(This column is posted at www.StevenSavage.com and Steve’s Tumblr. Find out more at my newsletter.)
As my regular readers are aware, I’ve speculated on how the Pandemic has slowed down my projects and my life. That got me asking something – is there a way to calculate how much time is lost due to the pandemic? Of course I had to try.
Let’s go through my thought processes – it might help you as well.
So first, I decided to calculate time lost in hours. Because I’m that over-organized and like fine detail.
IMPORTANT NOTE: The calculations below already account for how different needs interfere with each other. In other words, this is real loss due to stress/time/etc. not just available time shifting around.
First, I went to my projects. I track my projects pretty closely, and I found I’ve functioned at 80-90% efficiency for about a year. A few quick calculations and I found that my overall projects – from writing to home improvement – got delayed or took extra time. That was about 5 hours a week, to my surprise – disconnected from everything else.
Secondly, I went to regular chores such as shopping and so on. No longer could I or my GF randomly run to the store. We also had to preplan a lot of work, engage in other safety procedures, and so on. This one was shocking as we found this added another two hours of time a week.
(Sometimes online shopping takes longer as you just can’t grab stuff you realize you need or do it on the way home from work).
Finally, seeing now and then I notice we’d just crash more than usual. That was intermittent, but usually turned out to be about four hours a week.
Note this also didn’t worry about saving time due to not commuting. That was not as big as I thought – only about three hours a week. Car pooling saved me more time than realized because I could just sit and work on stuff.
So all together I realized I’m losing eight hours a week in the pandemic from stress, from things taking longer, from not being able to double-up on chores. In one year I’ll have lost over 400 hours – this is due to things taking longer, extra unexpected tasks, stress, and schedule changes.
It really does feel like I need a two month vacation.
So anyway there’s an invite to you – how much time have you lost?
Steven Savage