Is mum guilt just a judgement on how we spend our time?

Not the concept itself, more the lack of time I seem to have.

My children, who seem to be going through a parroting phase at the moment, often tell me "we just don't have time for that" (cue mum guilt).

But I cant help thinking how the value of time has increased significantly since I have had kids and more recently, since I've returned to work full time.

I am constantly working on my work-life balance, as in trying to balance my time.

Most arguments with my husband are about making time for me to exercise, or carving out a few hours for him to remove the palm tree currently growing in our gutters. We seem to be trying to invent hours that simply don't exist.

My kids will tell you the minutes between 8am and 8.20am are some of the most frantic in our week.

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I've been trying to make the effort to go at the two-year-old's pace lately, but seriously, that only seems feasible on a Sunday if I'm honest. Particularly because he's going through his 'picking up and examining all the rocks' phase.

It seems since hitting my 30s time has become more valuable. I value my own time more, I value other people's time more.

The mum guilt memes on socials are targeting time. If I read "the days are long but the years are short" or "you can't get this time back" when I'm scrolling at 2am again I think I'll scream.

Time Management expert, author and mother of five children, Laura Vanderkam regularly discusses time, parenting and working.

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She regularly talks about 168 hours, which is the amount of hours everyone has in one week. Mrs Vanderkam, Taylor Swift and I all have the same amount of hours in a week. She is all about respecting that. She takes issue with "you'll never meet a mum who wished she worked more" comment that is flung around the Internet.

"I think the most problematic part of this comment - well, other than the idea that 40 hours of childcare out of 168 hours in a week means someone else is raising your kid - is that work and time with kids are inevitably at odds with each other," she said in a blog post.

"This can only be true if work and childcare are the only activities that fill women's time. In reality, women do a variety of things with their hours."

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Mrs Vanderkam has studied how people spend time and how it's changed throughout history.

"Time with children and time spent at work could both rise if some of the other categories fell enough," she wrote.

"Over the entire population, this is exactly what happened between the 1960s and today. Women started doing a lot less housework. Indeed, there was almost an hour by hour trade-off, averaged over the entire population, of housework for paid work. Time spent with children rose."

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So I'm starting to think about how I spend my time more. Do I need to spend 116 minutes a day scrolling Instagram? No. But I also shouldn't feel guilty about the 30 minutes I spend putting my content for Instagram together.

I've obviously got some work to-do and maybe a trial separation with my phone is in the future.

But for the most part, valuing my time, and the time of people around me will remain important. Now to get rid of the palm tree in our gutter....

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