The Life Pie — A Brutally Honest Look at Where Your Time Actually Goes

A few weeks ago I sat down and did the life pie exercise again — draw a circle, divide it into slices, be honest about where your time actually goes.

I’d been putting it off, if I’m honest — not because it’s hard, but because I had a fairly solid idea of what it would show, and if I get a rare spare moment lately, I’d rather just switch off than sit down and do something like this. A few months into fatherhood, running on broken sleep and a job that doesn’t slow down just because you have, I was fairly confident the pie was going to be skewed in a few directions. A reasonable chunk of work. A lot of chores. A sliver of everything else. The kind of picture that makes you wince.

I’ve written before about the first time I did this exercise — a work training session, a sports coach, a whiteboard, and a version of my life pie that genuinely stopped me cold. Some people call this a wheel of life. He called it the life pie, and the name just stuck. If you haven’t read that one, it’s worth doing first — it’s the origin story, the moment the whole idea landed for me. This isn’t that post. This is the ongoing bit. What happens when you drag the same exercise out years later, in a completely different season of life, and actually look at it again.

Life pie, wheel of life — different name, same idea

Here’s the pie, roughly, from the last few months:

Sleep — 33%. Work — 28%. Family and friends — 20%. Exercise — 5%. Hobbies — 5%. Chores — 5%. Transit — 4%.

Not the disaster I’d braced for. Which was, itself, a bit disorienting. I’d built up a story in my head about how much a baby messes with your schedule, and the pie mostly just… didn’t agree with me. Turns out bracing for impact and actually getting hit are two different things.

Sleep being the biggest slice surprised me most, and I want to be honest about what that number is actually hiding. It’s broken sleep. Awake more than once most nights, the kind of tired that sits behind your eyes by mid-afternoon. But the bookends are good — I still get to bed early and I’m still up early, and there’s enough total sleep happening in between the interruptions that the number holds up better than the experience of it would suggest. A pie can be technically fine and still feel like a slog. Worth remembering that a slice size doesn’t tell you anything about how a slice actually felt.

The slice that grew, and why

Family and friends sitting at 20% is higher than it’s ever been for me, and I know exactly why. We’ve been forced to slow down. There isn’t really a version of having a seven-month-old that doesn’t involve more time at home, more time just being present (she demands it), more time doing very little that looks like anything from the outside.

The honest bit — the bit I nearly left out — is that friends are folded into that slice almost by accident rather than by design. It’s overwhelmingly family time. When friends do show up, it’s normally with the family there too — a barbecue, a walk, someone coming over rather than a night out. This isn’t necessarily on purpose. It’s just what fits right now. Whether that’s a problem or just a season, I genuinely don’t know yet. I suspect it’s the latter.

Where the slices stop staying in their lanes

One thing this round of the exercise made obvious that I hadn’t fully clocked before: the categories don’t hold still. They blur into each other constantly, and the pie chart pretends they don’t.

Exercise these days mostly happens as a walk — with my daughter, sometimes with my wife too. Is that exercise? Family time? Both, clearly, but a pie chart forces you to pick a slice and move on. Hobbies are similar — anything I do for myself happens in the gaps when she’s asleep, which means hobby time is really nap-time-gambling dressed up as a category. None of this is a flaw in the exercise. It’s just a reminder that the pie is a simplification, not a spreadsheet. Useful for spotting drift, not precise enough to run your life by the decimal point.

The bit that changes with the seasons

Chores sit at 5% right now, and that number is doing less than it looks like on paper. It covers the actual list — vacuuming, bathrooms, three or four loads of washing over the weekend, dishes most nights, a share of the cooking. Roughly three hours each day of the weekend, thirty minutes or so on weeknights.

What it doesn’t include, because it isn’t happening right now, is the garden. In summer that same slice picks up another few hours a week — mowing, keeping the yard in check, the kind of maintenance that just doesn’t exist as a task in the middle of winter with a newborn in the house. I’ve written before about how much the garden gives me, and how little of me it’s been getting lately. This is the numbers confirming what I already suspected. Some slices don’t shrink because you stopped caring. They shrink because the season took the time somewhere else, and something has to give.

It’s a decent reminder that a life pie drawn in July and the same life pie drawn in January can look different without anything having gone wrong. Context matters. A pie without a season attached to it is only half telling the truth.

The slice that’s already changing and doesn’t know it yet

Work at 28% is the one I keep coming back to, because it’s the one place where the pie is quietly out of date the moment I’ve drawn it.

I’ve been trying to wind work hours back for a while now — nothing dramatic, just a slow, deliberate pulling back from the twelve-hour-day instinct that got me into trouble once already. The last few weeks have actually been better on that front. Genuinely better. But this pie reflects the last few months as a whole, not the improvement that’s happened most recently, so the number still shows the old pattern rather than the new one.

That’s the thing nobody mentions about this exercise: it’s a snapshot, not a live feed. By the time you’ve drawn it, it’s already slightly behind you. Which means the useful question isn’t just what does the pie say — it’s also what do I know that the pie doesn’t show yet. In my case, that work is already trending the right way, even if the slice hasn’t caught up to admit it.

When I actually do this

The old advice — mine included, in an earlier draft of this exact post — was to do this every six months or so. I don’t, and I’ve stopped pretending I should.

My wife and I do a proper yearly review together (a post for another day), and that’s probably the most natural home for this exercise if you want a recurring one. But mostly I do it ad hoc — when something’s shifted enough that I want an honest look, when things might not feel right, or when I’m doing some bigger picture thinking anyway and it seems like the right moment to check. This was the first time I’d properly sat down and drawn it since my daughter arrived. Given how much changes with a new baby, I went in expecting the pie to have been knocked completely sideways. Mostly, it hadn’t. The one real opportunity — winding work back further — was already underway. I just couldn’t see it yet in the numbers.

Draw yours

If you want to try this yourself: draw a circle, divide it honestly, and don’t aim for a tidy result. Expect some slices to blur into each other. Expect the season you’re in to explain more than you’d like. And don’t be surprised if the thing you’re already quietly working on hasn’t shown up in the pie yet — that’s not the exercise failing. That’s just timing.

I sat down expecting a mess. What I got instead was mostly fine, one slice already improving quietly in the background, and a clearer sense of where the real work still is.

Draw the circle. See what it tells you. Then get on with your week.

— Dave

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