I prefer to get paid without trading my time for it. Doesn't that sound like a better way to live? Here's another great video:
When people find out I write about time management,
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they assume two things.
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One is that I'm always on time,
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I have four small children,
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and I would like to blame them for my occasional tardiness,
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but sometimes it's just not their fault.
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I was once late to my own speech on time management.
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We all had to just take a moment together and savor that irony.
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The second thing they assume is that I have lots of tips and tricks
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for saving bits of time here and there.
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Sometimes I'll hear from magazines that are doing a story along these lines,
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generally on how to help their readers find an extra hour in the day.
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And the idea is that we'll shave bits of time off everyday activities,
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and we'll have time for the good stuff.
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I question the entire premise of this piece, but I'm always interested
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in hearing what they've come up with before they call me.
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Some of my favorites:
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doing errands where you only have to make right-hand turns --
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Being extremely judicious in microwave usage:
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it says three to three-and-a-half minutes on the package,
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we're totally getting in on the bottom side of that.
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And my personal favorite, which makes sense on some level,
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is to DVR your favorite shows so you can fast-forward through the commercials.
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That way, you save eight minutes every half hour,
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so in the course of two hours of watching TV,
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you find 32 minutes to exercise.
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You know another way to find 32 minutes to exercise?
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Don't watch two hours of TV a day, right?
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Anyway, the idea is we'll save bits of time here and there, add it up,
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we will finally get to everything we want to do.
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But after studying how successful people spend their time
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and looking at their schedules hour by hour,
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I think this idea has it completely backward.
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We don't build the lives we want by saving time.
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We build the lives we want,
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and then time saves itself.
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I recently did a time diary project
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looking at 1,001 days in the lives of extremely busy women.
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They had demanding jobs, sometimes their own businesses,
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kids to care for, maybe parents to care for,
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community commitments --
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I had them keep track of their time for a week
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so I could add up how much they worked and slept,
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and I interviewed them about their strategies, for my book.
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One of the women whose time log I studied
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goes out on a Wednesday night for something.
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She comes home to find that her water heater has broken,
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and there is now water all over her basement.
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If you've ever had anything like this happen to you,
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you know it is a hugely damaging, frightening, sopping mess.
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So she's dealing with the immediate aftermath that night,
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next day she's got plumbers coming in,
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day after that, professional cleaning crew dealing with the ruined carpet.
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All this is being recorded on her time log.
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Winds up taking seven hours of her week.
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That's like finding an extra hour in the day.
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But I'm sure if you had asked her at the start of the week,
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"Could you find seven hours to train for a triathlon?"
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"Could you find seven hours to mentor seven worthy people?"
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I'm sure she would've said what most of us would've said,
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which is, "No -- can't you see how busy I am?"
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Yet when she had to find seven hours
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because there is water all over her basement,
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she found seven hours.
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And what this shows us is that time is highly elastic.
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We cannot make more time,
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but time will stretch to accommodate what we choose to put into it.
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And so the key to time management
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is treating our priorities
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as the equivalent of that broken water heater.
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I like to use language from one of the busiest people I ever interviewed.
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By busy, I mean she was running a small business
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with 12 people on the payroll,
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she had six children in her spare time.
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I was getting in touch with her to set up an interview
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on how she "had it all" -- that phrase.
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I remember it was a Thursday morning,
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and she was not available to speak with me.
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But the reason she was unavailable to speak with me
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is that she was out for a hike,
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because it was a beautiful spring morning,
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and she wanted to go for a hike.
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So of course this makes me even more intrigued,
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and when I finally do catch up with her, she explains it like this.
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She says, "Listen Laura, everything I do,
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every minute I spend, is my choice."
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And rather than say,
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"I don't have time to do x, y or z,"
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she'd say, "I don't do x, y or z because it's not a priority."
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"I don't have time," often means "It's not a priority."
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If you think about it, that's really more accurate language.
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I could tell you I don't have time to dust my blinds,
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but that's not true.
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If you offered to pay me $100,000 to dust my blinds,
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I would get to it pretty quickly.
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Since that is not going to happen,
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I can acknowledge this is not a matter of lacking time;
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it's that I don't want to do it.
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Using this language reminds us that time is a choice.
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there may be horrible consequences for making different choices,
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I will give you that.
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But we are smart people,
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and certainly over the long run,
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we have the power to fill our lives
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with the things that deserve to be there.
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So how do we do that?
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How do we treat our priorities
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as the equivalent of that broken water heater?
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Well, first we need to figure out what they are.
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I want to give you two strategies for thinking about this.
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The first, on the professional side:
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I'm sure many people coming up to the end of the year
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are giving or getting annual performance reviews.
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You look back over your successes over the year,
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your "opportunities for growth."
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And this serves its purpose,
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but I find it's more effective to do this looking forward.
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So I want you to pretend it's the end of next year.
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You're giving yourself a performance review,
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and it has been an absolutely amazing year for you professionally.
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What three to five things did you do that made it so amazing?
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So you can write next year's performance review now.
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And you can do this for your personal life, too.
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I'm sure many of you, like me, come December,
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get cards that contain these folded up sheets of colored paper,
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on which is written what is known as the family holiday letter.
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Bit of a wretched genre of literature, really,
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going on about how amazing everyone in the household is,
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or even more scintillating,
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how busy everyone in the household is.
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But these letters serve a purpose,
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which is that they tell your friends and family
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what you did in your personal life that mattered to you over the year.
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So this year's kind of done,
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but I want you to pretend it's the end of next year,
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and it has been an absolutely amazing year
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for you and the people you care about.
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What three to five things did you do that made it so amazing?
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So you can write next year's family holiday letter now.
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Please, don't send it.
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But you can write it.
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And now, between the performance review and the family holiday letter,
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we have a list of six to ten goals we can work on in the next year.
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And now we need to break these down into doable steps.
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So maybe you want to write a family history.
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First, you can read some other family histories,
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get a sense for the style.
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Then maybe think about the questions you want to ask your relatives,
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set up appointments to interview them.
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Or maybe you want to run a 5K.
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So you need to find a race and sign up, figure out a training plan,
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and dig those shoes out of the back of the closet.
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And then -- this is key --
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we treat our priorities as the equivalent of that broken water heater,
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by putting them into our schedules first.
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We do this by thinking through our weeks before we are in them.
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I find a really good time to do this is Friday afternoons.
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Friday afternoon is what an economist might call
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a "low opportunity cost" time.
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Most of us are not sitting there on Friday afternoons saying,
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"I am excited to make progress
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toward my personal and professional priorities
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But we are willing to think about what those should be.
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So take a little bit of time Friday afternoon,
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make yourself a three-category priority list: career, relationships, self.
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Making a three-category list reminds us
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that there should be something in all three categories.
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Career, we think about;
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relationships, self --
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But anyway, just a short list,
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two to three items in each.
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Then look out over the whole of the next week,
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and see where you can plan them in.
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Where you plan them in is up to you.
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I know this is going to be more complicated for some people than others.
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I mean, some people's lives are just harder than others.
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It is not going to be easy to find time to take that poetry class
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if you are caring for multiple children on your own.
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And I don't want to minimize anyone's struggle.
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But I do think that the numbers I am about to tell you are empowering.
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There are 168 hours in a week.
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Twenty-four times seven is 168 hours.
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That is a lot of time.
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If you are working a full-time job, so 40 hours a week,
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sleeping eight hours a night, so 56 hours a week --
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that leaves 72 hours for other things.
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That is a lot of time.
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You say you're working 50 hours a week,
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maybe a main job and a side hustle.
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Well, that leaves 62 hours for other things.
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You say you're working 60 hours.
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Well, that leaves 52 hours for other things.
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You say you're working more than 60 hours.
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There was once a study comparing people's estimated work weeks
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They found that people claiming 75-plus-hour work weeks
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were off by about 25 hours.
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You can guess in which direction, right?
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Anyway, in 168 hours a week,
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I think we can find time for what matters to you.
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If you want to spend more time with your kids,
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you want to study more for a test you're taking,
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you want to exercise for three hours and volunteer for two,
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And that's even if you're working way more than full-time hours.
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So we have plenty of time, which is great,
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because guess what?
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We don't even need that much time to do amazing things.
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But when most of us have bits of time, what do we do?
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Pull out the phone, right?
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Start deleting emails.
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Otherwise, we're puttering around the house
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But small moments can have great power.
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You can use your bits of time
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Maybe it's choosing to read something wonderful on the bus
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on the way to work.
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I know when I had a job that required two bus rides
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and a subway ride every morning,
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I used to go to the library on weekends to get stuff to read.
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It made the whole experience almost, almost, enjoyable.
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Breaks at work can be used for meditating or praying.
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If family dinner is out because of your crazy work schedule,
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maybe family breakfast could be a good substitute.
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It's about looking at the whole of one's time
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and seeing where the good stuff can go.
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I truly believe this.
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Even if we are busy,
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we have time for what matters.
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And when we focus on what matters,
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we can build the lives we want
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in the time we've got.
