> 2. Cooking: 3 h (who the hell cooks three times a day?)

i work from home so i do usually. once you get good at cooking, most restaurant food is un-appetizing or extremely expensive for what you are receiving. it also helps me maintain my weight and not be a complete fatass.

i still eat out a couple of times a week but i'd say a good 75% to 90% of my meals are cooked at home. par-cooking common ingredients in batches helps a lot. it's basically like running a small commercial kitchen for myself.

once you get good at cooking it's basically a 'flow' activity. line cooks get 'in the zone' when the rush hits.

also, once you get the basics down most day to day meals take about 10-15 minutes to cook, not including roasting time which is passive.

the only downside for cooking to me is the cleanup. that never stops sucking for me and brings out my lazy streak.

I think if you actually timed some of this stuff your numbers might need to be adjusted. For example, unless your 1/2hr laundry is drop-off/pick-up from a service, it takes a couple hours to run a load through a washer, dryer & fold to put away. Ditto with errands. Some weeks you get lucky. Other weeks, not so much.

People with children at home will obviously have very different time allocations (I do laundry almost daily, and if I let it pile up to fold once a week it takes 2-3hours to fold and put away everything. Family meal times can take 2hours each, depending whether we get the food ready quickly and the kids feel like eating. Someone is always sick. )

Not OP, but laundry for me consumes about that much time, since I swing by a local (self-service, in my apt complex) laundromat to drop things in the wash, which takes a couple minutes, swing by again to transfer to dryer, and then the third time to pick it up, at which point it gets folded. Those might take place over the course of a couple hours, but 1.5hrs is spent doing other things. Not at all unreasonable.

> 2. Cooking: 3 h (who the hell cooks three times a day?)

People who enjoy cooking, and people who actually care for their health.

I explicitly divide my "cooking" into two categories. Food I make to sustain my body, and food I make because I like it as an activity. Most of the meals I eat fall under the former category, and so I personally prefer to eat meals that make themselves (e.g. drop some wieners into a pan, light up the stove, come back in 5 minutes, done) or to order - any time spent on preparing them is time wasted for me. Cooking for pleasure is something I'd put into "hobby" section, and thus not count it as a chore (cleaning up after it - that's another thing).

I think the meals I have are quite healthy, I just cook once a day. Also, if you enjoy cooking, wouldn't you add it to the free time because it's a hobby?

This! When I cook for fun (i.e. friends) I wouldn't count it as a chore, and the daily meals either I do big batches of stuff and freeze them (i.e. this sunday I cooked about 1kg of bolognese sauce that's now frozen in 1 servings) or I cook something that doesn't really take more than 20-30 minutes of active cooking.

Time spent cooking isn't a factor when determining the health of the meal.

I make five medium sized breakfast burrito's on Sunday night and refrigerate them. One every morning. That's a whole wheat wrap, a couple eggs, green peppers, and chopped onions. This takes me about a half hour on Sunday including cleanup and 5 seconds to grab one out of the fridge each morning. I supplement it with a granola bar.

I won't claim to be ultra concerned with my dietary balance, but you definitely don't need to spend a ton of time cooking to be healthy.

I once spent a few months alternating between cooking up a batch of "the concoction" on a weekend afternoon, and eating nothing but that over the next two weeks.

If it tasted better, I might still be doing it. It's actually the same sort of thing prisons feed to problem inmates to punish misbehavior, except they call it "nutriloaf", and put more actual food in it.

Mine was mostly eggs, coconut oil, and chia seed. It looked horrible, but it barely tasted like anything at all. I might tweak my recipe and try it again some day, but the family won't even look in its general direction, so somebody still has to actually cook meals.

Even so, that can be reduced to twice a day if you cook in batches (i.e. have leftovers for lunch). That seems more optimal to me without compromising the healthy aspect.

Agree and extend with the suggestion to try healthy fast food. Take advantage of products like fresh instant salad in a bag, or frozen stir fry vegetables in a bag.

I'll have my wok cleaned and put away for next time before the frozen pizza chefs have their oven preheated. Or I'll be half done eating my lunch salad before the frozen burrito comes out of the microwave.

I'm not sure that "open bag, dump salad on plate" even counts as cooking, but that's like 1/3 of my meals and the "cooking" process takes about 10 seconds.

I suppose it depends how you define cooking. If I'm at home, I'll generally make something 3 times a day but breakfast is usually something really quick and lunch will tend to be a sandwich or heated leftovers. I like cooking but I can't really imagine cooking multiple full-blown meals a day. I don't eat that much even if someone else is doing the cooking.

In the US, it is a hell of a lot cheaper to cook for yourself than to eat out. For poorer folks, it is the only option, or ramen.

Ramen is cooking for yourself! It's very expensive if you eat out[0].

[0] http://tokiunderground.com/

I meant instant ramen. I put ramen in a different category as that takes much less time than cooking from raw ingredients.

You say free time is your priority, but even with this ideal list (it makes some very unrealistic assumptions) your free time is only 50% of your responsibilities time.

Yes, it could be more. I'm actually thinking about reducing my working hours. Could you elaborate on which assumptions seem unrealistic to you? I tried to list them as honest as possible, but for sure I might have overlooked something. The estimated free time aligns quite well with my daily perception (also, I could see 'staying healthy' as free time, because I go rock climbing and thats just something I love to do as a hobby).

On second thought, "very unrealistic" was harsh. I (or anyone) could nitpick a few hours per week here and there but nothing significant. You are right that it's really just about current life situation. As a married homeowner, my responsibility time is much higher, hah.

No kidding! I feel like my wife & I get somewhere between 1-2hr/day of discretionary time, and it's not in large blocks most days... and it includes things like calling the utility provider to figure out a billing problem, vacation & event planning, chatting with neighbors/friends, and anything else that isn't a natural part of the "committed parent + homeowner" categories.

If you include sleeping as a responsibility.

Absolutely. I definitely would not do if I didn't have to!

It distorts the statistics a bit, though. You could have 75% of your waking hours be free time and still calculate that you're spending half your time on 'responsibilities'.

Is this created from actual measurement or what you think you spend your time on?

No, it's not from actual measurement. I tried to think through my days in the past few weeks. But even if I'm off an hour here or there, I'd never come down to just 10 hours of free time a week.

How have you produced less dirt? I've been trying it out. No shoes in the house has helped a lot but I'm curious about what other ways there are.

Not OP but: High quality mats inside and outside every entrance to the house/apartment. I use a stiff bristle mat outside and a softer/more absorbent mat inside.

It's not that nasty if you have non-carpeted floors and a swiffer. Living somewhere warmer (no salt, snow, etc.) helps too.

I don't have orthopedic problems, but I've found that I'm generally more comfortable by the end of the day if I'm wearing shoes at home vs barefoot or slippers. This is especially true if I spend a few hours in the kitchen standing up to cook, etc.

Additionally, where I grew up it's odd/rude for a visitor to remove their shoes or be asked to remove their shoes. Different strokes and all that. :)

Curious where you grew up, because I've noticed lately (since we stopped wearing shoes in the house), that almost all our visitors -- no matter what their ethnicity or place of origin -- tend to either volunteer to remove theirs or tell us they also don't wear shoes indoors.