168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think

by Laura Vanderkam

True time management is about filling our lives with things that deserve to be there.

I’ve started limiting the length of my work to-do lists, so I only do work that I think matters.

Keats creates a memorable image of lying “cool-bedded in the flowery grass” doing absolutely nothing. In a world where we think of ourselves as starved for time, such “honied indolence” sounds quite appealing. But, of course, Keats lived before the electronic age. These days, when most of us have an hour to go lie in the grass, we turn on the TV, check e-mail, or peruse Facebook instead. Then we complain of having no time to think. In our distracted world, even fallow hours take discipline. Fortunately, like everything, living intentionally becomes easier over time.

when you focus on what you do best, on what brings you the most satisfaction, there is plenty of space for everything.

“time diary” studies over the past 40 years. The ATUS and similar studies ask thousands of people to report what they did every few minutes over the previous 24 hours, more or less like a lawyer billing his time. Sometimes, this happens with a researcher on the phone, talking the respondent through the day and reminding anyone who tries to claim he did 28 hours of activities of the realities of time and physics. In other studies, researchers send participants diaries and ask them to record their activities on a certain day or, in some cases, for a week. Statisticians then break the answers down by category, and subject the data to various demographic cuts.

And consequently, we feel overworked and underrested, and tend to believe stories that confirm this view.

identify these core competencies at home and at work.

You’ll need to change your life to spend more time on these things, and less on the things that are neither meaningful nor pleasurable for you or for people you care about.

This was obviously a small discovery, though, frankly, in the time many of us waste watching TV we don’t really like or frittering away hours on meaningless conference calls, we could make big changes. We could go back to school. We could write a novel each year. Seriously. It takes about 1,000 hours to write a book, and if you stop watching 20 hours of TV per week, you’ll free up the time right there.

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.”

How to Keep a Time Log If you want to get more out of your 168 hours in the future, it helps to know how you’re spending them now. You can use the spreadsheet that follows, or download one from My168Hours.com, create your own, use a word-processing document, or record your activities in a little notebook.

Corporate fortunes rise and fall, but businesses that succeed in modern times tend to be very focused on what they do better than anybody else.

An individual’s core competencies are best thought of as abilities that can be leveraged across multiple spheres. They should be important and meaningful. And they should be the things we do best and that others cannot do nearly as well.

(each category includes related travel time): Personal care (with a subcategory of “sleep”) Eating and drinking Household activities (housework, food prep and cleanup, lawn and garden care, household management) Purchasing goods and services (grocery shopping, purchasing consumer goods) Caring for and helping household members (with a broad subcategory of “children,” which is then broken down to physical care, education-related activities, reading to/with children, and playing/doing hobbies with children) Caring for and helping nonhousehold members Working and work-related activities, including commuting Educational activities Organizational, civic, and religious activities Leisure and sports (socializing and communicating, watching TV, participating in sports, exercise, and recreation) Telephone calls, mail and e-mail Other activities

Then it’s time to look at the dreams you haven’t turned into reality.

“passion muscle.”

by trying lots of things you think you might enjoy, you will learn more about yourself, and what you are actually good at, what might be your core competencies, and which of the biggies are worth going for. You may be shocked by what you discover. This is why you just have to keep an open mind and try things.

Classifying Your Time into Categories After you complete the time log at the end of Chapter 1, go through and put the entries into categories. Some of the most common ones include personal care (including sleep), household activities, purchasing goods and services, caring for or helping household members, working and work-related activities, leisure (including TV), exercise, and “other,” though you are free to use your own. Record your daily and weekly totals, filling in the major categories that are relevant to you. Daily Totals: Weekly Totals: Subcategories You can use the space below to break the major categories into subcategories. For instance, child care can be separated into physical care, playing, education, and reading. Housework can be divided into laundry, food prep, house cleaning, lawn work, and so on. Work can also be divided into different activities (phone calls, meetings, presentations, e-mail, research, fighting fires, or whatever you happen to do). The List of 100 Dreams What would you like to be doing in your 168 hours? Make a list of as many activities as possible that you’d like to try or accomplish during your life. Cross off the ones you’ve done, and note how they made you feel. Don’t let the size of the page restrict you. Make the list as long as you want. Your Core Competencies After trying enough different activities, and looking back through your life, you may start to discover certain themes. Answer these two questions: What do I do best, that ...

What things do I spend time on that other people could do, or could do better?

But here’s the fascinating part: if you love what you do, you’ll have more energy for the rest of your life, too.

They found that the best results required three things: • that people be given a great deal of freedom in figuring out how to carry out the work—that is, the opportunity to make day-to-day decisions in the project • that team members felt challenged in a positive fashion by the work • that people felt they had sufficient organizational support (resources, a supportive work group, a supportive supervisor who communicated well, and an organizational environment where creativity was encouraged)

They found that people were happiest when they were completely absorbed in activities that were difficult but doable, to the point where their brains no longer had space to ruminate about the troubles of daily life.

Pay attention to when you feel most absorbed at work. If you want to be blissful, your job should involve spending as much time as possible in that space where you are leveraging your core competencies,

We spend a lot of our 168 hours working, so being in the right job matters. To find out if you’re in the right job, ask yourself these questions: Does my job tap into my intrinsic motivations (things I loved as a kid or would do for free)? Does my job give me a reasonable amount of autonomy? Am I challenged regularly to the extent of my abilities? Do my work environment, organization, and coworkers encourage my best work? If the answer is “no” to any of these four questions, what can I change? In the next week? In the next year? Can I create the right job within my organization? Another organization? Or will I need to go out on my own?

At the beginning of the meeting, the meeting leader spells out the goals.

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.

This chapter is about clearing your work calendar of things that shouldn’t be there so you can focus on your core competencies.

1. Seize control of your schedule. 2. Do not mistake things that look like work for actual work. 3. Get rid of non-core-competency tasks by ignoring, minimizing, or outsourcing them. 4. Boost efficiency by getting better at what you do.

Part of being effective during the hours you choose to work is developing the discipline to spend real time on what’s important even if other things—including, frequently, your own bad habits—try to shove you off course.

We have projects now, not jobs. So make sure you’re clear on what you want to get out of every job you do.

The “1 year” list starts to be workable from a scheduling perspective. What would need to happen in the next year for you to know, concretely, that you are closer to your career goals than you are now?

Once you know what you’d like to do in the next year, you can break this down into what you’d like to do in the next month (120–240 hours) or week (30–60 hours). On Sunday nights, or before the start of your workweek, sit down and list the actionable tasks you need to do to advance you toward these goals. Then, this is the key part: schedule them in, knowing exactly how long they will take.

the average office worker admits to wasting 1.7 hours per day on these kinds of things, according to a 2007 survey by Salary.com—then you need to get a grip and cut it out. Schedule a few short “time waster” breaks per day or, when you find yourself wandering, make a hash mark in a notebook and force yourself to return to the task at hand. 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.

I define “work” as activities that are advancing you toward the career and life you want. If they aren’t, then they are not work. This is true even if they appear on your work calendar or you’ve always done them, and they should not have more esteem in your mind than playing Tetris. That doesn’t mean you won’t do them—again, remember the average office worker wastes 1.7 hours per day on personal e-mail, phone calls, gossip, and so on—but you shouldn’t harbor any illusions that your unnecessarily long conference call is anything but disguised and ineffective leisure time.

try to establish a culture in which every meeting has a point, an agenda, an extremely limited time frame, an outcome, and a bias toward involving fewer people rather than more. Change your mind-set. You weren’t invited to the meeting because you’re important—you were invited because people don’t think you have anything better to do!

Smart outsourcing means remembering that “Just because I can do something doesn’t mean I should be doing something,” as Harris puts it. “It’s really important to invest in people’s professional development.”

“death by a thousand opportunities.” You simply cannot take them all on. It’s not just a matter of protecting your personal life, it’s a matter of realizing that you won’t invest adequately in the professional activities that matter most if you’re busy doing other things.

instead this could be a good opportunity to teach her daughter that she needs to be responsible for dealing with her own work, rather than relying on Mom. Harris started a discussion with her daughter on how the girl could approach the teacher and work out a solution. This counseling utilized her core-competency skills as a mom, rather than the lower-value skill of playing fetch.

the best way to create more time is to actually get better at your professional craft.

• What do I want to accomplish, professionally, in the next year? That is, what could I say in a year-end review or in the family Christmas letter? • What actionable steps will these goals require? How many hours will these steps take? • How many hours do I want to work per week? Multiply this by 50 to get a rough total for the year (1,500 to 3,000 hours if you’re working 30–60 hours per week). • Are my goals reasonable within this time frame? • Where can I block these tasks in to my work schedule? • What do I want off my plate at work? • Of these things, what can I ignore? Minimize? Outsource? • How can I get better at my professional craft? THESE ARE SOME SIGNS THAT I HAVE GOTTEN BETTER AT MY PROFESSIONAL CRAFT OVER THE YEARS: 1. __________________________________________ 2. __________________________________________ 3. __________________________________________

I find this encouraging because her story does not fit the dominant cultural narrative that achieving big new things in a career is necessarily going to conflict with a full personal life.

This is the anatomy of a breakthrough for busy, balanced people: Know what the next level looks like Understand the metrics and gatekeepers Work up to the point of diminishing returns Spin a good story Be open to possibilities and plan for opportunities Be ready to ride the wave

I have learned that in most fields, it is very difficult to get to this state of forward momentum—where you are improving at your craft, seeking out new opportunities, and making a name for yourself—working fewer than 30 of your 168 hours.

When the mornings aren’t rushed, you can turn breakfast into a family meal. Discuss what everyone plans to accomplish that day over your cereal and coffee. Use the morning time to fit in some family reading or projects such as puzzles or building giant Lego towers. Have evening conferences when you’re putting the kids to bed to discuss how the day went. Use this time to strategize new ways to deal with school issues, friend issues, or the vagaries of teenage life.

And, interestingly, they make more time for family intimacy by not enrolling their children in every activity under the sun. “I have four kids and they all play together, so it’s not like they’re ever lonely,” Cheryl says. This gets at an important discovery: functioning as a taxi service is not a parental core competency in the way that eating dinner together or doing Bible studies together (frequent Chumley activities) are. Plus, it does little good to have your children enrolled in many different activities if the fragmentation means that Mom and Dad can’t build the kind of happy marriage that children crave.

Sometimes our best ideas about advancing our careers or solving personal problems spring out of these fallow hours.

While television is pleasant, it does not make us feel particularly happy or rejuvenated, the way true recreation should.

Choose a small number of activities that bring you the most happiness; one of these has to be exercise Create blocks in your schedule for these activities Commit enough time, energy, and resources to make them meaningful Use the principle of alignment to build in more time with family and friends, or for leisure generally Use bits of time for bits of joy

Many people wile away the hours from 10:00 p.m. to midnight watching late-night TV. Television doesn’t really relax you. Go to bed instead, and shift that free time to the morning, when you’ll have more energy to tackle a work-out, or a novel-writing or painting session.

Some families turn their weekends into a death march of children’s sporting events and errands.