“I’ll Leave Myself a Little Time” is The Partridge Family’s quiet, sunlit act of self-rescue—an insistence that even when life feels rushed and heavy, you can still carve out a small pocket of joy and let tomorrow bring its own light.
There’s a certain kind of song that doesn’t try to “win” you in the first ten seconds. It simply opens a window. “I’ll Leave Myself a Little Time” is exactly that kind of record—an unhurried breath at the end of a busy side, a gentle decision set to melody: I’m going to give myself room to feel better, even if I can’t fully explain why. It’s not one of The Partridge Family’s headline smashes, and that’s part of its enduring charm. It has the intimacy of an album track that waited patiently for you to grow into it.
The most important facts are beautifully plain. “I’ll Leave Myself a Little Time” appears on Up to Date (Bell Records), The Partridge Family’s second album, released in 1971. It closes Side Two (listed as track B5)—a placement that feels emotionally perfect, because the song sounds like the last thought you have when the day finally loosens its grip. It was written by Steve Dossick, and multiple track listings and lyric sources credit him specifically. Just as telling is when it was captured: the album’s documented recording dates list May 16, 1970 for “I’ll Leave Myself a Little Time”—meaning this little pocket of optimism was recorded months before the record reached the public, like a message sent ahead to meet you later.
Because it was not released as a single, the song didn’t have its own Hot 100 “debut week” to pin to its sleeve. Instead, it lived inside the success of Up to Date itself—an album that reached No. 3 on the Billboard 200, and was certified Gold on March 25, 1971. The big radio moments from that era came via the album’s hit singles—“Doesn’t Somebody Want to Be Wanted” (Billboard No. 6) and “I’ll Meet You Halfway” (Billboard No. 9)—but “I’ll Leave Myself a Little Time” is the one that feels like it was made for the quieter hour after the applause.
And what does it mean—this modest, almost conversational title? It means choosing gentleness when the world keeps urging speed. The lyric’s core image is sunlight arriving regardless of your worries—tomorrow bringing the sunshine to a brand new day anyway—a line that doesn’t deny hardship so much as it refuses to let hardship take the whole calendar. This is not the language of someone pretending everything is fine. It’s the language of someone practicing a small, brave discipline: leaving space for gladness even when gladness feels undeserved or unexplained.
That’s why the song remains so touching when you hear it now. In the Partridge universe, so much is bright by design—television color, pop gloss, the engineered buoyancy of a family band that always seems to land on its feet. But “I’ll Leave Myself a Little Time” carries a subtler shade: relief. You can almost feel the shoulders lowering as the chorus returns, the way you exhale when you finally admit you’ve been carrying too much for too long.
It’s easy to overlook songs like this because they weren’t built to dominate the room. Yet that’s exactly why they last. They become personal. They become the track you play not to relive a chart year, but to relive a feeling—the feeling that it’s still possible, even late in the day, to choose a different way. To run “old Mister Time” a little less, and let your own heart set the pace for once.