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August 15, 2016By Paula Pant

#38: Why You’re Not As Busy As You Think, with Laura Vanderkam

Laura Vanderkam 168 hours time log

There are 168 hours in a week.

If you work 40 hours per week and sleep 8 hours per night (56 hours per week), you’ve accounted for 96 hours. You have an additional 72 waking hours per week.

What are you doing with this time?

Let’s assume you spend 10 hours per week commuting, 10 hours handling chores and errands, and 5 hours showering and getting dressed. Let’s also assume you work 50 hours per week instead of 40.

You still have 37 additional hours per week.

How are you spending that time?

That’s the question today’s guest, Laura Vanderkam, tried to answer by analyzing more than 1,000 time logs kept by full-time professional workers.

Laura is a mom of four young children. She works five days a week from 6:30 am to 5:30 pm, plus checks email in the evenings. She could claim to work 11-hour days. She could claim to be overworked and time-strapped.

But she doesn’t. She says, in fact, that she has more personal time than most people think.

Within her 11-hour workday, Laura takes breaks for lunch, quick exercise breaks, and conversations with her family. She occasionally pops out of work for doctor or dentist appointments. She handles online errands and checks Facebook or Twitter.

Her 11-hour workday, when scrutinized more closely, only amounts to around 9 hours of actual work.

Her life, in other words, includes space for downtime.

When she started looking at time logs kept by professional white-collar workers, she noticed the same pattern. Many people who thought they worked 60+ hour weeks actually only worked 40 to 50 hours. Many people who thought they were sleep-deprived actually slept for 7.5 to 8 hours per night.

In preparation for this interview, I logged my time in 15-minute increments over the course of a 168-hour week. I saw the same patterns that Laura described within my own life. Over the course of a 168-hour week, I worked for 43.25 hours. I slept for 53.75 hours, which is more than 7.5 hours per night. Working and sleeping consumed 97 hours of my week. That left 71 hours for other activities.

The good news: I only spent one hour watching TV that week.

The bad news: housework, chores, cooking, errands and “life management,” like opening mail, consumed nearly 20 hours of my week. This shocked me; I assumed I spent far less time on domestic tasks.

The worst news: I spend 9.5 hours “puttering,” not doing anything in particular. I’m not referring to intentional recharging time, such as time spent reading, meditating or journaling. I’m referring to a time vortex, hours that evaporate into the ether.

I asked Laura what she thought about the 9.5 hours that I lost in a time vortex.

“If you don’t take a real break, your brain will take a fake one,” she replied.

Translation: I need more frequent and intentional breaks. Exercise more. Get outdoors. Stretch.

I’m not the only one.

Our society shares a collective narrative that Americans are overworked, sleep-deprived and don’t have enough time for family or personal lives. That’s our emotional truth. But statistics paint a different picture. When we track our time in 15-minute increments over the course of a 168-hour week, we don’t see deprivation. We see abundance.

In today’s episode, Laura describes this surprising fact: we have more time than we think.

She also shares tactics on how to reduce chores and errands, stay focused and productive at work, and recognize the difference between “effort” and “diminishing returns.”

If you feel busy, stressed and overworked, you’ll love hearing Laura’s refreshing, uplifting perspective on how to manage and recognize your abundance of time.

Check out the episode!

If you’d like to learn more, Laura’s book 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think made a HUGE impression on me, inspiring me to keep a detailed time log (which helped me pinpoint my exact time-wasters).

I also enjoyed her latest book, I Know How She Does It: How Successful Women Make the Most of Their Time.

__________

Speaking of time: if you’re an entrepreneur, you might spend a lot of time sending invoices, tracking payments, and dealing with the books. Eliminate those tasks by using Freshbooks, a program that automates your invoicing and bookkeeping.

Try it FREE for 30 days by visiting Freshbooks.com/paula. When they ask how you heard about their service, please mention this show.

Thanks to Freshbooks for being an early sponsor of this show, and thank you so much for listening to and supporting this podcast. Remember to subscribe to the podcast so that you’ll never miss an episode.

Finally, please leave us an honest review on iTunes. These reviews make a huge difference in helping us understand how to improve the show and in helping us book excellent guests. I really appreciate it!

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Posted in: Episodes, Self-Improvement, Psychology and MindsetTagged in: time management

19 Comments
Leave a Comment
  1. caroline

    # August 15, 2016 at 9:29 am

    This episode made me feel a lot better about getting groceries and preplanned meals delivered to my house. I was fretting over the cost since it’s cheaper to shop and plan myself, but it’s freed up such an incredible amount of time that I’m a lot less stressed. I relax more at night and work better during the day. Thanks for the great podcast.

    Reply ↓
  2. K

    # August 16, 2016 at 12:06 pm

    Am I not supposed to each lunch during the workweek? My break time for lunch is not counted towards the 40 hours of work I’m required to put in, so if I take a lunch hour each day, I may only be working 40 hours a week, but I have to be AT work for 45 hours.

    Reply ↓
    • Paula Pant

      # August 16, 2016 at 1:35 pm

      Okay. You’re at work for 45 hours. Let’s also assume that you commute 1 hour per day, 5 days per week. Let’s also assume that you spend 30 minutes per day, 5 days per week getting ready for work. That’s a total of 52.5 hours.

      There are 168 hours per week. That means you have another 115.5 hours.

      Let’s assume you sleep 8 hours per night. Let’s also assume 10 hours/week for chores and errands. That adds up to another 66 hours.

      There are still 49.5 hours in the week that are unaccounted for.

      I highly recommend tracking your time in 15-minute increments over the span of a week. When I did this, it was a complete eye-opener.

      Reply ↓
      • K

        # August 20, 2016 at 11:15 am

        I apologize for not being clear. What I wanted to hear was your reasoning behind the assumption that people who work 40 hours a week only spend 40 hours at work.

        Reply ↓
        • Paula Pant

          # August 22, 2016 at 1:38 pm

          Hi K,

          I don’t think that I said that — did I? If so, I misspoke. Sorry about that. I certainly don’t think that everyone who works 40 hours spends precisely 40 hours at their place of employment. 🙂

          My point is that even after accounting for the hours spent at work (whether it’s 40 hrs, 45 hrs, 50 hrs, etc.), plus commuting, chores, errands, showering, personal care, etc., there is often still more time remaining than most people estimate. Tracking that time is a huge eye-opener.

          Reply ↓
        • David @ VapeHabitat

          # August 15, 2018 at 11:10 am

          Brilliant saying, K!
          I think people spend only about 60-70% of what they can while at work. Statistically proven, and sad

          Reply ↓
  3. Melanie Sorrentino

    # August 16, 2016 at 12:28 pm

    Great post! As I transition between tasks today I’m consciously directing my actions in a straight path. Instead of getting distracted I’m aiming to keep the wild horse of my mind on course.

    Reply ↓
  4. Evie

    # August 16, 2016 at 1:57 pm

    This episode was a great reminder that I can definitely get more out of my days. I don’t have kids or a commute, so for me it’s more about not losing time to the “vortex” of netflix or click-bait. It’s interesting that you view “puttering” as wasted time, while I value puttering – it keeps my brain from feeling stymied by mundane work tasks and increases my overall daily productivity. I actually have a little alarm set to go off every hour to remind me to take a short break. I’ll go make the bed, wash some dishes, or start a load of laundry. After 5-10 minutes I return refreshed and ready to tackle the next email or item on the ol’ work list! Thanks for this one! 🙂

    Reply ↓
  5. Kirsten

    # August 18, 2016 at 9:35 am

    I have followed Laura’s work and have experimented with time logs and other tools she recommends. I understand the value in her ideas to a point – yes, we should be more mindful of how we choose to spend our time.

    Ultimately, though, I was ultimately left with the impression that this version of success involves constantly watching the clock and frantically cramming in as many “virtuous” activities as possible. Ugh. That sounds miserable. To me, that’s not the goal at all. Instead, I want a calm life with natural rhythms where I don’t feel rushed or harried. Time is like money – I want to have enough of it that I don’t have to think about so much.

    Reply ↓
  6. Stephonee

    # August 23, 2016 at 9:41 pm

    Great episode! I’ve been trying to be more mindful of saying “that’s just not on the priority list right now” instead of “I’m too busy!” like I used to.

    Also, since listening to this episode late last week, I’ve started tracking my time again. I did a three-day time tracking experiment back in college, using the pen and paper method. This time, I’m using the app Toggl, which I was already using to track my time for my freelance clients (both billable time and in general). Since I was already tracking *some* of my time in Toggl, it was easier to just start tracking all of it by making a few new “projects” in the app for Household stuff and non-billable client-related tasks (which I wasn’t tracking before but probably should have been!). We’ll see if I get any new insights after a few more days of tracking! 🙂

    Reply ↓

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