227: A New Way to Look At Your Schedule – Time Exchange

The Time Exchange: What 24 Little Circles Taught Me About My Day

Time is the one thing in life we can never get more of. We’re all handed a fresh 24 hours every day, and it disappears hour by hour whether we do anything with it or not. If you have ADHD, or suspect you do, you’re probably also dealing with time blindness on top of that, which makes this whole equation even harder to feel in a real way. So I want to dig into a small exercise that made time suddenly feel very real to me.

A rudimentary kind of time log

I’ve heard the advice a hundred times: audit your time, journal it, and you’ll see exactly where it’s going. I always dismissed that advice, because there’s no way I’m remembering to stop and write down what I did for the last hour, and even if I set a timer, I wouldn’t remember anyway. It seemed futile.

So instead, here’s the rudimentary version. Grab a piece of paper and draw three rows of eight circles each, touching side to side, with a little space between rows for notes. That’s 24 circles, one for every hour in your day.

In the first row, mark off your sleep window, winding down and waking up, however many hours that really is for you. In my case, that’s 11 p.m. to 6 a.m. The second row picks up where the first left off. I bracketed mine into two chunks: the hustle of making lunches, breakfast, and getting people out the door, and then the long stretch where my kids are gone during the day. The third row covers the evening: kid activities and shuttling between 3 and 5, making and eating and cleaning up dinner from 6 to 8, and then a wind-down bracket at 9 and 10, when I want my brain to stop working but I’m not quite ready for bed.

None of this has to be exact. We’re giving ourselves grace here. The point isn’t a perfect log, it’s a rough shape of where your day actually goes.

The exchange that changes how you see your day

Here’s why this little exercise turned out to matter: once I actually looked at my 24 circles laid out like this, I could see that I only have about six hours in which to make everything else happen. My dreams for this podcast, client work, maintaining the house when nobody’s around, calling my mom, reaching out to a friend, exercising, all of it has to fit inside a genuinely finite window.

That’s the part that makes our fish brains marvel, and often feel frustrated. Those six hours happen every single day, whether we use them well or not. I don’t think we need to log everything all the time, but it’s worth asking: what am I actually doing with that time? If I’m not seeing results from the somethings I’m filling it with, that’s worth taking an honest accounting of. Every hour spent on one thing is an hour exchanged away from something else, whether we notice the trade happening or not.

Where this collided with a digital detox

This idea landed at a strangely perfect moment for me. My church is doing a digital detox for Lent, and while I didn’t know the exact plan yet, I decided to start practicing anyway: no short-form content from 8:30 a.m. to 8:30 p.m. each day. Long-form is still fair game: work on my laptop, an educational video, an audiobook, a podcast. What’s off the table is the quick 10, 15, 30-second hits.

Even on day one, it was already showing me something. All those little 30-second scrolls, the ones we reach for during a transition, or because we’re frustrated and don’t know what to do next, add up to real hours pulled out of those same six circles. Maybe you’re doing this without even realizing it. Maybe you’ve looked at a goal and thought, I have no time for that, without ever asking what you’re actually doing during the time you do have.

Your practical, actionable step

Draw your own 24 circles and mark off sleep, obligations, and the hours that are genuinely yours. Then, for one day, notice what you’re actually exchanging that time for, especially the short-form scrolling you might not be counting. See what you’d be willing to trade it for instead.

Until next time, continue to choose joy.