted time really, you basically need it and most I personally find it enjoyable and excluding sleeping, it's practically a use of free time. I think would love some checkbox that signifies a "waste" in a sense.

Also, your application doesn't seem to like accidental space-bars being pressed in inputs. Causes NaN and its hard to figure out why.

Regardless pretty cool/interesting

Author here - I find a lot of those mentioned personally enjoyable too, but what I was essentially trying to do was quantify my own 'must do' activities (e.g. if I don't sleep ~8hrs/night things go downhill fast, etc) regardless of whether or not I enjoy them.

From there, I view the remaining time as truly open, not requiring working, or general meat sack maintenance. Categorization can definitely go either way though. Part of the message, aside from just quantifying how limited time is, would be to find enjoyment where you can in your 'mandatory' activities too as they'll represent the bulk of your life.

> Part of the message, aside from just quantifying how limited time is, would be to find enjoyment where you can in your 'mandatory' activities too as they'll represent the bulk of your life.

I wish I could give this comment more upvotes. I'm slowly learning this lesson in my personal life - I wish I could learn it faster, but the goddamn brain is just too much more insistent than the body..

This reminds me of an incredible dialogue from a remarkable Seinfeld episode (S02E02):

> GEORGE: They always make me take stock of my life and how I’ve pretty much wasted all of it, and how I plan to continue wasting it.

> JERRY: I know, and then you say to yourself, “From this moment on, I’m not going to waste any more of it.” But then you go, “How? What can I do that’s not wasting it?”

In my probably unpopular opinion, parenting shouln'd be on the list. It's not a forced activity like sleeping or eating or commuting. It's a conscious choice people make between it and other hobbies.

Not a forced activity? Not a parent I suppose. It is as forced as work. You don't have to work just as you don't have to have a child.

Were you forced to have children?

Are you forced to have a job, groom, eat or sleep?

Yes. If don't eat or sleep you die. These are required activities, not things you can decide to do or not do, so they are not competing for free time.

Anorexia heard of it. That's what happens if you choose not to eat. Yes you die but it is a choice (ish, a desease? yes, but stil a choice(of madness)).

Being a parent is time forcefully spent. Now one could argue that all free time for a parent of children below a certain age is parenting time,and thus it might make sense to have a checkbox rather than a time slider for parenting time. The point is a parents free time is non existant we simply cannot play games on a pc or code for an extended period of time on weekends or holidays because that comes at the cost of not monitoring your child's daily consumption of soap (it should be zero, but you will be amased), or you could lock them in a padded room (illegal) so that you can code/game whatever in peace.

The point is, a child makes sure that you never have a split second while they are awake to do what you want because they will literally sit on your hands and pull your hair (and you will come to love it in a bizarre way) that's just how it is (for a while)

You can choose not to have a child (though caveats around carelessness apply). You kind of cannot opt out of parenting once you have a child. Not if you wish to remain a decent human being. It's kind of forced on you, even more so than a job, because it's much easier to change jobs or just go on a welfare than to stop doing all the parenting each day as a parent throws at you.

That sounds very naive. Yes people have chosen to have kids (and some haven’t) but you also chose where and how you work so by similar logic we should discount those choices. Once you have kids there are a lot of things that aren’t optional, and unlike a long commute aren’t easy to change.

You choose how and where to work, yes, and this is already factored in the form by the duration of the commute. Unlike having kids, you can't elect to not work though, because you need money to pay for buying food and shelter. (Unless you are in survival mode, in which case the concept of free time is probably foreign anyway).

> It's not a forced activity

Because rape never happens?

I don't agree with the original but this doesn't sound convincing. You still get to choose to keep the child, right?

Alabama forbids abortion even in cases of rape.

Some other states have very short time limits for legal abortion.

You can still give it up for adoption right after birth,no?

Has anyone in this conversation considered that maybe the devil has plenty of advocates on this topic and doesn’t need anymore?

Haha, fair enough. Consider me out.

Err.. what? you can put the time as 0 if you dont (and will never have a child). But if you have a child then you cannot choose.

Well, you can, just like you can choose not to work, shower or clean, but you're not fulfilling your duties in that case.

Well, then time spent working is also your "free time" because that's your personal choice to work, unless you're a slave.

The Story of the Mexican Fisherman

https://bemorewithless.com/the-story-of-the-mexican-fisherma...

I tried to be realistic but it comes out as -7.5. I must be lying about sleep.

61.5 pw free. Work for myself, no commute, kids are 14 and 11 so pretty self sufficient. Run rather than gym (saves travel and fannying about time), don't sleep massive amounts...

The default 7 hours a week "grooming"? Wtf?

I'm obviously scruffy and unclean, too.

A few ways to get more free time:

- combine commuting with working out. Even if you only run 1/2 way and still have to catch a train for the second half you’ll still be getting time back. - hire a cleaning service if you can afford it. Maybe a Roomba? - move closer to work to reduce your commute time. - don’t keep your phone by your bed. If you are like me you’ll waste time in the morning and evening. - don’t make more chores for yourself than necessary. For example, you can often wear pants 2 days of the week without issue.

I feel very strongly the amount of free time is, to a great extent, a social standard rather than some economical constrain. I believe 35 hours work week is no less productive (or even more). I wonder how many believe the same and whether we can push it as a community.

One of my biggest satisfactions in life is killing jobs. Finding out about a solution to make some work obsolete, even my own work. But this game is also a team game. To work together to make things simpler and cultivate the free time enabled by this.

Well I know the author of this certainly has more free time than me. 7 hours a week at the gym? What and incredibly laid back lifestyle.

>7 hours a week at the gym? What and incredibly laid back lifestyle.

What a strange thing to pick at - is there a joke I'm missing? And it's not strictly the gym, it's 'gym/fitness'.

Oh well that certainly makes a difference!

I'd say an average of 30 minutes/day of gym/fitness is the bare minimum, but even double that can be very beneficial in many respects. You should find the time

Thanks for the advice, trosi. What was actually stopping me from putting in more time in the gym like I did when I was young was a limp attaboy from a stranger.

I'm absolutely thrilled if I can find the time coinciding with the energy to do 30m a day at the gym. But as any parent who is not offloading all the work onto a beleaguered spouse can tell you: it's pretty rare when you have toddlers.

If walking quickly every day for an hour increases my life expectancy by 6 or so years it would have been worth it.

That's only exercise if your lifestyle is extremely sedentary. So yeah, you should do it. But it's a very generous definition of "gym/fitness."

Author here - I would consider my lifestyle intentionally laid back, yes (to the capacity I'm able to at least) :)

However, it's just a 4 day standard weight lifting routine (1 hr/day) but includes total time door to door (changing, commuting, lifting, commuting back). I enjoy this though, so aside from the mood/longevity benefits would do it anyways.

I have a 4 year old and I foster rescue dogs.

I dimly remember a time in my life where what you're describing was possible, but these days I'm just happy if I can do an okay job at work and still find time to hit the machines in my house. It is definitely a difference in our attitudes towards this activity that you don't call that "free" time.

fostering rescue dogs is where you invest your free time in. it's a worthwhile use of your time, and you probably wouldn't do it if you didn't get something out of it.

It costs lots of money and the people who adopt them never know me. I don't get anything out of it at all.

then why do you do it? (i don't mean to criticize your choice, but i am curious, and i wonder if we can discover a motivation or reward that you haven't considered. i certainly believe that you are doing something good, so i wonder why you feel you get nothing out of it)

edit: i just thought about this some more and i realized that there are plenty of situations that could have brought you to where you are. i don't want to speculate what though.

I get up at 4 AM for work (i.e no time to do anything in the morning apart from breakfast, brushing teeth and getting dressed) and most days I'm done at work by 3 PM, home by 3:30-4:00. My wife has already picked the three-year old up from day care. He's playing, watching TV, or helping me make dinner. I clean as I go when cooking so the kitchen ends up clean and the dishwasher reloaded/run during this time, then we sit down to eat as a family and we're done around 5PM.

Clean those things up and do a quick chore (vacuuming takes about 15 minutes, or load/run the washing machine, etc.) and then play pretty much uninterrupted with the kid for 1.5-2 hours while my wife does her thing or vice-versa. Some days we just lark as a family by going to the playground or whatever. 6:30-7:30 is bedtime routine for the little guy with bathing, brushing teeth, winding down and then lullaby. 7:30-10PM (my bedtime) is when we have quality time together, our own hobbies, etc.

We don't foster dogs, that's true, but we have other interests that take a fair bit of time each week. So while we do double up a bit on "parenting time" and "chores", you can see how there's absolutely enough time for each of us to spend 1 hour/day doing health and fitness related activities while the other one takes care of the kid. If you're a single parent this all goes out the window, obviously.

> you can see how there's absolutely enough time for each of us to spend 1 hour/day doing health and fitness related activities while the other one takes care of the kid. If you're a single parent this all goes out the window, obviously.

Actually, I'm waiting for you to actually detail the sport where that hour fits. The dogs take up another hour or two, and require extra playtime.

For me, because I sync up with folks in the UK at a time reasonable to them I'm usually on the phone by 7am 3 days a week. I need to be in the office until around 4-4:30, and as I have to interface with San Francisco commutes I have a 45- 60m commute.

Honestly, maybe you're just using a different definition of fitness time. 3 days a week, my commute requires I walk a mile and get that done quickly or I'll be late for meetings. But that's just walking, it's not "fitness". I suspect folks here are rather generous with the definition.

If I look after the kid between 5:30 PM and 6:30 and my wife takes 6:30 until 7:30, we both get an hour each day to do whatever we want. So... there's the slot in our schedule right there?

We could stretch it to 90 minutes apiece without sweating, which would account for us driving to the gym and back if that's what we did, but we both focus on bodyweight fitness at home instead so we really only need an hour.

The stuff about your phone times and commute wasn't really part of your original comment. I was just offering a point of view that you can "have a life" even with small children and hobbies, it's all in how you prioritise.

I can't really imagine not being there to put the kids to bed, if I'm honest.

I am probably at the other extreme, in having too much free time. Not that I don't have things to do, although I'm self-employed, my income depends on a complex system I've built that needs constant refining. My todo list is long. But it can easily be pushed off.

So, that's what I'm doing at this very moment while thinking about how much free time I have.

Sigh, quantifying this is depressing

I think of free time as time spent doing something you want to do, not necessarily time spent doing nothing.

If you find work that feels like play, then I'd consider that "time spent doing what you want to do."

Reading HN wasn't an input box, that's my free time.

NaN! I have immeasurable free time

Either I need to revisit my work life balance or we hugged this site to death. Or both

So I'm 20 and I've only got 26.5 hours of free time each week. I think this is... terrible?

Expected an article about how do deal with boring free time. Got an existential crisis instead

I would put eating/cooking in the free time category. Arguably sleeping as well.

If you have less than 24hrs a day for fully-expendable time, at your own leisure, you are doing something wrong.

Let the mexicans work, man, you are doing something wrong.

24 hour club. All day every day!

Damn I only got 116. How do you avoid sleep completely?

Ah, well, I might be misconfigured. Anyways I consider sleep a good thing, so, it's all in the game. It's volentary sleep, to say the least. But good call. I am mistaking and not you.

In answer to your question: 5 hours.

I have 1 free year left

Parenting.

79 as the average life span? Is that worldwide? I fully expect to make it to 90.

According to Wikipedia life expectancy worldwide is 69.

Japan has the highest life expectancy of any country at around 85.

Have i got news for you!

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