Laura Vanderkam is a productivity and time-management expert who has written for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune and Fast Company, among others. She is the author of Off the Clock, What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast, 168 Hours (one of my favorite books of all time) and I Know How She Does It. Laura’s weekly podcast with Sarah Hart-Unger touches on work/life balance and related issues. This popular speaker, writer, mother, choir member and runner offers no list of quick tips and tricks for time management. Rather, she insists, it is about setting priorities: “Even if we are busy, we have time for what matters. And if we focus on what matters, we can build the lives we want in the time we’ve got (re: TEDWomen 2016).”
1) For those unfamiliar, can you please explain the basic tenets, as well as the overall value proposition, of performing a personal time audit and keeping a time log?
If you want to spend your time better, you really need to figure out where your time is going now because if you don’t know where the time is going now, it’s unclear that you will know to change the way you spend your time to the right thing. You may identify something that you thought was a problem but really isn’t. It could also be that something you never even thought about is taking a lot more time than you might have imagined.
You need to make sure that you’re working from good data, and the best way to get that data is to try tracking your time. I usually recommend people do a time audit for a week because a week tends to be the cycle of life as we actually live it. Tuesdays are no more common than Saturdays, but if you think of your life as Tuesdays instead of thinking of your life as Saturdays, you’ll have a very different impression of where your time is spent. As such, we want to make sure that we get both days in there, a Tuesday and a Saturday, as well as all the other days of the week, too.
You could do the audit for more days, but a week is probably about the max that most people are actually going to stick with it. I find that a week is a good amount. I have tracked my time in half-hour blocks. That doesn’t mean I’m writing something down every half hour. I more tend to check in three times a day and write in what I’ve been doing since the last time I checked in. It takes me about three minutes a day, roughly 20minutes a week. It’s really not that much time, but I find it gives me a very good sense of where the time goes.
A lot of leisure time is easy to engage in mindlessly and so people will tell themselves that they have no free time whatsoever. They go through the process of tracking their time, and they discover they are watching two hours of television a night. Or maybe leisure time is spent web surfing here and there for multiple hours a day. Yet these activities do not really result in renewal, which is interesting if you think about it. Why? The truth is these activities are not actually that rejuvenating. Most of us hope that our downtime will give us more energy and the truth is these activities actually tend not to give us more energy.
The key point is there are two kinds of fun. There’s effortless fun and there’s effortful fun. Effortless fun is just like it sounds, fun that takes no effort whatsoever. You don’t have to plan it. You don’t have to do anything to partake in it. You can sit in your pajamas on the couch. So stuff like watching television, surfing the web — that can all be effortless fun, and that’s fine. We all need some of that in our lives. The issue is that it tends not to be very memorable so we do not notice this time spent in the same way that we would with some effortful fun.
Effortful fun is things like getting together with friends, going out to dinner with your spouse, doing a hobby, doing something like joining a choir, practicing with the choir and performing with them. These are all effortful fun — meaning they take work. You have to plan time for them. You have to often organize them with other people. It takes effort to do them. The thing is those things are so much more memorable than effortless kinds of fun. We tend to remember effortful fun, and as we remember these experiences it seems to stretch time because our perception of time is shaped by how many distinct memories we have accumulated. We don’t tend to remember effortless fun or our brains lump them all together as one memory.
You can spend an evening throwing a dinner party, having close friends over for a potluck. Or you can spend an evening looking at photos on Instagram of other people’s dinner parties. Both are fun, both are a way you could spend leisure time. One takes a lot more work than the other, but one is also a lot more memorable than the other and arguably more fun.
3) A friend shared a James Schall quote that’s stuck with me, “Savoring life in some way requires being willing to waste it, so as not to be constantly fixated on whether we are using it well. Time’s too precious to treat it as precious.” Given your expertise on the topic of time, what do you make of this passage?
I generally agree with the merits of feeling off the clock. It is nice when we do not need to figure out what we have to do next — when we are not tied to some certain time that we have to stop doing something we are enjoying and move to something else. That feels very cool. That’s a very pleasant thing, a pleasant experience to feel off the clock, hence, the title of my last book.
That said, I really do believe that it is time discipline that leads to time freedom. Most of us live very full, busy lives. It is difficult to get those open spots of time unless you make arrangements for them. It is fun to cuddle up on the couch with your spouse, but what are your kids doing? If you have a toddler, you’ve got to keep the toddler from falling down the stairs. When a child goes to bed, how late can you stay up before somebody’s paying the piper when the kid wakes up at 5 a.m.?
Are you free from making arrangements to ensure that something that needs to happen is going to happen? Without discipline, you may come home to no food in the house (and everyone’s going to be miserable). For instance, did you make arrangements that groceries got delivered?
These are just examples, but the fact is this logistical stuff has to happen. If you haven’t made arrangements or systems for it to happen it is going to weigh on your brain. You’re sitting there trying to relax and enjoy your time with your spouse and you are like “Wait, what am I doing Monday morning at work?” You are thinking about other stuff so you aren’t really off the clock at all. You need to create the needed discipline so that you can truly go off the clock.
Lastly, it is of note that this will be different for men and women. Men often feel more relaxed in their downtime because they have assumed that the women in their life have dealt with these details. I know that that is not the case in all families but a lot of the people I write for are women who wind up shouldering the lion’s share of their family’s logistical details. I wonder when people say, “I just want to relax and do nothing,” if they assume they can relax and do nothing because someone else has dealt with the other details of their life.
For those who are not in a position where someone else is dealing with the details of their life then you need to figure out how you can share that load or set up specific systems for you to be able to go off the clock.
4) The unexpected passing of my brother drives my pursuit of helping people have more fun. After his death, I stumbled upon the Ric Elias TED Talk, “3 Thing I Learned While My Plane Crashed,” where he discovered after a near-death experience that he was the collector of “bad wines” — a powerful message, in my opinion, about the opportunity cost and lost when we do not take advantage of the chances to engage in experience. How can the use of time be leveraged to ensure we are not the collector of bad wines?
Engaging in experiences and in things that are adventures is a great way to spend our time. When I did this time audit study for “Off the Clock” I had 900 people with full-time jobs and families track their time for a day, and I asked them questions about how they felt about the way they spent their time. I found that many of the people with what I call the highest time-perception scores — people who felt like time was abundant — were highly likely to have done very interesting things. On the Monday that I had them track, those with high time perception scores went to salsa dancing lessons on a Monday night, went to a big band concert on a Monday night —even took their family to see a movie on a Monday night.
These are things that are available to do, it is just we tend not to on a weekday. I would assume that the reason is that we always feel like, “Well, I’m tired.” Or, “I worked all day, I just want to do nothing.” It’s impossible to do nothing, you are always doing something, but as we have already discussed, that something can be effortless or effortful.
Too many days of effortless fun turns into weeks and months that are not memorable. There’s a quote that I have in my book from somebody who goes, “Very often when we say, ‘Where did the time go?’ what we actually mean is, ‘I don’t remember where the time went.'” When we don’t have interesting experiences we do not remember where our time went. Whole years can wind up disappearing into memory sinkholes. Time… just gone.
In contrast, if we have meaningful experiences, if we put interesting memorable things in our time, then we do remember the experience and that makes us feel like we have more time. What I have shared are just examples, some people may feel like salsa dancing on a Monday sounds like the eighth circle of hell — that’s fine, to each her own.
I suggest, however, that there are probably some things that you like to do — even if you’re incredibly introverted — that you could be doing more. You may have one or two close friends that you would like to see one-on-one some of the time. It could be that it’s choosing to play a board game with your family instead of sort of letting the evening pass away mindlessly. It could be that you want to go on a walk in an interesting place in the evening, rather than having the evening simply pass you by.
Think about the little adventures you can have and if you do these things occasionally then you will remember these days. When you remember these days, then your days don’t just disappear.
5) What is a newbie tip for someone just getting started with time logging that will help them succeed? What is a pro tip for someone who has time logged a few times looking to increase the value of the exercise?
If you have never tried tracking your time before, you might challenge yourself to first just get through the exercise for a day. The best way to have momentum on this is to go ahead and recount yesterday. Start thinking about what time you got up yesterday morning, what you did after that, what you did after that and see if you can re-create a mental picture of what you did yesterday. If you can, great! You have already started; you’ve got one-day’ worth of data. Now do that again. Great, now you’ve got two days.
If manageable, that is a good way to get started. If you cannot remember a full day accurately, a successful part of tracking time is having some sort of trigger to remind yourself to write down what you were doing. If you need breaks in the day to accurately time track, figure out what is something you do, semi-frequently, that will nudge you to document what you have been doing the past few hours. For many people, if you take a bathroom break during the day this can be a trigger. Come back and write down what you’ve been doing since your last bathroom break, and then finalize any documentation before you go to bed at night. Doing it this way, most people will have several check-ins during the day, which is a great way to get started. One more thing for newbies: don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good. It is not about recording what you are doing every five minutes — half-hour chunks are fine. Furthermore, it is OK to just write “work” or “driving to work” or “hanging out at the house.” You will start, possibly, changing how you are spending your time as a result of tracking your time. That is fine too. You’re more likely to spend actual half-hour blocks on one thing once you start tracking your time — that is OK. At the beginning just don’t make the perfect be the enemy of the good, make it rough. Regardless of your process, you find yourself better about your time just for doing it.
For the pros, one thing you can do after you’ve tracked your time here and there is to create a realistic ideal week for yourself. Before a week starts, map out a schedule of what you would do if the week went exactly as you would envision a good week might go. Important to note, this is within the constraints of your current life. You still have to go to your job, you still have your family, you still have whatever obligations you have, you still have to commute, and you don’t get a flying car in your perfect week. It needs to exist in the realm of the possible. Think about how you would allocate your hours and create your schedule. Once that is complete, track your time again and see how closely it matches up.
If it does not match up, ask yourself why it doesn’t. What sorts of things turn out to be unrealistic in your life? How much extra space do you need to leave for the inevitabilities of life that will come up? Having a realistic, ideal schedule that you can work from can help you realize this ideal.