What Will You Do With Your 1,000 Hours?
A new way to look at personal growth
Let’s do a little math to find out how much free time we really have.
There are 24 hours in a day, 168 hours in a week, 8,760 hours in a year.
Some of those hours are spoken for. If you need eight hours of sleep a night, that’s 2,920 of the 8,760. If you work 40 hours a week for 49 weeks (so, excluding holidays and two weeks’ vacation), you’re working 1,960 hours.
Subtracting all this takes us down to 3,880 waking, nonworking hours. Of course, people have vastly different levels of caregiving or chore responsibilities, and some people work more or fewer hours for day. But we could imagine that just about everyone has somewhere between 1,000 to 2,000 discretionary hours per year. (The American Time Use Survey pegs the population average at 5.19 hours of leisure per day, or 1,894.35 hours per year. The busiest segment — working mothers of children under age six — tend to have about 3.15 hours of discretionary time per day, or 1,149.75 per year.)
When you put it that way, it’s not such a small number, is it? You can do a lot in 1,000 to 2,000 hours.
