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How much free time do you have?

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Re: How much free time do you have?

#211

Post by jedrek »

southerndrift wrote: post #182
jeena wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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…

> 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.

Re: How much free time do you have?

#212

Post by cerberusss »

bordercases wrote: post #171
alltakendamned wrote: post #112

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.

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.

Re: How much free time do you have?

#213

Post by cerberusss »

unnouinceput wrote: post #23
frequentnapper wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 chores? Don't you have to do cleaning and cooking? Groceries?

Re: How much free time do you have?

#214

Post by cerberusss »

maccard wrote: post #209
cerberusss wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: How much free time do you have?

#215

Post by vagab0nd »

jasonkester wrote: post #130

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 s…

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.?

Re: How much free time do you have?

#216

Post by gewoonkris »

ianai wrote: post #208
emilecantin wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 "exhaus…

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

Re: How much free time do you have?

#217

Post by KirinDave »

kungtotte wrote: post #191
KirinDave wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 folk…

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 st…

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

Re: How much free time do you have?

#218

Post by southerndrift »

jedrek wrote: post #211
southerndrift wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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.

Re: How much free time do you have?

#219

Post by unnouinceput »

cerberusss wrote: post #213
unnouinceput wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 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.

Re: How much free time do you have?

#220

Post by bordercases »

ianai wrote: post #40
plants wrote: post #5

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 par…

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.

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.

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