What If It's Not A Time Management Problem?

I often hear working moms say they feel so stretched between work and motherhood that they’re failing at both.

I never felt that way.

You see, I was determined to succeed in my career and equally determined to not let my career make me fail in motherhood. So, my days became a relay race.

I’d wake my daughter, give her a bath, help her brush her teeth, and make her a respectable breakfast while babysitting Teams on my phone. By the time I reached my desk, it felt like I’d already lived an entire day.

At work, I’d put out fires and answer hundreds of emails and messages, multitasking through meeting after meeting. I’d borrow a few minutes from the end of one to steal a few bites of food and run to the restroom before diving into the next.

After hours at my desk, I’d head into the kitchen to make my family a balanced dinner, race through the short window between dinner and bedtime, and finally collapse on the couch with my husband, half-watching TV with my phone in hand, looping through email, Teams, Instagram, and back again.

Day after day, through a thousand tiny actions and decisions, I made my life SO small.

Eventually the stress of it all bled into my sleep. Anxiety lived in my chest all day and followed me into bed at night. I was irritable with my husband and on autopilot with my daughter. My hair was falling out, I had to go on blood pressure medication, and I was thiiiissss close to taking a leave of absence just to catch my breath.

Which means, health became another thing on the list. And I was doing all of the things on the list, dammit.

The shreds of free time I had left went to a health rescue mission. Doctor’s appointments. An overnight sleep study. More time at the gym.

Nothing about my time felt like my own.

But I didn’t have a discipline problem, and I definitely didn’t need another planner or task-tracking app.

My problem was that I was time poor.

If this sounds like you, you might be time poor too.

I was already on a journey to touch back to an older version of myself, so along with reaching out to old friends and colleagues, I decided I should probably pick up a damn book.

One of my early picks was I Know How She Does It by Laura Vanderkam. Vanderkam studies how people actually spend their 168 hours a week rather than how they think they do, and it was through her book that I discovered the life changing magic of doing a time study.

I downloaded her time study template and logged my life in fifteen-minute intervals for two weeks. Every task switch captured in one of the 1,344 cells on the page, with a note about what I was doing, where I was, who I was with.

I felt insane doing it. My margins were already so thin, and here I was spending them on the most tedious task in the world. But I also felt like I couldn’t afford not to. I knew I needed to see where my time was going before I could change anything about it.

When I totaled it up, I cried. Yes, I am a Leo, and yes, we are known to have a flair for the dramatic. But I wasn’t crying because the results surprised me. I cried because seeing it quantified felt like holding a mirror up to my burnout. It was ugly.

I worked fifty-two hours the first week and fifty-five the second. More than half my waking hours were spent on a screen. The extra childcare coverage I was paying for went to more work, not to rest or the gym.

Across both weeks, the time with my family that actually felt nourishing (not tantrum management, not the grueling parts of caregiving, but the good stuff) came to about twenty hours.

And across those same two weeks, the time I spent reading, journaling, or simply existing without input came to less than three.

Despite the grief and guilt I felt for letting things get so bad, I also felt empowered and in control of my time for the first time in years. The beautiful thing about having two weeks of your life color-coded and mapped out in fifteen-minute increments is that it starts to resemble a puzzle.

I started rearranging the pieces and finding new ways for it all to fit together. I asked myself hard questions about why I was doing each task and whether I really needed to be the one doing it, at work and at home.

So much of what I was carrying, I was carrying because I wouldn’t ask for help. I had stubbornly decided, on everyone else’s behalf, that it would be too burdensome to even bring it up, even though nobody had asked that of me, and nobody was holding me to that standard. (Isn’t that wild? When you realize how much of your hell is your own making?)

Sometimes people tell me they’d never do a time study because they’re afraid of what it would say about them. They’re worried it’ll catch them scrolling, or worse, that it’ll finally prove what we’ve always suspected: they’re lazy.

But if you’re anything like me (read: a perfectionist, an eldest daughter, stubbornly carrying way too much for your loved ones and your team and anyone else who leans on you), then I don’t think that’s what a time study does at all.

I think it shows you how little is left for you.

That’s what mine did.

And that’s why I’ve spent the last eleven months building.

That’s right, friends! I’m building an app called Time Spent. It takes what I did with my time study and turns it into something you can do too, but it’s way better than tallying up all of your hours and activities in the tiny cells of a spreadsheet. It does the counting while you log, and what comes back is a picture of your week instead of a wall of cells for you to sort through on your own.

Nobody loses their life all at once. You lose it the way I did. A thousand small decisions, not one wrong on its own, yet, when you look up and you can’t find yourself in what’s left.

So, lets see where your time is going and then start moving the pieces. Let’s get your time feeling like yours again.

If you want to learn more about the Time Spent App and be here when beta testing opens up, subscribe below!

And if you’re new here, thanks for listening. I’m Tiffany, a multi-passionate mom living in Chicago. I spent the last decade climbing the corporate career ladder, but now I’m officially off the clock and spending my time on the things that light me up the most, like writing this newsletter and building the Time Spent app.

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