this post was submitted on 30 Nov 2025
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Yeah.
There are 168 hours in a week.
I sleep about 7.5 hours, but am usually in bed for 8 hours. Let's just call that 56 hours.
I work about 45 hours per week. My commute takes me about 15 minutes each way, so that's a minimum of 2.5 hours per week of biking (this also serves as light cardio). More realistically, I do about half the pickups and dropoffs for my school age kids, so each one of those adds about 45 minutes, so that's another 3.75 hours. That's a total of 50.25 hours on work stuff.
I sneak in about 3 or 4 workouts per week during my lunch break, adding about an hour to each workday that I do that. On days I don't work out, I might run errands or eat lunch with friends. So let's just call that 5.
Let's add 7 hours to our morning routines, where I generally have to wake up an hour before actually leaving the home. And another 7 hours for my kids bedtime routines.
That leaves just under 43 hours per week of everything else. I'm generally able to fit in social activities like meeting up with friends two or three times per week (10 hours), cooking and meal prep (10 hours, may overlap with social activities like when I'm hosting a BBQ), miscellaneous chores (5 hours), a decent chunk of TV, movies, or reading (10-20 hours per week depending on what sports season it is), other kid activities (10-20 hours per week, may overlap with other social activities).
So the ordinary workweeks are a bit tight but doable. Vacation/holiday weeks tend to give a bit more time, but also tend to add on the parenting responsibilities.
And if I'm feeling time pressure, there's always places to get a bit more time: outsourcing some of the cooking and cleaning (not necessarily by hiring someone to come to the home but simply by eating out so that someone else cooks and washes dishes).
I also have kids. IMO, the way you're accounting for hours doesn't reflect the boom/bust cycle of the 5 day work and school week.
A day in my work week is:
Things will probably calm down some when our kids are a touch older, but right now the week days are very hectic.
My kids are younger than yours, which has some advantages (no homework, not really any extracurricular activities, longer sleep) and disadvantages (not really able to feed or clothe themselves, need parent help for bathing, still need some assistance on brushing teeth, need to be read to instead of being able to read on their own).
During busy weeks (like when one of us parents is out of town for work or something) we're quick to switch from home cooked meals to takeout or eating out, may hire cleaners, and push off some of the social interactions, but I also recognize that I'm working with a pretty nice buffer in that I'm already hanging out with friends about 10 hours per week.
10 hours worth of hangout time with friends sounds nice. Our kids are 5 and 8, which means they're vaguely more self-sufficient and also means we can go on more adventurous trips, but they still require quite a bit of looking after due to bickering and what not.