How to Gain Control of Your Free Time - Laura Vanderkam (Excerpt)

Here's what I mean. I recently did a Time Diary project looking at 1,001 days in the lives of extremely busy women. They had demanding jobs, sometimes their own businesses, kids to care for, maybe parents to care for, community commitments, busy, busy people. I had them keep track of their time for a week so I could add up how much they worked and slept, and I interviewed them about their strategies for my book. One of the women whose time log I studied, she goes out for a Wednesday night for something. She comes home to find that her water heater has broken, and there is now water all over her basement. If you've ever had anything like this happen to you, you know it is a hugely damaging, frightening, sopping mess. So she's dealing with the immediate aftermath that night. Next day she's got plumbers coming in. Day after that, professional cleaning crew dealing with the ruined carpet. All this is being recorded on her time log. It winds up taking seven hours of her week. Seven hours. That's like finding an extra hour in the day. But I'm sure if you had asked her at the start of the week, could you find seven hours to train for a triathlon? Could you find seven hours to mentor seven worthy people? I'm sure she would have said what most of us would have said, which is, no. Can't you see how busy I am? Yet when she had to find seven hours, because there is water all over her basement, she found seven hours. And what this shows us is that time is highly elastic. We cannot make more time. But time will stretch to accommodate what we choose to put into it. And so the key to time management is treating our priorities as the equivalent of that broken water heater. And to get at this, I like to use some language from one of the busiest people I ever interviewed. By busy, I mean she was running a small business with 12 people on the payroll. She had six children in her spare time. I was getting in touch with her to set up an interview on how she had it all, that phrase. I remember it was a Thursday morning, and she was not available to speak with me, of course. But the reason she was unavailable to speak with me is that she was out for a hike. Because it was a beautiful spring morning, and she wanted to go for a hike. So, of course, this makes me even more intrigued. And when I finally do catch up with her, she explains it like this. She says, listen, Laura, everything I do, every minute I spend is my choice. And rather than say, I don't have time to do X, Y, or Z, she'd say, I don't do X, Y, or Z because it's not a priority. I don't have time often means it's not a priority. If you think about it, that's really more accurate language. I mean, I could tell you I don't have time to dust my blinds, but that's not true. If you offered to pay me $100,000 to go dust my blinds, I would get to it pretty quickly. Since that is not going to happen, I can acknowledge this is not a matter of lacking time. It's that I don't want to do it. Using this language reminds us that time is a choice. And granted, there may be horrible consequences for making different choices. I will give you that. But we are smart people, and certainly over the long run, we have the power to fill our lives with the things that deserve to be there. But I do think that the numbers I am about to tell you are empowering. There are 168 hours in a week. 24 times 7 is 168 hours. That is a lot of time. If you are working a full-time job, so 40 hours a week, sleeping eight hours a night, so 56 hours a week, that leaves 72 hours for other things. That is a lot of time. You say you are working 50 hours a week, maybe a main job and a side hustle. Well, that leaves 62 hours for other things. You say you are working 60 hours. Well, that leaves 52 hours for other things. You say you are working more than 60 hours. Well, are you sure? There was once a study comparing people's estimated work weeks with time diaries. It found that people claiming 75-plus-hour work weeks were off by about 25 hours. You can guess in which direction, right? Anyway, in 168 hours a week, I think we can find time for what matters to you. If you want to spend more time with your kids, you want to study more for a test you are taking, you want to exercise for three hours and volunteer for two, you can. And that is even if you are working way more than full-time hours. So we have plenty of time, which is great, because guess what? We don't even need that much time to do amazing things. But when most of us have bits of time, what do we do? Pull out the phone, right? Start deleting emails. Otherwise, we are puttering around the house or watching TV. But small moments can have great power. You can use your bits of time for bits of joy. Maybe it is choosing to read something wonderful on the bus on the way to work. I know when I had a job that required two bus rides and a subway ride every morning, I used to go to the library on weekends to get stuff to read. It made the whole experience almost enjoyable. Breaks at work can be used for meditating or praying. If family dinner is out because of your crazy work schedule, maybe family breakfast could be a good substitute. It is about looking at the whole of one's time and seeing where the good stuff can go. I truly believe this. There is time. Even if we are busy, we have time for what matters. And when we focus on what matters, we can build the lives we want in the time we've got. Thank you.