Afford Anything - How to Believe Your Time is Abundant -- with Laura Vanderkam

Episode Date: August 27, 2018

#147: Which of the following two attitudes describes you? "I'm crunched for time." -- or -- "I have all the time in the world." I'm guessing your answer is the first, rather than the second. But what if you could feel like your time is expansive and abundant, without drastic changes to your schedule? Most of us want to feel "off the clock," enjoying an existence in which we can linger, without feeling pressure from the demands and stresses on our schedules. According to Laura Vanderkam, even the busiest, most-scheduled people can achieve this feeling. We can live off-the-clock. Laura is a time management expert, but her latest book isn't about *management* in the traditional sense of the word. Rather, it focuses on *time perception* -- getting into the headspace of believing time is abundant, regardless of the demands imposed upon it. The brain stores memories efficiently, which means it vividly recalls novel experiences -- such as the one-week trip to Belize -- while compressing repetitive experiences, like a commute, into a single memory. For that reason, time feels like it passes more quickly when we encounter situations that are routine and familiar, and slows when we experience new situations. That's how a one-week conference feels long, but a routine week at the office flies by. Of course, we can't eschew familiarity; there are many benefits to adopting a routine. But we can slow time by savoring our everyday experiences. The more we engage mindfully in everyday activities -- from savoring each bite of food to noticing the flowers during our commute to work -- the more we're likely to feel relaxed about our time. We create happy memories, rather than compressing our experiences in our minds. Treating our hours with intention can also lengthen our experience of time. We plan and structure our workdays, deciding how to spend our hours between 8 am and 6 pm. But often, we aren't deliberate about how we'll craft the hours from 6 pm to 11 pm, and therefore can feel like we rarely see family, even if we're with them for three to four hours each evening. Deliberately crafting hours doesn't mean jam-packing our schedule in 30-minute increments. Scheduling a two-hour block of time to linger over a long dinner can blend intentionality with the art of savoring. In fact, Laura notes, those who are the most disciplined about their time are also more likely to feel that they enjoy plenty of free time. Structure creates freedom. Today on the podcast, Laura and I talk about how to make time feel abundant. For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/episode147 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You can afford anything but not everything. Every decision that you make is a trade-off against something else. And that's true not just for how you manage your money, but also how you manage your time, your focus, your energy, anything in your life that's a limited resource. And so let's talk about one of those limited resources. Let's talk about time. Time is a bit of a paradox.

It is limited, but it is not scarce. And that's what we're going to cover in today's episode, how to develop an abundance mindset around time. My name is Paula Pan. I'm the host of the Afford Anything podcast. And today we're going to dive into this notion of time. What's interesting about time and the way that it's similar to money is that with both money and time, a person can choose to have an abundance mindset or a scarcity mindset.

And I don't mean to sound all like rah, raw, the secret, like just manifest stuff, man. Don't worry, this episode is not going to get all hippier than thou. But the truth of the matter is, you could have two people with a lot of the world. identical or nearly identical schedules, and one person might still perceive time to be abundant, while the other might perceive time to be scarce. And so the way that we experience time has a huge impact in both our day-to-day happiness levels as well as what we believe that we are capable of doing. If we believe that time is scarce and that we don't have enough time, then we live our lives accordingly and we make decisions accordingly. If we believe that time is

abundant and that we are able to make time for the things that matter, then again, we live our lives accordingly and that can have a very positive downstream effect. So given that we all have the same limitations on time, the same at least ultimate limitation, which is 24 hours a day and only one human lifetime, the question is how do we develop a mindset of time abundance? Today, I have invited time management expert Laura Vandercam on the podcast to help answer that question. Now, Laura has written several books about the topic of time management, and there are two things that I believe are fascinating about her approach. Number one is that she reaches beyond the tactical. Sure, she shares tips and actionable advice, absolutely. But beyond that, she doesn't

just talk about the management of time. She talks about how to improve a person's relationship with time and a person's perception of time. And she also discusses how to form the belief and the understanding that time is abundant, particularly when we are intentional about the ways in which we spend it. This is her second time joining us on the Afford Anything podcast. She was previously a guest on this show to discuss her book 168 hours. That book is premised on the notion that there are 168 hours in a week. So if we work for 50, commute for 10, and sleep for 56, well, that adds up to 116 hours, which means that there are still 52 hours in a week unaccounted for. Some of these are spent showering and brushing our teeth and sitting on the toilet, but we don't do that for 52 hours a week.

So what exactly are we doing? In her last appearance on this podcast, we talked about that question. And in today's interview, we're going to shift the conversation to the notion of being off the clock. Being off the clock is not about creating more time or outsourcing or reaching inbox zero or any of those common time management tactics. being off the clock is about enjoying our time, which has the effect of creating the perception of more time. When we are off the clock, we can linger, we can savor, we can get into the zone. And so we both enjoy our time more and we begin to believe that we are the type of people who have the time to enjoy our time and ultimately our lives. So how do we do this? How do we reach that state of being off the clock?

Well, let's hear from Laura right now. Hey, Laura. Hey, how's it going? It's awesome. How are you doing? I'm doing great. Glad to talk with you again. Absolutely. I'm glad to talk to you too. I was fascinated by your book off the clock because so much of it is, at least my interpretation of it, is around the perception that we have of time. Two people with seemingly identical or near identical schedules can feel either compressed for time or can feel that time is abundant. how did you start to uncover this? What got you kind of interested in this, this line of thinking around time management? Well, I've long been fascinated by people who seem to have a lot going on in their lives and in fact do have a lot going on in their lives and yet seem very relaxed about their time. If you talk to them, they aren't racing off to get to the next thing. They're really focused on you or, you know, you want to have your conversation go long. They're okay with that or they can get to stuff quickly. I mean, you call to get a meeting with. with them and they can meet you right then. Who are these people? What is what is their secret? So I wanted to discover that. And you know, I like to explore not just stories, but data. I mean, we can tell

ourselves whatever we want, but I like to see if there's data supporting things as well. And so I decided to explore this question from that perspective too. And, you know, I had 900 people who had full-time jobs and also had families. So the things that make you busy in life had them track their time for a day. And then I asked them all sorts of questions about how they felt about their time, their time perception, if it was scarce or abundant, various questions to get at that, assign them scores, and I could compare the people who had the highest time perception scores with the people at the lowest. I could look at their schedules and see, well, what was actually different? They were all working full-time. So their work hours were not that different. They all had families, so they didn't exactly have

gobs of time to do whatever they wanted. But there were enough little differences that I could see between their lives that I think matter and that other people can learn stuff from as well. So tell us about some of those little differences. Well, the first thing is, you know, if you want to feel relaxed about time, you actually have to have a good sense of where your time is going. And I know that seems like a bit of a paradox, like, well, how can I be off the clock if I'm studying the clock to see where my time is going? But the truth is one of the things that makes us feel tense and nervous and anxious about time is when we don't know if we're giving enough time to the things that we think are important,

So one example might be a student before finals. Like if they don't know that they've been studying all semester and have been diligently putting X hours into it every week and working through the syllabus, that's what leads you to cram right before and stay up all night and do silly things like that because you're feeling like, oh, I didn't do something I was supposed to do. But somebody who had carefully planned their time and said, you know, every week I'm going to study this number of hours and I know I have and I can look back over the semester and see that feels a lot more relaxed going into it.

So that allows you to feel off the clock. It's this paradox that knowing where the time goes allows us to feel free about our time. But there are other differences as well. One of my favorites is that people who felt like they had the most time were highly likely to have done something that was kind of interesting or out of the ordinary on the March Monday that I had them track. Total normal day. Nothing crazy about this March Monday. But the people with the highest time perception scores, there'd be stuff on their evenings like go to salsa dancing lessons. Like one person went to a big band concert.

Somebody went to a movie on a Monday night, you know, meeting friends for dinner on a Monday night. And that, again, seems like a bit of a paradox, like making those plans by making you feel less relaxed because look, I've got plans, I got stuff I got to get to. But it turns out the opposite is true. Knowing that you are the kind of person who can go salsa dancing on Monday night makes you feel like you have all the time in the world. That's a great place to be in. It seems as though, and this is where I think probably to many of the people listening, it might sound a little bit like chicken and egg because the knee-jerk response to that might be, well, only people who have leisure time could go salsa dancing on a Monday night.

What would you say to that? Well, everyone had leisure time. And again, this is all people who were sort of equivalently busy. They all had full-time jobs. They all had families. I would totally say that, yeah, if you're retired, you've got more leisure time, right? If you don't have small children at home, you might theoretically have more leisure time than if you did. But that's not the case. These people all had those constraints on their time. One fascinating finding is that the people with the lowest time perception scores, the people who felt like time was most scarce, felt most stressed about their time, actually watched more TV than the people with the high time perception scores. So they had leisure time. They were just spending it on something different.

Right. And so it seems from the study that you did, it seems as though, intentionality is one of the big differentiating factors between a perception that time is abundant versus a perception that time is scarce. Oh, absolutely. I mean, the thing about time is that it keeps passing, whether you think about where it is going or not. And so the problem with that is that is very easy to spend it mindlessly because you can't stop it. It's like a stream. And so once you're in your canoe in the stream, it's a little bit hard to direct. You have to sort of pause and get to the side every now and then say, oh, that's where the river is going. And oh, I see that. Well, I wonder if I could steer this way. And it's only by taking those moments to reflect that you can actually

have more of a sense of steering that canoe. And that was one of the things I found, too, the people who felt like they had the most time engaged in what I call reflective activities far more often than the people who felt like they had no time. Reflective activities being things like journaling or meditating or praying, otherwise stepping back and looking at life. It's not that these people had more free time to do this with, the chicken and egg issue of like, oh, well, clearly they had more time to journal, and that's why they journaled and felt relaxed about time. I mean, you know, again, they spent less time on TV. They spent less time on social media. People had the same amount of leisure time. It's just they spent it differently. Right. In fact, I remember, because I'd never

heard any documentation about a person describing precisely how much time they spent praying or meditating or doing any type of reflective activity. And so one of the stories in your book that stood out to me was the gentleman who would go to CrossFit every morning and then go to Waffle House. And right before his breakfast, he would pray for exactly five to seven minutes. That detail really stood out at me. Yeah, I'm not sure if his eyes were closed the whole time or if there's more of a just like general thinking about life and pondering the good things and what he needed help with and all that. But yeah, he'd clearly thought about his time a lot. Right. Yeah, but that was so important for him to have that time to spend his morning in a way that he was in control of it because he was managing a large

company. And so as soon as he showed up at the office, everybody needed something from him. And he wanted to be able to give them that time, but he also had other things he needed to do. So that reflective time in the morning was what allowed him to be relaxed the rest of the day. Right. Exactly. And that detail of knowing exactly how much time you're spending on a given activity is that paradox of the more structure you have around your time, the more free it can feel. Another thing that you've talked about in your book that I thought was really interesting was that novelty or new experiences can stretch the experience of time. Can you describe that a little bit? Why is that? Well, the way our brains perceive time is in units of memory. So for any given period of

time that you have more memory units formed from. You will perceive that as longer. So one way to think about this is on your first day of vacation, if you're going somewhere new that you've not been before, the first day often seems very, very long. And partly what it is is that your brain is laying down lots of new tracks. It has no idea what will be important for the future. And so it's remembering all of it because it is remembering more things, time seems more vast. Whereas if you think of, you know, say a normal Tuesday, commute to work, do the same things. You got it.

Your brain's got it. It's not laying any new tracks because it's been through all of this before. So it's not actually forming memories of it. And so then the time is gone. Because that's the thing. When we say, where did the time go? What we're often saying is,

I don't remember where the time went. Whereas if you remember where the time went, then it doesn't seem to have slipped away in quite the same fashion. So one way to then alter, one's perception of time is to consciously create more memorable experiences, more novel experiences, because the more of those you have, the more vast time will appear. So in the context of a person who has routine, they have a nine to five job that they're

required to go to physically, and they have other, maybe their kid has swim practice on Mondays and Wednesdays, they have all of these familiar routines within their life. How do you create novel experiences within that framework? Well, it doesn't have to be elaborate. I mean, as I talked about what the people in my time diary study were doing, you could go to salsa dancing on a Monday night, go to a concert. I mean, start looking at concert listings and say, you know, challenge yourself to do one a month or something like that. It could also be that you take your colleagues, you go somewhere different for lunch.

You know, a lot of people go to the same place over and over again. That's great. You like the food. But maybe you can try somewhere else once in a while, or you could all have a picnic together. You could turn a regular meeting into a walking meeting. You might park in a different garage and walk a slightly different route to work, you know, stop by a cool little store on the way in that you've just been passing most of the time and not stopping in or after work if you're running late as we often are in the morning.

It could be that you just take your family for a walk after dinner instead of watching TV. You all go to the playground if it's nice. But, you know, just setting some sort of intention for something that's a little bit different, a little bit more adventurous, will make the time matter. memorable, it will make that day stand out in memory. And when it stands out, then it doesn't feel like it's just slipping into the past. Right. How would you describe the experience of being off the clock? What exactly does that mean? Well, to me, being off the clock is about the sense of time freedom, which is both that we are in control of our time. We feel like we're generally

spending our time in the way that we wish to. We feel relaxed about it. Don't feel stressed. It's more about like interacting with time, someone as like an artist might manipulate her materials rather than doing it as this kind of, you know, drumbeat that you have to march to wherever it's telling you to go. And can a person be working when they're off the clock? Can you be engaged in something that happens to pay you while being off the clock? Well, I certainly think so. I have this experience a lot with my work. Obviously speak on this topic of time management, But my primary job I think of is writing books and writing articles. And when I am writing, for me, I have that experience that people call flow where time seems to stand still.

And really time has no meaning anymore. I will be working and look up and see that like 90 minutes have passed. And I would have had no way of telling you that through any sense of it. Different jobs feature different things. But if you have one of those things where you're doing something difficult but doable, really focused on it, you can get into that zone where you are feeling off. the clock. And in general, the more time you can spend in that, the better. And the more you will feel like you are really having a good experience of work as opposed to sort of those clock watching experiences that we've all had. We're really hoping this meeting goes faster. You would love

for it to be 11 o'clock already, and it just isn't. One thing that I like, not just about your latest book, but really about all of your work, is the focus on not just managing your time, but really improving your relationship with time and allowing yourself to feel as though time is abundant in spite of, or maybe not even in spite of, but regardless of what may be on your schedule or how many demands may be on your schedule. Do you think that there are some people who are resistant to the notion of time abundance? Do people want to believe that time is scarce? I definitely come across that mindset from time to time. I get angry letters all of the time from people who are like, you don't understand. I'm really more busy than I think I am. I'm glad that you took some time out of your busy schedule to write me about this. But what it is is we have these stories that we are telling ourselves about our lives. And we often become very wedded to our stories because they are sources of identity, whether that's the harried, overworked, you know, person, like, oh, I have no time for anything fun. Can't you see how busy I am with work?

Or, you know, we can do it in our personal lives, too, or like, I'm, you know, I give so much my time to everyone else. I have no time for me. You know, is it true? I don't know. I mean, maybe it is, but I think it's important to examine where the time goes. And sometimes that, you know, people keep track of their time and get very angry about this. Like, oh, that wasn't a typical week because they worked, you know, 45 hours during the week they tracked. I'm like, no, no, I normally work 60. I was like, okay, fine. You know, maybe it was an atypical week, but maybe your idea of what a typical week is is based on one week that happened and it was long and forever that's become your identity of who you are. I had that happen recently with somebody who was, you know, she had a

more positive perspective on it, but she had tracked her time and one night during the week, she'd work till 10 p.m. Now, you know, people who are working until 10 p.m. do not think they're working 40 hours a week. But in fact, her time log showed she was working 38 hours that week. It was just that one night was really late. So she could tell herself the story of, oh, my life is working till 10 p.m. I must be working these 80 hour weeks or something, but she wasn't. It would just happen once. So it's a question of whether that is getting your picture of a typical life or not. I believe that most people have some amount of leisure time. It's just a question of whether you choose to see it and choose to spend it on the things that are rejuvenating or maybe if you spend it on lower value

things because you've chosen not to be mindful about it and conscious about it because you have in your mind this idea that it doesn't exist. And so do you think in that case it sort of becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy? If you believe that it doesn't exist, then you won't be mindful about it because it doesn't exist because you think it doesn't exist. And as a result, you spend it kind of scrolling Instagram rather than lingering over dinner with your family. Yeah, that's exactly what happened. I laugh about this. I remember once I love working Mother Magazine. scene, but they once had a poll, an online poll on their website where you're supposed to answer, when did you last have me time? And I click through to see what the answer is. And 50% of the

respondents claim they couldn't remember, which is pretty funny, like, because you're taking an online poll. Like, give me a break. This is a break. You're taking a break from your workday. This is a break. But it's a mindless one, right? Like you haven't thought about it. Like, you didn't get up from your desk and go for a little walk outside, then come back in, which would have been actually rejuvenating as opposed to taking online. polls, which just isn't. But in your mind, like, oh, I was still at my desk, so I was still working. And that's the story we choose to tell ourselves. You know, people will be like, oh, I have no free time. You look at the time log and the entire evening devoted to Big Bang

theory. You know, what was that? But what it is is people have not as much free time as they want. But the story, not as much as I want is a much better story than none. None, you can't do anything with that. That's just defeat us. It's not true, but it's just defeat us. Like, that's a mindset of I am not even going to think about it. Not as much as I want. Well, that's, that's quite useful because then you can figure, well, how could I scale it up over time? Like, how could I do the right things within this time? So I feel most relaxed when I do have leisure time. That suggests much better questions. So I encourage people to have that as their story. We'll come back to this episode after this word from our sponsors. So I've been a Grove collaborative VIP member for a while.

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Is there cultural pressure to cling to that story? Yeah, I definitely think there's some amount of that because being busy means that you have a lot going on, right? The demand for your time is high. which if the demand for your time is high, that means you must be important, right? I mean, clearly, because the demand is there. So therefore, we are so busy. But the honest truth is that many of the most successful people I've tracked and studied and interviewed have a surprising amount of white space on their schedule. It's not that they couldn't fill the time. They most certainly could. The demand is there. They chose not to. I think that that's a more profound message there.

know, I could fill this space, but I'm not going to because it's not the best use of my time. I'd rather, you know, say no to something that was asked to me to do, even though I am free, even though I am available, because I don't view it as the best use of my time. Like, it's maybe a five or six on a scale of one to ten, and so I want to leave that space open so that either it's there and I can sink or, you know, if something that is a nine or ten comes to me, I have the space to take it on. So what would a person do? Let's say that you're looking at your schedule for the day and you have a chunk of blank

space, an open hour that you've intentionally left open, what do you do with it in a way that would make it intentional but not overly scheduled? Well, if you have that open space, I would hope that maybe sometime before the week began, you'd made a list of your various top priorities for the week. So maybe it's career projects that you're thinking about, long-term career projects, you know, have the space to think about ideas that you might want to put into practice someday. That would be a great thing to do with an open hour. Or maybe it's even calling a friend. You know, if you need some time to actually focus on that conversation, people do take breaks during the day. Maybe that would be a good thing to do with it. Or go outside and get away from the office and walk

around for a bit, get a little fresh air and exercise. All of those are great things. So it could be work. It could be not work. But think about what your highest value activity would be, things that were advancing you toward your goals. And as much as possible, when open space is there, you can fill it with those things. And speaking of highest value activities and also speaking of calling your friends, one thing that you mentioned is that people are a good use of time. Can you elaborate on this idea? So one of the things I found in my time diary project for off the clock is that people's time perception scores rose in direct correlation with how much time they spent interacting with family and friends. So somebody who would like meet a friend in the evening and then do a family activity after dinner would feel like she had more time than somebody who spent the same. amount of time doing chores and then just like all watching TV and not really interacting.

Even though I guess all leisure time, it's the same amount, but it is more of what you choose to do with it. And I think it's partly because, you know, there's this thing. I often get people telling me like, oh, I don't like time management at all because the best moments in life are these moments where, you know, you're just hanging out with family and friends. You're not even looking at the clock. This is a better approach to life. And that's fine. But the problem is you've got to plan your schedule to have that time, right? And so the more that you can plan your schedule to have interactions with people who energize you, the better you will feel about your time. I think that's true, both at work and at home. And the problem is we often tend to make relationship priority,

sort of the lowest thing on the list. Like, you know, I'll take that new hire out for coffee after I've gotten through all my email or, you know, I'll talk with my spouse after we've gotten through all our chores. But honestly, the time spent interacting with this person that you are excited to be interacting with is really going to be the best use of your time. It's going to make you feel more productive than cleaning the kitchen. What do you do if you reach out to people in an effort to form relationships and their response is, oh, I would love to, but I'm busy. Well, that's fine. Everyone has their own problems, I guess. No, I mean, you can't force anything. For people like that, it's often great to meet them at some place that you know.

know they're already going to be. You know, if you're meeting someone at a conference, you know that they go to or you happen to both be in an event together. That's fine. Some people are just hard to make plans with because they are hard to make plans with. I try not to be that person myself. And I encourage people not to. But there are lots of people out there. So one person is busy, you know, keep reaching out to different people. And you'll find people who are excited about creating new relationships and then you can nurture those. One of the stories that you told in your book is a time that you had set aside to go on a 20-mile bike ride. And of course, like everyone, you had a long list of things to do, but this was time that you specifically set aside for the bike ride.

And yet mentally, during this bike ride, your mind kept going back to that to-do list. How do you escape that? Because in those circumstances, you may be physically. disengaged with your obligations, but you're still psychically there. Yeah, this is a challenge. And it's so maddening at times because I had arranged my life to have this 20-mile bike ride. And I'm sitting there going down this path and thinking about like, no, no, do I need to get another driver because we've got the set of swim lessons. And I think I'm traveling on that day. I've got to get the kids from here to there. So there's a lot of life logistics. I mean, there's some things you can do. One is like

setting aside actual time to deal with life logistics, right? And I'm not. And I'm not. And it's like setting aside, like carving out certain planning times or meeting with your spouse or you can, you know, or caregiver or whatever, you can discuss all these logistics so that it's a little bit out of your brain because I find at least for me, once I know there's a plan, then I can let it go because the plans in place. We're good. But I think we can also just accept that this is part of the nature of the human brain. We're forever doing things like this. But you can sort of start to notice other things and mentally expand the time around those things you're noticing. So for instance, when I was biking, all of a sudden I came out into this clearing where I was along the river,

and it was just such a gorgeous clearing, like the wildflowers, summer, the buzzing insects, this slow water next to me. It was just a very beautiful place. And for a moment, I'm looking at this beauty and I'm not thinking about, like, who's driving, who to swim lessons. And so I'm just trying to capture that moment, like, oh, look, I'm having this beautiful moment. Like, notice that, savor that. And yeah, you're going to get back to the swim lesson problem eventually.

But when I think about that bike ride now, I am not thinking about swim lessons, which sorted itself out one way or the other. Either they went to swim lessons or they didn't. I don't really remember what happened with that. But I do remember that beautiful scene in the water. I remember those buzzing insects and the wildflowers in the sun and the July heat and the breeze on my arms as I'm biking swiftly past the river. So that part expands in memory because I did notice it. And so cultivating that mental muscle of finding something you can savor and linger on and noting it, writing it down afterwards. I wrote it in the book. That was one of the ways I really cemented that memory as well. Often that becomes the thing you remember and becomes your image at that time.

Can you talk more about nurturing memories? Because there is that element of our experience of time largely depends on the memories that we choose to create. And of course, we can choose to remember the good, but we can also have that negativity bias in which we remember that one night of the week that we worked until 10 p.m., but not the other four nights in which we didn't. Yeah, so it's very important to cultivate memory. I mean, memory is not just this thing that it happens and you remember it. If you think about how we organize memories, we're often telling them in terms of stories. You know, if somebody asked you, oh, well, how is your honeymoon? You tell a certain story, right? Like, you don't actually sit there, well, day one, we did this. Day one, two, it was. Like, you'll tell a

story, which is whatever story you've remembered and retold over the years, this is how the memory works. And that becomes the memory over time as the more immediate sense of it starts to fade. But we can really call these things up. Sometimes it's about revisiting places. So one of the experiences I had while writing off the clock is I was invited back to give the commencement address at my high school, 20 years after graduating. And I was a residential school. And so, of course, all sorts of memories of building a life there while living. there and I walked around the campus and all sorts of things start coming back, like even the smell right over the place and that dumpster I saw outside my window all the time. These memories

just start coming back like that as sometimes these artifacts like that. Or it could be looking through old photo albums, talking with somebody from a period of time in your past about that experience, or even just writing it down. I've lately been trying to do this, writing some of these little micro memoirs, my experience of different points of my life. And it's just for me. Like, trust me, I'm not showing these to anyone. And I'm writing without with it in mind. Like, these are not for public consumption. Sometimes it's because they involve people other than me. And I don't know if it's something would ever need to be out in public about. But it's just that I can bring it back for myself. And as I think about these things, time sort of expands in the

rear view mirror. I don't feel like all this time went quickly. It's like I know where it went. I have this experience with time tracking. Now I started tracking my time continuously about three years ago. And so now I don't even need to have these conversations with myself like, oh, did that happen around this time last year? Like I could go look up that bike ride I was just telling you about from July of 2017. I could see exactly what time I left for it. I could tell you what time I went on it.

I could tell you what I did before, tell you what I did after. And because I have that, all my memories are so much more accessible than they would be otherwise. It's really quite amazing. I'm not saying everyone needs to track their time for years. But if you do, you will have quite a holistic perspective on where the time really went. Yeah. And I agree with that. I tracked my time for one a week. And that was an eye-opening experience, mostly in discovering how much I waste. Well, don't feel bad about that. We all waste time. I can tell you.

I mean, I definitely waste time. I shuddered to think sometimes about how much time I waste. And even that those words that we're using right now, the whole concept of wasted time is really time that is spent in a non-intentional or unintentional manner. Exactly. And if you do something great with it, like awesome. But I think the problem is when we don't. We have this time. It could be it's leisure time, but you know, you're spending an hour on Instagram looking at photos of other people's houses. Why? Right. Like it's probably not making you feel better about your house. At least that's never my experience. I'm looking at it. And as are not the photos, people post on Instagram. So it's like, well, I could have just, I could have read a book on the porch. I could have stared at the clouds. I could have just taken deep breaths or something that would have actually made me feel relaxed.

You know, looking at these photos just makes me feel like I need to redecorate and I don't really need to redecorate. So, yeah, I think it's really wasted time is when you're spending time in ways that are not advancing you toward your goals, one of which might be feeling like you have a relaxed and joyful life. And interestingly, when I talk about it that way, it is quite possible to be wasting lots of time at work doing things that look productive. Like that meeting might be a huge, colossal waste of time if it didn't have to happen. If people didn't think through what should have happened, if nothing changed the world as a result of that meeting. You know, we don't think of a meeting as wasting time, but it could be. Absolutely. And that was another, I think, very good point that you made in the book is that calling something work does not make it more noble than any other. use of time. No, it doesn't. I don't know. Just because you got paid for that time, it doesn't mean

it was automatically good. I think being able to question that story that anything labeled work is automatically important is key to taking control of your time. And I saw that in many of the successful people whose time I studied, I write off the clock about Inc. Magazine had asked me to study the schedules of a number of high-profile business people, entrepreneurs, founders of companies. Many of them did not work extreme hours. In fact, almost none of them worked extreme hours. And partly, they were choosing what to spend their time on. They could have definitely spent more time at work. It's just that they had other things they wanted to do as well. And so they were mindful of planning their time to use the 24 hours of a day, the 168 hours of a week,

wisely for all the things that they had going on. And partly knowing that when you spend spend a lot of time doing pointless things at work. You don't have the energy for the stuff that does have a point. So you've got to be judicious on where the time really goes. That's right. And you told it the story of someone who wanted to set up a meeting with an important person, emailed them thinking, hey, they might not have time for weeks to meet with me. And that person replied and said, yeah, I'm bum-free anytime except Wednesday morning. That anecdote is out of the one-minute manager, which is that story that we're like, well, how does this manager he has any time to meet except Wednesday morning?

morning. It's because he's got everything going so well. Like everyone who's working for him knows what they're doing and they're not being micromanaged. And so he's free. But what I thought was funny is that, you know, I thought, well, that's a story. That's a story in a book. And then I was trying to set up an interview with somebody I was going to talk to for this book. And he's managing teams on three continents and all this other stuff. And I said a note, you know, seeing what I could get on his calendar.

You know, I think I'm going to be given like 15 minutes on a Wednesday, like three weeks from now. And he's just like, oh, well, you know, Thursday and Friday and Friday. are completely open for me right now. So pick a few times that work for you and let me know. What on earth? But there are people like this. And it's just they don't want their schedules filled up. And so he'd managed his time. He had a very specific mindset for planning his time that the people who work for him know what they're supposed to be doing. They're welcome to run things by him. But he empowers them to make their decisions. They come with solutions. They're not, you know, asking his opinion on this. Like, this is what I think is right. There's why. What do you think? He makes sure he doesn't set a whole lot of formal meetings because formal meetings have a huge

opportunity cost. And work cultures where people are meeting all the time becomes this vicious cycle that no one will make a decision without a meeting. But then you can't get on anyone's calendar until later because everyone's so booked up with other meetings. And then people call meetings because they want to make sure people are still working on projects because they assume everyone's going to other meetings. And so it's just this huge, vicious cycle of the opportunity costs of time.

And so he's like, well, we won't have a formal meeting. No, you can just come to my office and talk to me for five minutes. If I'm there, I'll talk to you. Call me. You don't need a formal time to call. Just pick up the phone and call and work it out yourself. Have a five-minute chat in the hallway rather than a formally scheduled meeting for 30 or 60 minutes, which is what all meetings must take. Isn't it amazing that all matters in the universe must be decided in exactly 30 or 60 minutes? Where did that come from? Exactly. It's about having a commitment to open space on your calendar. But when you are ruthless about creating open space. You can actually be very effective. And you mentioned meetings and social media or just staring at your phone in general as two of the biggest

time wasting culprits. Yeah. So, I mean, well, meetings, yes. Again, that's the 30 or 60 minutes when it could have taken six. I mean, why? And they multiply the wasted time. Because if it's just you wasting your time, that's one thing. You got six people in a room. There's a lot of wasted time. The phone is another thing I found. The people in my time diary study for off the clock who felt most relaxed about their time, looked at their phones about half as frequently as the people who felt most starved for time. There might be some correlation issue here. Like maybe people who had more stressful jobs felt like they needed to look at their phone more frequently. And that's what was this was picking up on. It wasn't that it was looking at the phone itself. But there's been

some other research finding that, you know, when people were told that they could check email whenever they wanted and then they were given instructions for a different week that, you know, you could only check email like three times a day. And then they flipped groups, right? And then they flipped groups, So the same people who had been checking three times a day could check whenever, and the people who had been checking whenever could only check three times a day. They found that people checking three times a day felt a lot more relaxed. And it's just, even though it seems like you might miss something and that could make you feel stressed. But this constant connectivity makes you feel like you have no time.

It makes you feel like you're always plugged in. And that's a mistake because usually it isn't that important. Speaking of time management and being off the clock, I got a question. if you could reclaim up to 192 hours per year of your time, would you do it? Yeah, of course you would. Our friends at FreshBooks, who make ridiculously easy to use cloud accounting software, they're the architects behind this question. And the reason that they ask the question is because they have figured out

that people who use the FreshBooks platform save about 192 hours per year. That works out to two full working days per month. And they save that amount of time because Fresh Books simplifies these administrative tasks like invoicing and tracking expenses, the tasks that freelancers and small business owners have to do, even though that's not the stuff that you're getting paid for, but you still have to do it. So by spending less time dealing with paperwork,

you've got more time to focus on your business or your family or your life. If you're a freelancer listening to this and you're not using FreshBooks yet, and how's a good time to try it? FreshBooks is offering a 30-day, unrestricted, free trial to my listeners. So to claim it, go to FreshBooks.com. slash paula. Again, that's freshbooks.com slash paula for an unrestricted 30-day free trial, no credit card required. When they ask, how did you hear about us? Type in, afford anything. Do you want to get into the routine of taking vitamins? Check out Care of. There are a monthly subscription

vitamin service that delivers personalized packs to your door. Care of has this online quiz that asks you questions about your diet and your health goals and your lifestyle. And based on that quiz, it gives you recommendations on what vitamins and supplements you specifically need. Now, this quiz takes five minutes to fill out, so it's rather quick, and they give you all of their recommendations, and they'll provide their research supporting each recommendation so that you can evaluate what you want. And it's totally up to you if you want to go with the recommendations you can, or if you want to add some things or subtract some things, you can personalize it as you want. And they have vegan and vegetarian supplement options, and you'll get these vitamins delivered

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What do you do when you schedule a block of time for something and then your mind just starts to wander? I'm thinking right now about you're of course familiar with the concept of a maker schedule versus a manager schedule, where if you are a maker or a creator, if you're a writer, you want to schedule a chunk of time for writing or producing music or art or whatever it is that you do, that deep work. How do you get past the problem of, or I've made this time, but now that I'm here, my brain is off in la la land. Yeah, well, I mean, maybe it is that you actually need a break. You've plunged right into this without doing a proper train. And transition or you're really fragged from something else that you are doing, in which case you

need to acknowledge this. I mean, we are not machines. And even machines need downtime. I mean, that's the thing. Your car is getting repaired from time to time. You got to put fuel in it. We're pretty similar in that way. So maybe you just need a snack. That could be what's going on. But it also could be that you're trying to bite off too big a chunk. I mean, sometimes what happens is people are so busy with other stuff in life. They're like, wow, I've managed to get like an open block of four hours. This must be the most important four. hours in my life. You know, they set up the expectation so large that you'll never be able to achieve it. You know, like, I've got to write this like Nobel Prize winning novel in these four hours and that's

not going to happen. So then the expectation is so huge that it's just paralyzing. So I think it's often helpful to just start small and be like, well, I've got this open block of time. We're just going to see what I can do with it. Maybe I'll just write a little bit on this and a little bit on that. And, you know, I'd like to work on this book. But I, oh, here's this part that I'm really excited about. Let me just write a little bit on that. Oh, this is the way I thought about starting it. Let me just write a little bit on that. You do enough little bits. You get something. You kind of fool yourself into writing the whole thing, but it was never actually pushing yourself too hard. I really believe in being gentle with ourselves and setting our expectations low because then we can exceed them. And that's very happy-inducing.

What is the primary takeaway that you hope people get from your latest book off the clock? Well, I hope people can feel, even if they do have a lot going on in their lives, there's ways that they can interact with time in order to make time feel more abundant. They can consciously plan an adventures. They can think about how they will remember these adventures. They can think about really savoring and lingering in good moments. And if you do these things, and yes, spend time with people you love as well, because that expands time too. If you do these things, time will not feel like this drumbeat marching you toward doom. will feel so much better. It will feel like life is good and relaxed and full and wonderful.

And if we can interact with time that way, well, how much more exciting is that? We really do truly feel off the clock as opposed to, you know, be holding to the clock in some way or another. Well, thank you, Laura. Where can people find you if they'd like to learn more? Well, I hope that your listeners will come visit my website, which is laura vandercam.com. If you're looking for something else to listen to in the time when you're not listening to this podcast, I have a podcast called Best of Both World. with Sarah Hart Unger, we talk about issues of work and family from the perspective of loving both. I really do believe there's enough time in the 168 hours we all have each week to really succeed on both.

So people can listen to that as well and hopefully check out off the clock too. Excellent. And we will link to all of that in the show notes. Thank you so much, Laura. Well, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it. Thank you so much, Laura, for this interview. What are some of the key takeaways that we got from today's conversation? Here are four. Number one, do not become attached to the idea that you are starved for time.

There is something of a perception in our culture that busy equates with important. The jab, oh, you've got too much time on your hands, is a way to insult somebody. Think about that for a second. Telling someone that they have too much time on their hands is a put-down. That sounds like an aspiration. And so if you would like to enjoy the experience of having more time, if you would like to develop the mindset, that time is abundant and you've got all the time in the world, and you have the flexibility to go out and have fun and linger and savor, then the first step in doing so is not becoming wedded to the idea or to the story that you are perpetually time starved. We often become very wedded to our stories because they are sources of identity, whether that's the harried, overworked person, like, oh, I have no time for anything fun. Can't you see how busy I am with work? Or, you know, we can do it in our personal lives too or like give so much of my time to everyone else. I have no time for me. You know, is it true? So here's the thing about a scarcity mindset versus an abundance mindset. We'll relate this to the concept of money. If you believe that money is scarce, then your mind will be.

be consumed with hoarding it, with clutching onto every penny. You will obsess about the small stuff. You will drive yourself nuts over a $5 decision. And because cognitive space is limited, you will be so consumed with obsessing over clutching and hoarding that you'll miss out on opportunities, bigger opportunities, big wins. And so in order for money to become more abundant in your life, you have to first believe that money is abundant. Even if your own bank balance is tight, you at least have to believe that money in the world is abundant. There are trillions and trillions of dollars floating out there in the world, and you only need a tiny fraction of that to enjoy an excellent life. And once you start viewing money as abundant and viewing opportunities to

make and save and invest money as abundant, then you begin to enter into a mental space, It is completely different from that space of scarcity and deprivation. You become more generous. You become more giving. You take bigger entrepreneurial and creative risks. You see more opportunities simply because you believe that more opportunities are there. The law of attraction, I think, really should be called the law of attention. We notice the things that we pay attention to.

And when you start paying attention to abundance, you start seeing more of it. It's kind of like if you start paying attention to greed, cars, you start seeing more of them, not because there are more of them on the road, but just because they're the ones that you have a cultivated eye-foreseeing. If you start paying attention to Rottweilers, you will naturally just begin to notice more. Again, not because there are more of those dogs in existence, but simply because you have decided to start paying attention to them and as a result, you notice them more frequently. The same is true when it comes to money abundance and time abundance. And so that, I think, is takeaway number one from this interview. If you want your time

to be abundant, you have to believe that time is abundant. People often say that life is short, but one of my favorite expressions, I actually have two favorite expressions, and they're in direct contradiction to each other on the surface, although I think the meaning behind them is the same. One of my favorite expressions is life is long. And if you think about it, life is long. And then the other expression that I really like is, life is short, we must take it slowly. And so you see what I mean. On the surface, those two statements seem to contradict one another. But the meaning of both of those sentiments, I believe, is the same. So that is key takeaway number one from this conversation with Laura Vandercam.

Key takeaway number two. People are worth your time. And that's for two reasons. Number one, it's because relationships are important, they are valuable. And despite the fact that we will never receive a trophy nor a certificate for the quality of our relationships, they are one of the most, if not the most valuable thing. And that's one reason why people are important, why relationships are important. The other reason is because spending time with other people increases your perception of time. It increases the sense that time is abundant. So one of the things I found, in my time diary project for off the clock is that people's time perception scores rose in direct correlation with how much time they spent interacting with family and friends. So somebody who

would like meet a friend in the evening and then do a family activity after dinner would feel like she had more time than somebody who spent the same amount of time doing chores and then just like all watching TV and not really interacting. All leisure time is the same amount, but it is more of what you choose to do with it. I often get people telling me like, oh, I don't like time management at all because the best moments in life are these moments where, you know, you're just hanging out with family and friends. You're not even looking at the clock. This is a better approach to life. And that's fine.

But the problem is you've got to plan your schedule to have that time. There are several things that happen when you spend time with people. Number one, you fuel the perception that I am the type of person who has time to spend with people I love. And that adds to your sense of time abundance. and it adds to your happiness. Number two, other people are, by definition, novel. You are with yourself all day every day, but you're only with another person for a limited period of time.

Even if that other person is someone you see frequently, you're still with them for a shorter amount of time than you are with yourself. And as we also talked about during the interview, anytime that you encounter something that's new or novel or unfamiliar or out of your routine, that expands your sense of time. So simply being with another person, having a conversation, can make time feel more expansive. And I can tell you as an introvert, there are definitely times when the two hours that I spend at a party can stretch a lot longer than the two hours that I spend at home in my living room by myself. There are times when I have to actively fight the urge to leave the party and I tell myself, all right, Paula, just stay for another 15 minutes.

And then I do, and within the next 15 minutes, I'm going to. I've entered into an interesting conversation with someone, and then I'm really enjoying myself. So certainly that makes time feel expansive in the moment, but also in hindsight, when I look back at the previous year or two years of my life, all of those many nights at home alone, cooking dinner, watching TV, reading a book. Because that happens often, my brain has compressed all of those memories into effectively a single. experience, there isn't any one particular night that stands out, but if I think back to a conference or a party or a concert or a hike, that specific experience stands out in memory. And in that regard, my overall perception of the past year can seem longer, more vivid, more detailed.

If you want to increase your perception of time, if you want to feel that time is abundant, spend it with other people, ideally doing new or interesting things. And by the way, I know there's a sizable contingent of this audience that is pursuing financial independence. Isn't this the point of financial independence? Isn't a big part of the purpose of developing streams of passive income so that you can redirect more of your energy, more of your time, towards relationships, towards novel experiences, towards learning and adventure, and meaning? Well, if that is the ultimate goal, don't defer that for the next decade. There are

many hours in a week, every week, in which you can do that now. Even if it's as simple as running errands with a friend, going to a grocery store with a friend rather than going alone, and going to a different store than the one that you usually go to. So that's key takeaway number two. People are worth the time. Key takeaway number three, improving your relationship with time is largely also the practice of deliberately cultivating memories. It's very important to cultivate memory. Memory is not just this thing that happens and you remember it. If you think about how we organize memories, we're often telling them in terms of stories.

You know, if somebody asks you, oh, well, how is your honeymoon? You tell a certain story, right? Like, you don't actually sit there, well, day one, we did this. Day one, two, it was. Like, you'll tell a story, which is whatever story you've remembered and retold over the years. This is how the memory works, and that becomes the memory over time as the more immediate sense of it starts to fade. But we can really call these things up. There are two cognitive biases that impact the way in which we form memories. One of these is referred to as

nostalgia bias, which is the notion that memories get rosier with hindsight. You know, the joke about all the old people talking about like the good old days. Well, the good old days weren't necessarily that good. It's just that nostalgia bias makes us remember those days fondly because we often tend to remember the highlights. And a more immediate example of that is if you have young children and you take your young kids to Disney World, five years later, when you look back on that trip, you'll remember the peak moments. You'll remember the joy of eating ice creams together in the park or the thrill of that particular rollercoaster. and what you will forget what you'll block out of your memory

were the tantrums and the meltdowns and the 52 times that you had to go stand in line for the restroom and the long lines and the fact that it was kind of humid and sweaty. You'll forget all of that and you'll remember the peak moments and that is the notion of nostalgia bias. However, competing with that is a different cognitive bias which is known as negativity bias. And negativity bias,

states that we also have a tendency to latch on to a negative memory. For example, if you think about, if somebody asks you, oh, do you normally work late hours, and last week one night of the week you worked late and the other four nights you didn't, and also you had two days off out of seven, the thing that will come to mind is the night that you worked late. The thing that will not come to mind is the previous night when you came home at a normal hour, and cooked dinner and watch TV. And so we have both of these notions that affect the way in which we form memories. And Laura makes the point that in order to cultivate our memories, we must choose what stories we tell, not just to the world, but also to ourselves.

Writing in a journal, writing that's never meant to be read by the outside world, can be a way in which we tell ourselves stories and reinforce those stories in time when we look back on what we've written, telling stories to a friend, keeping a blog. And even sharing photos and stories on social media, I mean, for all of the flack that it gets, there is a good reason why we tend to show the highlight reel on social media. It's largely because when we look back on our own lives,

those are the points that we want to remember. We want to remember the gorgeous sunset and not the diarrhea. We want to remember the beach and not the flight delay. And so we post pictures of the former and not the latter. And yes, that can skew other people's perceptions of our lives, but it can also help us when we look back on our own feed and we reflect back on our own lives, remember the good points. So key takeaway number three is that if you want to improve,

your relationship with time, be deliberate about how you cultivate memories. And one of the most effective ways to do that is by choosing which stories you tell. And finally, key takeaway number four, we live in a culture that glorifies hard work and glorifies the hustle and grind. Even I myself, many times in my blog, on the podcast, in my social media accounts, I myself am guilty of many times really glorifying hustle. Work hard. Push yourself. Go further. But I believe, and Laura also says this in her book, that wisdom is the ability to simultaneously hold two seemingly contradictory notions. And so while, yes, I believe in the hustle, I also believe very much in downtime. And Laura, towards the end of our conversation, said it best. We are not machines, and even machines need

downtime. Even our laptop and cell phone batteries need to recharge. That is our fourth and final takeaway from this conversation with Laura Vandercom. You can find the show notes at afford anything.com slash episode 147. Coming up on the Afford Anything podcast, we have an interview with Brian Portnoy, an investment expert who talks about our own subconscious biases and behavioral quirks that affect the way that we invest. So we talk heavily about the world of behavioral economics and how that impacts the way in which we invest, particularly given the overwhelming and often opaque smattering of investment choices that are out there. So that episode about the investor's paradox is coming up in a couple of weeks.

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Thank you again so much for tuning in. My name is Paula Pant. I'm the host of the Afford Anything podcast. I hope you've enjoyed today's episode. And I appreciate you spending this time with us and being part of this community. I'll catch you next week.