Between work, friends, kids, and relationships, we juggle a lot. So if you could plan your perfect day—allotting however much time you wanted to each daily activity—what would your perfect day look like?
That’s exactly what a recent survey, published in the Journal of Economic Psychology, asked 900 women. Would they spend more time with friends? Less time in spin class? The women, age 38 on average, broke it down like this:
106 minutes: romance & intimacy
98 minutes: computer time
82 minutes: socializing
78 minutes: relaxing
75 minutes: eating
68 minutes: exercising
57 minutes: talking on the phone
56 minutes: shopping
36 minutes: working
Of course, that all follows a blissful eight hours of sleep, with time left over. But hey, where do children come in? The researchers took a look at data from the US Time Use Survey for that. When asked to be totally self-indulgent, women said they would spend the day with their partner (619 minutes), socializing (103 minutes), and relaxing (74 minutes). Plus, a two minutes on housework and two minutes with the children for good measure. If only it were that easy.
I thought a lot of results that came out of the survey were interesting—the 900 women surveyed sure like to work out! And what happened to multi-tasking? Or am I the only one who’s laptop smells like yesterday’s late-night snack?—but it’s the romance one that really piqued my interest. Between the two surveys, women would ideally spend over 10 hours with their partner, and two of those hours on romance and intimacy. But how many of us get even close to that on an average day?
What does your perfect day look like…and how does it compare to a real day? What small steps can you take to shift the minutes in your favor?
