I slept 51.81 hours per week — not amazing, but not awful either, at just a little under seven-and-a-half hours per day. For all my middle-of-the-night nursing sessions (I logged 146 interrupted nights), I was making up the time somewhere. Indeed, my log showed naps, gloriously long nights in hotel rooms by myself and mornings of handing the baby over to my husband with a simple “your turn.”

There are 168 hours in a week. If I worked 37.40 and slept 51.81, this left 78.79 hours for other things. This is a lot of space. Even if I felt I was constantly packing lunches, I spent a mere 9.09 hours weekly on housework and errands. There was some driving around — 7.84 hours a week — but there was also time for singing karaoke twice, picking strawberries, peaches and apples and even two solo beach days for me: one on the Atlantic, one on the Pacific. My life wasn’t just train-car-bathroom pumping.

I am not the only one for whom time tracking has led to a sense of abundance. I have found that for women especially, it is the best antidote to the pernicious narrative that professional success requires harsh sacrifices at home.

Amy Mahon, a partner in the London office of the law firm Clifford Chance, works 60 hours a week. That might suggest she never sees her 4-year-old daughter. But her logs show otherwise. She works two late nights and the other three goes home early for family time (with some work after her daughter goes to bed). She rarely goes into the office on weekends — she does one to two hours at home around family commitments.

The normal narrative laments the two late nights while ignoring Saturday, Sunday and the fact that she brings her daughter to school most days. “You need to look at it as a whole,” she says of her schedule. “There’s time for it all.”

Kim Armentrout, the pastor of the Englewood United Methodist Church in Englewood, Ohio, began a yearlong time-logging project in January. “My work can change so much from one season to the next,” she says. Holy Week was stressful (58 hours of work). But like me, she realized that “I did tell myself false stories.”

One: A funeral meant she could do nothing else all week. She timed the commitment and realized it was only five hours at a funeral home, seven if it was held at the church. “It’s kind of a gift to not tell myself that story anymore,” she says. She can focus on the grieving while knowing other important church work will still get done. Another story: As a pastor with irregular hours, she was neglecting her husband and daughter. Her logs, however, showed she spent over 30 hours a week interacting with them, a huge proportion of the time her school-age child was home and awake. The realization: “I can stop feeling guilty.”