Relationship Minute: Time With Your Spouse
Do you know what time it is?
There are 168 hours in a week. It sounds like a lot—and it is—but it doesn’t always feel that way. Ten minutes felt like an hour when I was in school, watching the clock tick down to the dismissal bell. Today, an hour feels like ten minutes when it’s the last hour before my son leaves to go back to school. You probably feel the same when your spouse is leaving for deployment.
The importance of an hour is certainly impacted by what is happening and how I feel about it. To get the most out of my 168, I need to invest some time in figuring out how I spend those hours.
I feel busy, and I’m always telling other people that I’m busy. I have all the appearances of being busy. But just what is it that I am doing each day that has created all of this busy-ness?
If you don’t know, in detail, where you are spending your time each day, then you can’t know what changes you can make to free up your time.
Stop the busy-ness and take some time to think this through.
Let’s take a look at the 168 hours in your week.
The average person sleeps about seven hours a night. This takes up 49 of your 168 hours, leaving 119.
The average person spends an average of four hours a day on meals (shopping, preparing, eating, and cleaning up after). This takes 28 of the 119 hours, leaving 91 hours.
And then there is work or school, along with getting ready and then dealing with traffic commuting to and from, and that takes an average of 50 hours a week. You have 41 hours left.
Household chores take another eight hours a week (laundry, cleaning, vacuuming, dusting, etc.). This leaves you with 33 hours.
Thirty-three hours to do everything else?
I’m sure you can think of many more things which take up your time.
But, where are your priorities?
What do you value most?
Where does your relationship fall on the list?
My wife and I place a high value on our marriage, and with two children, we really have to make sure it remains a focus for us. In his book His Needs, Her Needs, Dr. Willard Harvey recommends couples spend at least 15 hours each week for undivided attention, with one of the focuses being intimate conversation. That’s about two hours a day to prevent your marriage from becoming too focused on the kids, feeling like you’re just like business partners, or forgetting how to play together and create fun times and memories.
Here are some tips to help you get control of your time:
1. Create a plan, write it down, and share it with an accountability partner.
2. Document your plan on your calendar, and reserve that time to get things done.
3. Target being early. Circumstances, like traffic, always seem to press us for time and make us late.
4. Learn to say no. If you say yes to some request, it’s amazing how that seems to attract like a magnet more and more requests of your time.
5. Focus on doing one thing at a time. Studies are showing that multi-tasking actually wastes more time than it saves.
6. Delegate! And don’t get stuck on how they got it done, only that it gets done.
7. Set a time limit for a task and track how long it takes. The more you do this, the better you get at estimating.
8. Disconnect. You are not obligated:
- To answer that phone just because it’s ringing, let them leave a voicemail and call them back.
- To reply to an email immediately, taking the opportunity to think about your response is almost always better.
- To respond to a text. (Never text while driving!)
Take a hard look at where you spend your time and what your priorities are. Make sure your marriage is a priority, and use these tips to make time in your 168 for your spouse and your marriage. You, your spouse, and your marriage will be much better for it
