You have 168 hours each week—how do you spend them?

Years ago, when I worked in management consulting, I was starting to feel the burden of having too much to do and not enough time to accomplish it all. The industry is notoriously demanding from a time standpoint. People often work over 12 hours per day, work a few hours on the weekends, and pull periodic all-nighters, and all of this is usually punctuated with traveling four days a week and living out of a suitcase. I noticed that after my colleagues spent a year or two in this lifestyle, they’d complain about work/life balance and then quit shortly after. I didn’t want that to happen to me.

I was attending a training event a few years into my time at the firm when I looked around the room and felt like I could see into the future; I knew who would still be at the company in a year and who would move on. It wasn’t that hard to see given that some of my colleagues were so visibly downtrodden. But what perplexed me was that while some of them were clearly struggling, others were doing fine. In fact, a handful of people seemed to be fully energized by their experience working at the firm. Why was the lifestyle sustainable for some individuals, whereas others were burned out and miserable?

After extensive reflection, I realized that most people were thinking about the idea of work/life balance as a function of time, but that couldn’t be the right way to look at it. We all had the same 168 hours a week to work with, and we were in a profession where we were all over-indexed on time at work. So if time was the only metric, we were always going to come up short.

It dawned on me that instead of thinking about balance as a function of time, some people realized it was more about quality. These were the colleagues who had fun stories every Monday morning about the interesting things they did over the weekend. They went to shows, concerts, and baseball games. They traveled (even though they had been traveling for work during the week). They had quirky hobbies like swimming from Alcatraz to San Francisco, salsa dancing, motorcycle racing, or playing flamenco guitar. They talked about the fun things they did with family and silly moments they had hanging out with friends. Because their personal lives had such richness, every weekend left them feeling emotionally refreshed and recharged. They showed up at work on Monday as multifaceted human beings rather than management consultants who got to rest on the weekend.

Audit your time and optimize for joy

When it comes to following your true north and living an inspired life, the key premise for time management is simple: spend more time doing things that bring you joy.

It sounds obvious, but it’s one of those things that is often easier said than done. From work to commuting to buying groceries and loading the dishwasher, sometimes the daily minutia can become so all-encompassing that it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that life should be enjoyable. Yes, enjoyable. I don’t mean that in a “someday I’ll have more time” kind of way. I mean it in a “here and now” kind of way. Life is a gift. You never know how long the gift is going to last, and it would be a shame to hold off on enjoying yourself until it’s too late.

The challenge lies in putting this concept into practice. It takes intentionality, but everyone can derive more happiness and satisfaction from their life by better managing their time.

You might think you have too many responsibilities and nonnegotiables in your schedule to make a meaningful shift in the amount of time you can spend on activities that make you happy, but I bet you will be surprised at how much time you can get back when you focus your efforts on what matters most to you.

I would like to challenge you to audit how you spend your time this week. Record where every single hour goes, whether it’s sleeping, working, commuting, exercising, being a caregiver for others, scrolling through social media, or going out with friends. Put a number to all the activities you take part in.

To download a PDF of this chart, click here.

Once you have your 168 hours recorded and accounted for at the end of this week, take a look and consider how it makes you feel. Are you surprised that you spend so much time on certain tasks? Or that you spend very little time on others?

Figure out how you can make changes to your schedule so that you’re spending time on the things (and people) that matter most. (You can’t forgo work or sleep, but you also shouldn’t be forgoing hobbies, date nights, and other activities that bring you joy.)

I’ve done this exercise many times, and I can tell you it’s certainly eye-opening! It’s helped me become highly intentional with how I spend my time, which has enabled me to improve my quality of life. I hope this exercise does the same for you!