Afford Anything - How to Schedule Your Day for Peak Enjoyment, with Laura Vanderkam

Episode Date: January 4, 2023

#421: Life is busy. We spend too much time on chores, errands, commuting, emails and other draining tasks. We lack time for joy and hobbies. Or do we?  Today’s guest, Laura Vanderkam, talks to us about how to make the most of our time and carve out more space for gratifying experiences. Laura Vanderkam is a time management and productivity expert. Her latest work, “Tranquility By Tuesday: 9 Ways to Calm the Chaos and Make Time for What Matters” shares actionable steps to help you fill your schedule with more of what you love. Enjoy! Timing of discussion points as of January 2023: 06:06: Where the time management focus should land 13:44: What is tranquility? 15:22: How to structure your hours 16:33: Set your bedtime: the foundational rule for time management 24:18: The power of planning on Fridays 29:05: Move your body by 3 pm 35:02: Create “backup slots” 37:10: The impact of various time management guidelines 38:43: The Big Adventures Rule 44:06: Taking a night for yourself 47:51: Batch the little things 50:16: The effortful before the effortless For more information, visit the show notes at https://affordanything.com/episode421 Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You can afford anything but not everything. Every choice that you make is a trade-off against something else, and that doesn't just apply to your money. That applies to your time, your focus, your energy, your attention, any limited resource that you need to manage. Saying yes to something implicitly carries trade-offs. And that opens up two questions. First, what matters most?

Second, how do you make decisions that reflect that which matters most? answering these two questions is a lifetime practice. And that's what this podcast is here to explore and facilitate. My name is Paula Pant. I am the host of the Afford Anything podcast. And today, one of the foremost time management experts, Laura Vandercom, joins us to talk about the latest evidence-backed ideas in the world of time management. Laura Vandercombe has been on this show many times before. I believe this is approximately her fourth appearance, if I'm not mistaken,

and she keeps coming back for one reason. She is darn good at what she does. Her ideas about time management go beyond the tactical. Tactics are important, of course, but she frames time management into a wider context and presents evidence-backed counterintuitive ideas. I want to give you two examples of things that I've learned from her that come from previous interviews on this podcast.

One, Laura noted that if you don't take a real break, your brain will take a fake one. You may think that you are being productive by refusing to give yourself even a 15-minute break, but you will mindlessly scroll Instagram or stare out the window, even if you lock your phone away from yourself, you will stare out the window or stare at the ceiling because your brain does need that break.

Before there was the internet, people were still building chains of paper clips while sitting at their desk. Distraction predates the internet, and that distraction often comes from not giving yourself adequate breaks. That's one of the things that I learned from her. Another was that she is the person who taught me

that when it comes to thinking about what you do yourself versus what you delegate, she's the one who taught me to first fill your schedule with the things that cannot be delegated. So for example, you can't delegate going to the gym. You can't delegate calling your mom. You're the only person who can do those things. You can't pay somebody to go to the gym on your behalf or to call your mom on your behalf. So fill your schedule with those things first.

And then if you have time remaining and you want to optionally choose to tackle some projects that could be delegated, such as installing baseboards or deep cleaning your refrigerator. Sure, you're welcome to do that if you have sufficient time, but never clean your refrigerator at the cost of not calling your mom or not going to the gym, because that is an inversion of priorities. So those are two things that I learned from Laura Vandercam from previous podcast episodes that she's done. Today, we're going to hear about her latest work. Now, Laura and I, a little behind the scenes here, we actually recorded this interview several months ago before I started at Columbia. And we did this because I knew that once I began

this fellowship, I was going to be incredibly busy. And I decided to line up a bunch of interviews in advance. So I am looking forward to hearing this as a midpoint check-in for how we all can make better use of our time, our energy, our focus, and accordingly our lives in this new year. With that said, here she is, best-selling author, Laura Vandercombe. Hi, Laura. Hi, Paula. Thanks for having me. Thank you for coming on the show.

Laura, you've been writing about and studying the topic of time management for around 15 years now. It's funny, you know, you keep track of the time of these sorts of things of writing about time. I guess it is true. Yes, I've been writing about this for a great management. years. Can you tell us in the last decade and a half of studying this topic, what are some of the biggest or least intuitive insights that you've gained? There's a couple of things. Time itself doesn't actually change. We always have the same 24 hours in a day, the same 168 hours in a week or 8,760 hours in a year, except for leap year. So we're always working with the same volume of hours,

and everybody is working with the same volume of hours. So it's that constant. That said, there are ways that time has changed for various people. You know, when I first started writing about time, social media, for instance, was not quite as big a thing. So that's something that changed. Ideas of digital entertainment that are out there have certainly expanded. But one of the biggest changes, of course, has happened in the past few years.

How people work has, in many cases changed quite a bit. the ability to work remotely, work flexibly, move time around and not stick to sort of a nine to five schedule for work has certainly been there as long as we have had smartphones, laptops, things like that. But there was a lot of resistance to it before COVID. But now, if you look at the percent of people who are working remotely, it is still very elevated. So that's been a change as people are commuting less, for instance, or changing the way the workday looks. So, you know, there's been changes. There's definitely been changes. But I think that overall, we always still have to deal with those 24 hours in a day. And so we always have to ask ourselves, what do I wish to be spending those hours doing? And is the way that I'm

spending these 24 hours matching up with what I want my life to look like. Do you think that traditional time management advice adequately addresses these issues? One comment that you made in your recent book, is that oftentimes when you turn to traditional time management advice, they will discuss tactics such as clean the shower while you're in it. Yes. For whatever reason, that is the time management hack that I keep reading. That's supposed to save us some time. I mean, it's the same thing as with money. You can clip coupons, but if you are saving 30 cents on cereal, you are only saving 30 cents. I mean, it has not changed anything about your life overall. It usually is the bigger pieces that have to change in order for someone's finances to really

be in a different position. And it's the exact same thing with time. You are not suddenly going to build an amazing life by cleaning the shower while you were in it. Or for instance, another hack is if you send a lot of emails where the answer is okay, just type K instead of okay. That is also not going to give you an amazing life, even if you're typing hundreds of emails a day that are K versus is okay. We have to focus on the bigger picture of what is in my life. Are the things that are in my life, things that are meaningful for myself and the people I care about? Are there things that I am looking forward to? Do I feel like my work is meaningful? Do I feel like I am part of a community? Do I feel like I am loved and loving other people and as such are feeling satisfied

with life? And when those big pieces are right, you can type extra letters all you want. Right. So what you advocate is more of a foundational framework. Yeah, and I get it. I mean, it's the same thing with finance. I mean, most people are not going to, you know, up and move all of a sudden or sell all their cars tomorrow or anything like that. And so that's why a lot of finance advice does tend to focus on something that is small that you could, you know, change in the next day or two. And so people can, for instance, shop differently at the grocery store or maybe don't buy lattes. Don't buy lattes. I mean, that is something you can, in fact, do tomorrow. Moving is a little bit harder, but, you know, ultimately moving might be the thing to do. I tend to encourage people to focus on big picture stuff. But I will say that the good news is probably for a lot of people, the big picture is pretty good. I'm guessing that for a lot of people, you aren't necessarily dreaming of quitting your job or if you were, you've already done that. You've moved on from that. You've got a different situation now. Probably your friends and family, You like them, right? That's why you're all still in this world to gather. It's more a question for many busy people of making sure that life doesn't feel so much like a slog, right? Like that we feel like there are things that we really find enjoyable right now in a satisfying sense. You asked earlier about something that was counterintuitive. One of the most counterintuitive things I have found is that a lot of times when busy people are like, I need to make my life better, I need to just start cutting

things left and right. I have to get rid of all this stuff in my life. And that may be true. There may be plenty of commitments you don't want to have. But what often helps is to build in new commitments that you truly want to do, the things that make you really excited, things that make you feel like a real person with your own interests aside from just work and family. That's perhaps the counterintuitive that I want busy people to put more stuff in their life. But I find that when we put more stuff in our life, we naturally get rid of some of the bad stuff just because we don't have deal with it anymore. So additive rather than subtractive. That's not something you often hear in time management. No, but, you know, we're going to have a burstingly full life no matter what. It's just the question

of what you want to fill it with. Right. There are many things I've learned from you over the years. One that has always stayed with me. You mentioned that if you don't take a real break, your brain will take a fake one for you. And so oftentimes if you're not intentional about how you're filling your days, and we'll talk about this in more detail in a moment, but you might fritter away 20 minutes reading a comment thread on your second cousin's Facebook post about their dog's birthday party, right? Because your brain just needs a break, but you haven't actually awarded yourself one. Yeah, we need to be thoughtful about how we're spending our time. And because time keeps passing, no matter what you do, it can be very difficult to spend it mindfully. Where this plays out is that you

have people who feel like they have absolutely no free time whatsoever who have, in fact, spent 20 plus minutes reading this comment thread on the second cousin's birthday, or scrolling around through other stuff they don't care about watching mindless TV, puttering around the house, they're not doing anything. I mean, you could tell yourself you're sorting the mail pile, but you're not. You're like just standing there, moving from room to room doing nothing. But again, we all need some downtime, and we all get some downtime. It's just the question of what we are doing with that downtime. And when we notice it and we see where it's going to happen and we make a plan for it, we can use that time in ways that are actually rejuvenating as opposed to just mindlessly

letting it pass us by. You've studied time management logs. You yourself have kept a meticulous time management log of every half hour of your life for the past 15 years or so. And you've also studied time management logs from what thousands. Am I right? Thousands of people? Thousands of people, yes. I've only tracked my time for about seven and a half years. Maybe that's better than 15. I don't think it's any better. Maybe 15 would have been better. Who knows?

Have you found any patterns or consistencies in how much downtime a person needs? I mean, of the 168 hours a week that we exist, you know, we can make reasonable predictions about how many of those hours will be spent sleeping, how many of those hours will be spent working. But how many of those hours do we need to allocate for downtime? Yeah, it's funny. I was reading something recently that said, you know, you need somewhere between two to five a day. I will tell you that's probably about right. If you have less than two hours consistently, now remember, there are seven days in a week. So, you know, a Monday might have a little bit less, but you might have a little bit more on a Friday, Saturday, Sunday, right? And by downtime, we mean things that are not quite as intense. But it certainly could be something like going for a walk. It doesn't mean that you're sitting around doing absolutely nothing or, you know, you know, any sort of passive leisure, it could be active leisure too. But just having some decompression time is obviously very important. But if you have too much, you get bored, you get antsy,

then you need to start looking for ways to fill it. And so it's kind of funny because a lot of us are, of the mindset that we don't have nearly enough time. And for many people, that might be true. But I actually find that for many people, I am constantly telling people to go get a hobby. I think one of my most common bits of time management advice is go get a hobby because somebody is in a situation where they are working, they may have something in their life, but it doesn't consume all their time. It's not necessarily all that every minute is with it. And so there is some downtime and having something else to orient their personal time around can often just change their entire perspective. And so on the topic of getting a hobby, so you have come up with a list of nine, we'll call them

rules, but if the word rules is unappealing to people who are listening, you could call it guidelines or experiments. Strategies. Yeah, exactly. Laura's musings of the moment, yes. And so these are nine guidelines for increasing a sense of tranquility in your life. What is tranquility? Tranquility is kind of a funny word.

The synonyms for it are like serenity and calm and things like that. A lot of people who are living very busy, full lives are oftentimes. telling themselves, oh, like, well, next week will be more calm. Next week, things are going to calm down. Next month, things will be different. Next year, I don't know. Things will be different. The truth is, it probably won't.

I mean, you're going to be the exact same person. You're going to have the same things going on in your life. We really need strategies that allow us to live a sustainable life now. To make life feel very doable, to make life feel both calm and enjoyable. I'm going for the sort of tranquility that's not up in a mountain top by yourself. because for many of us, that's not going to happen. I think more of the tranquility of, you know, this is going to sound really crazy, but I like to watch circus acts sometimes because I think they're always so well staged.

And I picture the clown who's like spinning plates on his fingers or on a pole on his head or whatever. And the guy doing that is incredibly calm. He's just sitting there, you know, it's another day on the job. Yes, there's 16 plates spinning around his body somewhere. But he's good. He's got a system. It's all balanced. He's figuring it out. He'll do this act, then he'll move on to the next one. So that's the sort of tranquility I'm thinking about. There's a lot of moving parts, but I feel in control.

I feel like I'm making time for the things that matter, and I'm enjoying myself. And that goes back to something you said earlier, which is that often time management is about enjoying the moment. It's about doing all of the things that you are doing or adding in new things that you want to be doing. but doing so in such a way that your quality of life is high in the moment. Yeah, because life is lived in hours. And how we feel about our life is a function of how we spend our hours. And I think that can trip a lot of people up because, you know, we can sit there and say, well, the pieces of my life are, in fact, very good.

I have a good job or I have, you know, a family. We have this beautiful house or whatever it is that are the pieces of a good life. But if how you spend your hours is not making you happy, then it can be easy to not feel happy about having these good things. And then, of course, you feel bad because like, well, why aren't I happy about my great job, good house, nice family, whatever it is? If you are stuck in traffic commuting between the beautiful house and the good job. Let's talk about how to restructure your hours. You start with something that I and many people find impossible of your. or nine guidelines the first, and I'm curious as to why this is the first, the first is to set a

bedtime. It is. It is to set a bedtime. And there's a couple of reasons why I really think this is a foundational time management rule. One is that we all do better at life when we are not sleep deprived. This is just a fundamental biological reality. Your body needs a certain amount of sleep. And it might be slightly different from everyone. I know from time tracking that I am a 7.4 hours per day sort of girl, right? That is what I need. That is what my body is aiming for. When I am in the habit of getting to bed at the right time, I will wake up on my own 7.4 hours after I have gone to sleep. It's different for everybody. But if you ignore this number, you are going to have a problem. You are not going to be functioning at your best. It is simply harder to do it. It is simply harder to do

anything if you are sleep deprived. And I will say here, because I've written a lot about sleep in the past, most people do get enough sleep from a numerical perspective because their bodies force them to. It's the same thing as, you know, we talked about needing breaks. Your brain will take a mindless break and look through that comment thread. Your body will force you to get enough sleep. You will crash on the couch. You will sleep in on weekends or sleep through your alarm on some Thursday morning when you didn't mean to. This is what your body will do to make sure that you get whatever numerical quantity of sleep you need. But wouldn't it be so much better to get it in a way that you could control so that you're building it into your life in a structured way so that you

can make good choices with your time and you're not feeling exhausted on the days when you undershot the number and then need to make it up later. I tell people figure out how much sleep you need. Figure out what time you need to get up in the morning because most adults have to get up for work or family responsibilities at a certain time. Like that's not a number that's going to move much, count back from that number the amount of sleep you need, and that is your bedtime. Like, this is a math problem. This is not a question of, you know, what kind of person you are or anything else like that. It is math. It is nothing more than math. If you have to wake up at 630 and you need seven and a half hours of sleep, you need to be in your bed and going to sleep by 11 p.m.

That's the truth. But if you do this night after night, you'll find waking up at 630 to be quite doable. and you will feel like you can make life work at that point. That's the basic reason, but there's sort of a deeper truth behind this, which is that most of us are clear that a day has a beginning. Right. You get up at some point, and that is the beginning of your day. We are a little fuzzier on the concept that each day has an end. And when you know your bedtime, this is when the day is over, now you know exactly how long

the day is. You have a given quantity of temporal space, and you need to figure out what to do with it and what mindful choices you can make within that, whatever it is for you, 16 and a half hours, 17 hours, you know, 15 hours, however much waking time it is based on how much sleep you need. But when you can see that, you start to make more mindful choices about what can fit in a day and what can't. The concept of a strict bedtime puts a limitation on a day, which then it caps it, whereas mentally a day might feel unlimited.

But it isn't. It never is. You have to sleep. Even if you stay up very late one night, then you will crash the next night or at some point during the week. So you won't get those hours back. Those hours are gone regardless. What I'm encouraging people to do is to get those hours in a set way that you can then decide how you would like to spend them. So by putting additional structure boundaries around what we know to be a waking day, we then plan the hours in that day better because we know we have a definitive end. You know you have between, let's say, 6.30 a.m. and 11 p.m. And now what is going to happen during that time? What can't happen during that time? It's a problem to figure out, but it's a set problem. It's like playing Tetris.

You know, this can fit. This cannot. Right. A couple of follow-ups. So one is, I use a Fitbit, which tracks my sleep. And what I've observed is that the amount of time that I spend laying down in bed with my eyes closed is not the amount of time that I'm actually sleeping. It's It takes me eight hours to achieve seven hours of sleep. And sometimes there are some days or nights where that that's better than others, where, you know, my sleep is more efficient. Is there anything that a person can do about that? Or is that just something that needs to get baked in? Yeah.

I mean, I think if people experiment with this, they can see, you know, sometimes for some people that's that, you know, I'm not saying with you. But like, for some people, it's maybe limiting alcohol, you know, before sleep or limiting caffeine earlier in the day. it might even be not having as much liquids in general before bed so you don't have to get up and go to the bathroom. For instance, that's something that can, you know, affect nighttime sleep or maybe it's the noise in your space or the temperature. And so those are all things that people can experiment with. I don't think it necessarily is the goal to be in deep sleep for all of that time.

It may be that your body is just set that you want to be resting for eight hours and have seven hours of sleep within that. And that is just your number. right? And that is fine. So your actual sleep is seven, but your time in bed has to be eight. And that could be totally true. And that's fine. Once it's data that you have, you can work with it. And so it's the same thing. It's like, you know, sometimes people are like, well, I want to need to figure out how I can sleep less. And it's like, well, I'm not sure that that's what you need to figure out. You know, you need to figure out how to live life to do what you need to do in the amount of time that you have that is awake. And so, you know,

for some people, they may need longer amounts of time in bed because for whatever reason, their body's sleep is not, I don't know, efficient, I'll put it in quotes. But it's not a value judgment. It's just, you know, what you are. And if you've done the lifestyle things that you can change, then it is what it is. We'll come back to this episode after this word from our sponsors. The holidays are right around the corner. And if you're hosting, you're going to need to get prepared.

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All right, the second tip that you offer, the second guideline, is to plan on Fridays and to plan not just what you're going to do at work, but also what you're going to do for yourself personally, as well as for your relationships. First of all, why Fridays? Friday is what an economist might call a low opportunity cost time. Most of us are not sitting there on Friday afternoon feeling excited about starting major projects. You're kind of sliding into the weekend. And since it is very easy to waste this time, it would be better to repurpose it and to plan and use some of the fact that you can't do anything, like you can't do the work itself, but you might be willing to think about what future you should be doing. And so I suggest Friday partly for that reason. You know, a lot of people plan on, let's say, Sunday night. But if you need to make an appointment

with someone or set up a meeting, that person may not be available to make that plan on Sunday night, whereas Friday during business hours, you can often reach the person or call the place that you need an appointment that's more efficient that way. It allows you to seize Monday morning energy. If you plan on Monday morning, you aren't going to do anything Monday morning. It'll be pushed forward what you could do. But also because it allows you to go into the weekend knowing what you need to do the next week. So you're not thinking about it all weekend. I find that many people, you know, wind up with the Sunday scleries or something on the end of the weekend, even if they like their job, it's just that they know there's a ton of stuff waiting for them and they don't have a plan to deal with it. And so their brain is

kind of churning through it. Whereas if you leave work on Friday with a plan, you're good. You can, you know, execute on it Monday morning and not have to think about it all weekend. How long does it take or how long should it take to create plans? I really don't think it needs to take much time. I would say it takes me 20 minutes more or less. Now, it might be more elaborate for some folks than others. But the key of this planning, and I'm not saying this is the only time you ever think about the future in your life, but you want one time during the week where you look at the whole of the week. You look forward a little bit and see what's coming up and you look at both professional and personal stuff, because this allows you to think through, well, what is most important? What do I really want to see happen in the next week professionally?

What do I want to see happen with your friends and family? What do I want to see happen for myself? And so once you have those big pieces mapped out and you put them into your schedule, then as you are doing everything else, as you're figuring out where everything else goes, you know that you already have taken care of these things. You then be like, oh, yes, I need to meet with ex person. You've already looked at your calendar and seen that, oh, well, there's a camp show for my kid on Thursday at 4 and I'd really like to go to that. That would be important for me to do. And so you're not randomly giving away 4 p.m. on Thursday just because you didn't think about it. That happens all the time that people just don't think about it and then they've created their own problems. So, you know, it's when you can think about

the whole of life. Think about what is important and not just what is happening and give yourself sort of marching orders for the week. What happens if you, like me, I struggle with, I'll make a plan, but then I have low plan compliance throughout the week. Well, the compliance comes in different forms. There's our own compliance and there's sort of the world, the universe is compliance with our plans. And the universe, of course, has no obligation to comply with your plan. And that is to be expected. Life happens. We have to deal with this.

And because of that, it's important to do some of the other rules, such as leaving open space so that we can deal with the unexpected. But if you personally are not complying with the plans, then it's probably not a good plan for you. This is not a moment for wishful thinking. The only reason to do this is if it's functional. If you're not going to do something, then there was no point planning it. You may as well just take it off the list entirely. There's no virtue in putting something on a to-do list and not doing it.

It's supposed to be a guide for you. If you don't want to do it, better to acknowledge that. Get rid of it. It's not going to happen. Often what I've noticed is that the plans that I make assume that I have a certain level of energy. And when I get to the time that I've allocated to execute something, I'm just drained. I just don't have the energy for it. Are there any effective ways to address this?

Well, there are a few. I mean, one is that you can start to notice this about yourself and make plans that take your energy levels into account. I mean, many people start the day ready to take on the world. Somewhere around 2 o'clock, 3 o'clock in the afternoon, they no longer feel like they're ready to take on the world. They're kind of ready for a nap at that point. So it's good to know this about yourself. And to make fewer plans than you think can fit in the space. This is the most common sin that people overestimate what they can do in a day. It's better to make yourself a much shorter list. And then if you feel, finish that and you have more energy, like, great, go find some more stuff. I'm sure you can figure out something to do with yourself, but better to be realistic about what can happen. There are ways to address your energy, and one of the best ways is actually rule number three, the next one that we would be getting to here, which is to move by 3 p.m. And this is, you know, anyone who does exercise regularly knows that it does boost your energy. I mean, yes, you are spending energy to move yourself, but overall, it does add to your energy levels. This rule is to move. This rule is to move for at least 10 minutes in the first half of every day. And there's some pretty good research

that people who do these like little bursts of energy will, you know, rate themselves as far more energetic afterwards than they were before. Sometimes really all it is that allows you to feel like you can do this thing that you couldn't before is taking a 10 minute walk outside. Like you come back refreshed, ready to do it. And yet it's funny how many people just don't do this because it's like, oh, well, I'm too busy to leave my desk and go walk around. And it's like that, and then you sit there wasting 50 minutes reading the comment thread on Facebook post about the birthday party. Better to take 10 minutes, get the real break, get some physical activity, and you will feel far more energized afterwards. Right. And you make the point that even if you already have an exercise habit that

takes place in the evening, perhaps there are people who are listening to this who are thinking, oh, but normally I go to the gym after work at 6 p.m. Still, the 10 minutes, sometime in the first half of the day can elevate your energy levels for the remainder of the day. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I'm not saying anyone needs to stop being an evening exerciser. I'm saying find 10 minutes at some point during your day where you can pause what you're doing and move around, move your body. And yeah, even if you're going to the gym at 6 p.m., like that doesn't mean you need to sit for 10 hours prior to that. Like, it would be a good idea to get up and do something. Right, exactly. Oftentimes, you know, that notion comes from all or nothing thinking, which is a common cognitive bias. Yeah, no,

people are not a custom thing, wait, 10 minutes doesn't count for anything. It's like, well, I'm not trying to get you to like lose 50 pounds by walking for 10 minutes. That's probably not going to happen. That's not the goal. The goal is simply to boost your energy levels. And that I can pretty much guarantee will happen. Right. Move for sanity, not vanity. Yeah, sanity, not vanity. Absolutely. And so the first three focus on personal well-being, the next six then focus more on your relationship with the outside world. Yeah, I would say that's partly how I would think of it. I mean, the next four, are really focused on what we talk about filling your life with the good stuff. And then the last two are kind of about wasting less time. So yeah, the next step is then, you know, putting the good stuff in. All right. Let's talk about rule number four, which is actually a concept. It's really a mental framework shift. Three times a week is a habit. Yeah. So this is honestly a life-changing mindset. We mentioned earlier this idea of all or nothing thinking, you know, that if I'm not at the gym for an hour it doesn't count or if I'm not doing X, Y, or Z every day, like, I'm not doing it. And the truth is, people have various things they want to do. I mean, they want to exercise or they want to practice

the piano or eat family meals or anything along those lines. And they tell themselves, like, oh, it's never happening. We never do those things. And the reason you have that never mindset is you're often looking at life day by day. And maybe you do something in your life, but not that frequently. Maybe you do it once or twice a week. But if you're doing something once a week, most days you're not doing it. And so if your mindset is one day, most of the time you're getting it to the end of the day and say, I didn't do it, right? That can make you feel very defeated. But you don't have to have that mindset. First, if we shift to a weekly perspective, we start to view time differently right there. And I maintain that anything that happens three times a week is a

habit. Three times is a reasonable amount of time. But often when people track their time or look back over their lives, they see that they are doing something maybe once or twice a week. And they're not doing it never, they're doing it not as much as I want. But not as much as I want is a very, very different story from never. And so not as much as I want. Well, then we can say, well, could you scale it up just a little bit? Can you get to three times a week? And often, for instance, people will be like, we never eat family meals. Well, they look at their time. They say, well, actually, we do often eat together Friday nights. It's okay, great. Well, that's not never. It's some amount of time. Can we find two other spots during the week? We start doing Sunday morning family breakfast.

and maybe it works for like a later dinner on Monday nights or something, or we find just one other spot during the week where maybe we can all eat together. And all of a sudden, you are the kind of family that eats together. Anything that happens three times a week as a habit, if it's happening three times a week, it can be part of your identity. And I find that when people have that mindset, it's a sense of possibility. It's like, oh, I don't have to find time every single day. I just have to find it regularly.

And I can adopt whatever identity I want now. Even in the middle of my busy life, I am a kind of person who runs. Like maybe it doesn't happen at 6 a.m. every single morning. But, you know, even most people who claim to run daily, don't run at 6 a.m. every single morning. If it happens three times a week, you are a runner. If you are practicing the piano three times a week, you are a piano player. Like, you are a musician. That is part of your identity.

So I encourage people to aim for three times a week and you might be surprised what you can do. Right. And you make the observation in your book that oftentimes even when people say that they do something daily, what they really mean is that they do it on weekdays, which are only five days a week, not seven. And sometimes what they really mean is that they only do it on week days except Friday, so four times a week. So even people who believe that they have a daily habit might only have a five out of seven day habit. It might be four times a week. It might be that they don't do it on weekends or holidays or vacations or anything else, in which case maybe it's 200 times a year.

But then, again, we're in the realm of the three to four times a week idea. And three times a week is a habit. Instead of aiming for daily and automatically failing, just aim for three times a week. And my guess is for many things you can succeed. The next rule, rule number five, is to create a backup slot. What is a backup slot? Yeah. If you've ever been invited to an outdoor event in, say, June, there is often what they call a rain date.

So it's like, okay, well, this picnic is going to happen on June 10th. But if it rains, it will be rescheduled for June 11th at this time. And the idea is that, you know, we're acknowledging what can go wrong. I mean, it's right there in the name, the rain is it could happen on your outdoor event. But you're not asking, will it be rescheduled? It will be at a certain time, you know, the rain date, whatever that is. So people know not to put anything unmovable in the backup slot. And I think anything important needs the equivalent of a rain date, right?

So if you want to meet with an employee, for instance, really give some important feedback to that person, you can set a time, but inevitably there's going to be some huge crisis. It's going to have to be rescheduled. And it's like it keeps moving forward. This is what makes people feel like incredibly ineffective because something they want to have happen, but isn't urgent. Keeps getting moved forward. So if you really truly want it to happen, set a backup time for it as well. And that way, when the crisis happens for the first time, more often than not, you'll be able to make the second time work. Now, obviously, this can get unwieldy, like, as the number of priorities sort of stack up if I have to set a second time for every single one of them. So one shorthand way to get at this, I try to leave Fridays as open as possible. And a lot of people have found this to be a pretty effective way to automatically build in backup spots into their life. Because if Friday is open, then it won't stay open. Like, you're not going to get Friday off. Like, I mean, if you want Friday off, you have to take it off as vacation. But by leaving it open, you know, if emergencies arise earlier in the week, whatever has moved forward because something

else came up can go to Friday. And that way, you're not ending the week with this debt to the next week because the next week is going to have crises of its own. So by building an open space, you can take care of those things. And it vastly increases the chances that things that are priorities truly do happen. In the surveys that you did, because you worked with a number of people, We actually have not discussed this yet, but you did a pilot study and then a main study of how many people who followed these guidelines? The main study was 150 people who learned each of the nine rules week by week. They would learn the rule. They would answer questions about how they plan to implement it in their lives. And then they answered questions a week later about how it went.

Over the course of the nine weeks, I measured them on various dimensions of time satisfaction. And so I could see how their lives changed over the course of the nine weeks. I'm happy to report that they did, in fact, feel better about their time. They had time satisfaction scores were significantly higher at the end than they had been before. That was pretty exciting. And I knew that was going to happen because of the pilot study that you mentioned. So just as a methodology for doing any sort of data intensive research, before you do a huge study with lots and lots of people, sometimes it is wise to do a smaller study with fewer people to see if you will get results. I knew that when people did do these rules and, you know, checking out my various time satisfaction,

scores and measures, that I saw that their scores did move, like these various dimensions. They did, you know, feel better about their leisure time. They felt like they were wasting less time, various things. So I did it with a small group first, got results. And then I felt more confident with a few tweaks, rolling it out to a much bigger group of people that I would, in fact, see results at the end of it. And when you did the study of these rules that we've been discussing, were there any specific rules that people, said made a greater or lesser impact than some of the others? Well, I think they were all different. And people had their favorites. I would say that the giving yourself a bedtime was, as somebody put it,

the least sexy, but the most impactful of the rules, because getting enough sleep, it really does change everything. But one of the sort of cult favorites of the rules was the next one we haven't gotten to yet, but rule number six was one big adventure, one little adventure. during every week, do two out of the ordinary memorable things. One big adventure, which could be like three to four hours, something you might do on half a weekend day, and then one little adventure. So that's like an hour or so. So you could do it on a lunch break or a weekday evening, but just something that's out of the ordinary and memorable.

People started thinking about, like, what can I do that is different from the daily grind of go to work, you know, come home, have dinner, get the kids their baths, put them to bed, watch TV, do it ever again. Adult life can start to feel incredibly similar, and time sort of blends into each other. And whole years will disappear into these memory sinkholes. But when you start planning little adventures into your life, that is not the case. Now you're thinking of what, that wasn't a week that completely disappeared. Well, that was the week we went roller skating. That was the week I went and did mini golfing on my lunch break. Like that was the week I went and saw that new park with my work friend.

That was the week that we went to that beach we've never been to on Sunday. It just changes the perspective of time. It creates more memories because novelty is what creates memories in our lives. And when you have more memories, time seems to expand. People were changing their perception of time. They were also changing their perception of themselves. Because all of a sudden, we were the kind of people who did fun stuff. I'm the kind of person who doesn't just watch TV after dinner.

I load everyone in the car and go try out that new gelato place that we keep driving. past and not stopping at. People had a different mental shift with that, but that was a very powerful mental shift for a lot of people. So when it comes to the little adventures, something like going bowling with your friends or going to that new gelato place down the street, those ideas, for me at least, those ideas seem to come to mind quite easily. When I think about what would I do for four hours on a Saturday morning, I mean, there's not a whole lot I can think of. Aren't you in New York? There's a million things you could do. And it would be worth exploring, right? There's tons of museums. There's every different neighborhood. It would take probably three

hours to get to a neighborhood on the other side of the city and explore it, you know, go to some spot that's there. Maybe there's something historic there. You could see it. And then while you're there, you might see a cool boutique that you could just window shop at for a while. It's that sort of thing. Just being aware of what's within a day trip of you. Okay. What about for the people who are listening who are in smaller towns? Yeah, there's always something. There is no place I can think of. within a radius of about two hours that you could get to on half a weekend day. And you can make your own fun too. Maybe you are getting together with new people.

That's certainly something that it would be different, exploring different places. Even during the days of lockdown, there were still ways to come up with something. I would attend online concerts. You could dial in to some group that you would never have watched otherwise. That could be a little or a big adventure, as the case may be. There's always something. And part of it is the looking for it. changes your entire perspective on life too because now you are the kind of person who is looking for fun

things to do instead of just accepting what's in front of you and doing the same stuff you always do. We'll come back to this episode in just a minute. But first, Black Friday is here at IKEA and the clock is taking on savings you won't want to miss. Join IKEA family for free today and unlock deals on everything from holiday must-haves to cozy at-home essentials, all the little and big things you need to make this season shine. But don't wait. Like leftovers at midnight, our Black Friday offers won't last. Shop now at IKEA.ca.ca.combe-Leghri-Fri-Fi. IKEA, bring home to life. Hack the holidays with the PC Holiday Insiders Report.

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Precision crafted to navigate every corner of my mouth. All for just $18. Okay, okay. Try the season's hottest flavors from the PC Holiday Insiders Report. Please feast responsibly. The next rule, I'm curious as to how it differs. So the next rule is to take one night for you. How does that differ from taking out the time to have an adventure?

A lot of my readers and study participants of this book, It had families. And so by the nature of that, many of their bigger adventures would involve their family members. But taking one night for you, the idea is to do something that is not work and is not family, that is solely that you enjoy. And ideally, you make a weekly commitment to this thing. It's one night a week that you do this thing that is just for you. So it could be playing in a softball league. It could be singing in a choir. It could be volunteering somewhere. It could be that you're in with a group of friends who gets together every Thursday night for dinner or for drinks or for going for a walk together or whatever it happens to be. But something that's a commitment, because when it's a commitment, you'll do it. Even when life is busy and you have a reason to be like, yeah, I can't stay late that night at work or I can't drive the carpool that night because I have my softball game.

I'm pitching. I have to be there. It allows you to make other things move because the commitment is there. And I find that it was one of the more challenging rules for people to take on, partly because you had to think about what it was going to be. And maybe you couldn't do it immediately, even if you want to join a softball team. They may not be taking new members this Thursday night, for instance. But over time, you can certainly find stuff. And it reminds you that you have an identity apart from work and family.

For many people, this can become sort of like the tent post that the rest of their life is structured around. Like, oh, yeah, it's Thursday night again. It's choir night again. And you're there and it's marking time and you enjoy it. And you feel very differently about it, that life is not this grind of I'm dealing with these responsibilities at work. I'm dealing with these responsibilities at home. When you're there, you are just you. And that can be a very different way of looking at life. I'm sure there are some people who are listening to this right now who are thinking, wait a minute, this sounds very additive because now we've just added a big adventure and a little adventure and a

night for me and now I have an earlier bedtime, it seems almost like an endless list of ands. So for the people who are listening to this, who are feeling overwhelmed by all of these suggestions, I mean, what would you say to them? It's less time than you think. There are 168 hours in a week. Like a big adventure that takes three hours is a very small amount of time. A little adventure that takes less than one hour is an even smaller amount of time. A weekly commitment might literally be two hours or less. Some of the people I profile in the book for instance, a woman started doing a regular tennis game on Tuesday night. She was gone for a total of 90 minutes. It's just like 90 minutes out of 168 hours in a week. I think it's doable, but those small

bits of time wind up changing, you know, your perspective on what life is like. They wind up giving you things to look forward to. But I find that, you know, what these things crowd out is often the time that wasn't that great anyway. I've seen that in my own life. I started tracking my time several years ago. And I noticed that a lot of the weekdays kind of looked the same. I had felt really busy. Like I wanted to join a choir. I've sung in many choirs in the past and I wanted to join one again. It wasn't obvious which one I should join. And then it was, oh, well, do I even have the time? But then I started tracking my time. I'm like, you know, every night. I'm interacting with the kids, but maybe they're going off and trying to watch their own TV show or playing in their own room. Okay, maybe I could be with them six out of seven nights. And then one night do something a little bit different. That gave me the impetus to go join a choir again and start singing with them. I think a lot of people will find the same thing, that what these rules encourage you to do is to replace some of that low value time that you are not doing anything that is meaningful or enjoyable for you or the people you care about with something that truly would make a difference in your life. Let's move to the eighth rule, which is to batch the little things. Yeah, the eighth and ninth rules are both about wasting less time. To batch the little things, you learn to recognize these sort of small tasks that can seem to take.

over all our time. Maybe it's filling out a form that HR has sent you responding to an invitation to something that's not urgent paying bills or whatever, just all these small things. What happens is because they feel like they are always options, they can kind of weigh on you. I've got so much to do because I've got all these things that have to happen. But more insidiously, what often happens is that we're doing something else. You carved out this time to work on a project that you really want to throw yourself into it. Oh, it's getting a little difficult. I have to go fill out that form for HR, right? You pull yourself away from these things where it didn't really have to happen, but it gives you the satisfaction of crossing something off the list. And often the really big

things that we need to wrestle with are more difficult and don't give the obvious satisfaction of crossing stuff off the list. So I want people to struggle a little bit more. I want them to struggle with the big stuff, which means that you need to batch the little things. What I particularly like to do, sort of full-scale batching is carve-out time Friday. Again, is a good time for this. Give yourself a punch list. Anything that was not terribly important during the week that has to happen, but didn't have to happen at a certain time, do it in one fell swoop. You could probably get through it in one to two hours on Friday if you're just focusing and moving one thing after another. And then you feel like a machine, like, woohoo, I just crossed 20 things off my list over two hours, but you kept them from being

options during the rest of the week when you might have carved out time for what Cal Newport calls deep work. Then they're not interrupting you from that. Now, obviously, many people cannot do everything on Friday. They can't push everything forward to Friday. But you still might be able to batch little things and say a 30-minute window in the afternoon. So when it's not your peak time, you've done your deeper work in the morning, you've got all that taken care of. And now it's like, okay, I've accomplished these big things. Now I can take 30 minutes to go through all the little stuff. The problem is oftentimes people try to get through the little stuff first. They want to clear the decks. Then I'm going to focus on the big stuff. But we all run out of energy. So you spend your first hour or two at work clearing the decks. And then,

oh wait, I've got to make that call or I've got to be at that meeting and the next thing you know, it's after lunch and your energy starts to dip. And you never got to that big thing you wanted to do. So better to batch the little stuff and leave more time open for other things. So batching the little stuff is a strategy for protecting and preserving deep work time. Yes, exactly. And then the ninth rule, the effortful before effortless. This looks at more of how we spend our leisure time. Batching little things. We can do that in our personal lives too, although I really think of it as sort of a work-focused kind of rule to keep us from wasting less time at work. work. But effortful before effortless is about wasting less time in our leisure time. Even the busiest people have some amount of leisure time. The problem is that a lot of it occurs in short chunks, five to ten minute chunks. You don't know when it's going to happen and you don't necessarily

have stuff with you to do, nor do you know how much energy you're going to have ahead of time. So what do we do at that time? Well, you pull out the phone. You can use those little chunks of time to delete email or to look through social media or read headlines or something. And that's fine, but it doesn't feel very rejuvenating. And that time adds up. When people look at the screen time functions on their phone, they're like, how is it even possible that it spent like three, four hours on my phone? I don't have three to four hours in my day.

Well, you don't have a three hour chunk, but you do have three hours in 10 minute chunks. And now it's all been spent looking at influencers who are wearing matching clothing with their children. And it's just depressing. You didn't want to see that. Instead, we want to try to flip the automatic. flow of activities. Choose something that is a little bit more of effortful fun, something like reading, crafts, hobbies, interacting with friends and family members, anything along those lines. Aim to do that for just a short period of time first whenever some leisure time opens up.

Even if it's just a small bit of time, you've got five minutes while you're waiting for a phone call to start. Instead of looking at Instagram, open the Kindle app and start reading an e-book for three minutes. And if you want to stop after three minutes and go do something, effortless, great. Go do it. But by flipping the automatic flow of activities, you have space for both. You do some effortful and some effortless. The problem is if you start with effortless, you will never get to the effortful because the effortless is just too easy. You're not going to stop doing it. Then it winds up consuming all of your leisure time. The same thing is true with longer chunks of leisure time too. A lot of people fall into the habit of, especially people who have young children,

for instance, they get them down 8, 8.30 at night. It's like, okay, I don't have to be in bed until my bedtime at like what 1030 or something. I've got two hours but I have zero energy. What am I going to do? Well, you lie on the couch and flip through different things or what are we going to stream tonight? I don't know. And the time gets wasted and you haven't chosen what to do with it. And it can feel sort of, well, you know, that's all the leisure time I had and I spent it in something I didn't care about. But if all you do is just say, okay, before I start streaming whatever and flipping through channels, I'm going to spend 20 minutes reading a book or doing a puzzle or having a glass of wine with my partner or anything along those lines. It allows you to do both. You are now the kind of

person who reads books and watches, whatever, but you are still getting the time for reading or getting the time for your hobbies. I found that when people did this, their entire perspective on leisure time changed. This was the biggest movement in time satisfaction scores in the entire book. Like people, their scores on the question of yesterday I didn't waste time on things that weren't important to me, rose 32% from the beginning of the study to the end. This is really a big difference. You mentioned reading, such as just reading a Kindle, and it's easy to see how that is available to you in any random gap of time because you always have your smartphone with you. But when it comes to the problem of not having crafts or hobbies available to you, right? You have this random

chunk of time that's unplanned and it's 10 minutes and you're not at home. How do you, you incorporate those effortful things when those effortful things require some degree of objects or set up? Your smartphone really is the ticket to the world. We complain about our smartphones, but they're really amazing things. If you put a little bit of thought into it, there are often ways you can indulge in what you might think of as like micro-hobbies, versions of your hobbies that can be done in micro bits of time. If you are an artist, well, guess how many museums have their collections online. If you are working in longer leisure chunks on painting a still life of fruit, like why don't you go look at pictures online from various museums of how other artists have done

still lives of fruit? That is something that you can do with your phone in five minutes of time and really see some amazing stuff instead of scrolling around and not saying any of that. If you are a musician, maybe in your longer chunks of leisure time, you might practice your instrument. But in shorter chunks, you could listen to other artists performing a piece that you are learning, that you can listen to how some other pianist went through and played that piece. And now that's in your head for the next time you do sit down at the piano and figure out how you're going to do your own interpretation. So there's still ways you can indulge lots of other hobbies, but you do have to be mindful of it. It's the kind of thing of like taking our leisure time seriously.

I want people to recognize that it is precious. We cannot just be completely leisurely about it. think about it. But when we do, there's all sorts of magical possibilities that open up. So don't be leisurely about leisure time. Exactly. Well, thank you for spending this time with us, Laura. Are there any final takeaways that you want to impress upon the community that's listening to this? Yeah. Well, I mean, the whole point of tranquility by Tuesday is that you really can build the life you want in the time that you've got. Even if life is hectic, even if it feels chaotic at time, there are good systems you can build and good habits you can have that make life feel doable and sustainable and even joyful.

I'm hoping that people will come away from learning about these rules or reading the book with that in mind, that you don't have to wait for next year. Life is going to calm down. You can live that life now. Thank you. Where can people find you if they'd like to know more about you and your work? Yeah, you can come visit my website, Laura Vandercom.com, and you can learn about Tranquility by Tuesday and my other books there and about podcasts and all sorts of other stuff. Thank you, Laura. What are three key takeaways that we got from today's episode? Number one, better productivity, time management, and a more fulfilling life isn't about just cutting out what's superfluous. It's also about adding in what is most meaningful.

We're going to have a burstingly full life no matter what. It's just the question of what you want to fill it with. Many people believe that they need to remove activities in order to make time for what matters most. But the counter to that is to add in more of what you love so that you can crowd out the things that don't matter. One of the most counterintuitive things I have found is that a lot of times when busy people are like, I need to make my life better. I need to just start cutting things left and right. I have to get rid of all this stuff in my life. And that may be true. There may be plenty of commitments you don't want to have. But what often helps is to build in new commitments that you truly want to do, the things that make you really excited, things that make you feel

like a real person with your own interests aside from just work and family. That's perhaps the counterintuitive that I want busy people to put more stuff in their life. But I find that when we put more stuff in our life, we naturally get rid of some of the bad stuff just because we don't have time to deal with it anymore. That is the first key takeaway. Key take away. way number two. To live a more fulfilling life, look at more than just the large pieces. Look at the smaller details that leave an outsized impact on your level of satisfaction. Life is lived in hours. And how we feel about our life is a function of how we spend our hours. And I think that can trip a lot of people up because, you know, we can sit there and say, well, the pieces of my life are, in

fact very good. I have a good job or I have, you know, a family. We have this beautiful house or whatever it is that are the pieces of a good life. But if how you spend your hours is not making you happy, then it can be easy to not feel happy about having these good things. Often people can feel dissatisfaction, but not understand why they're feeling that way if the larger pieces of their life seem wonderful. And it's great if that's your situation. Wow. What a champagne problem. But champagne problems are still problems. And so smoothing out the pebbles, even when the boulders are beautiful, rough pebbles can still cut your feet, which is another way of saying, pay attention to those details because they matter more than you think. That is the second key take.

Finally, key takeaway number three, strategically prioritize your time, both professionally and personally, and do this in writing on a weekly basis. You want one time during the week where you look at the whole of the week. You look forward a little bit and see what's coming up, and you look at both professional and personal stuff, because this allows you to think through, well, what is most important? What do I really want to see happen in the next week professionally? What do I want to see happen with your friends and family? What do I want to see happen for myself? And so once you have those big pieces mapped out and you put them into your schedule, then as you are doing everything else, as you're figuring out where everything else goes, you know that you already have taken care of these things. You are then being like, oh, yes, I need to meet with ex person. You've already looked at your calendar and seen that, oh, well, there's a camp show for my kid on Thursday at 4 and I'd really like to go to that. That would be important for me to do. And so you're not randomly giving away 4 p.m. on Thursday just because you didn't think about it.

Those are three key takeaways from this conversation with Laura Vandercam. Thank you for tuning in. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. If you did, please subscribe to the show notes so that you can get updates of all of our episodes with timestamps. So you can go directly to a part of the episode that you want to reference back to. You can subscribe for free, afford anything.com slash show notes. The show notes are also a great way to share the episode with a friend, a family member, a colleague, a sibling, someone who you think could benefit from hearing some of the things that we talk about. Share this show with them. That's a single most important thing you can do to spread these ideas. We normally do a first Friday episode so that this episode is coming out Wednesday, January 4th, 2023, we normally do a first Friday episode. Friday episode, which would fall in two days from now. This month, January 2023, we are going to skip our normal first Friday episode. I would love to do one, but the first draft of my

thesis is due in nine days. And so I am heads down, obsessively single-minded focused on that. I will, by the way, after that draft is done, I will share with you some of the research that I have done for my thesis. I want to do an entire bonus episode on it because it is fascinating. But we're going to skip the first Friday episode. I will be back in one week with our normal Wednesday show. So make sure that you are subscribed so that you don't miss that episode or any of our awesome normal weekly shows. We release a new episode every Wednesday. Thank you so much for being part of the Afford Anything community. If you want to chat about this episode with other members of the community or share your new year's goals or reflect on the year that just ended or ask questions

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