168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think

by Laura Vanderkam

In our distracted world, even fallow hours take discipline.

We don’t think about how we want to spend our time, and so we spend massive amounts of time on things—television, Web surfing, housework, errands—that give a slight amount of pleasure or feeling of accomplishment, but do little for our careers, our families, or our personal lives.

This is what happens when you treat your 168 hours as a blank slate. This is what happens when you fill them up only with things that deserve to be there. You build a life where you really can have it all.

For Daytner, these core competencies are the things she spends most of her time doing: nurturing her business, nurturing her family, and nurturing herself. Effective people outsource, ignore, or minimize everything else.

The best way to start on this project—and to get the most out of this book—is to do the equivalent of the American Time Use Survey on your own life. Like a lawyer billing time, record exactly what you’re doing as frequently as you can. Ideally, you would do this every six minutes to make the math easy, or pay someone to follow you around like your very own Boswell, but more practically, this diagnosis will involve getting a small notebook and, every time you take a bathroom break, noting what you did since your last one. You can also use the worksheet at the end of this chapter, or download a spreadsheet from My168Hours.com. You might want to print up a few copies, since it may take a few weeks to get in the habit of recording your life.

Recognizing this requires changing the narrative. As Daytner explained to me, she doesn’t tell herself I don’t have time to do X, Y, or Z. She tells herself that she won’t do X, Y, or Z because “it’s not a priority.” Often that’s a perfectly adequate explanation. I could tell you that I’m not going to sew my toddler’s Halloween costume because I don’t have time, but that’s not true. I have time. In any given week, I have 168 hours. If someone offered to pay me $100,000 to hand-sew a Halloween costume, you can bet I’d find the time to do it. Since that’s not going to happen, I can acknowledge that I don’t think sewing is as good a use of my 168 hours as writing, or playing with my children, or, for that matter, sleeping.

“I think I like things where there are no prodigies. I think I like them because I think I can do them. They are accessible to you and me.”

-- Roald Hoffmann

life is likewise a bundle of tasks and activities an individual takes on. Some, like sleeping and eating, are required, but the rest are simply combinations of choices each of us makes, bundled together for one reason or another, and as Smith and Rivkin wrote, “there is no reason to assume . . . that tasks must continue to be bundled together in the future in the same pattern they have been bundled in the past.”

Broadly, those who get the most out of life try to figure out and focus on their core competencies. They know that at least one key difference between happy, successful people, and those just muddling along is that the happy ones spend as many of their 168 hours as possible on their core competencies—honing their focus to get somewhere—and, like modern corporations, chucking everything else.

Even if you have a good idea, you might not see all the possibilities, so it helps to spend time finding your own “clarity of strategic intent.”

if you choose your life’s work well, something bewitching can happen through your labors. Each hour you log can be a source of joy.

FEELS LIKE "yes but…" do this but be wary of those that would use your enthusiasm against you

There is much happiness to be gained by throwing yourself into a meaningful professional pursuit, be it building a company whose products make people’s lives easier, making scientific discoveries no one else has thought of before, or composing symphonies.

Right -- that is because people (generally speaking) WANT to work: if you've ever felt proud or energized by your work, you would "get" this -- the accomplishment is connected to you.

You can have efficient meetings. You can negotiate a great flex-time schedule, but what’s the point? You’ll spend 40 hours a week doing something you don’t like instead of 50.

But what about satisficing? What if the job is *just* good enough as-is and then leaves you that time? (thinking here of my time at DDC 2016-2019)

In other words, while most people aren’t in their dream jobs, they have managed to squeeze enough peaches at this economic farmers market to come up with something that’s not wildly off the mark.

As you look over your “List of 100 Dreams,” consider whether any involve ways you played as a kid, ways that consumed blissful hours when you didn’t have to worry about making a living or impressing anyone with your job title.

Ultimately, you want work that’s optimally challenging, where “the work calls on your best skills, and helps you develop new skills—but is not completely beyond your skill level.”

Seems obvious but I like seeing it written out.

While it’s hard to tease out the chicken-and-egg problem with these questions—are you happy because you’re in the right job, or does being happy make any job seem better?—we do know this: if you are blissful at work at least a few times per week, the carry-over creativity boost, compared with someone who isn’t happy, can soon cover the full 40–50 hours.

You are highly unlikely to find your dream job by hunting through online job postings.

The truth is that any existing job description has been conceived of by someone else. Expecting someone else to have conceived of your perfect job is roughly similar to expecting someone else to read your mind.

It doesn’t necessarily matter what you were hired for. Fundamentally, most employers want you to make more money for them (or bring more attention to your enterprise, or post better results than your stakeholders anticipate, or whatever the currency of your profession happens to be—but don’t fool yourself. It often comes back to money somehow).

If you think hard enough, there is bound to be some way you can spend the working chunk of your 168 hours solving your organization’s problems in a way that aligns, neatly, with what you want out of the job.

If you like something enough, you will find a job in an organization that you think will be flexible and open to your talents, and then you will figure out a way to concoct your dream job within it, remembering that it is often easier to ask for forgiveness than permission.

It’s not about changing how many of your 168 hours you work, it’s about changing how much control you have over them.

This is why it’s a good idea to take a few minutes at the end of the day—perhaps during your spouse conference (see Chapter 6) or instead of watching TV—to reflect on what you want your career and life to look like.

After all, there’s no point in having the same meeting four times in a row, simply because it is Friday again, to learn that everyone is still working on their projects.

Granted, I did not send a single e-mail, attend any meetings, edit any PowerPoint slides, read any headlines related to my job, call any clients, sit through any conference calls with my colleagues, travel anywhere, manage the papers on my desk, or do anything that most knowledge workers have come to think of as “work.”

CORRECTION: "most knowledge workers' BOSSES"

As we saw in Chapter 3, a growing proportion of people work as I do—on my own, doing creative work, often at home or in coffee shops, or occasionally while visiting a client.

WHEREIN I ask myself: how can I make "working at my job" feel like "working for myself fbo my job"?

This is the 168 Hours principle for work: Ideally, there should be almost nothing during your work hours—whatever you choose those to be—that is not advancing you toward your goals for the career and life you want.

Any “work” that is not advancing you toward the professional life you want should not count as work. It is wasted time.

Here’s a question you may not have asked yourself recently: What do you want to do during your workday?

But remember, there is a good chance you won’t be working for the same person or company in a decade.

Make a game of it. If you can cut your number of hash marks in half, you can reward yourself with a 30-minute Facebook session.

FINE

The point is to minimize the amount of time spent on these things so you can focus more of your time on your long-term priorities.

If it’s truly dumb work, maybe it doesn’t have to be done at all.

:fire:

I don’t like the idea of compensating people for “years of experience,” since many people labor in the trenches for years without improving.

The only way this happens is through focused “deliberate practice,” as Geoff Colvin’s book Talent Is Overrated, makes clear.

It is comforting to see that even the great writers in the English language have their awkward moments; I have realized that the important thing is not to be flawless, but to be compelling enough to make up for the flaws.

You seem to be getting lucky more often because you are making your own luck.

To take her mind off what she figured was going to be yet another round of rejections, Ingram wrote a draft of a 58,000-word young adult novel in January 2009. Just in January. Seriously.

That's only 8k more than the NaNoWriMo goal and you get an extra day AND you don't have Thanksgiving jamming you up. Which isn't to say "oh that's easy" but…

You cannot remove randomness from the universe. You can, however, use your 168 hours to stack the odds in your favor.

When seeds do sprout, obviously, you need to know what to do with them. That’s what I mean by planning for possibilities. Lots of people ponder what they’d do if things went wrong. Try to spend an equal number of your 168 hours pondering what you’d do if things went right.

Number 24 on the list is “Cut raisins and dates with kitchen shears” (I have been racking my brain to figure out why raisins might need to be smaller than they already are).

But then, a few nights per week, open up the hours of 8:00–10:00 or 11:00, after your kids go to bed, for work.

No. I'm no good after like 6pm. And I doubt many are.

The problem is that “most people do their heavy cleaning on Saturday or Sunday, which is family time. So they’re not buying a clean home, they’re buying their weekend back.” If you spend a lot of hours working from Monday to Friday, that’s worth more than The Maids’ prices.

Or you can take the free approach: developing selective vision and looking right past the dust balls until they are big enough to support commercial agriculture.

But “I don’t want to spend less time with my children,” Wagner says. “I want to spend less time doing housework.”

After all, we own a juicer, too, and don’t use that.

Then why own the juicer? It just takes up space?

Work hours are often a blur of go-go-go from one scheduled deadline to the next. Then you come home for the evening or weekend. Now what? We feel like the businessmen-turned-hostages and the hostage-takers in Ann Patchett’s novel Bel Canto, finding ourselves suddenly locked up in a strange Latin American vice presidential mansion, unsure what to do with our hours.

Yikes

Likewise, long weekend hours can easily disappear into chores, Blackberry breaks, shuttling children around, and checking what’s on TV. Then, suddenly, it’s Sunday night and you feel about as relaxed and rejuvenated as you would in a clashing cardigan and polo shirt, or in the middle of a Latin American hostage situation.

“No one’s going to give you that hour,” she says. “You have to make it for yourself.”

--Alexi Panos