The 43-Hour Time Sink

Step 4: How do I assess my life portfolio?

If you haven’t read them already, you might want to start with Step 1: How do I define a great life?, Step 2: What is my life purpose?, or Step 3: What is my life vision?

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A while back I got into the “quantified self” self-improvement movement, where you track data about your daily life. I tracked steps. Calories. Lifts. Sleep. For a while, I even logged “Sexual Activity” because Apple Health had a field for it. (I don’t recommend it. Bit of a mood killer.)

My quantified self journey began with a Pebble smartwatch in 2014

The trouble with the quantified self movement is the “so what?” The data is only useful if it gives you insight that changes your behaviour. Otherwise, what’s the point?

So, you can imagine my delight when Step 4 of Strategize Your Life finally had use for some of this data. Specifically, Step 4 asks you to:

1. Estimate how you spend your time across 16 “strategic life units”:

   

   It’s very sexy to call your significant other a “Strategic Life Unit,” try it in the bedroom tonight

2. Rate each one for Importance and Satisfaction.

3. Plot the results on a 2×2 grid.

The resulting bubble plot highlights where you should invest more (or less) of your time, energy, and money. That’s right, behaviour change!

What I didn’t expect was finding a single life unit quietly eating up 43 hours of my week…

A. Estimate how you spend your time

Unsurprisingly, when I asked ChatGPT to kick off Step Four it suggested looking back over the past year and estimating how much time I spent on each life unit in an average week.

Where possible I used data, mostly from my Garmin watch. Otherwise, I guesstimated. I also asked ChatGPT to sanity-check a few of my answers with research.

Here’s how the conversation went.

Physiological needs - 65 hours/week

Me: My average sleep per day over the last year, according to Garmin, is 7h 51m, so let’s use that. How much time does the average person spend eating over a week? Ideally, use research based on a New Zealand male aged 48.

ChatGPT: Stats NZ’s Time Use Survey (2009/10) reports 1h 25m/day spent “eating and drinking” on average. That’s 9h 55m/week.

Activities of daily living - 8 hours

Me: I think if I add together the time I spend cooking, general cleaning, washing dishes, cleaning clothes, vacuuming, dusting, washing bathrooms etc it would be between 45 minutes to an hour and a half per day, but I would like you to do some research to find out how much time the average person spends doing housework.

ChatGPT: Household work (NZ benchmark): the same survey reports 2h 02m/day on “household work” on average → 14h 14m/week. It also notes women spend about an hour more per day on household work than men, and that overall unpaid work totals differ a lot by gender (women 4h 20m/day vs men 2h 32m/day, across all unpaid work categories).

Family - 6 hours

Me: Let’s call it an hour a day on weekdays with the kids, and three hours on Saturday and Sunday. I only have them for half the time, though. Again, I would like to know if there is any research out there that suggests what the average might be for a typical New Zealand single-person household.

ChatGPT: If we use NZ “time caring for children” research as the closest proxy:

• Stats NZ analysis finds partnered fathers average ~6 hours/day caring for children, including 1h 17m/day of active childcare.

• It also shows childcare time drops when kids are older: sole parents with young children (under 5) spend ~3 hours/day more on childcare than those with older kids (5–13).

• Because your kids are 12 and 14 and you’ve got them half the time, your own estimate (focused time) might be totally reasonable — it’s just not measuring the same thing as “total care time” in that research, which includes a lot of “being available/with them”.

Friendship - 3 hours

Me: I think it would be two or three hours a week. Again, I’d like to know if there’s any research that suggests what the norm is.

ChatGPT: Socialising/conversation (NZ benchmark): Stats NZ reports 1h 07m/day on average → 7h 49m/week. This isn’t “friends only” (it can include family, neighbours, whoever), but it’s a decent anchor for your “2–3 hours/week” gut feel.

Significant other - 14 hours

Me: The amount of time I spend with Kate depends on whether or not I have the kids for a long week or a short week. On a short week, I’d see her for six hours. On a long week it’s more likely to be closer to 4 + 4 + 8 + 6. So we’d need the average of those two weeks.

ChatGPT: Got it. Short week: 6 hours. Long week: 4 + 4 + 8 + 6 = 22 hours. Average: (6 + 22) ÷ 2 = 14 hours/week

Job/career - 2 hours

Education/learning - 6 hours

Finances - 1 hour

Physical health/sports - 4 hours

Mental health/mindfulness - 1 hour

Spirituality/faith - 0 hours

Community/citizenship - 3 hours

Societal engagement - 1 hour

Hobbies/interests - 6 hours

Offline entertainment - 6 hours

Online entertainment / untracked - 43 hours

Forty-three hours. Oof. To be fair, “online entertainment” was my catch-all bucket, and I’m probably under-reporting some other categories. For example, the Family bucket only counts one-on-one time. Still, this was the big surprise of this time audit. I don’t watch much TV, don’t get too caught up in doomscrolling…but lately I have been playing the digital version of Spirit Island. A lot. I worked out that I spent 408 hours playing Spirit Island from 5 June 2025 to 6 January 2026. About 13 hours a week on average, or roughly 2 hours a day.

Spirit Island is actually a board game, but I play it online because the setup is much faster

B & C. Rate each life unit for Importance and Satisfaction and plot the results

After the time audit, I scored each life unit for Satisfaction and Importance from 0-10 and asked ChatGPT to produce a bubble plot with Importance on the y-axis, Satisfaction on the x-axis, and the bubble size roughly matching time spent. The result was unreadable¹, so I ended up switching to Gemini, which created this:

So What?

As I said earlier, all of this is pointless if it doesn’t change behaviour. So what can I learn from this map? Three things:

1. Protect what’s already working. Life is pretty great across Significant other, Family, Friends, Physical health, Hobbies and Offline entertainment. All high importance, high satisfaction.

2. Fix the Job/career bubble. I suspected this already, but seeing it on the bubble plot made it very obvious that Job/career is important to me, my satisfaction is low, and I was spending almost no time improving it.

3. My big time suck is Online entertainment. It’s not destructive, it’s not wrecking my life. But it is 43 hours a week. If I want to lift my job/career satisfaction, this is the logical place to reclaim some time. So that’s what I tried to do…

Step 4, done. I dare you to try it too and run the same audit on your own life. Just be prepared for your own uncomfortable number.

Next week, I’ll tell you what happened when I decided to do a month-long Digital Detox, sparked by that big-ass ‘Online entertainment / untracked downtime’ bubble. Step 5: What can I learn from benchmarks? will have to wait.

1. I was using ChatGPT v5 at the time, I’m not sure if it’s improved its bubble plot powers since then