168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think

by Laura Vanderkam

You have to think through the time you’re going to spend together because it is valuable.

Get up 15–20 minutes before your children so you’re ready and the mornings aren’t rushed.

So he finally settled on a mom who’d recently left her day job and was working as a personal chef. He pays her $60 per week plus the cost of groceries, and she makes him enough food for 12-15 basic meals, counting leftovers. (In general, personal chefs either cook in a client’s home or in rented space in commercial kitchens where they cook in bulk for multiple clients). In theory, this is $60 added to Savara’s budget, but in reality it isn’t. His credit card bills have gone down. It turns out that not only is Savara’s personal chef more efficient about buying groceries, “A great side effect is that I spend a lot less money on random things,” Savara says—such as doughnuts that he didn’t come in for, but which look oh-so-tempting in an end-cap display. All told, he saves about 10 hours per week, time he’s used to practice the guitar and write more for his Web site.

Interesting

Unfortunately, this calculation of opportunity cost often gets lost in the debate about outsourcing, or the best ways to pinch pennies in a down economy.

everyone does have to write a little in their lives, most people think they do it just fine. They’re wrong. Likewise, with clothes, “just because you like it doesn’t mean it works on you,”

By far, though, the biggest genius element is the plethora of ready-made foods that smart online grocers offer.

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The easiest way to cut down this time is to stop caring what your house looks like. If you do care what your house looks like, you probably can’t lop this to zero

what makes a house look clean is clear horizontal surfaces. That means having almost nothing on the counters, coffee table, dining room table, desks, and so on.

suggestions include the “27 Fling Boogie,” which means going through your house with a trash bag and throwing out twenty-seven things.

Spend 15 minutes each day for a month tackling some horizontal hot spot.

The net result of having clear horizontal surfaces and bins for stuff all over the place is that cleaning is not overwhelming. It takes less than 20 minutes a day to keep it under control. Just don’t open my closets. Trust me on this one.

reasons women think they do more housework than they actually log is the mental overhead caused by “the random, miscellaneous things that kill you,”

He’s part of a growing industry of folks who will do these little things that kill you.

Interesting?

“don’t want to come home at night and put a bicycle together for their son. They want to spend time with their son.”

A business called "Helping Hand" whose charges by the Hour but does the thing you may not want to do, put together furniture, take dog for walk, wait for plumber, take car to shop etc

The only reason we consider household outsourcing expensive is that we, as a society, largely expect women to do these things for free.

many people still believe that “caring for a family” means cooking, scrubbing, vacuuming, lunch packing, weeding, and laundry, in addition to the emotional work of nurturing children’s brains and souls.

does it make you a better parent to stand there in the kitchen every morning packing elaborate lunches that will get soggy when $2-3 for the hot school lunch would suffice? Is that really what kids need? Or

“I find it so interesting that it is commonplace in our society to outsource child care, but the burdensome routines of keeping house are, for the most part, not outsourced,”

give structure and purpose to your leisure time, though—the equivalent of treating your weekend wardrobe with the respect you’d assign your weekday suit and tie—you can have the kind of full life that few of us think is possible.

I think time is too precious for us to be totally leisurely about leisure.

we wind up spending big chunks of it in the most frictionless way possible: in front of the television.

There are several reasons that television dominates our leisure time, and they are understandable reasons.

First, TV is relatively cheap on a per-hour basis.

Second, television makes few demands of the watcher.

TV can make you feel relaxed in less than 30 minutes.

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

There are two ways to avoid falling prey to this crowding.

The first is to not own a TV,

The more practical option is to plan ahead—that is, lower the transaction costs—and fill your leisure time with enough meaningful activities and constructive relaxation that TV doesn’t become the ...

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

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Once you’ve created a spreadsheet documenting how you spend your 168 hours, go through and find times that you can block out for your leisure activities.

“As much as possible, train in the morning, before you get busy, and before you’re given an excuse to miss your workout,”

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.

always leave yourself open to last-minute opportunities, having at least one fun activity planned for the weekend gives you something to look forward to during the week.

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people are happiest when they are in a state of “flow,” throwing themselves into something that challenges them to the extent of their abilities.

Women with breast cancer who lack close friends are more likely to die from the disease than those who are more socially integrated.

few years ago, for a study published in 2008 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, researchers asked thirty-four University of Virginia students to wear weighted backpacks and estimate the incline of a steep (26-degree) hill. The guesses were wildly inaccurate, which is no surprise. People have as hard a time estimating angles as they do estimating how many hours they work or sleep. What is surprising is that students who were standing next to their friends perceived the hill as much less steep than students who stood alone did. When asked to estimate the angle, those with friends said 47 degrees (compared with 55 degrees for solo walkers), and “the longer friends knew each other, the less steep the hill appeared,” the researchers wrote.

Even a phone call while you’re doing dishes can help you stay in touch.

You can pray while waiting for the elevator,

Send your spouse a romantic text message.