Why Parents Feel Like They Have No Free Time

January 02, 2025

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(For working parents navigating home + family life)

Have you ever felt like you have no free time as a parent? In this episode, I share the secret to balancing work, family, and personal time, which has given me a new outlook and a practical perspective on how I manage my time. Using this strategy has helped me tremendously in making time for what truly matters as a husband and father.

GenRef creates time management content for parents with busy lives and hectic schedules. Subscribe for time management tips, strategies for building powerful daily routines, and action plans to help you achieve your goals while maintaining balance in your life.

Episode Transcript

Hey everybody, this is Jon with GenRef. Have you ever felt like you have no free time? You have all these things you have to do, but no time to do them. It's because we're busy, we have things to do. I have to go to the grocery store, gotta go get my car fixed, or go to UPS and return an Amazon package or whatever. If you want your life to be a certain way, you need to do certain things to live the life you want. And that means sometimes you have to do things you don't want to do. You don't really have much of a choice. A lot of your time is spent doing these kinds of things, and it means you have less free time for yourself to relax or to do a hobby you enjoy. We don't have as much free time as we'd like to do the things we want to do. When I first started working, I remember being surprised how little free time I had. I had a long commute and I wasn't used to that. I got used to it, but it was a rude awakening. And as I got older, especially after I had kids, I found that I had even less time for myself. I love my family, but I can't say I have more time for myself now because I don't. But I've learned how to find time for myself. Everyone goes through seasons of life where life is busier. And of course, when that happens, it's not really surprising that we have less time for ourselves, but that's not what this is about. I'm talking about when we chronically and perpetually feel like we have no time at all, no matter what we do, no matter how hard we work, no matter how much we put into our lives, we have no time for ourselves. And that's frustrating. I've been there, believe me. I've gone through periods where I felt like I didn't have time for anything outside of work and chores, but I figured out how to break that cycle. Here's what I've learned. You don't want to find time for what's important to you. You need to make time for what's important. You have to be intentional about it. You can't just expect life to slow down because it doesn't slow down. Waiting around for it to get better is just gonna disappoint you. So how do you make time for what's important to you? You need to structure your day and your week around the fact that you need time to do what's important to you. Even if it's just for a little while every day and every week, it makes all the difference when you take this approach. It's not about trying to be productive and rush through our daily lives. It's about making time for the things that are important to you and figuring out how you're gonna do that ahead of time without waiting around for that to happen. Let me give an example. I got to a point in my life where I wanted to make my health more of a priority, but I didn't feel like I had any time for working out. Because I had so little time, it made the most sense for me to work out at home. So I decided to add 30 minutes of exercise to my morning routine, which required me to get up earlier. Getting up earlier was hard at first, but making time for what was important to me made me feel like I had more time for myself. You wanna spend your time in a way that supports what's important to you. It doesn't mean you're always going to spend your time doing things that involve your own free time, because there are lots of different things that are important to you. Sometimes we don't always know what's important to us until we don't have time to do it anymore. When that time is taken away, we get frustrated. If it's taken away for long enough, we can really start to suffer. But when we spend our time supporting the things that are important to us, whether it's spending time with family, playing video games, exercising, or whatever else we like to do, we feel better. We're living the life we want because we're spending our time doing what's important to us. And the way to do that is by managing our time effectively. If you wanna learn how to spend your time more effectively so you can live the life you want, like this video and subscribe to our channel to see more videos like this one. You can also check out our website in the link below. Leave a comment telling us what you wish you had more time for. Thanks for watching.