Now that we’ve made the move abroad, my businesses are more automated than ever, and I’m more used to my 4-hour workweek lifestyle, I wanted to do it again and see how things have changed. I’ll share the results with you here.

A lot of people seem to think that if you only have to work a few hours per week, you must be spending the rest of your time relaxing in a hammock drinking piña coladas. I mean, what else is there to do? Actually, everything!

I do spend my fair share of time relaxing, being with family and friends, and even doing “nothing”. But I can’t do “nothing” for very long before I get restless and want to do something more productive. I’ve found that tracking my time really helps me be aware of what I’m doing in the moment, and feel less pressured doing tasks I don’t enjoy. I also realize that time will keep moving on, no matter what I do. As long as I’m enjoying life, growing, and helping others where I can, I feel like I’m living my life well.

Disclaimer: Even though I have these tasks recorded to the minute, they’re not always accurate to the minute. Sometimes I forgot to switch my timer right when I switched tasks, so had to modify it later with a little guess work. Being off by a few minutes for several things has led to being off by a couple hours overall. But it will have to do. For this exercise, I used SlimTimer, a free on-line time tracking tool.

Work Time

I define “work” as activities done specifically to help produce income. This week I “worked” a little more than usual because I was getting some video tutorials written for one product, and launched a special offer with another. I also planned some important new features to work on next. For me, it’s normal for this category to be under 5 hours per week total.

• Music Teacher’s Helper: 5 Hours, 18 minutes. This includes advertising/marketing (1:35), checking programmer’s work (1:30), customer support (0:48), and the rest in business planning, finances, and checking stats.
• Studio Helper: 2 hours, 1 minute. This includes working on video tutorials (1:27), business planning (24 min), and the rest dealing with feature requests and checking stats.
• Other: 33 minutes. This week, I started researching a new business idea, and that’s what this time was.

Total Work Hours: 7 Hours, 52 Minutes

Family Time

One of the things I like most about my lifestyle is that I have so much time to spend with my family. We’re together pretty much all day, even if we’re not doing the same thing. I’ve only included my personal time with my family here, so this doesn’t include the time my wife homeschools the kids, or the time they spend playing together. Driving them to their art class should probably be included here, but I put all driving under Personal.

• Playing with kids: 11 hours, 32 minutes. I try to play with my kids a little every day. A lot of this is computer or iPad games with one daughter while my wife is doing homeschool with the other one. But it also includes reading to them, playing hide and seek, “restaurant” and other imagination games.
• Watching Movies: 6 hours, 51 minutes. We watched a few movies with the kids this week, in the evenings, including the 1969 Doctor Dolittle, and Tarzan in Spanish.
• Family Outings: 5 hours, 15 minutes. This includes a little hike up the mountains behind our house, and a trip to the park to ride ponies and bicycles. We also spent time together with our friends, which I’ve included in the Personal: Visiting with Friends section.
• Talking with Jen: 3 hours, 56 minutes. Jen and I enjoy just sitting and talking, as well as reading together. We want to make even more time for it this coming week.

Total Family Time: 27 hours, 34 minutes

Personal Time

Even though it looks like I have a lot of time left over for myself, I don’t really feel like I have much “free time”. I guess that’s because I try to fill my time up with things that I like to do and am passionate about. I still have a full to-do list, and do spend time on things I’d rather not, but I try to work on the most important items first each day. Overall, I’m doing what I love with the majority of my time.

• Sleep: 57 hours, 21 minutes. That’s just over 8 hours per night. This week, we’ve been sleeping in a different room where the sun hits us warmly every morning around 6:30 through the windows. It’s not conducive to sleeping in, but is a very relaxing way to get up.
• Visiting with friends: 11 hours, 22 minutes. We had some friends over for a late lunch one day this week, and we spent an afternoon out with another friend.
• Meals: 11 hours, 2 minutes. We ate out a lot this week (almost every day), and took time to enjoy our food. The meal with our friends is included under “Visiting with friends”.
• Reading: 9 hours, 8 minutes. I have some really interesting books I’m reading right now, although half of this time was spent reading articles and blogs on-line.
• Personal Email: 8 hours, 13 minutes. I had a LOT more time-consuming e-mail than usual this week. I’ve been getting a lot of e-mails from people starting businesses who want advice. I’ve really enjoyed being able to help people in this regard. Maybe soon I will have to start charging for consulting and move this into the “Work” category. :)
• Writing: 4 hours, 31 minutes. This was time I spent working on my new book about how to create an on-line business. I suppose this could also be considered “Work” since I will eventually sell the book, but that’s not my main purpose in writing it.
• Daily Hygiene: 3 hours, 27 minutes. It’s amazing how much time this takes. But I do love a hot shower.
• Sex: 3 hours, 9 minutes. Ahh… Having a pregnant wife has some nice hormonal advantages.
• Meditating and spiritual time: 2 hours, 41 minutes. I have a great place to sit for my morning meditation overlooking the hills and the city view. Very relaxing.
• Finances: 2 hours, 3 minutes. This is higher than normal because I’ve been working a lot with my accountant trying to figure out taxes, and have been looking at other investment opportunities.
• Exercise: 1 hour, 47 minutes. This includes my daily stretching and tai chi, and a little weight lifting. This doesn’t include all the hiking and walking we did as a family this week.
• And I spent anywhere from 10 minutes to 1 hour, 30 minutes on each of the following: cleaning and organizing, house maintenance, driving, facebook, games (pool, and angry birds), journal, playing the piano, shopping, time tracking, vacation planning, writing on my blog, and selling stuff on Craigslist.

Total Personal Time: 128 hours, 52 minutes

Now that I’ve gone through all the effort of tracking my time for a week, it would be a shame to simply write a blog post about it and not use the data to see where I can improve. In the weeks ahead, I would like to make the following changes:

• More time with my wife, especially reading and talking with her.
• More family time together with the kids at home. We spend a lot of time together outside the home, but when we’re inside, we tend to do our own thing. I also want to take a more active role in homeschool, helping the kids with their blogs, music, as well as math and reading, etc.
• More time working on my book. I’m excited to complete this project and hopefully it will help a lot of people looking to create a business.
• Less time reading on-line. I want most of my reading time to be focused and intentional, not jumping from item to item.
• Less time on e-mail. I had built up a practice of checking e-mail just twice a day and leaving it alone the rest of the time. But I didn’t follow that so well this week, and found my productivity waver because of it.

Have you ever tracked your time? If you’ve ever charged per hour, chances are you’ve tracked your time working, but have you ever measured what you’re doing with the rest of your time? Yeah, maybe it is a bit fanatical. But I think there is value in it at least every once in a while.

I’m interested to hear your thoughts below, and what changes you’d like to make in how you spend your time.

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The past couple weeks, I’ve found myself with quite a bit of extra time on my hands. Somehow, I’ve usually been able to finish up work-related tasks in under an hour a day, and less than that on tracking finances or doing household tasks. Now that we don’t have a house or so much “stuff” to worry about, I’m magically finding myself left with lots of time to fill! This is a good problem to have, I think.

As much as I’ve heard how it’s good advice to have “down time” to just relax and do nothing, I still find that a challenge. I try to play pool, or sit around and relax, which is nice here and there. But sooner or later, I feel like I’ve just got to be up and doing something “productive”.

I continue to make lists of things I want to accomplish during the day, or the week, and work to accomplish them, but the lists are less stringent than they use to be. I only list a few tasks, and I try to make them things that are truly important to me – not just mundane stuff that needs to be done anyway. This week, my list has included things like “Play Mario Kart with my kids”, “Study Spanish”, and “Make videos of our Panama trip”. But the two things I’ve probably spent the most time on the past few weeks have been composing music, and typing my old journals.

Composing Music

I have enjoyed playing the piano and singing since I was young, and wrote a number of pieces in high school, but just haven’t had (made) the time since. Well, now I’m making the time! I’ve written a couple hymn arrangements for piano, and am working on a vocal arrangement of “Away in a Manger” for Christmas time. It’s been loads of fun, and I really enjoy sharing this part of me. I hope these arrangements will lift others’ spirits as well.

To hear a recording of me playing my arrangements, click the links below.

How Great the Humble Birth

I Am a Child of God

Note: These were recorded in Garageband through a MIDI interface, so the piano sound isn’t as nice as a real piano, and it misinterpreted how hard/soft I hit some of the keys. Anyway, I made some sheet music for them, too. If you want it, let me know, and I can send you a pdf you can print.

Typing Old Journals

I’ve also been typing my old journals into Google Docs (which is the only word processor I use these days). I started writing in a journal when I was 12 years old and now I’ve typed almost to the end of my 15th year. I’m now 29, so I have a ways to go (I wrote a lot), but I started typing my journals in 2003, so I can just read once I hit that point.

It’s been really interesting to look back at who I was and how I thought, as well as the ways that I’ve grown, and the lessons I’ve learned and sometimes forgotten.

One thing I noticed about my younger self (we’re talking Jr. High and High School days) was that I was surrounded by so many more people. I wrote a lot about how I’d care about someone who was having a hard time, and would pray for them throughout the day, how I’d visit friends who were sick, how I’d sing with friends, serve with friends, and play with friends. I was filled with a lot of love for others, and felt a lot of love from others. It was a great time, and I’m surprised to see how much of that I’ve lost!

Now, working from home as I do, I can go for several days without seeing anyone but my wife and kids. Even when I did work in an office, being a computer programmer, I was usually alone. Likewise, most of the activities I do now, I do alone. For years, I chose to put a lot of outside activities on hold to have more time to build my business. And I’ve realized that all of this loneliness has taken its toll on me socially and in relationships.

I haven’t been one to make much time to be with friends. I usually go to events or parties if someone invites me, but there have only been a handful of times when I’ve initiated these types of events. I’m not sure why, but the consequence has been that I don’t feel as close to people outside my family as I used to. That’s okay in some ways, because my family relationships are the most important to me. But I realize friendship is an important part of my life I’ve been neglecting lately, and I’d like to take more time to build friendships in the years ahead, and go out and serve a little more. And, especially because we’re home schooling, I want to make sure I provide this opportunity to my kids as well.

So, a big apology to any of my friends out there who have felt forgotten over the years. And a big thanks for all you’ve meant to me in my life. It’s amazing how many great experiences I’ve had, and how much help I’ve received from friends – that I had forgotten. I’m so glad I wrote them down in my journal!

A Balanced Life

I now have a lot more spare time than I used to, which is wonderful. But I think if I really put my mind to it, I could have made the time to compose music or review my journals, at any time during the past 15 years. It may have taken longer, but I still could have done it. It’s just not where I put my focus. But really, if I had tried to raise a family, go to school, work at a job, build a business, hang out with friends, compose music, and more, all at the same time, nothing would have ever gotten done well, and I would have been stressed out – not fulfilled. Actually, I did all of that for a while and it was pretty crazy.

Sometimes I think it’s necessary to reduce or eliminate certain activities from your life, so you can focus on what’s most important to you at the time. I guess I cut out some social activities and some music in order to build my business. Now I’m focusing more on those, and less on the business (because I have so much help that it almost runs itself). Maybe a “balanced” life doesn’t mean doing everything all at once. Maybe it’s more about doing what’s most important and fulfilling to you, right now, while temporarily saying “no” to other things.

Well, I’m going to go work on that hymn arrangement now.

How do you spend your spare time?

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I like being productive. And I like being able to look back at how I spend my time and see how closely it aligns with my ideals. That’s why I track my time while I’m working.

Because I run my own business from home, I’ve had some people ask me recently how much time I spend “working” each week. I define work as doing activities that directly relate to producing income. For me, that’s running my business. Things like mowing the lawn, or planning my next vacation are certainly work, but I don’t count them here (although I do track them, which I’ll show you below).

So, in answer to the above question, I usually spend between 8-15 hours per week on activities specifically related to producing income. Sometimes it’s more, sometimes less. It depends on how excited I am about what I’m doing, or what other things I have going on. When I was in Panama, I averaged about 5 hours per week.

What About The Rest?

But much more important than the question of how much time I spend “working” is the question, “How do I spend the rest of my time?” And am I spending my time how I really want to? It’s possible to spend all day reading blogs, watching TV, or just sleeping and eating. But is that how I want to live? No sir. Well, not usually…

I’m a very project-driven person. If there’s something I’m passionate about accomplishing, I can focus on little else until I have accomplished or achieved it. It’s just how I work, and it’s how I get things done. There was a time I was spending 12 hours a day (roughly 70 hours/week) working on producing income. I doubt I’ll ever put that much effort again into making money, but I don’t think I’d have a successful business today if I hadn’t been so committed to making it work.

I think there needs to be time for work and time for relaxation and play (Eccl 3:1-8). But what is the right balance for you? And when you’re working, what do you want to be working on?

Try Tracking for Simple Improvement

I’m now going to share with you today how I spent my time this past week. For over a year now, I’ve been tracking my time using a free tool called Slim Timer. I started using it because I wanted to track the hours I was working on web projects, back when I was billing hourly. But have since realized how useful it is to track how I’m spending time in other areas of my life, and the habit just stuck.

I’ve learned that once I start diligently tracking something, whether it be every bite of food I put into my mouth, every penny I spend, or every minute of how I use my time – I start to become more conscious of what I’m doing and almost instantly start seeing improvement, even if I haven’t been trying to improve. At different times in my life, I’ve tracked all three (food, money, and time) and with each one, I have been amazed at what effect such a simple exercise (tracking) had on me.

For example, in my 8th grade health class, I had to write down everything (and I mean everything) I ate and drank for a week. If you’ve never done that, I recommend you try it! I couldn’t believe how much garbage I was feeding myself and I instantly started eating more healthy. I don’t know why – I just did! The same thing happened with tracking money in my teen years. Every penny I spent I recorded and categorized in MSMoney, and I instantly started saving more and spending more wisely. Now as I’ve tracked my time over the past while, and have reviewed it regularly, I have seen a lot of improvement and I know I’m spending my time now more in the way that I want to, than ever before in my life. If you’ve never tracked something like this, try it! It’s amazing what even a simple log can show you that you just don’t realize otherwise.

I should say before showing you this report, that I certainly don’t have time management mastered. I still end up wasting time on things that really aren’t that important to me, or creating an imbalance of too much of one thing. I’m also not always perfect in remembering to track my time. But I am improving, and most importantly, I am happy and I love my life!

So, here are the totals for the past 7 days. (Note: I’m posting this on a Thursday, so it’s from Thursday to Thursday, although I usually review on a Sun-Sat schedule, if that matters.)

Working Hours

• Web Projects: 4 hours, 47 minutes. This includes creating proposals, assigning tasks to my programmers, checking their work, and discussing projects with clients. I currently have about four projects going.
• Music Teacher’s Helper: 2 hours, 28 minutes. This is my main source of income. I spend so little time on it because it’s very streamlined, and I have great teams to help so much with it. Tasks involved here include advertising, support, correspondence with my teams, blogging, checking stats, finances, and a little programming. (I have each of those tracked to the minute). Next week will probably be higher here as I’ll be writing some more marketing content and maybe creating another video tutorial.
• Studio Helper: 5 hours, 32 minutes. This is a newer project which is just starting to take off. In addition to making sure the programming is going smoothly, I have been working hard on some marketing, planning, did a little programming myself, and launched a special offer this week, that resulted in a number of new subscriptions. Yay!

Total Working Hours: 12 hours, 47 minutes

Other Hours

So how did I spend the rest of my time? Well, contrary to what those who know me may think, I don’t (anymore) spend all day in front of the computer. I do carry my iPhone most everywhere, but I don’t usually track my time as diligently when I’m not working. I bet if I did, I’d start spending it better, though!

That said, a lot of these numbers will be estimates, whereas some will be more exact.

• Sleep: 60 hours. Everyone needs sleep. Some more than others. I almost always get 8 hours per night, and a couple days this week I slept in an extra hour or two because it felt good, so 60 hours is probably about right for the week. I don’t use an alarm anymore, unless I have an early meeting or something. I usually just get up when my body tells me it’s time. However, if I sleep too long, I get a headache all day, so I try to get up before I feel the headache coming on. I usually go to bed between 10pm and midnight, and wake up between 6am and 8am.
• Time alone with my wife: 23 hours. Our kids currently go to preschool twice a week for 3 hours, so we automatically get 6 hours per week of date time for that – we love our lunch dates! Plus, last Saturday night we went out to dinner and to Opera premier of “Little Women” (first time in a while that we’ve had an evening date without the kids). We love spending time together! Then, every night after we put the girls to bed around 8, we stay up and talk, watch movies or travel shows, or read (she’s been reading “Harry Potter” to me). This is usually for 1-3 hours per night. So I think I’ve estimated about right for this week.
• Time with kids: 17 hours. This is one I really wish I was tracking better, because it’s so important. I will often come up during “breaks” while I’m working to play catch with the girls in the front room :), play imaginary games with them (or dolls), wrestle, or this week, teach Emily how to ride a bike without training wheels! Sometimes we’ll do these things before or after meals as well. We have Family Home Evening every Monday night where we sing, pray, and have a lesson, games and a treat. And every night we have a little devotional where we sing, pray and read together as a family. I also threw in a couple hours of driving time this week as well, when we were all together, since that sometimes turns into conversation. This also includes meals together, and evening time after dinner when we just “do nothing” together. We have dinner together almost every night, lunch together except when the girls have preschool, and occasionally we’ll have breakfast together. Usually, I eat with the girls, and Jen eats later.
• Church: 10 hours. We go to church for 3 hours each Sunday. I also study the gospel for about 30 minutes every morning, which I count here. This also counts the time I spend doing my calling (making appointments for our bishop, or updating the ward website), and time attending the Temple, which I did once this week. I counted Family Home Evening and devotional time as family time, but it could just as easily be counted here. Time spent on “church stuff” is generally very fulfilling for me because I feel like I’m being of service, or at least feeding my soul some good spiritual food, which keeps me going in other areas of my life.
• Personal: 39 hours. This week, this includes writing this blog post (1 1/2 hours), visiting relatives (6 1/2 hours), cleaning (30 minutes), morning and evening rituals: shower, etc. (4 hours), exercise: daily morning tai chi and yoga routine (2 hours), fixing an old computer my grandma gave me (1 hour), cast meeting for Joseph (1 hour), personal e-mail (2 hours), reading (1 hour), personal finances (1 1/2 hours), planning (1 hour), mowing the lawn (1 hour), and working on a video of our Panama trip (7 hours) – that’s been my big project lately.

Okay, so you math experts out there will notice that this totals up to about 162 hours (if my math is right). But there are 168 hours in a week (24*7). So that leaves about 6 hours unaccounted for!! What happened to those other 6 hours?! You know what? I don’t know! I told you there might be some inaccuracies. :) It was probably spent mostly reading on the web, or resting on the couch or something – I don’t know.  But that does makes me curious. Does this mean I could have an extra 6 hours in my week if I could find it? Or did I just do a bad job at tracking what am I doing in that time?

Ah… but I must remember the more important question from the beginning of this post. Am I doing what I want to be doing, and am I spending the time I want on the things that are most important to me? I can answer yes to that. The point isn’t to squeeze as much into our day as we can, and do as many things as possible. The point is to make sure we do those things that we love and that bring us fulfillment. (Although, now I’m tempted to start tracking every minute on Slim Timer through my iPhone next week just to see where that time went… See how I am?)

I wanted to go on and share with you some of the other tools I use to track my time and appointments, but this has gotten pretty long, so I think I’ll save those for another post.

But before you leave, I want you to get something from this post. Rather than it just being an interesting (or not) post to read about the weekly life of Brandon Pearce, why not take a look at yourself, and your own time, and ask yourself if you’re spending your time the way you want to? You may not want to spend your time at all like I do, but figure out how you do want to spend it and see how close you’re living to that. You may be surprised.

Or start tracking it using Slim Timer or another tool and see what happens. Even logging part of your day, like I do, is immensely helpful. Set aside some time to think about what your ideal day might look like (a topic which deserves at least a whole post to itself), and how you can reach it. You just may have an enlightening experience (such as, you’ve lost 6 hours of your week and don’t know where to find it…).

Happy living!

(May 3, 2009: Update: I think I figured out where the extra hours went. I forgot to calculate in my Oratorio Society rehearsal (practice for Mendelssohn’s Elijah, which was 2 hours), and my weekly Tai Chi / Yoga class, which is 3 hours. Plus driving, I think that accounts for about everything. Yay!)

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