or: nobody has the spoons
When I think about how I want an area of my life to go, I benchmark against a friend who's good at that thing — a 95th-percentile friend, usually. I want to be as fit as my fittest friend, as fun at parties as my most fun friend, as well-read as the friend who somehow finishes sixty books a year.
Because I do this area by area, I walk around with a vague sense that I'm underperforming the benchmark — in most areas, most of the time. But being 95th percentile at everything is, of course, impossible. It gets even worse when you listen to professionals: productivity from Ali Abdaal, nutrition from a dietician, mobility from a yoga teacher. Each of them takes their area so seriously, and does it so well, that they talk about their standard as though it were the obvious default — and none of them, individually, sounds crazy.
I made this page to show myself how unworkable that is. My experience with the sliders: when I look at any one of these areas on its own, I think "yes, obviously I should be doing at least a reasonable job of that". Then I set everything to what looks like a reasonable level, and it's a completely unworkable quantity of time.
What's counted here is the areas of life you actively point time at — the job included, since you're supposed to be a high performer too. Not counted: sleeping itself, transport, brushing your teeth, the moments between things, and dealing with the unexpected. A week has 168 hours; take out ~53 asleep and ~15 of that connective tissue, and you have roughly hours you can actually aim at priorities.
Hours are the active weekly cost of each level, averaged across pushes and quieter stretches — most of these areas get bursts of attention, not a constant drip; the arithmetic is sketched in each description. The list itself came out of a Saturday evening with my girlfriend, half-joking about what a reasonable standard for each thing would be. Some hours overlap (a social climbing session is exercise and friendship), so the truth is somewhat kinder. It is not fifty hours kinder.
A merely reasonable job of everything — with children set to zero — costs about hours a week, against the ~ you can aim at priorities. That fits, technically, with about hours of slack across the entire week: roughly an hour a day for queues, illness, overrunning novels, and lying on the floor.
Now add children at a reasonable standard (~ hours) and the total is — more than every waking hour of the week. Upgrade everything to "good" and it costs hours before children, which also exceeds your waking hours. "Excellent" across the board is hours, or with children: roughly two entire waking weeks of demand placed on one.
I don't take despair from this. I take calibration. If a reasonable standard everywhere costs more hours than exist, then failing to hold reasonable standards everywhere is not a personal failing — it is arithmetic. The people who appear to do it all are running on some combination of unusual energy, less sleep needed, sharper prioritisation, money converted into time, or quiet costs you only see up close.
What follows instead: cover the bases, and above the baseline treat standards as choices rather than obligations. Life phases make this workable — a demanding job plus small children is precisely the phase in which most sliders are supposed to sit low, with permission. Pick the handful of areas that get real investment this phase, do them properly, and let the rest sit — deliberately, without self-reproach — at "scraping by". High standards held permanently on things far out of reach are just a machine for manufacturing dissatisfaction.
Or, shorter: be self-compassionate, because nobody is doing all of this. Not the dietician, not Ali Abdaal, not the 95th-percentile friend. They are each doing three of them, magnificently, in front of an audience.