Let's just get the math out of the way before we talk about why you feel like you're constantly running out of time. To find out how many hours are in 1 week, you multiply the 24 hours in a single day by the 7 days that make up a standard week.
That gives us exactly 168 hours.
It sounds like a lot, right? One hundred and sixty-eight. If someone handed you 168 dollars every Sunday and told you to make it last, you’d probably feel okay about it. But when it comes to time, those hours vanish. Most of us feel like we’re operating on about 40 hours total, probably because we mentally categorize our lives into "work" and "everything else," forgetting that the "everything else" includes sleeping, eating, and staring blankly at the fridge wondering why we opened it.
Breaking Down the 168 Hours
Most people don't actually live in 168-hour blocks. We live in "awake" blocks. If you’re getting the recommended eight hours of sleep—which, let's be honest, many of us aren't—that’s 56 hours a week spent in bed. Suddenly, your usable time drops to 112 hours.
If you work a standard 40-hour week, you’re down to 72.
Now, subtract the commute. Subtract the 10 hours a week you probably spend scrolling through Reels or TikTok. Subtract the mundane chores. What’s left is your "discretionary time," and for the average American, it's significantly less than you think. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) American Time Use Survey, the average person spends about 5.2 hours per day on leisure activities. Multiply that by seven, and you’ve got about 36.4 hours of "fun" time buried within that 168-hour total.
It’s a math problem that doesn't always add up emotionally.
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Some weeks feel like they last a year. Others pass in a blink. This is what psychologists call "time perception." When you're doing something new or scary, your brain records more data, making the week feel longer. When you're stuck in a monotonous routine, your brain takes fewer "snapshots," and the 168 hours seem to evaporate into a single, blurry memory.
Why 168 Is the Magic Number for Productivity Experts
You might have heard of Laura Vanderkam. She’s a productivity expert who basically wrote the book on this—literally, it’s called 168 Hours. Her whole argument is that we actually have plenty of time, we’re just terrible at accounting for it.
When we say "I don't have time to go to the gym," what we’re usually saying is "That’s not a priority in my 168 hours."
Think about it this way. There are 1,440 minutes in a day. That’s 10,080 minutes in a week. If you spend 30 minutes exercising, you’ve used roughly 0.3% of your weekly time. Framing it that way makes "not having time" sound a bit silly. But humans aren't robots. We can't optimize every single minute without burning out.
The 168-hour perspective is meant to be liberating, not a tool for self-shaming. It’s about realizing that even after a full-time job and a healthy sleep schedule, there are still 72 hours left over. That is three full days of time scattered throughout the week in bits and pieces.
The Daylight Savings Glitch
Of course, the "168 hours" rule isn't actually true twice a year.
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In the spring, when we "spring forward" for Daylight Saving Time, the week technically has only 167 hours. In the fall, when we "fall back," the week stretches to 169 hours. It’s a tiny shift, but it’s enough to mess with our circadian rhythms and, statistically, increase the risk of heart attacks and car accidents on the following Monday. Our bodies are incredibly sensitive to that one-hour fluctuation in the weekly total.
Cultural Differences in How We View the Week
Not everyone looks at 168 hours the same way. In many European countries, the "work" portion of those hours is strictly capped. In France, the 35-hour workweek is legendary. If you compare a French worker to an American worker, the "free" portion of their 168 hours looks very different.
Then there’s the concept of "time poverty."
This is a real thing studied by sociologists. Time poverty happens when you have so many obligations—work, childcare, eldercare, commuting—that you have no control over your 168 hours. It’s a luxury to be able to "audit" your time. For many, those 168 hours are spoken for before the week even begins.
The Physics of a Week
If we want to get really nerdy, we should talk about how the seven-day week is actually a bit of a human invention. Unlike a day (one rotation of Earth) or a year (one orbit around the Sun), a week doesn't have a direct basis in celestial physics. It’s roughly the time between phases of the moon, sure, but it’s mostly a social construct we’ve agreed upon.
The Babylonians are largely to blame for our 168-hour constraint. They were big on the number seven because they observed seven celestial bodies: the Sun, the Moon, Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, Venus, and Saturn.
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If they had been into the number eight, we’d be dealing with 192-hour weeks. Imagine how much more Netflix we could watch then.
How to Actually Use Your 168 Hours Without Losing Your Mind
If you’re feeling overwhelmed, the best thing you can do is a time audit. It’s boring, but it works. For one week, just track what you’re doing. You don't need a fancy app; a notepad works fine.
What most people find is "time leakage."
It’s the 15 minutes spent waiting for a meeting to start, the 20 minutes spent deciding what to eat, and the hour spent reading arguments on the internet. These aren't "bad" uses of time, but they are often unconscious. When you realize that how many hours are in 1 week is a fixed 168, you start to see those 15-minute leaks as actual drains on your life.
The Realistic Breakdown
Let's look at a "busy" person's week:
- Sleep: 50 hours (7 hours/night)
- Work: 45 hours (including some overtime)
- Commute: 10 hours
- Hygiene/Dressing: 7 hours
- Cooking/Eating: 14 hours
- Total: 126 hours
Even in this "packed" schedule, there are 42 hours remaining. That’s more than a full-time job’s worth of hours just sitting there. The problem isn't a lack of hours. The problem is that the hours are fragmented. It’s hard to write a novel or learn a language in 15-minute increments between loads of laundry.
Actionable Steps to Reclaim Your Week
- The Sunday Night Review. Spend 10 minutes looking at the upcoming 168 hours. Identify the big rocks—the things that must happen.
- Kill the "Not Enough Time" Narrative. Stop saying you don't have time. Start saying "It's not a priority." It changes the psychology from being a victim of the clock to being the boss of it.
- Batch the Mundane. If you spend 30 minutes every day grocery shopping, you're using 3.5 hours of your week. Do it once, and you save 3 hours.
- Protect the "Deep Work" Blocks. Try to find at least two or three 4-hour blocks in your 168 hours where you have zero interruptions. This is where real progress happens.
- Acknowledge the "Sunk" Hours. You are going to lose time to traffic, bad moods, and slow internet. Budget for it. If you plan for 168 perfect hours, you'll fail by Monday afternoon.
The reality of 168 hours is that it's both a lot and very little. It's enough time to change your life, but it's short enough that you can't afford to live it on autopilot. Understanding the math is just the first step; the real trick is figuring out how to make those hours feel like they actually belong to you.
Track your next 168 hours with a simple spreadsheet. Assign every hour a category like "Sleep," "Work," "Leisure," or "Maintenance." By the end of the week, you’ll have a visual map of where your life is actually going, which is usually the wake-up call most of us need to start spending our time intentionally.