BREAKING: Man Who "Never Has Time" Somehow Finds 37 Hours Per Week to Complain About Not Having Time
If there’s one thing Americans love more than avocado toast and iced coffee, it’s a good, solid, multi-layered complaint about how we’re all just running on fumes, hamster-wheel-ing our way through a capitalist nightmare where the entire concept of a weekend has been reduced to a fever dream between two Zoom meetings. And holy hell, do we ever have the data to prove it.
Enter Dave Holcomb, 34, a mid-level regional logistics coordinator from Columbus, Ohio, who this week became an accidental internet icon after his wife, 32-year-old Megan Holcomb, posted a detailed spreadsheet of his weekly activities to Reddit’s r/AITA. The post, titled “AITA for telling my husband he doesn’t have a time management problem, he has a ‘I’m lying to myself and everyone else’ problem?” has racked up over 12,000 upvotes and more gold awards than a Fortnite streamer’s charity drive.
Here’s the kicker: Dave, like approximately 400% of the working population, claims he is “completely out of time.” He says he’s overwhelmed, under-rested, and perpetually one missed deadline away from a full-on mental health crisis. But Megan, a data analyst who apparently runs her household like a small-scale CIA operation, decided to prove his schedule was less “crushing workload” and more “chronic, self-inflicted procrastination with a side of video games.”
She tracked his every move for three weeks. And the results are absolutely, jaw-droppingly, borderline-offensive levels of damning.
The spreadsheet, which Megan shared with permission after blurring out sensitive work data (and his Steam username, which is apparently “xX_TimeCriminal_Xx”), breaks down Dave’s 168-hour week. The findings? Dave clocks in 42 hours of actual, billable work. He sleeps 56 hours (a solid 8 per night, which is more than most new parents get in a calendar year). He spends 10 hours commuting. He spends 8 hours on “basic life maintenance” (showering, eating, the occasional trip to the bathroom). That’s 116 hours accounted for.
That leaves 52 hours. A full 52 hours of “free time” every single week.
So where does it all go? Buckle up, buttercup, because this is where the spreadsheet gets spicy.
According to Megan’s meticulous logs, Dave spends:
- **14 hours per week on his phone, scrolling social media.** That’s two full workdays. Of doomscrolling. On an app that he literally complains “makes him feel empty.”
- **12 hours per week playing “one more round” of Call of Duty.** He plays from 10 PM to midnight every single night, then wakes up groggy and complains he’s “exhausted.”
- **8 hours per week “researching” new hobbies.** This includes 3 hours watching woodworking videos on YouTube, 2 hours reading about hydroponic gardening, and 3 hours meticulously planning a home gym that he will never, ever buy equipment for.
- **5 hours per week complaining about work.** Not doing work. Complaining. Usually to Megan, while she’s trying to cook dinner.
- **4 hours per week watching “just the highlights” of sports games.** He doesn’t even watch the whole game. He watches the curated, action-packed 10-minute recaps. And still claims he “can’t find time to watch the full game.”
- **2 hours per week rearranging the “priority” column on his to-do list.** This is, apparently, a deeply satisfying psychological exercise that makes him feel productive without actually doing anything.
- **1 hour per week “cleaning his desk.”** Which he then uses as an excuse for why he couldn’t start that big project.
Total: 46 hours of “free time” accounted for. That leaves a solid 6 hours unaccounted for, which Megan assumes is spent staring blankly at the fridge, wondering where the leftovers went.
The internet, predictably, did not hold back.
“This is the most aggressive personal attack I’ve ever seen, and it’s not even about me,” wrote user u/DefinitelyNotADave. “I feel like I just got doxxed by a spreadsheet.”
“The fact that he spends more time planning a home gym than actually working out is a whole mood,” added u/SweatyButStopped. “NTA. Divorce him. Marry the spreadsheet.”
“I’m a project manager and I’m legitimately going to use this post in my next team meeting about ‘capacity planning,’” commented u/CubicleWarrior99. “This is the single greatest argument for why WFH is both a blessing and a curse.”
But the real kicker? Dave’s response. When Megan confronted him with the spreadsheet, Dave reportedly got defensive. He claimed that his phone scrolling was “decompressing,” his gaming was “stress relief,” and his hobby research was “intellectual curiosity.” He then told Megan she was being “controlling” and that she “didn’t understand how hard his job is.”
Reader, she had the spreadsheet. She had the receipts. She had the timestamped screenshots of him tweeting about how “this country needs a four-day workweek” while actively ignoring an email from his boss about a project due Friday.
Megan’s final line in the Reddit post is chef’s kiss: “I’m not saying he doesn’t deserve time to relax. I’m saying he’s built a life where he’s relaxing *instead* of working, then blaming the universe for the consequences.”
The post has sparked a massive thread where people are now sharing their own “time audit” horror stories. One woman tracked her husband’s “30-minute” bathroom breaks that actually averaged 45 minutes. Another revealed her partner spends 3 hours a day “meal prepping” but only eats frozen pizza.
And that’s the real tragedy of the modern American workplace, isn’t it
Final Thoughts
After reading this piece, I’m struck by how time has lost its elastic, human rhythm and become a rigid commodity—a ledger of productivity rather than a canvas for experience. The real scandal isn’t that we’re always short on time, but that we’ve stripped it of its natural texture, trading the slow burn of a conversation for the dopamine hit of a notification. In the end, reclaiming time isn’t about better management; it’s about the courage to let it stretch, to let it breathe, and to remember that the richest moments are rarely the most efficient ones.