168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think

by Laura Vanderkam

it’s a lot easier to come home and sit on a secondhand sofa than if you’re miserable for 8 hours a day.

often comes back to money somehow).

In the profession of soldiering what does it come back to? I believe happiness and satisfaction red a greater importance. A happy wife is a happy life, a happy soldier is a better soldier. He/she, will work harder, obsorb more information and display more initiative and creativity

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.

There’s a simple formula in Anner’s organizations for getting the most out of work time: no one goes to a meeting who does not need to be there.

Every meeting has an agenda, with a clearly defined, short time frame next to each item.

Productivity, like religion, is a concept prone to much interpretation.

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.

Doing a lot does not mean you’re doing anything important with your 168 hours.

Given that you’d never have to work a day in your life, what would you do more of and what would you shove off your plate?

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.

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?

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).

list the actionable tasks you need to do to advance you toward these goals.

schedule them in, knowing exactly how long ...

If you want to use your 168 hours effectively, once you make a commitment to yourself to spend a certain number of hours on a task, keep it. Never miss a deadline.

you adopt this philosophy, look objectively at your schedule, and are honest about how much time projects will take, I’m betting you can find space for almost anything that matters to you within your 168 hours.

Don’t let your own weakness contribute to the problem.

at your retirement dinner, people won’t talk about your pristine in-box or packed schedule. They’ll want to talk about what you’ve done.

Fassbinder-Orth succeeded by making sure she knew exactly what constituted “work” versus “not work.”

playing Tetris online is not work.

You can compress time spent on non-core-competency activities with a three-part strategy: • Ignore it • Minimize it, or • Outsource it

model requires setting very specific goals, deadlines, and responsibilities, which turns out to be a good management technique anyway,

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.

Smart outsourcing means remembering that “Just because I can do something doesn’t mean I should be doing something,”

In economics, the law of comparative advantage states that even if one party in a transaction is better at everything than the other party, it

can sometimes still make sense for both to specialize, since time and resources are always going to be limited.

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

just because you do things best doesn’t means you can’t get better. The only way this happens is through focused “deliberate practice,” as Geoff Colvin’s book Talent Is Overrated, makes clear.

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.

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

Much of life is how you frame it. If you want others to believe you are successful, it helps to believe this yourself.

One thing to keep in mind as you build your track record is that people in almost all fields love numbers.

Numbers, even when abused, appear to provide objective evidence of your argument. They convince people where words do not. You should use this to your advantage.

we feel overworked and so, to make the pieces fit, the work-life-balance literature tells us, we must negotiate a way to change our work schedules.

women in particular think that a bigger accommodation—working part-time—is the key to “having it all.” (Very few men work part-time by choice).

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,

and fourth hours are more productive. Each hour has additional benefits as you roll through your projects and get in a groove, or start seeking out new opportunities. At some point, these benefits stop accruing because you lose intensity, but right up until that point, every additional hour can generate a huge return. And unfortunately, for many reasons, including cultural assumptions, procrastination, and workplace distractions, a number of people who otherwise love their work stop before that point.

A 60-hour workweek can easily consist of only 25 hours of real work if you’re not careful.

If you work 60 hours a

week and sleep 8 hours a night, this leaves 52 hours a week, or nearly 7.5 hours per day, for other things. A 50-hour week leaves 62 hours, or about 9 hours per day, and a 40-hour week leaves 72 hours, or more than 10 per day.

people are hungry for authentic stories.

Since our prehistoric days around the campfire, humans have had a deep desire for narratives, and particularly amid the information clutter we encounter now, we are drawn to identities and images that have been honed over a lifetime.

you can’t excite a reporter in 20 seconds, or you can’t excite an investor in 20 seconds, then you’re unlikely to ever excite them.

How do you want people to perceive you? If someone were to write a profile of you for a company newsletter or, for that matter, The New Yorker, what would you hope it would say?

The best stories not only reach back to earlier events, they include the present.

People are hungry for authentic tales. Phoniness is counterproductive.

helps to have other people believe that your breakthrough is the next logical step in the story.

Try to spend an equal number of your 168 hours pondering what you’d do if things went right. If the CEO of your company called you into her office tomorrow and said she was so impressed with your work that she wanted to put you in charge of your dream project, do you know what you would ask for?

The point is to treat your children as privileged clients.