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.

“Simply changing my words from ‘I don’t have time for that’ to ‘That’s not a priority for me’ has completely changed the way that I organize my life. Actually, the way I live my life.”

We say we are too busy to read—only half of us, according to the National Endowment for the Arts, read a novel, short story, poem, or play in the last year.

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. We spend very little time on things that require more thought or initiative, like nurturing our kids, exercising, or engaging in the limited hours we do work in deliberate practice of our professional crafts. We try to squeeze these high-impact activities around the edges of things that are easy, or that seem inevitable merely because we always do them or because we think others expect us to. And consequently, we feel overworked and underrested, and tend to believe stories that confirm this view.