One of the challenges of making the most of our “down time” is that we often don’t know when, exactly, it’s going to appear, or how long it will last. It’s easy to be caught off guard, and so not be sure what you want to do with the hours.

I find myself dealing with something along those lines at the moment. My due date was Sept. 16 — now come and gone — and I’d more or less planned my workstream to be on whatever you call maternity leave when you’re self-employed. Of course, I also figured I’d have a baby to be caring for around the clock during this time! But the baby isn’t here yet, I’m somewhat wary of setting up interviews that I might have to cancel, and it’s hard to concentrate in the fog of late pregnancy.

So I’ve been trying to figure out what to do with myself. I’ve been going back to my “List of 100 Dreams” that I wrote out for 168 Hours — things I like to do, that I find pleasurable, or that I’d like to accomplish in my life. These can be profound or mundane. Some are pretty mundane; for instance, I wrote that I want to maintain a stash of Trader Joe’s dark chocolate-covered caramels. Well, today, I hauled myself down to Union Square and bought three tubs of the things (yum!) I’m buying books with abandon for my Kindle. Going for walks isn’t working as well as I might have hoped due to some physical maladies, but I did manage to take Jasper for a 2-mile walk in his stroller yesterday. I am trying to spend time writing in my journal, even if my other writing projects are on hold. Just hopefully there won’t be too many more days of this!

The New York Times has a funny story on new software that tries to save you from yourself. You start a workday with plenty of productive time ahead of you, but then you’re zapped from one link to the next in your in-box, and then you’re checking everything on Facebook and Twitter, then going back to your inbox, then quickly looking at your work, then ten minutes later taking another Facebook break…

Absent a boss standing over your shoulder, is there any way to get it under control? The article discusses a few programs such as RescueTime, LeechBlock, and Freedom, which either limit your time on certain websites, or block them entirely. Of course, you can always get around these programs, but at least they make you aware of what you’re doing.

When I asked people to keep time logs for 168 Hours, they were often amazed by how much time they were spending reading news online, following links, checking Facebook and so forth. Since you’re sitting at your desk on the computer, it looks like work, but it can add up fast. I’m trying to be aware of these time wasters myself, though sometimes it’s hard — today, for instance, I’m trying to come up with some column ideas, which is involving reading a lot of stuff online. Did I honestly think I was going to find a good idea at People.com? Probably not, but hey, you never know…

…or at least that’s the message of Sue Shellenbarger’s column this morning in the Wall Street Journal.

According to a Gallup survey being released today, business owners outrank 10 other occupational groups in overall well-being, even though small business owners often struggle with extreme stress (e.g. meeting a payroll), have less access to comprehensive health insurance, and in the current recession and credit crunch are often really seeing their businesses struggle. Shellenbarger quotes John Howard, director of the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health as saying the survey “reaffirms my view that the more control you have over your work, the happier you are.”

There are some other studies that reaffirm this view as well. In 168 Hours, I cite extensively from work done by Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School on creativity and productivity. The right job, she has noted, involves two key aspects.

First, it has to tap your internal motivations — that is, you like the stuff of the job for its own sake (Shellenbarger’s lead anecdote, about Roger Peugeot, a plumber, says he “genuinely likes fixing plumbing messes” and despite the recession says “I’m still excited to get up and go to work every day.”)

Second, it has to meet three key job conditions: you have to have lots of autonomy (control of day-to-day decisions), you have to be sufficiently challenged, and you have to have a supportive work environment.

It’s not hard to see why self-employment would maximize many of these conditions. In a huge corporation, pretty much everyone has a boss. If you’re running a small business, on the other hand, you really do decide, from day-to-day, how things run. And while you can certainly fail, you often feel more in control of this than if you are just one of 1000 people who can be laid off at a moment’s notice. As for challenge, working for yourself means you’re often handling almost everything — it’s hard not to be challenged! And while big companies can do many things to create a supportive work environment, it’s unclear why anyone else would design the perfect work environment for you. Various entrepreneurship experts have told me that self-employed folks often start businesses in order to create the kinds of companies they’d like to work for.

We spend a lot of our waking hours working. Generally not the bulk, but a lot nonetheless. If you’re not in a job that makes you happy, that’s a high proportion of your 168 hours to be writing off. While plenty of people do find organization jobs that make them happy, self-employment does make it somewhat easier to fit all the pieces together (even if there are  downsides, too).

Amanda Steinberg, whose Daily Worth email recently featured one of my USA Today op-eds, has another post from a few days ago about how she spends her time, called “A Day in the Life of a Power Mom.”

The message? By focusing her time at work, hiring good people (who don’t have to be micro-managed), and splitting her shifts (working after the kids go to bed), she is managing to run two businesses and sleep eight hours a night while raising two small children. And she doesn’t feel particularly overwhelmed, which is a theme I heard from several of the busiest people I interviewed for 168 Hours. They maintained that they could fit more into their lives if they wanted — a refreshing break from the usual complaints that there’s just no time!

For the 168 Hours book project, I had several people keep logs of their time. Paula, a Nashville mom of a preschooler who is also launching her own business, requested a time makeover. Her husband is an airline pilot, so he was often on the road, and she was feeling like she wasn’t doing a good job making all the pieces fit together.

She sent me her time log, which looked pretty reasonable to me. She was doing a lot of fun things (going to the pool and the park) with her 3-year-old son, B, plus spending a lot of sheer quantity hours with him. She was working somewhere between 25-30 hours per week. She logged these hours partially when B was in preschool, and in bits and pieces here and there.  She was sleeping enough. She wanted time to exercise, but that appeared to be more a matter of not making time than not having time.

In other words, she had what most people consider a pretty ideal schedule for a mom of a young child: part-time hours, lots of flexibility. A recent Pew Research Center survey found that the percentage of working moms who say part-time work would be ideal for them rose from 48 to 60 percent from 1997 to 2007, while the percentage that said full-time work was best fell from 32 to 21 percent.

I am not surprised by these numbers, but I also think they show a bit of a blind spot, which was coming out in the fact that Paula wasn’t feeling as blissful about her time as her “ideal” situation suggested she should. I asked her why she needed a makeover. Did she feel like her time with her son seemed more like a chore than an opportunity for meaningful interaction? Did she want more hours to work?

Well, it turns out that I was spot-on, or as she put it, “Oh you hit it perfectly! Spending time with my son is not what I’d like it to be– it definitely feels more like a chore than fun. I’m always thinking about work and what needs to be done…it takes away from my fun. Of course, I think a big part of that is also the fact that business is really struggling — the financial strains are a huge part of this.”

So I told her something you are unlikely to hear in other work-life balance or time management literature. I told Paula she needed to work more. There were two reasons for this.

First, we achieve certain economies of scale with work. From talking with hundreds of people about their time use for this and other projects, I’ve learned that it is very hard to feel like you’re getting somewhere in your career — making a name for yourself, improving at your craft, achieving a breakthrough — working less than 30 hours per week. This is a lot, because these are real hours. Not sitting-in-meetings-you-didn’t-need-to-attend hours, or lingering-over-take-out-at-8pm hours. These are real hours spent focused on your professional craft, both the substance of your work and the networking and prospecting necessary to get to the next level. When you work more than 30 hours, you tend to reach a tipping point. If you’re running a business, your revenues grow beyond what the additional hours would suggest. If you’re working for someone else, you start seeing new opportunities and landing better projects.

Second, because she did have so much time available to be with her son, she wasn’t being very focused with it. It was the exact opposite problem with her work schedule! People who sit at their offices for 80 hours a week are monstrously inefficient, because they’re always there. Likewise, Paula was just sort of muddling through her hours with B, doing the same things over and over again and, not surprisingly, having the same returns that she would have if she showed up at an office without thinking through her time.

I suspected that if she bumped up her uninterrupted work hours– either by hiring more childcare or having her husband take B on the days he was home — she would feel less panicked about her new business, and she would treat the limited hours she had with B more seriously.

Paula spent some time thinking about this and discussing it with her family. Her husband was open to taking B for 4-6 hours during the days he was in Nashville. She also liked some of the suggestions I gave about making her time with B more positive (playgroups, playdates — caring for small children on your own can be incredibly isolating). “I’m not your typical soccer mom, but I’ve recently found a few other moms who aren’t either and so I’ll try to coordinate with them,” she said. “It feels so meaningless to hang out and watch movies all the time… Plus I don’t want to raise a couch potato, but I’ll admit it’s hard not to let the TV be a babysitter.”

I encouraged her to make time for her own interests outside of work, too. There is no need to apologize for having someone else take care of a small child for 3 hours per week (especially in the context of a 168 hour week) so you can exercise. Given how much more energy you’ll have for your child if you do exercise the kid should frankly be demanding it!

Paula was also open to this idea and wrote a week later that “You would be proud of me,” because she used a full day spa gift certificate her husband had won and had an amazing time. “The best thing about it was that when I was done, I didn’t have that intensity of having to constantly check my phone and email… I felt like my brain has been able to focus on what is in front of me — not scattered. And I had a very productive Friday as a result.” Obviously she wasn’t going to be spending a whole day at the spa every week! But she could recreate some of that focus through solo exercise time on a more regular basis.

So did bumping up her work hours and decreasing her time with B (a bit) help? She wrote me a month later. “I’ve been thinking about it a lot lately especially because of the reversal of instinct that occurred,” she said. “Here I was a mom trying to balance work and time with my toddler — therefore in a downward spiral of decreasing work time while decreasing enjoyment with him. I took your advice and added more hours to my work schedule (can we hear the gasps of moms around the world on that?!?!) and it’s made a HUGE difference!”

She was now spending a strong 35-40 hours a week working again, mostly by doing more at night while her husband traveled (so she wasn’t having to fork out more for childcare). “The result is that I feel much more satisfied with my efforts — and though the pay check hasn’t increased quite yet, the pipeline is and my direction is much more clearly defined with 3 new service platforms I’m offering on my website.” With the pipeline full, “I am now able to ENJOY my time with B and not constantly worrying about having to work more to get caught up.” Put together, this allowed her “to be at peace with where my life is right now.”

Time Out New York Kids did an interview recently with Daily Show correspondents (and parents of two small kids) Jason Jones and Samantha Bee. The interviewer asked how they managed to balance their jobs and their side acting and writing projects with parenthood. Their answer?

JJ Honestly, I watched a lot of TV before.
SB I know, I think we wasted a lot of time.
JJ I wasted a lot of time. There are hours in the day for everything if you give up wasting time. And don’t get me wrong: I love wasting time.

You can read the rest of the interview here.

I have an essay in the Wall Street Journal this morning called “The Myth of the Overscheduled Child.”

Just as adults do not work nearly as much as we think we do (or sleep as little as we claim), kids are not, in general, drowning in homework or extracurricular activities. And the busy ones seem to be doing just fine!

USA Today ran a story today called “At some schools, budget cuts put the kibosh on sports.” In the South-Western City Schools district (around Columbus, Ohio), for instance, the school district canceled all after-school activities in order to cut $2.5 million in expenses. Net result? No sports, no marching band, etc. The lights go out soon after the school day is over.

Now, this seems fairly drastic, and I partially suspect that the school district chose to cut sports because they decided that parents and kids would be furious… and hence would push to pass a property tax increase that failed several times before. Cutting all activities is one way to save $2.5 million. Another is to get rid of 17 administrative positions, which could easily amount to $150,000 in payroll costs each by the time you figure in benefits. School district administration staffs are notoriously bloated.

But anyway, I bring this up because, in the past few years, it’s become trendy to claim that kids are too overscheduled. They’re doing too many sports and activities and need more time for unstructured play! We need to take back our time, and say no to all these sports and activities that are crowding out family life….

Except I highly doubt that’s what will be the result of the death of sports and other activities in the South-Western City Schools. Kids who are suddenly kicked out of their schools by 2:30PM every day will not rediscover the joys of playing kick-the-can around their streets. Instead, they will be home, by themselves, watching TV and eating junk food, or getting into worse trouble (it is an often repeated statistic that a high proportion of teen pregnancies are started between 3-6PM).

The truth is, kids, like adults, are happiest when they are busy and working on projects that matter. There is abundant evidence that children who participate in extra-curricular activities do better academically and on health outcomes than children who don’t. Even kids who do 20 hours of such activities a week don’t come out the worse for wear. Teens who spend 30 hours per week at school and about 5 hours on homework still have a lot of time to fill, even if they’re sleeping the 9-10 hours per night many children need. It’s too bad that some kids will no longer have the opportunity to fill their leisure time with productive activities because such opportunities have been deemed expendable.