Time audit: your 168-hour week

How the time audit works

Every week has exactly 168 hours (7 × 24). The audit converts your nightly sleep to a weekly figure by multiplying by seven, adds the weekly hours of the other five categories, and subtracts the total from 168. What remains is time you have not assigned to any category. Each row of the table also shows the daily average (weekly hours ÷ 7) and the share of the week (hours ÷ 168 × 100).

Worked example with the default figures: 7.5 hours of sleep a night is 52.5 hours a week. Add 40 hours of work, 5 of commuting, 14 of chores, 3 of exercise and 21 of leisure screen time, and the total is 135.5 hours, or 80.7% of the week. That leaves 32.5 hours, about 4 hours 39 minutes a day, for meals, washing, family, friends and anything else. Sleep is the largest block at 31% of the week.

For context, the American Time Use Survey from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics consistently finds that sleeping is the single largest use of time, averaging around nine hours a day for people aged 15 and over once naps and lying in are included.

Reading your results honestly

Estimates from memory are usually off. People tend to overstate time spent working and understate time on phones and television, so the unaccounted figure is often larger than it should be. If your total goes over 168, some activities overlap (listening to podcasts while commuting, watching a show while cooking) and you have counted them twice; decide which one the hour belongs to.

The most reliable audit is a log: write down what you did in 30-minute blocks for three to seven ordinary days, then enter the weekly averages here. Look first at the categories you can actually change. Commuting and chores can sometimes be batched or shared, and leisure screen time is the category most people underestimate. A small shift adds up: cutting 30 minutes a day frees 3.5 hours a week, roughly 182 hours over a year.