168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think

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hours is enough time to work 50 hours a week, sleep 8 hours a night, and still spend massive amounts of time with your children. But since all hours aren’t created equally, making this come out right involves moving around chunks of hours like puzzle pieces. Split shifts are a good way to use the fact that young children sleep more than adults do to still get your work hours in.” Use bits of time for bits of joy. Plan on how to use your time when you are idle or when the unexpected happens. We particularly love one of her underlying motivations for looking at time differently, which is to debunk the maddeningly prevalent idea that women cannot do things like have a “Career” and a “Family” all at once”

Either way, whether or not you choose to continue with this strategy is really up to you. Nevertheless, the results of this exercise I am sure will be enlightening. Next you’re going to do some introspection and goal setting This is not just a time management book like the name implies. This really is a book about people living their dream lives and dream jobs and accomplishing their goals, and fundamental to all of that is first taking control of your time.” Your core competencies are those things that you do best that nobody else can do as well as you. For example, at your job this might be in-depth research, or it might be analyzing complex data, or it might be managing with empathy. At home this would be something like spending time with your kids or partner, or exercising. The latter two illustrate a slightly different way of thinking about your core competencies—the things only you can do for you. Nobody else can exercise for you, just as nobody else can strengthen the relationship you have with your kids or partner for you. Those things take one-on-one time with you and only you.The other problem with thinking about your time in increments of 24 hours instead of 168 hours, is that it is inherently more stressful (you feel you have “less time”), especially if you don’t take the planning fallacy into consideration—the phenomenon whereby an individual displays the “optimism bias” and thinks they need less time than they do to complete a given task, regardless of historical evidence to the contrary. In the above example you can see I spent more time than I’d planned on meals (a total of 6.75 hours in a week), and a little less time on work (39 hours that week). I also slept less than I thought I would. In Vanderkam’s words, “… we spend massive amounts of time on things… that give a slight amount of pleasure or feeling of accomplishment, but do little for our careers, our families, or our personal lives… consequently, we feel overworked and underrated, and tend to believe stories that confirm this view.”

Laura Vanderkam is the author of several time management and productivity books and has her own TED talk "How to Gain Control of Your Free Time" which reflects some of the strategies in this book. Despite the imperfections of this book, I have re-read (or re-listened to it multiple times) so clearly it hits a chord with me. OMG. HAHAHA. Seriously? Raise your hand if you have a dedicated assistant? OK, even if you do have an assistant, raise your hand if that assistant is tasked with managing your work schedule/calendar AND your personal schedule/calendar (i.e. haircuts, appointments, etc.). Yeah, didn't think so. Dear Laura Vanderkam: Mad Men is not a show that takes place in the present tense.Money might be a problem: If you can’t afford to outsource some of the things that gobble up your time but are not core competencies, well, you’re going to be at a disadvantage to someone who can. That’s not to say there aren’t other options, but outsourcing time-consuming chores is something you’ll find a lot easier if you’re wealthy.