“Where does the time go?” is a question we have all asked ourselves. If you’re serious about understanding how you use your time, one strategy is to keep a time log for a week or so, accounting for every minute of each day.
Author Brigid Schulte did just that, and she learned that she did have more free time than she thought she did — but that it was all in fragments, so it didn’t feel like it amounted to much. She described her situation as “time confetti — and really, what does a pile of confetti ever amount to?” You can’t fully experience leisure when it’s a few minutes here and a few more minutes there, just as you can’t deeply concentrate on a project or develop a relationship when all you have is small increments.
Understanding this fragmentation is the first step in changing it. Whether through blocking time, focused sprints, advanced scheduling, shutting your door, batching tasks, or saying no, working to consolidate the bits into larger periods is a worthwhile effort. Confetti may be wonderful at a party, but not as a time management practice.
Source: Brigid Schulte in Overwhelmed as quoted in Reset by Dan Heath, 2025, p. 104-105.
