168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think

by Laura Vanderkam

Economists often talk about something called “returns to scale,” which basically means how much additional benefit you gain from additional inputs. Because most activities involve start-up costs, there are often increasing returns up to an optimum point. After that, returns diminish, because demand is not infinite, and the inputs can be more profitably used for other things. For instance, it is just as easy to make a pan of brownies as it is to make one brownie, and if you have kids, they will definitely lap up that whole first dozen. However, if you make a dozen pans of brownies, you’ll run out of space in the fridge and your family will get so sick of brownies they’ll start hankering for fruit. The brownies will go stale and you’ll have to dump them, meaning that the eggs you used for the last few pans would have been more profitably employed as breakfast. So it goes with work hours. In order to do 1 hour of work, you need to get to your workplace and—even if you work from home—figure out what you should be doing and start attacking the problem. All of these actions involve effort, which means that if you only worked 1 hour per week, you wouldn’t get much out of it. But the second, third,