I haven't finished the video but one curious thing is that you (correctly!) classified housework and parenting as unpaid LABOR, yet your gut reaction is "I don't work enough", completely discounting that you spend about half of your time working, just the majority of it doing unpaid labor. I'm not saying I wouldn't have reacted the same even knowing rationally that unpaid labor is still labor, I just thought it was interesting.
I don’t have kids and I have a typical 40 hour/week desk job with a shortish commute. I feel like my work-life balance was SO much better when I was working 4 days a week, 10 hour shifts than now when I’m working 5 days a week, 8 hour shifts. I feel like the two hours in the morning/evening kind of waste away anyway, and in exchange, I got a WHOLE EXTRA DAY. I could do appointments on a weekday, and I still had two whole weekend days - usually one day for doing something fun, and one day to just veg out at home. I’m not sure if it’s true for you too, but it could be part of why you feel you work so much and yet not enough. If you never truly put it down and pick it up, you are essentially always working a teensy bit, always carrying that extra bit of stress, and you may feel like that extra time of minimal (but still present) effort isn’t paying off. The days that I stay signed into my work accounts or even LinkedIn are the days that I feel most drained. Even if I’m not actually checking them! Just the notification or muscle memory to check it is enough to not let me truly relax.
It would be interesting for this to be one of your annual videos where you track your time, maybe for a shorter span, but then you can compare changes and also implement other questions people had
Super interesting. Sounds like a very well balanced life. Not something to feel guilty about, but something for other people to aspire to. (Also: unpaid labour = labour. Never forget that!)
I LOVED this video. The analysis of the ‘life’ data you captured is so valuable to share. Will also consider doing this myself personally I’m sure we can all find some validation in it. Would LOVE to see this again as life changes would be so interesting to compare directly. Thank you for sharing Hannah!
Just a quick comment on your socialising. You said you didn't see your friends most of the time but also any time you saw your friends with Rowan it would have been tracked as parenting. So you're probably seeing your friends more often it's just that they aren't your complete priority in the moment 😊
Yes good point!! I definitely FEEL the difference though between socialising when I’ve got Rowan (especially if Dan isn’t around) and socialising when I’m child free. Socialising with Rowan around honestly I can’t relax and I feel like I miss out on most of the conversations happening, it’s such a different experience !!
I love love love this data! Everyone's life is so different and it's so interesting to understand a little bit more how someone's day to day life works, like, genuinely what order you do things in. As someone who wants kids but doesn't have them yet, and as an income earner with a long commute, I feel our experiences are totally different, but so valuable!
So glad I watched the ad for once! I’ve tried hello fresh before, loved it, but had to cancel due to cost so lots of deals won’t work for me since I’m not a new customer. My disabilities (all of them!!) are flaring up right now and my car broke down, oh my god I’m so happy I can get this offer and not have to worry about ubering to the shops and planning meals and all of that nonsense!!! THANK YOU!!!!!!!!
More difficult to track but I would love to see someone who works full time do proper tracking of their day as well. Not just flat 8 hours working but actually tracking how much time they might participate in "time theft" while being paid on the job, and then compare how many hours of paid labour vs paid not working time vs unpaid labour. I would volunteer but I don't want that data to get in the hands of my employer 😆 It would be nteresting to see if your more focused, shorter work hours is actually comparable to someone getting paid full time.
I'm curious to track it for myself but my current job doesn't really lend itself to thenotion of 'time theft' since I'm fully customer facing, I definitely have down time at work but if there's no one to serve I have nothing to do even if I want to be doing something.
So I use a pomodoro timer for work tasks as someone who works 7.5 hours per day. On a good day I’ll do 7-8 25 minute segments, roughly 3-3.5 hours of solid work for that 7.5 hours, but it’s often much lower 😅 I’ve been struggling with motivation and not enjoying the work I do, so it can be difficult for me to get started sometimes, but I’m trying to have a better mindset.
@@morehannah It's interesting that you frame it that way as I have a very thinking heavy job and would always consider my thinking time as working time, whereas I also work remotely so I am also doing laundry, online shopping, leaving comments on newly released youtube videos 😆 etc on top of working during my contracted 8.5 hour workday.
@@leighthomp I absolutely adore my job and although I am not tracking my work I do estimate I only really get 3-5 hours of good working time in per day anyway (depending on the day and the project I am working on). I think studies say the same so probably more a maximum human mental capacity thing as well.
Ahh i find this totally interesting! We are a matched salary household and I am struggling with the thought of having a baby because I know the parenting split or Career sacrifices would fall to me or as I work shift work me and my husband would never see each other!! Such a tricky dynamic to work around! Live your content ❤️
Parenting is not just unpaid labour, it is also absolutely contributing to society (as another user pointed out). Please give yourself credit for raising a tiny human (and, if we must think in those terms, a future tax payer). You're contributing to society with so much more than money and job time.
I have an app I use to track my hours on things called Life Cycle so I know my breakdown (as a night shift worker on 4 nights a week): Body admin: 40% Paid labour: 23% Unpaid labour: 10.5% (don’t have a child and fully share chores with my partner) Leisure: 26.5%
Really fascinating stuff. I wonder if you’re instinctive reaction might have been different / tempered if the first pie chart you saw was filtered to exclude sleep. Because a chart showing only how you spent your waking hours might have been more “acceptable” to your brain? Maybe not but it’s one of those elements of statistics that presentation is critical (hence you always get analysis of graphs on election leaflets lol). We (rightly) spend a lot of our time asleep - we know this but rarely see it visually presented. Taking that out of the equation may have made you feel there was less “waste” there maybe?
I really felt the drop in the body admin on weekdays. As a work from home mum with a partner who has a commute, it’s often either shower with the toddler or don’t shower 😅
I’m currently unable to work due to disabilities and I’ve always wanted to track just how much time I spent on healthcare, because I genuinely feel like it’s a fulltime job!! I might try out the app and see what comes out :) also I was wondering, if Dan was the WFH freelancer and you had the office job, how different would your time have looked? do you think it would be a completely equal reversal or not?
I love your top today! 💖 Also, yeah, in a similar situation (but no kids) where I completely restructured my life to do less time in paid labor and end up feeling I'm not working enough 🤷♀️🤷♀️
This video was so interesting, thank you for sharing! I was particularly interested by the question of how does the data compare to how it *Feels* you're spending your time. That's been on my mind a lot! I recently started my PhD and also got an internship, so I would be very curious to see how my work and school time compare to my free time (socializing, hanging out with my husband, and me time). It would be especially illuminating since my uni's grad worker's are on month 7 of striking for a better contract that values our time and labor more effectively, and to be able to have data on exactly how much we add to our uni's community!
No insight but it has inspired me to track my time for the next 30 days. As a freelancer with chronic health issues, I never feel like i'm doing enough work or housework so it would be interesting to see if it's as bad as I feel like it is.
I teach IT to elderly people and I recently told my boss that I will only do 20h a week on education and then my fridays are dedicated to some SoMe work for the company. So on average, my work week is around 27h - compared to the standard in Denmark being 37h. I 100p have to deal with the guilt and shame of not being able to "perform better" than my 27h a week. But it was a very concious decision I had to make for my sanity and overall health. I've been pushing myself far too hard the first 28years of my life and it's time to prioritize myself and my happiness. Plus, I recently inherited some money which I used to buy an old farm that I am renovating. Which means a lot of my energy is going towards that proect and I have less energy to focus on my "career". It also means I have no rent and can afford to work less... Im assuming this will change in the future but for right now, I like spending less time on "paid labour" and more time on "unpaid labour", which in my case is taking care of my pets and renovating the property.
I'd be so intrigued to see an overview of Dan's similar data or estimates of what that would look like. I'm very tempted to do a similar experiment with my partner to get a more objective account of the labour time totals.
Wait... what confuses me is the work time prediction. Let me take you along the maths (I was too curious to not do some maths haha). You guessed 25% of your time would be paid labour. So there are 7 *24= 168 hours in a week. 0,25*168=42 hours. How did you suddenly think you were a part-time worker but making full-time hours haha? 0,15*168=25 hours, which is what you've mentioned before right, around 24? 4 days of effectively 6 hours of work between childcare runs? I'm impressed that you get to an average of 24 hours exactly. Respect for being self employed and working from home and have set work times so well.
Haha if I had done this maths I would’ve realised very quickly how absurd my prediction was !! I guess it was more how it FELT for me. Maybe would be closer to. 25% of my awake time!
A note on perceiving paid word as a larger chunk of your time, even if the data doesn't support it - I think it's twofold. One, like you said, you are using more brain energy at paid work, which means more of your finite daily energy is put into it; those hours are more potent and saturated. And two, paid work has a tangible return (money, being the main one). It's not that unpaid labour gives us nothing back or is worthless, far from true! It's just that doing the washing, again, is less rewarding. And you get absolutely nothing out of it, except clean clothes. Until the next load, of course.
I wonder what the percentages would look like if you only looked at waking hours not sleeping hours. You might of had a different reaction to your working hours as a percentage.
I am so interested to track my time now. I don't have any kids, so I imagine my "me time" will be significantly higher. I think I would also want to split my "me time" into more categories like reading, watching youtube, and mindless scrolling.
There are so many possibilities of sub categories I wanted to keep it as simple as possible but yes would be interesting to know the difference in me time for sure!
I just did some very quick math and in a seven day week if someone worked a full time forty hour a week job that would not 23.8%. Resist the guilt, if it's working for you and your family, then it's right.
So out of curiosity i just did the math and working 40 hours a week is only 23% of the hours in a week and 32 hours (4 out of 5 days) is 19%. I honestly didnt think it would be that low but it adds a lot of perspective the 15% that you tracked. Its funny how your intitial guess (which i thought was totally reasonable) was actually higher than what it would be for someone who works "full time".
I am about to quit my 9-5 (I mean more 10-8 but you know what I mean) and actually I think time tracking the initial weeks or maybe waiting a few weeks and then after that of my like freelancing/vibing/writing/running around and having a gap year era would maybe be very interesting. So good to know about now then cause I might do this.
I find this such an interesting concept. I work 5 hours a week and the rest of the time I'm mumming so mine would be almost entirely parenting or sleep 😂
About that comment towards the end of how focused you are when you are working and how it "feels" like you are working more than the time you actually are - I think that is a very astute observation. I'm a grandmother now, and I am shocked anew every time I'm with my grandchildren how immensely DISTRACTING they are. I guess I forgot. Parenting is wildly unfocused, distracting and full of multi-tasking. And draining. Another comment about what your unpaid labor hours would earn you if you were paid minimum wage - I've always thought about that as the amount of money I was saving our household, and often more if we wanted more specialized or higher quality work. You are currently doing at LEAST 33K a year of work to support your family. Thank you for the tracking and analyzing. It's fascinating and much more valuable than I thought it would be (not being a spreadsheet person... 🙂)
I have an idea why you feel like you do more paid labour than tha data suggests. If you take sleep out of the equation, you spend a huge chunk of your conscious time on paid labour. Like it may only be 15% of your time but it's about 25% of the time when you're awake.
This was very intersting, very insightful. With the other video about time tracking I didn't feel like tracking my time, but with this one it looks way easier than the first video. I want to time track now! haha I'm be really curious to see how big the chunck of body admin is having cronic pain and being autistic, thus needing a lot of down time.
This is so interesting! Look at all that work you're doing for free! Only further compounds my belief that we need some kind of universal basic income because capitalism does not and will not EVER value the labour of parenting, caring, maintaining a home, and so on. I'm disabled and on benefits and really hate the rhetoric around employment in the UK. Politicians seem to think that finding paid work as a disabled or chronically ill person is simply a matter of toughening up and it makes me feel so much shame about how I spend my time. I would guess that the majority of my time is spent on body admin. From the outside it probably looks leisure time. And every day I get to wake up and read about able-bodied plonkers like Reeves and Badenoch who thinks that the reason there are so many disabled and mentally ill people out of work is because we get TOO MUCH help and accommodation, and not because of years of public spending cuts, inequality, and discrimination. So much talk about cutting welfare system spending and zero conversation about WHY disabled people struggle so much to access and stay in work, and what we could try and do to fix it. It's almost as though the lens of capitalism automatically dehumanises and shames disabled and other non-working people. It sucks, but it was good to hear someone else talk about the shame of not working/not working enough.
I think my data would be something like this: 40% sleep and bodily admin 30% paid work, work break and commute 30% me time and a little unpaid labour On a workday it's 52% work and 8% me time tho. Not happy about that.
So interesting 🤔 as a stay at home mom to a 2.5 year old with no day care or consistent grandparents help. My data would definitely make me feel weird. Good to know how much i could make in a year!
Hi! Really liked the video and interesting to look into the life of others hahah. Making the categories and how parenting is kind in the mix of all of them is hard. In terms of the paid vs unpaid work or the friends seeing etc, it might also be usefull to take out all of the time sleeping? So what percentage of waking hours are you working? Because I feel like that ends up hiiiiigj
There was something in what you were saying about how the cooking, cleaning, tidying all adds up to like a full time job that made me think that just because it's easier for you to be taking on more of the labour because you're the defualt parent, doesnt mean its necessarily fair or inevitable. I dont even necessarily think thats a fair statement about you and Dan - my previous version of this comment unfairly called you guys out and I'm sorry for that. I just think that when we do fall into the traditional gender roles in our relationships, we need to call attention to it and push back against it - which it sounds like Hannah and Dan totally do! Unjust habits can happen without either party intending them, speaking as someone who's perpetuated and fallen afoul of unfair domestic labour divisions. Really sorry if this crosses a boundary. I know a lot of people our age and younger watch your videos, and I just wanted to put this out there, mainly for them.
Hannah acknowledges that they have a pretty “stereotypical” setup, but I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with that. It’s not a position that they have reached thoughtlessly, or just as the societal default. Things can of course drift out of kilter, but they have a mature relationship and I’m sure Hannah would raise it with him if she felt that were the case.
@@talexe I know :) that's why I tried to phrase my comment so carefully. I do think it's still worth talking about though, because it is still the norm for women's careers to take a hit while their husbands' progress, in part because there's someone at home doing most of the household labour, and usually all the household management. I'm not criticising, at all - I don't think Hannah or Dan have done anything wrong, at all! But we need to be frank about the fact that this pattern persists and it drives gender inequality.
I know you mean well, and you raise a completely legitimate question for society. But I think there was an implied personal question there (essentially, “is Dan pulling his weight?) And that’s none of our business.
this comment reminded me a bit of the whole concept of men like raking leaves, taking the car to maintenance, and other equivalent "big, infrequent life admin tasks", while women tend to take on the mundane, unseen tasks. yes, these men are doing tasks, but are they really equal contributors? especially when women are already taking on most of childcare? imho, when a partner is taking care of a kid more often, it should fall on the other partner to do daily repetitive tasks that admin the adults lives, like cooking dinner, doing dishes, that kind of stuff.
Similar to what others have said. It’s not a dynamic that we’ve fallen into accidentally, if I wasn’t happy with it then we’d work to figure out how to change things. I like my current work hours, the flexibility and working from home. The reality is Dan has a lot less time to do things like cook dinner. Equality of house chores in a relationship doesn’t mean it’s 50/50 - it’s all a balance of each other’s available time and capacity and so the divide will change as circumstances change.
I wonder if the tracking itself had any impact on the results. For me, that would take up quite some energy which might result in more 'me time/recovery time' than usual.
I'm sad you saw how low your paid labour time was and thought it needed to be bigger. My first thought when I saw that is that we all probably see our "paid labour" time as bigger than it is? That's my theory anyway
Such an interesting video, thanks for sharing your data and thoughts ❤ I also work part time (20 h per week) have a 4 year old and have a similar division of labour to you and Dan. And my husband is a teacher here in Denmark and fortunately reasonably well paid, which takes away pressurw on me to work more hours. I love working less, but I totslly relate to your feeling of working more. It's not the hours, but all the thoughts/worries/planning and emotions going into work. And I dont think those are significantly less demanding, just because someone works parttime. If that makes sense. i work in an office / at home, so even though I'm only there 2 days a week I still have 1 boss to deal with and a commute + child pickup to figure out every week. Does this make sense? 😅🤔🤔🧡
not yet finished so maybe this is answered but did body admin include things such as time spent on grooming such as doing your hair / makeup or any hair removal? i’d be so interested to know how much time i spend on doing my hair given getting braids done in a salon can take 3-5 hours depending on the style!
I am curious to see where "life admin" stuff would fall with this categorization -- I assume doctor's appointments would be under "body admin" but what about things like bills and taxes, or even brainstorming renovation stuff? Some of that could probably go under "housework" and maybe other things get done during regular "paid labor", but it's strange to me to not have a specific category for it, since it's a pretty significant slice of the pie for me. I used to do a thing where I'd manually track my time at the end of the the day -- just rough approximations of what I feel like I'd done that day. At the beginning of each month I'd take a new piece of graph paper and outline my priorities for that month on the horizontal axis, and then watch the bars climb up at a rate of approximately one grid section per hour spent. Before making the graph, I'd also order the priorities by how much time I'd like to spend on each of them, so, ideally, by the end of the month the bars would start out high on the left and gradually get smaller. Of course, there were usually spikes and dips all over the place, but still, it was a helpful at-a-glance reminder of how well my actions were aligning with my intentions. Of course, you seem to have way fewer problems with discipline and are very organized to begin with, so you probably don't need anything like that, but maybe someone in the comments will benefit. I liked having it as part of my nighttime routine -- a moment to wind down, reflect, check-in with my priorities (without using an app, because we all know how opening up your phone can go), and color in some blocks with my pretty pens. Actually, maybe this will motivate me to restart that; I fell off the wagon when life got super busy and never started it back up again once it calmed down.
The fact that you even reply to this comment simply encapsulates why you’re my favorite RU-vidr. You manage to treat what others call taboo topics (like sex, poop, and money lol) as something completely normal and absolutely correct as something we all encounter every day. I just love how you neither make it into a 'oh look, I’m ONLY talking about this as a statement' nor do you hide it away. Looking at the RU-vid landscape, I think you’re part of a ‘normal people’ revolution, and it’s fantastic-especially because you’re doing it in a genre outside of storytime, humor, etc., in a way where you, through your personality and content, continually help reinforce the narrative that it’s totally okay to casually talk about these aspects of life. Hurrah. This is how progress happens
Sorry I'm an IT analyst so I'm just like.. why did you not keep things consistent across the board? like all commuting time will be rolled into the purpose of the commute, rather than commuting for daycare = parenting, while commuting for socializing = me time.
