Build the Life You Want With the Hours You Have, Says Time Management Expert
Photo: YANA SHELLMAN
We all have the same amount of time—24 hours a day and 168 hours a week, said time management expert Laura Vanderkam. Some people accomplish a lot with their time, both professionally and personally.
“They don’t have any more time than the rest of us,” she said, during a recent Deputy Director for Management Seminar Series lecture. “They are allocating their hours in interesting ways that the rest of us can learn from.”
To make the most of our time, we must figure out where our time is going now, she suggested.
“It’s the same as any study we’re doing—you want to make sure you’re working from good data,” she explained. The only way to get that is to track it.
There are lots of ways to keep an eye on time. Vanderkam, for instance, has charted her hours on weekly spreadsheets for the past nine years. Each day, she writes down what she’s doing three times a day. Others use notebooks or time-tracking apps. The tool itself doesn’t matter. What matters is it gets done.
“I suggest people try tracking their time for a week, ideally,” she said. They should add up how many hours are spent on work, sleep, commuting, family and friends, household chores, watching television or volunteering.
Some people, however, are resistant to the recommendation. Often, they don’t want to know how much time they may be wasting. Figuring out where time really goes is not about playing gotcha but rather “making sure we’re not telling ourselves stories about our lives that aren’t true.”
Vanderkam has studied stories people tell about how they spend their time. One of the most common tales describes how many hours people work. In hybrid offices, what a work week looks like is more ambiguous.
“We’re not punching in from 9 to 5,” she noted. Employees now work all over the country or even the world. Work calls can take place late at night or early in the day.
“If you don’t know what a work week truly looks like, it’s really hard to assign time to different projects and priorities,” Vanderkam said. “If you don’t know the denominator, you’re guessing on the numerator.”
After someone documents their schedule for a week, they must ask themselves three questions. What do they like most about their schedule, what do they want to spend more time on and what do they want to spend less time doing?
Many people consume a lot of time and effort thinking about how to get things off their plate. Vanderkam advised a different strategy.
“We don’t build the lives we want by saving time,” she said. “We build the lives we want and then time saves itself.”
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Every Friday afternoon, she suggested, people should list priorities for their career, relationships and self for the upcoming week to “turn what might be wasted time into some of our most productive minutes.”
Ideally, each item on the list is a step towards a larger goal. Unplanned things will always come up, so it’s important to tackle as many things on the list as early as possible in the week—on Monday or Tuesday. Making progress on priorities earlier in the week allows people to get to them before something interrupts their week or it gives folks time to get to everything.
Vanderkam regularly hears there isn’t enough time in the day.
“We won’t get to everything that is important to us in any given day, but we don’t live our lives in days,” she emphasized. “We live our lives in weeks. By looking at the whole of the week, we see just how much space there is.”
If a person works 40 hours a week and sleeps eight hours a night, that leaves 72 hours for other things. Things don’t have to happen at the same time every day. A person, for instance, doesn’t have to exercise every day during their lunch break. Instead, they can fit in exercise when they have a morning without a meeting or on a free evening.
“Anything that happens three times a week is a habit,” she said. “Three times is doable. Often, we’re already doing stuff once, sometimes twice. Getting to three times a week is not that hard.”
A surprising number of successful people build open space into their schedule. It’s practical because everything takes longer than anticipated.
Vanderkam added that using time well is also about pursuing opportunities as they come. Spend more time in a meeting, for example, if a great idea comes up rather than cutting the session short.
Vanderkam also advised caution with the word “yes,” when asked to do something in the future. Many times, people have a hard time saying no, especially when a deadline is far off and their calendar looks open.
“A better question to ask yourself when you’re asked to do something is ‘Would I do this tomorrow?’” she explained. “If you are tempted to move things around or cancel things, say ‘yes.’”
Another approach would be to look at what’s already on the calendar and figure out whether 30-minute meetings can become quick phone calls.
Using these strategies can help maximize your time at work and at home. “However busy you are, you can build the life you want in the time that you’ve got,” Vanderkam concluded.