Mm-hmm

... that we're not just stuck in these day-to-day responsiveness.

And you can really think about over the course of the week accomplishing quite a bit.

But it's also immediate enough that you know what life is gonna look like.

You know what else is on your plate.

You are not fooling yourself that you're gonna have so much more time than you actually do because you can see what, what's on, you know, happening this week.

Like, you know that there's also the back-to-school night, and there's also, you know, guests coming in over the weekend or whatever it is.

What big questions do you have yet to answer? What keeps you motivated in exploring our time?

So can you get a little bit more granular there in terms of strategy of how you might approach not only using your time more intentionally, but really enjoying your evenings?

Yeah, I really think the golden hours, that is the time after work and before bed on weekdays, is kind of the final frontier when it comes to time.

Like even people who have like great morning routines and are knocking it out of the park at work, like you get to the evening and things just kind of fall apart.

And that's because, you know, we're tired.

It's hard to muster the energy to do much if you've been dealing with work and family all day.

Yeah.

But that doesn't mean you can't do anything.

What brought you to kind of looking at time in that zoomed out way?

Because it's viewed as lost time?

Because it's viewed as lost time.

You're stuck in traffic.

And the morning commute ranks worse, I mean, I guess, because you're on your way to work, whereas the afternoon commute at least ends at home, which is a redeeming point that's absent from the morning run.

But anything you can do.

When we have times in life where we are basically just wishing time away, Anything you can do to move those minutes more into the neutral category is going to be a big life happiness boost.

So obviously, I'm a huge fan of remote work where that makes sense.

Yeah, the measurement system of old is you owe me eight hours per day.

Do you have somebody to share that was able to fit in something big that was a healthy behavior in what seemed to be a very full schedule?

Well, one of the first people I profile in the book is somebody who does ultra races.

So races longer than 26 miles.

And this is somebody who has a family, works full time in the office.

His wife also has pretty big professional goals.

So this is not the situation where, you know, the guy gets to do everything and she's just cleaning up the pieces afterwards.

She's also doing pretty amazing, you know, physical fitness goals as well.

Can you talk a little bit about the bedtime recommendation that you have and why you stand behind it? And this isn't something that's new in your work, but I think emphasized here again, and I think it's so great.

So you're saying have a set bedtime.

Absolutely.

I've studied how people spend their time, and I found a bit of a paradox, which is that people in general seem to be getting enough sleep when you look at longer periods of time.

You look at like a week.

Somebody can be sleeping, I don't know, 52.5 hours.

That's 7.5 hours a day on average, and that seems pretty good, right? Like they...

what...

Do you have any thoughts around that, how people should think about it?

Mm-hmm.

Um, that time is precious.

There is only so much of it.

I believe we do have a lot of time.

Time is big.

Time is big enough for what matters to us.

But part of having enough space for the things that matter to us is to be very judicious about devoting time to things that we are less excited about and are less feeling like they are moving us toward the life we want.

[laughs] Whatever a new commitment is, that actually if you're going to fit a new thing in, it's probably a great time just to, to do the time audit and just kind of say, "Well, how does this thing fit in in the time that I've already got?" So you don't feel overwhelmed by it without looking at the facts of a situation.

[laughs]

And, you know, then to see if, if they were in fact helpful.

I, I like to test things out, you know, because I can tell you I think it's helpful, but how do we know if that's true or not? Um, and so I recruited about 150 people to sign up for what I called the Tranquility by Tuesday project, and they would learn each of these nine rules over the course of nine weeks.

And so I would ask people questions, um, on a time satisfaction scale, how they felt about their time, their leisure time, their work time, you know, how much time they had in general, all these questions designed to get a numerical representation of their feelings about time.

And then they would learn a strategy.

They would answer questions about how they planned to implement it.

They would hopefully try it for a week.

Right

Like I think self-awareness comes into this a little bit and just really understanding what works best for you, I would imagine.

Absolutely.

I mean, there are, again, things that are practical and sometimes we could learn to do things if they are useful for our lives, even if they are not our natural tendencies.

The reason that early mornings is good for many people is that if you have a full time job.

and you have a family, the time that is available for you to do anything that requires some sort of energy tends to be early in the morning.

Because, you know, like, a 5pm workout can easily get derailed by a client who calls you at 445 asking for something, right? Like you're Like, well, I'm not going to hang up precisely at four fifty nine if this is my biggest client just because I have an appointment at the gym.

So that can get derailed or, you know, you've like your kids have something you need to go deal with.

Can you walk our listeners through that?

So walk me through what you mean, because I think a lot of people are going to push back on that.

Well, I am taking this from studying my own time.

I have tracked my time for about 11 years now.

Have you really? Yep, I have.

I have in half hour increments.

So, you know, I can look at how I spent every half hour of the last 11 years.

Unbelievable.

So when you call it the ringmaster, for someone who hasn't read the book yet, what is this and why does it matter?

So what are you bringing to the world with this book?

Yeah, good question, Laurie.

That sounds like something I had to put in my book proposal of like, why another book, Laura? Why should we bring this new book into the world? I would say this is honestly my favorite topics in time management and ways of looking at time that I have not explored at length before.

And so I wanted to each of the chapters had been in the running for doing a book on it on its own, basically.

And then I was like, well, actually, I can sort of run them all together with the theme of time abundance.

And so in general, big time is about what happens when you move beyond a story of time scarcity and truly do believe that you have time for what matters to you.

And I think it's helpful in trying to get to this mindset to zoom out further.

I think if you put a survey

What made you realize that the real problem wasn't time scarcity, but our relationship with time?

Well, I've been tracking my time for a great many years, and I have had thousands of other people track time for me as well.

And as part of this, you know, many people find that there is just more space within any given week than they had been assuming there was.

A lot of time passes mindlessly, and so we don't really even notice where it is going, what we are doing with it.

We don't remember what we do with it, and so it feels almost like it didn't exist.

But when you can kind of get your head around that time being there, about there being 168 hours in a week and about what you can do with that time, um, it starts to feel more abundant.

We start to see that even if there are many things we have to do, there is still quite a bit of time that we have say over.

Mm.

That, who is it that abundance story is hardest for? Where does that you have more time than you think, where does that stop being true?

I think all of us have moments in our lives where we feel incredibly busy, where we might feel rushed or frantic or behind or overwhelmed.

Those are all very common human emotions when it comes to how we feel about our time.

But, you know, I've been tracking my time for 11 years.

I have had thousands of other people track their time for me.

I've also studied lots of bigger time diary sets, you know, that different organizations have, have done.

And, you know, the idea that we are not increasingly overworked is just looking at average workweek data.

So how do you hold those two things together? Where's the line between staying open and just over-committing?

But how do you get people from one mindset to the other?

Yeah, from, oh my gosh, what do I have to do this week to, wow, what do I get to do this week? Well, I mean, partly it's that you are thinking about it because I think if you do put some thought into what is going on your calendar, into what is going into your schedule, you'll probably make better choices than if you just sort of let life happen.

I mean, maybe some people are incredibly amazingly lucky that wonderful stuff just appears out of the blue and, you know, all your friends are gathered in the same place you are at the same time you're there and, you know, You know, everything at work miraculously happens and the stars align for you to spend time on your favorite projects no matter what you do.

But I think most of us have to put a little bit of effort into those things to make them happen.

So, you know, start by doing that, by looking at your upcoming week and saying, well, what is most important to me professionally? Like, what would make this an awesome week for me in terms of my career? You know, what would make an awesome week in terms of my relationships with family and friends? And if I were knocking it out of the park next week, personally, like for my own physical, mental, spiritual, emotional health, what would have happened? And so by asking those questions, then you can start to say, okay, well, what can I do to make those things potentially happen over the course of the next week? And when you start to have this, you know, possibilities that can go into your schedule and then you start to make parts of them happen, like, yeah, like your schedule becomes this source of joy.

Your schedule is something you can fall in love with.

Like, oh, my goodness, I'm... you know, this afternoon I'm going to work with my colleague, Kate, and I love spending time with her and we're going to be coming up with ideas together.

Tell me about what time tracking is and why you think it benefits us.

Is there a correlation between I'm not enough and the need to do more and time?

I'm sure there is.

Time, again, is all about the stories we tell ourselves.

Time is all about mindset.

And I think it is great when people develop the sort of confidence that comes from achieving the things that they set out to do because that then makes you feel like, I'm doing good stuff, right? I'm accomplishing what I intend to.

And then I find that allows you to be more relaxed about other times.

So this is one of the reasons I'm always such a big fan of the weekly planning, because then you have sat down and said, well, what would a good week look like? Right.

It sounded like that story was if something you had to look forward to something in your 168 that you really loved enough like a page turner you will make the time you prioritize it just tell me about how important it is to actually have those things that you truly love you look forward to how do you how do you help people get to that point to have them in their 168

You don't have to do things every day, but you also have to do things every week.

It's so true.

I mean, I recently joined a second choir.

So I'm now singing in two choirs, which seems a little hard to justify sometimes.

But the truth is that the second one is so seasonal.

Like we sing from... you know, September to December, more or less.

But there's like a three week break in October after the first concert before we start the Christmas repertoire.

It

What are the minimal elements for listeners to organize like a circus, to be well organized?

So I think every busy person needs a dedicated weekly planning time.

And this is when you sit down look at the upcoming week and ask yourself what is most important in all these three rings, right? And for your professional life, for your relationships, for yourself, what is most important over the next week? Like what steps toward your larger goals would you like to see happen in all three rings? You also look at the obligations that are already on your calendar, the things that you are on the hook for over the next week, even if they're not your top priorities, like, do you have, The logistics figured out, do you have enough time allocated for these things or do you need to move things around or cancel things or ask for help or whatever else you need to do to make the next week work.

And you think about what could go wrong.

Like, have you figured out a backup plan for anything that's very important to you if things go awry and you know building in some open space is helpful for that.

And then finally, you know, a good circus is managed for delight.

Like people don't want to see a circus that looks like drudgery where everyone's just marching through their tricks.

After all this research, what's the one thing where you think, oh my God, if I knew this like five years ago,

And, and to try to get them to do that is running against the grain.

I think some of us are obviously more temperamentally drawn to this than others.

I mean, there's a reason I chose time management as a career [laughs] versus other things.

Um, and, and certainly many of the people who I talk to and who are into this are probably more naturally given to thinking of time in discrete units, and like, what can happen in this unit of time? How much time is this gonna take me? Is there space for it? What else can fit? What needs to happen sequentially for this to occur? Some people may be less naturally given to that.

The problem, though, is if you want to have a sort of full life with many things going on, if you want to build a career, if you wanna raise a family, you wanna have time for your own pursuits, maybe volunteering or, you know, doing some sort of athletic pursuit or having a hobby, it becomes increasingly difficult to do all these things without being more organized about your time.

And so I find that sometimes when people are saying, "Oh, it's impossible to do X and Y together," what that is really getting at is they don't find it intuitive to manage all the working parts of their time, which may be going on, you know, simultaneously and in sequence and stuff.

But I think everyone can learn, and I have definitely seen people who are not naturally given to this.

Give me, like, a how do I do it?

Maybe you could walk us a little bit, through a little bit more what you mean by that.

Well, so life happens, right? Things go wrong.

And if your life requires everything to happen perfectly according to plan, um, for it not to be a disaster, then you're gonna have a problem.

You're gonna have a lot of stress in your life because things do go awry.

People are late.

You know, stuff happens.

People get sick.

Walk me through that because I really like this.

Why do you think that narrative is so culturally dominant right now?

the issue with time is that it keeps passing no matter what you do.

So it is very difficult to figure out exactly where the time is going.

And so we base the stories of our lives more on moments that make an impression, right? We gather points of evidence that point toward a particular narrative.

And in any modern life, I mean, people can come up with a couple of moments where they feel rushed or harried or behind, but there are also other moments too.

And I challenge people to look at time more holistically, because I'm sure if you looked at the whole of a week, you could find several moments when you are not rushed and you are not harried and you are not stressed about time.

And those can become our narrative as well if we choose to see it that way.

How do you think that young moms in particular should be addressing time management?

And with regard to these categories of the experience of work, can you unpack a little bit of the names of the categories, w- how you kind of think about which vibe is appropriate for a, a given activity, the tracking, a little bit of the nuts and bolts for these bits?

I think one way to think about how you're spending your time at work and how you're feeling about your time at work is to give yourself, honestly, a mood score or an energy score as you go through your day.

I'm a big fan of time tracking in general.

I've found through other research I've done that when people track their time for a week, they tend to feel better about their time overall, because it turns out that many of the catastrophic stories people tell themselves about their time are, are not true, right? You know, life isn't actually all that bad.

You know, we don't work around the clock.

We do get some sleep.

We have some time for ourselves, even if it's not as much as we want.

How do you think about these two resources in conjunction with each other?

What was going on there?

In my book Big Time, I do a whole study where I had, yeah, it was about 280 people more or less track their time for a week.And answer questions at the beginning and the end of the week about how they felt about their time.

And that sounds like a very subjective thing, so what I did is I created a scale where people answered questions like, "Generally, I have time just for me," or, "Yesterday, I didn't waste time on things that weren't important to me." And then I had them, you know, rate themselves from 1 being strongly disagree to 7 being strongly agree, so I could turn time feelings into a score.

And so I looked at those 279 people at the beginning of the week, what their scores were, and then tracking time a week later, what were their scores.

And yeah, people felt better about their time.

Like, generally I have enough time for the things I wanna do, like agreement with that statement rose about 25% over the course of one week.

And that sounds pretty ridiculous.

So what have you learnt about those weeknights?

Talk to us about why having this committed plan is different than being like, "I'm gonna hang out and read," or, "I'm gonna take care of myself during this time."

Yeah, I think everybody needs something in their life that is not work and is not caring for family members.

It is something that is intrinsically enjoyable for you and makes you feel like a whole person, right? Like you have a broader identity than just that you are an employee or a mom or a wife or a husband or anything else.

So something that is unique to you that you love.

And people hear that from me, and they're like, "Yes, I like to read.

I like to take bubble baths.

I need to spend more time taking bubble baths," or something like that.

Can you talk to me about the advantage of switching that thinking?

Yep.

But what the biggest thing people find is that there are just chunks of time that they cannot account for, right? Time keeps passing no matter what you are doing, and it is the rare person who knows exactly where all 168 hours of the week go.

I mean, most people do not know there are 168 hours in the week, so that's the first problem right there.

Like, we live our lives in weeks over and over again, weekly cycles of things, and yet we don't even know that there are 168 hours in this chunk of time that we live repeatedly.

So where that comes in is somebody's like, "Well, I can't do anything else.

I work full-time." Okay.

Keep track of your work hours.

[laughs]

And, um, what is your advice or what have you seen work really well for those in that life stage? What things to look ahead to, things to think about ahead of that so that you don't feel like you'reThat time is getting washed up

Everyone should spend some time thinking about what they would like to spend more time doing in their lives.

And one of the troubles of walking around with the story that we have no pri- no time whatsoever is we don't ask what we'd like to do with our time, and when we don't think about what we'd like to do with our time, we do whatever is right in front of us, whatever is easiest.

And again, these days it tends to be our electronic hobbies of headline reading, checking social media comments, things like that.

But, you know, it could be puttering around the house.

I mean, it could've been staring at a cave wall in the old days.

Like, it, it's, it's gonna be whatever is easiest and whatever is right in front of you whenever a spot of time appears.

Mm-hmm.

Tell us a little bit about the principle of creating a backup slot.

So anyone can create a perfect schedule.

I think that the true time management masters create a resilient schedule that allows them to keep moving forward toward their goals even when life happens.

And people often get very discouraged that, you know, I meant to do X, whatever X is.

I meant to get to the gym.

I meant to, you know, do this big project with my kids.

I meant to, you know, set up a birthday party for my, you know, extended family.

It can frequently feel like it's a whole series of little things, and so I'd love for you to talk about that concept a little bit, of batching the little things to be, to use our time in a less scattered way.