Significance: Lack of time is often reported by women to be a barrier to being physically active. To increase physical activity participation among women, it is important to examine if perceived lack of time for physical activity reflects actual time commitments. Purpose: Therefore, the purpose of this study was to assess how women spend their time and to identify times during the week they could be more physically active. Design: Participants were 249 African American and Hispanic women, aged 45 to 70 years. Participants completed an intensive 2-week observational protocol during which time they completed a diary of all activity lasting at least 10 minutes in duration. To assess how women spend their time, minutes per week in each activity reported in the diary were aggregated into the following categories: occupation, sports/exercise, housework, child care, pet care, yard work, personal care, transportation, volunteer work, religious activities, and other. “Other” included low intensity leisure-time light activities, such as reading. To determine sedentary times when the women could be performing more intense activities, the percentage of women performing “other” activities was calculated. An activity performed by at least 50% of the women was considered to be important for intervention purposes. The mean and median number of minutes spent performing each of these light activities were computed. Results: Over a week, African American and Hispanic participants spent the most time working at jobs (28.60 and 17.92 hours, respectively), doing housework (10.67 and 18.94 hours, respectively), engaging in personal care tasks (15.36 and 15.99 hours, respectively), using transportation (13.86 and 12.80 hours, respectively), and doing “other” tasks (33.13 and 33.18 hours, respectively). Little time was spent in sports and exercise (54.88 and 90.92 minutes, respectively). A total of 28 hours per week was spent in sedentary leisure-time activity. The activities within the “other” dimension hypothesized to be most changeable were sitting or lying down watching television, sitting and talking in person or on the telephone, sitting reading, lying down for a nap or to rest, and sitting quietly not reading. Implications: Women should be encouraged to critically evaluate how they spend their time and, with this knowledge, plan ways to add moderate to vigorous physical activity into their daily routines. More interventions should be developed to teach women to substitute moderate to vigorous physical activities for their sedentary activities. Keyword(s): health promotion, physical activity, research