How should you actually spend your 168 hours a week?
You get 168 hours a week, the same as everyone who has ever complained about not having enough. This model treats them as a budget: rate each activity for the happiness and the meaning an hour of it gives you, lock the hours you genuinely cannot move, and a linear optimizer spends the rest optimally. The answer is almost never that you need more time.
Words on this sheet
- Weighting: How much this item counts against the others.
Life Intermediate Optimization free
After you install, this is the model to open.
Design Your 168-Hour Week
- In your spreadsheet, click the Sortia icon in the strip of icons down the right-hand edge. No strip? Click the arrow at the bottom-right to open it. You can also use Extensions, then Sortia, then Open Sortia.
- Click Start from a template and put that name in the search box.
- Pick the card with that name and click Load this template. It arrives on a new tab with real numbers already in it.
The answer
At the defaults, a week built around a 52-hour job, 45 hours of sleep and 14 hours of scrolling gets rebuilt into a week worth 17% more, without borrowing a single hour from anywhere.
- Optimized well-being score
- 1,070.5 vs 915 today
- Gain from pure reallocation
- +17.0% 155.5 points, same 168 hours
- Hours moved into growth and connection
- 30 per week
- Hours cut from scrolling and commuting
- 18 per week
The current week scores 915. Rearranged inside the exact same 168 hours, with the sleep, job, chores and commute floors all respected, the best available week scores 1,070.5, a gain of 17% from nothing but reallocation. The optimizer gets there by cutting 18 hours of scrolling and commuting, dropping the job to its 40-hour floor, and pushing 30 hours into family, friends, exercise, hobbies and career growth. The six commute hours you cannot delete are the most expensive line in the week: freeing them with a fully remote arrangement is worth another 30 points, taking the week to 1,100.5.
The model
Eleven activities, each rated 1 to 10 for happiness per hour and meaning per hour, each with a floor you refuse to go below and a cap past which extra hours stop paying.
| Total hours | 168 per week, fully allocated |
| Sleep | 49 to 59.5 hours (7 to 8.5 per night) |
| Core job hours | 40 to 55 hours |
| Commute floor | 6 hours (three office days) |
| Chores and errands floor | 7 hours |
| Meals and self-care | 10.5 to 17.5 hours |
| Family time cap | 21 hours (3 per day) |
| Happiness and meaning weights | 0.5 / 0.5, adjustable |
| Current week entered | 52 job, 45 sleep, 14 scrolling, 10 commute, 10 family |
Once it is in your sheet
- The model arrives with real numbers in it and runs as it stands, so you can press the button first and understand it second.
- Change the numbers to yours. The sheet marks which cells are inputs and which hold formulas, and most labels carry a note explaining the row.
- Press the run button at the bottom of the panel. It is labeled for the tool you are in, and the result lands on its own tab, with a written reading of it beside the figures.
Never used Google Sheets? Start here goes the whole way, in seven steps, and assumes nothing.
Next question
- Will a weekend like this cover its costs?Should You Book the Stall?
- You added up the likely costs. Is that enough?Will the Trip Blow the Budget?
- Should you counter the offer, or just take it?Job Offer: Counter or Accept?
- Which apartment should you take?Which Apartment? Score It
- Will the wedding go over budget?Will the Event Go Over Budget?
- Will we actually be ready when the guests arrive?Finish Before the Party?
Every model like this one, and the method behind them: Optimization in Google Sheets.