Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Laura Vanderkam on How to Make Time for What Matters EP 200

Episode Date: October 11, 2022

Laura Vanderkam joins me to discuss her new book Tranquility by Tuesday, where she lays out 9 steps to manage your productivity and time. Laura explains why we need to build the lives we want now and concrete strategies for getting more done—including having more fun. Laura Vanderkam is the author of several time management and productivity books, including her latest book, which releases today, Tranquility by Tuesday: 9 Ways to Calm the Chaos and Make Time for What Matters. She is the host of the podcast Before Breakfast and the co-host, with Sarah Hart-Unger, of the podcast Best of Both Worlds. --► Purchase Tranquility by Tuesday: https://amzn.to/3ViQAjQ (Amazon Link) --► Get the resources and all links related to this episode here: https://passionstruck.com/laura-vanderkam-on-make-time-for-what-matters/  --► For information about advertisers and promo codes, go to: https://passionstruck.com/deals/  --► Prefer to watch this interview: https://youtu.be/qX5_bb61QFk  --► Subscribe to Our YouTube Channel Here: https://www.youtube.com/c/JohnRMiles --► Subscribe to the Passion Struck Podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/passion-struck-with-john-r-miles/id1553279283  Thank you, Amazon Pharmacy, Indeed, and MasterClass, For Your Support Amazon Pharmacy -  Just Click https://amazon.com/passionstruck Indeed - Head to https://www.indeed.com/passionstruck, where you can receive a $75 credit to attract, interview, and hire in one place. MasterClass - Get 15% off at https://www.masterclass.com/passionstruck  Where to Follow Laura Vanderkam Website: https://lauravanderkam.com/  Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/lvanderkam/  Twitter: https://twitter.com/lvanderkam  LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lauravanderkam/  -- John R. Miles is the CEO, and Founder of PASSION STRUCK®, the first of its kind company, focused on impacting real change by teaching people how to live Intentionally. He is on a mission to help people live a no-regrets life that exalts their victories and lets them know they matter in the world. For over two decades, he built his own career applying his research of passion-struck leadership, first becoming a Fortune 50 CIO and then a multi-industry CEO. He is the executive producer and host of the top-ranked Passion Struck Podcast, selected as one of the Top 50 most inspirational podcasts in 2022. Learn more about John: https://johnrmiles.com/  ===== FOLLOW JOHN ON THE SOCIALS ===== * Twitter: https://twitter.com/Milesjohnr * Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/johnrmiles.c0m * Medium: https://medium.com/@JohnRMiles​ * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/john_r_miles * LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/milesjohn/ * Blog: https://johnrmiles.com/blog/ * Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_podcast * Gear: https://www.zazzle.com/store/passion_sruck_podcast

Coming up next on the Passion Struck podcast. I think everyone needs to recognize that you have some identity that is apart from work and as apart from family. And we've put a lot of effort into work and family. They require a lot of responsibility, very meaningful things, but they take a lot of energy. And how do we get energy? Well, there's certain things we can do holistically, like getting enough sleep and exercising. But often we draw energy from doing meaningful things that we personally find enjoyable. So I challenge people to take one night for you. One night a week or the equivalent number of weekend hours, do something that is not work, that is not family, that you personally find fun. Welcome to PassionStruck. Hi, I'm your host, John Armiles, and on the show, we decipher the secrets, tips, and

guidance of the world's most inspiring people and turn their wisdom into practical advice for you and those around you. Our mission is to help you unlock the power of intentionality so that you can become the best version of yourself. If you're new to the show, I offer advice and answer listener questions on Fridays. We have long-form interviews the rest of the week with guest-ranging from astronauts to authors,

CEOs, creators, innovators, scientists, military leaders, visionaries and athletes. Now, let's go out there and become PassionStruck. Hello, everyone, and thank you so much for returning. Today, Mark's a major milestone for the podcast as we, today, surpassed 200 episodes. And we also found out that we were ranked as one of the top 50 most inspirational podcasts of 2022.

I really appreciate all of you who come back to the show weekly to listen and learn, had a live better, be better, and impact the world. And if you're new to the show, thank you so much for being here, or you would like to introduce this to a friend or family member, we now have episode starter packs, both on Spotify as well as the PassionStruck website. These are collections of our fans favorite episodes that we organize into convenient topics to give any new listener a great way to get acquainted to everything that we do here on the show. Just go to passionstruck.com slash starter packs to get started. And I also wanted to thank you for all your ratings and reviews.

We now have over 10,000 of them globally on Apple alone. And they matter so much to improving both the ratings, but more importantly, the number of people who are joining our community. And in case you missed my episode from last week, it was on why Experiencing Pain is the pathway to growth, please go check it out. Now let's talk about today's guest. Laura Vandercam is the author of several time management and productivity books, including her book which releases today Tranquility by Tuesday, 9 ways to calm the chaos

and make time for what matters. Along with Juliet's school of possibilities, off the clock, I know how she does it, what the most successful people do before breakfast and 168 hours. She is the host of the podcast before breakfast, and the co-host of the podcast best of both worlds. In today's episode, we discuss how Laura began to examine how she was spending her own time and decided to make time and productivity into her passion. We go into the concept of what it means to be time poor and its impact on the quality of life and

ultimately our happiness. We go into why the goal of her book isn't to tackle the big parts of her reader's life, but instead how do you change your average Tuesday? We then dive into the nine rules of time management, which include, give yourself a bedtime, using your Fridays to plan the week ahead, the need for open space, why we need to take a night for ourselves, why it's so important to batch the little things, and being effortful about being effortless. That and so much more. Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life now. Let that journey begin.

I am so excited to welcome Laura Vandercam to the PassionStruck podcast. Welcome Laura. Thanks so much for having me. Well, first off, I just wanted to say congratulations on the release of your new book. I have it right here. Such a fantastic addition to your other bestsellers that came before it. Thank you so much. I really appreciate that. Well, I always like to give the audience a way to get to know the guest. And I like to ask a couple of questions to tee that up. But one of my favorite ones is this, we all have moments that define us. What is a moment that defined for you, how to look at your time and how you're using it?

Yeah, well, I mean, I certainly like to think that I've been decent with my time through my life, but I certainly remember that when I brought kid number one home from the hospital. Here he was in the house and I realized I have to account for basically every minute of his life as well. One of us or somebody we trust has to be with him constantly and will be as long as I have young kids and that you suddenly have a sense of being accountable for your hours in a way that you just can't if you are not primarily responsible

for another person or I don't know a dog I guess but you know that's a that's a different case but being responsible completely for another person will always change how people look at time. And so I'm sure many of your listeners have gone through something similar. And that's really when I began writing about how people spend time in earnest. Okay, well, I know you've got two popular podcasts. So I love one other podcasters come on and I know how important it is to give shout out. So I was hoping for the audience, you could discuss both of the podcasts that you have.

Yeah, so I have one that's called Before Breakfast and it is a short, every weekday morning podcast that will last about five minutes but it every day features a tip that will help you take your day from great to awesome. So that's Before Breakfast. And then I have another one that's called Best of Both Worlds. It is one that I co-host with a friend of mine, Sarah Hartunger, who is a practicing physician, mom of three. And she and I talk issues of work and

family from the perspective of people who truly enjoy both, right? That we don't see the two at being at odds. We just see them as part of our big, beautiful lives. And so that's how we approach time and how we spend it. Yeah, well, I had to listen to your most recent episode on Quiet Quitting. And I wanted to ask for the audience, so why did you and your co-host find this term to be so ambiguous?

And did you find a better way to describe it? Yeah, so Quiet Quitting has been in the news a lot lately. I think partly because it is so ambiguous that to some people, I guess the most obvious definition is doing the bare minimum at work, but then that allows people to say, well, what if it's only just doing what's in your job description

and letting go of doing above and beyond? That doesn't necessarily mean it's a bad thing. I mean, many people do an excellent job and what is in their job without going beyond what is overall expected of them. And so we thought, well, maybe we're talking about different things here. Maybe we're talking about having beautiful boundaries or powerful prioritization or some other alliterative phrase. But I think there's a lot of people who are struggling to figure out what place

work Has in their lives and I think it can be different amounts of space at different points in our lives People are definitely figuring out given the job market being what it is that there are options People can go find other jobs if they want, but sometimes other jobs have good things or bad things about them. I think a lot of people are feeling somewhat overwhelmed and exhausted after two years of pandemic uncertainty, particularly people have been balancing work and family at the same time during that. So there's just a lot of discussion going on on what we owe work, what work owes us and

how we make all the pieces of life fit together. Well, I also had a chance to listen to your solo episode today and having spent almost 30 years in corporate America as a leader, I can only tell you a handful of people who came up to me and told me that they were happy about the assignments that I was giving them. So why is your advice to people that if you are happy with what you're doing, you should let your boss know about it? Yeah. So this episode on the day we're recording this was called, if you're happy, let them know

it based on kind of the children's song, if you're happy, and just that people complain a lot. And I'm sure anyone who's been in management has been the recipient of lots of complaints over the years when people don't like what they're doing or are unhappy about some aspect of their lives. People are less likely to tell you exactly why they enjoyed something. So if you do like something, having a conversation with your manager about what that was, vastly increases the chances that you will get to do that thing more in the future, and get to do the specific aspect of it you like if you do enough self reflection about this. Different people can like projects for a different reason.

If you're put on a committee to organize a company-wide event, some people might enjoy that because they enjoy organizing events, right? And that's the part they like and that they'd like to do in the future. Somebody else might like it because they got to meet new people from all over the company and they could have been doing whatever. It wasn't that it was an event. It was just that they enjoyed the meeting new people aspect and all that. And so if you can identify what that is and tell your manager like, by the way, I found out I really enjoy events. Well, then your manager knows, Hey, we're going to do a department retreat next year.

She should definitely be the one who's planning that. Whereas if you say, I loved it because I got to meet all these other people. Linch, you know, is to put you on a task force that's doing a company-wide retention event or something. It's just a different sort of way of thinking about work, but by telling people what you like, you can spend more of your work hours doing the things you enjoy over time, since there's only so much time, you'll spend less time on the things you don't want to do. Well, I think it's also a good connection into how you spend your time, because if you're doing things that you like, you're going to be much happier spending your time doing them that way, as opposed to having a job

at work that you don't like. So I think it leads into our core discussion today as well. And maybe as a baseline before we get into the book, can you tell the audience what it means to be time poor? Yeah, so I'm always trying to consider how people can have more perspective of time abundance. And obviously the opposite of that is being time poor, to feel like time is scarce. There are certain phases of our lives where we are definitely objectively more time poor than others. And any of your listeners who, for instance, have a very demanding job who also maybe have young children

or have intense elder care responsibilities or anything like that, you are naturally going to feel more time poor than somebody who is maybe working fewer hours or has fewer responsibilities outside of work. However, I do still believe that people who are in what I call the busy years, building a career and having intense caregiving responsibilities of some form or another, can still feel like time is more abundant. There are certain ways we can approach our lives, certain strategies we can follow that will help us notice more of our discretionary time, use more of our discretionary time in ways

that feel rejuvenating and maybe spend a little bit less time on the things that feel particularly draining or that we don't enjoy as much. Yeah, I find it a very interesting topic to look at because if I were to ask you, what's the impact of our time on happiness, what would you tell the audience? Well, our lives are lived in hours.

So basically, a lot of our experienced motions about life are going to be a result of how we spend our hours. Obviously, some people have a more naturally bubbly temperament than others. Some people are more naturally grumpy than others. Pretty much all of us are going to feel better about life if we are spending our hours on things that we find meaningful or enjoyable for ourselves or the people we care about. There's some fascinating, just research into how people spend moment by moment time. And you can see that people are more happy when they are socializing with friends and family

versus commuting, right? It turns out that nobody likes to commute, right? If you can have your life set up so that your commute is shorter or non-existent, you are going to be starting naturally from a better place than if you have an hour each way where you are battling traffic, right? So that's just one example there. Or those people feel better when they have more autonomy, when they are doing things that they find challenging

but doable and they are in a supportive environment with people whose company they enjoy. So if you spend more of your work hours with those three categorizations there and fewer hours on things that you don't have a whole lot of control over with people who aren't as supportive and that you find incredibly dull or you find outside of your ability to do. I mean those hours are going to be unhappy no matter if you're a happy person or not happy person. So I think that how we spend our hours has a huge effect on our overall happiness. And the good news is that for the most part have some amount of choice

over how we spend our hours. Even if we have made choices in the past that have sort of locked us into current ways of spending our time, you lose somewhere far from your job, you kind of have that commute. You can still over time decide to make those hours better or figure out if there's a way to spend them in different ways. Lots of choices can be changed if you give yourself six months a year, something like that. Yes, well, I know myself. I feel when I'm time-pour, it directly impacts the quality of life, both for what I'm able to do from my own self-awareness, but also relationships with kids and partners and friends. So it really is important to make those intentional choices about how you're spending it. And it's interesting. I recently had Dr. Cassie Holmes on the podcast,

who's also an expert in time, teaches at the Anderson School of Business at UCLA. And she was telling me that in their research, they actually found that there's a sweet spot for time affluence. If you have less than two hours of free time, it's not a good thing. But if you have over five, it's not a good thing either. So there's this spot in between to figure out the sweet spot for yourself.

Yeah, no, it sounds totally good. Because when you have too much free time, then you wind up feeling like you are just sort of wasting it. In general, if we are able to make choices within our time, then we have the ability to choose things that are most rejuvenating, but not do them past the point of diminishing returns. And on the other hand, when we're twotime poor, then yeah, we're not happy because

we're not getting any time to do the things that we want to do. Yes, in tranquility by Tuesday, you open up the book by saying that your goal isn't to tackle the big pieces of a reader's life, but you want to change how they spend their average Tuesday. What is examining an average day help us with our purpose and how we're using our time? We often think of life in these sort of peak experiences, how you spend a vacation or something like that.

But much of life is lived in these normal average days. And so if we have the ability to upgrade how we spend our hours on an average Tuesday, our experience of life is just going to be far more positive just because there are so many Tuesdays and Wednesdays and Thursdays versus only looking at how you spend your two weeks of vacation a year or whatever it happens to be. And the other thing is that many of my readers are already productive ambitious people. I mean, they've made good choices about what fields they're in.

They've achieved some level of seniority at work. They've probably got great systems going on at home. They're not, you know, problem cases here. It's just that they need little tweaks to make life better. Everybody gets where they're supposed to go. They meet their deadlines. It's just life can often feel like a slog and particularly on our average Tuesdays,

life can feel like a slog. So if you can turn your average Tuesday into something that you have several moments during the day that you are genuinely looking forward to, then life is a very different experience. Absolutely is, but I like how you boil it down to that. I call it the term that I use for this is I say in life we have transition points.

It's almost like the transition if you're a writer between one paragraph to the other and it's in these transitions between experiences or what have you that we often stop focusing on the inputs that are so important to the outputs that we want to achieve in being the future self that we imagine ourselves to be. And so this podcast is all about how to live an intentional life, which is why the aspect of time

and time management are so important because life is finite. And we need to take advantage of all the moments that we have to reach the destinations that we wanna lead. So how did you come up with the nine different rules that will unpack today for this book? Tranquility by Tuesday is based on nine of my favorite time management rules

and for any of your listeners who don't like the phrase rules, we could just say there's suggestions, strategies, things you might wish to try or not try. If you don't find them useful, I'm not saying anyone has to do anything. But I have been asked over the years by a lot of people to give feedback on their schedules. You know, they share their schedules with me and they explain what issues they're having and people's lives are incredibly different. I mean, somebody who is a teacher, their work hours are gonna look different than somebody who's in more of a corporate job.

And both of them will look different from somebody who's stay at home parent or anything like that. But all of us seem to come down to the same issues when we get down to it. And so I found myself giving the same advice to people over and over again, I started wriggling, well, what are the things that I am telling people?

We all have different issues, but what are the most common things that I am telling people that they should try and their lives? And so I hone that down to nine strategies that are pretty much universally applicable. So whatever kind of job you are in, whatever kind of state of life you are in, whether you have kids or not, whether you are working full time part time, you're retired, even

some people find these useful. But if you ever feel like you would like to spend time better, these nine strategies can help you calm whatever chaos is going on and make time for what matters in your life. And because I write self-help for busy people, I want to make sure that if I am recommending something, it's not just like, hey, this might work. I know some people that it worked for.

Here you go, good luck. I want to make sure that I can justify it. And so for this book, I recruited people to try out the rules. Like I had 150 busy people try out the nine rules over nine weeks. During the time they kept answering questions on how they plan to implement them in their lives. A week later they would answer how each rule went. I could measure them and various dimensions before the nine weeks, during the nine weeks, after the nine weeks. And I'm happy to in their lives a week later, they would answer how each will went. I could measure them and various dimensions before the nine weeks, during the nine weeks, after the nine weeks. And I'm happy to report that all these rules do in

fact improve people's sense of time satisfaction to a significant degree. So that's good to know. It self-help does sometimes work. Well, it's fantastic that you were able to test it and get so much empirical evidence showing that these things truly will impact the listeners' lives if they implement them. And I like how you say at the end of the book, you should read through all the book and then you should go back to the specific lessons and review them so you get a more concrete

view of each, but go through them all so you see the entire picture that you divide into different sections. Well, I want to talk about the first one, which is give yourself a bedtime. And one of the most impactful books for me personally that I've ever read was The Five of the A.M. Club by Robin Sharma. And he kind of uses the opposite of that, which is give yourself a wake up time, and then back into the bedtime. But you also discussed this in the book. I thought, though, it was really interesting that you had a number of people examine this,

and what you found is that most people were actually sleeping enough. And what was interesting to me is even though they were sleeping enough, they were still feeling tired. What do you think is the core reason behind that? And I'm sure it's something that many of the audience can relate to. We'll be right back to my interview with Laura Vandercam. Your business can't keep waiting for your dream hire

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average savings based on usage and inside Rx data as compared to cash prices average savings for all generics are 78% 37% for selected brand medications restrictions apply. Please consider those who support the show and make it free for our listeners, advertisers, deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals. Now back to my interview with Laura Vandercam. Yeah. So this has been a puzzle I have been pondering for years, which I study time use data. You have people record how they spend their time looking back over the previous day, recording an entire week.

There's solid evidence that people in general get enough sleep from a numerical perspective. The American time you survey, which has thousands of Americans report how they spent time yesterday, like not a typical day, a day that actually happened yesterday, going through hour by hour, found times that the average American sleeps well over eight hours a day. And including very busy people.

So you think about parents of children under age six who also happen to have full-time jobs. I mean, you could cut the demographic anyway, but like those people sleep over eight hours a night. Like nobody ever believes me when I say this, but like the numbers are pretty clear. And I have found this too. I have done time diary studies. I did one a few years ago of women who had six figure jobs and who also had kids at home, right? So the people we often talk about was being like incredibly harried. So many balls in the air with like very demanding, high performance jobs and also managing a household, they slept 54 hours a week on average,

which comes out to 7.7 hours per day, like well within the range of what sleep specialists tell us to get. Even CEOs get enough sleep. There was a CEO time diary study that found that people managing huge public corporations were getting seven hours on average when you looked at the whole week. Again, nobody ever believes this.

Well, why? Because if you ask people, how are you feeling? Do you feel like you're getting enough sleep? People are like, no, I'm not. I'm exhausted. And so I'm like, well, why is that? And it turns out that the culprit is disorderly sleep. So what happens for a lot of people, they start out on a bad foot on Sunday night, they have slept late on Sunday morning. So they are not tired at what time

they should go to bed on Sunday night. They stay up late, they have to be up at the crack of dawn on Monday. So they're starting with the sleep debt Tuesday, they might get through and they're up late doing stuff. And then they have to wake up early Tuesday morning, but by that point with two nights of sleep debt, you start crashing, right? So you fall asleep on the couch watching TV, you fall asleep while putting a kid to bed.

Maybe Wednesday or Thursday morning, you hit snooze two or three times. Thursday morning, you sleep through your alarm and the day starts out of whack because of that. On the weekend, you sleep in on Saturday, maybe catch a nap Saturday afternoon, so you're up late Saturday night and then you sleep in late on Sunday morning and it starts all over again. Right? And so it's this equivalent of one of those drop tower carnival rides where you just get yanked up and down and yanked up and down, it is so much better from both a functionality perspective and an energy perspective to get the same amount of sleep every night.

So identify how much sleep you need, commit to getting that every single night. Not I'm going to sleep short this night, make it up the next night, but every single night. Since I know you mentioned the 5 a.m. club, which is about choosing a wake up time, my experience, many adults need to wake up at a certain time. There's not a huge amount of discretionary space in the morning without going to 5 a.m. though as those who can't get to bed at 8 p.m. have to figure out how to make this work. So if there's a set time that you have to wake up for your job or family responsibilities, then count back from that time, the amount of sleep you need, and voila,

you have a bedtime. And the idea is that you should commit to getting in bed at this time every night, unless you have a really good reason not to. And maybe you can move it by an hour on weekends, but any more than that is going to make Monday morning much more painful than necessary. And again, you are an adult. If you want to blow through your bedtime, that is totally fine. But I find that it nudges people to make a conscious choice.

Like, if your bedtime is 1030 and it is 1015 and you are nowhere near bed, you can tell yourself, well, is there a good reason I'm staying up or is there not? If there's not, maybe you decide to stop whatever it is and go get to sleep and then the next day, it finds out being far better. Yeah. And for the listener, if they haven't checked out the episode that we did with Dr. Sarah Mennek, she's a sleep expert from the University, California Irvine and a huge advocate of what Laura you're saying, which is that it benefits us so much if we get into a regular habit of going to bed at the same time and waking up at the same, because it sets your circadian rhythm

in many ways, as well as going outside, both at dusk and first thing in the morning when the sun comes out for how the sun glasses on, but you got to look at it through your natural eyes, something Andrew Huberman talks about a lot as well. Yeah, well, building any sort of habit with your time, it makes the day is more mindful. If you have, most of us are pretty clear on the idea that the day has a beginning. There's a time when you wake up and that's the beginning of the day. We are a little bit fuzzier on this notion that each day has an end.

By setting a time when the day ends, like you get a more concrete perspective of how many hours there are you are working with, and you can start to make more mindful choices of where all those hours go. Yeah, you also build habits and routines around knowing what your pattern is before you're going to get yourself into bed.

So you get in that cadence and it helps you overall. Well, I recently interviewed Jeremy Utley, who's a professor at the Stanford Design School, and we talked a lot about advice that not only does he give us students, but they keep and the professor he teaches it with gives to CEOs of major companies that they work with. And that is they tell them at times to completely take Fridays off. And your rule number two is about planning on Fridays and examining your career relationships in yourself. Why is it so important to build such an important habit like that? Yeah, so planning on Fridays, this rule encompasses two parts.

I mean, one is that we need to plan. Like, if somebody has a lot of moving parts in their lives, we can't keep everything in our heads. We can't just react to stuff coming up. If we plan our lives in weeks and give ourselves a designated weekly planning time every week, we start to feel far more in control of the chaos. And since you are one person with one life, I don't find it's very helpful to separate out like, oh, I'm planning my work. It's like, well, you have other time

too. And that's going to affect how you perform at work as well. So I tell people to think about the upcoming weeks on Fridays and to figure out what is most important for you to accomplish professionally in your relationships and for yourself. Designate a couple of priorities, figure out where those things can go. Then look at what else you have to do over the course of the week. Figure out what is expected of you, what you want to get done, where those things can go, figure out if you can solve any problems. There might be logistical problems that you can figure out. If you're thinking about work and home and relationships all at the same time, you're going to see any conflicts and be

able to hopefully ward those off at the beginning. As for Fridays, though, I find that it's a really good time to look forward to the next week. I mean, partly, most people are not doing much of consequence by Friday afternoon. It's what an economist might call a low opportunity cost time, kind of sliding into the weekend after lunch on Friday And so if you're gonna waste this time anyway, you may as well repurpose it to Look forward to the next week and by doing it planning at this point

You can turn what might be wasted time into some of your most productive minutes overall I find that it also allows us to use Mondays Like if you plan your week on Monday morning, it's really hard to get going on executing stuff until later in the day on Monday or maybe even Tuesday. And so again, if people are sliding into the weekend by Friday, you've just shortened your week. If you're planning on Monday, whereas if you plan on Friday, you get more of a work week. But I think the biggest reason is that even people who love their jobs can often wind up feeling a little bit of trepidation by Sunday evening, the Sunday scaries, as people call it.

And what that is, is your brain knows there's a ton of stuff waiting for it on Monday morning, but it doesn't know how it's going to deal with it. Like it doesn't have a plan. And until you have an active plan, your brain is just processing over and over and thinking about it and feeling anxious about it. Whereas if you go into the weekend with a plan because you have planned your week on Friday, you might be able to relax a little bit more

and enjoy more of your weekend. I was definitely feeling that this week. We did the abnormal thing of going to a concert on Sunday night on a week where I had five interviews plus the solo podcast to get out and all of them are authors. So I've got to read all their books as well. So I was sitting there at the concert just thinking about, wow, how am I going to do tomorrow

when I got an interview at nine o'clock the next day, but it definitely makes you think about those things, as you said. The idea would be that if you plan on Friday and sort of have a sense of when you're going to at least skim everyone's books before their interviews and whatever and you would look at the week and say, oh, well, there is a 9 a.m. Monday, so I got to make sure I do that person's prep on Friday because you're looking ahead

a couple days. Then you can enjoy the concert because you're planned for Monday morning at 9 o'clock and you have a plan for when you'll deal with everyone else. Yeah, well luckily I read your book a couple weeks ago because your publisher was smart enough to give it to me about six weeks ago. So I was able to build it properly in so I could read the whole thing. It's good. Which I'd love to do. Well, another thing that caught my eye in this chapter and it makes me think back to

this interview I did with this guy named Travbell, who lives in Australia. And he somehow got the domain, the bucket list guy. And what I liked about the book is you told the reader to create a list of 100 dreams. And it was interesting because when he did his TED Talk, it's amazing how few people have really written down their dreams. Some people haven't in their head, but it only came up to about between 5% to 10% have actually written down their bucket list

or their aspirations. What's your advice on that because it caught my eye when I saw it? The reason to do a list of 100 dreams is a little different than a bucket list just because I'm thinking about what goes on it. But this was an exercise that was shared with me a couple years ago by a career coach named Caroline Sunizola-Vine, as she did with her clients.

And the idea is that 100 items is a lot. So the 100 dreams is anything you might want to spend more time doing. So goals you have that are going to take more time or particular things you generally want to spend more time doing. When you do a bucket list, a lot of people run out of ideas about number 24 after they've listed the 24 countries they want to visit, right? So you get like the 24 countries you want to visit plus skydiving and run a marathon and like, okay, now what? Because people don't tend to put smaller items on a bucket list, because this is like your bucket list. Don't my goodness, my whole life.

But when you have a hundred items, you can't have that filter. It's gotta be anything. And what that encourages is for you to put more doable aspirations. So yeah, you've got that three week jaunt to Fiji, but you're also like, I'd like to sing karaoke sometime, right? I would like to go on a roller coaster. I want to go fishing. I want to

try out that new French bistro at the quarter. I mean, these are start to be dreams that are like not that hard to do. The upside of having dreams that are not that hard to do is you can start doing some, like in the next few weeks. And I like that mindset, because with a bucket list, it's gonna be hard to pull more than one or two off per year for most stuff. If you've got things like have really good matching mugs for our coffees,

instead of random broken ones, like I could do that. I could do that this weekend. So I like that mindset. Yeah, last year I was talking to a woman named Victoria Humphries who lives in the UK. And she came up with one of the most interesting ways I've seen this done.

She came up with the 50 things at 50. She gave herself two years to accomplish 50 items that she had on our list. And what she was saying is that the things like skydiving are the easy ones to take off the list. For her, the harder ones were things like volunteering at a homeless shelter or doing things that purposely put her in uncomfortable positions. But as you're saying, there are tons of things that we can do, just like those two that you can do any day of the week that you want to. So it doesn't have to be summoning Everest to make it on the list.

It could be something that is small but meaningful because what I find is the more of these things you tick off, the easier it becomes to go after the bigger ones. Yeah. You get that habit of like, here is something I want to do and I have made it happen. And then, yeah, as you develop that muscle, you can start thinking about projects that will require a little bit more planning and effort to make happen. We'll be right back to my interview with Laura Vandercam. With Masterclass, you can learn from the world's best minds. Anytime, anywhere and at your own pace, you can learn how to become a better writer from legendary authors like Malcolm Gladwell, James Patterson, Dan Brown, Amy Tan, and Amanda

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is I capture ideas for my next new book and the weekly podcast solo episodes that I do. I highly recommend you check it out. Unlimited access to every class, and as a passion struck listener, you get 15% off an annual membership. Go to masterclass.com slash passion struck now. That's masterclass.com slash passion struck for 15% off masterclass.com slash passion struck now. That's masterclass.com slash passion struck for 15% off masterclass. But even if not, identifying what we want to have in our lives and challenging ourselves to make it happen, it's just a good thing to do in general. And the more practice we get at doing it, the better. And so that's the upside of having very doable dreams.

Yes. Well, I'm going to jump to role five. And in that chapter, you say that anyone can make a schedule, but time management masters make resilient schedules. And I love that. And then later on in the chapter, you talk about the need for space. And I recently had Juliet Fontan, the podcast, and she's the author of a book called A Minute to Think. And she gives us an analogy that I really like, where she talks about a fire. And unless you give space to that fire, the fire is never going to ignite, it's just going to stay dormant.

Oh, the same thing, I think, with our creativity and our life. So why do you think it's so important to build open space into your life? Ideally, it would be so we could have creative space and brainstorming space. But I'm suggesting this for a more practical reason for many people, which is that often people have schedules that only work if nothing goes wrong. And the odds that nothing goes wrong in the course of any given week are very low, right? People get very frustrated about this. They have a manager, for instance, who's like, okay, I need to give celebratory feedback

to my team members. And I know I've got one guy who's been dealing with some particularly prickly issues. We're going to sit down at 10 a.m. on Tuesday. We're going to have that celebratory feedback conversation. And then what happens at 930? Well, like there's a huge emergency explosion. And your biggest client is like lost all their business. So I don't know.

Either there's something that happens, right? And you wind up moving the meeting because you can. It's not urgent, right? You all of a sudden, this thing that you said was really important is gone because life happened and it can feel very frustrating, but again, anyone can create a perfect schedule. True-time management masters make a resilient schedule, which is that if you have identified that as being a top priority for the week, you need a backup slot for it, right? So if it isn't going to happen at 10 a.m. on Tuesday, where do you both of you know that it is automatically

going to be rescheduled for? So maybe you've said already, like 10 a.m. Friday, like if for some reason 10 a.m. Tuesday doesn't happen, both of us know that we're automatically going to do it 10 a.m. Friday because it matters and I still want to make it happen, even if life comes up. Now obviously, it can get a little bit unwieldy

to create a backup slot specifically for absolutely everything in your life that's important, which is why we need to leave more open space in general. If you have meetings stacked up every day, all day long, and on the hour and one runs over, like what happens to every single meeting after that, well then they all start late because the previous one started late. And so that's very frustrating as well, but if you have even 30 minutes, an hour of open space in your day, you can get caught up from the previous and then start over from the beginning

and not have everything after launch be hideously behind. If you have something urgent come up that you have to deal, then it doesn't totally displace a priority. Your priority has a space to go. If you have open space on, let's say, Friday afternoon is completely open.

Well, it can go there. Or maybe something wonderful comes up during the week, right? You've just gotten a request for a proposal for something really huge that you want to do. If you have zero open space, you're going to have to bump something else to take that on. But if you have open space, well great. Now you can make progress on the things you already said you're going to do and you've got split, but to put the new thing. So that's why we have to be, build a schedule that is resilient enough to handle life as it comes, supposed to assuming that everything will go right. Yeah. So I think the other thing it does is I know for myself when I was in the corporate world,

it was just like I'm going from one meeting to the other, and it never seemed like I had, as Julien says, a minute to think about things because you can't be a good leader if you're not thinking about the future, thinking strategically, thinking with creativity about how you're solving issues. So I think it's also such a tremendous thing to do from that standpoint as well as you can use it to put yourself in the down state, which gives you just as much benefit as going into REM sleep if you know how to do it properly. So I love all those things.

So as we talked about earlier, this podcast is all about how do you live an intentional life. And I think in many ways, that's what Tranquility by Tuesday is really about, nine rules for using your time more intentionally and making the most of it. And I love this quote from Rule Six of the book about picturing yourself on the other side. And you write, the essence of discipline is recognizing this mild discomfort tends to be a small price

to pay for the upside to future you. Why do those who are disciplined and intentionally focus on what matters have more satisfaction on the other side. Normally, what do we think about discipline? It's about trying to get ourselves to do things that we don't want to do. But I find that it's often just as difficult to get yourself to do things that you actually do want to do, or at least you want to have done. And you know that you will probably enjoy it while you're doing it. It's just that there's this inertia that's required. And so this chapter on one big adventure, one little adventure, I'm trying to get people to plan more like memorable, interesting things

into their lives. And I'm sure many of us have had this experience you're like, well, I'm gonna go visit this new place after work. Like I've heard great things about this sculpture garden in a park that's a little bit out of the way from the way home from work. I'm gonna go do that.

And then you get to the end of the day and you're tired, kind of hungry, like, I'll just drive straight home. And I'll do it some other time. And it's like, well, you would have really enjoyed it. Like it would have been a really cool end to the day, but you have that inertia. And so it's just hard to overcome that inertia, even if it's in the pursuit of something you actually do

really want to do and would enjoy. I challenge people in the pursuit of happiness to picture yourself on the other side. Like in 90 minutes, you're going to be home one way or the other. And 90 minutes, this next 90 minutes will be over, right? It will only be a memory. So knowing that would you rather have the memory of having walked around that cool sculpture garden or not have that memory of having walked around the cool sculpture garden. And most of the time, people I want kind of like to have had that memory. That's why I said I was going to do it. Like I want to do it. Well, then all you have to do is picture yourself on the other side and say,

all I have to do is get through this next little bit of time. And I will be there that person with the memory. You're going to be enjoying it once you're doing it. It's not like I'm asking you to do something terrible. But it's just to overcome that initial resistance that's always easier to do nothing than to do something. Yes, well another thing I like that you put in here and I didn't even realize I was doing something that was so meaningful for myself as my partner

and I typically do a date night on Tuesday night but then on Thursday night, we kind of give that night that each of us can do whatever we want. And so I always mix it up. I find it so good to be able to give yourself the gift of taking a night for yourself. Why do you think that matters so much? Yeah, I think everyone needs to recognize that you have some identity that is apart from work and as apart from family. And we've put a lot of effort into work and family. They require a lot of responsibility, very meaningful things, but they take a lot of energy. And how do we get energy? Well, there are certain things we can do holistically, like getting enough sleep and exercising.

But often we draw energy from doing meaningful things that we personally find enjoyable. So I challenge people to take one night for you. One night a week or the equivalent number of weekend hours, do something that is not work, that is not family, that you personally find fun. And ideally, you can make a commitment to this. So this is something like join a choir, join a softball league, volunteer regularly somewhere, because when it's a commitment, then you do it, right? Like if you're just like, oh, I'm just gonna read, reading is my thing I'll do. Well, I love reading too, but you can read whenever, right?

So when it's busy, you'll just like, well, what I'll do that some other time or somebody else asks you to do something, you don't have a reason to say go, right? Your kid wants you to drive them to the mall again, and this is your time, you're gonna be reading. Well, your book's not going anywhere. There you can do it later.

And so you wind up kind of pushing for the fun, whereas if you are playing in a string quartet on Tuesday nights, like if you don't show up, they don't have a quartet, you have to be there. And so because it is a commitment, because your attendance is expected, you will go. And you will go, even if you were tired, you will go, even if life is busy, you will go, even if other people would kind of

prefer you did something else. And because you go, you will get the benefit of this act of self care. Like, you find it energizing, you find it meaningful, you know, you feel better during it and after it. And because you have to be there, because you've made this commitment, you do it. That's the reason to choose something like that. Okay, well, thank you for that. And in part three of your book, you go into wasting less time, which are habits for creating more restorative space. Why do you suggest to batch little things and what are its benefits?

Yeah, I find that even if you've got a lot of support, whether that's at work or at home, many of us wind up with small tasks that are not terrifically important and they're not exactly urgent either. I mean, they have to be done at some point, but they should not really be our top priority. And unfortunately, we can often stop whatever we're doing to do these things as soon as we learn about them, or we do them first because we're trying to cross a lot of things off our 2D lists before we get to our other work. And I think that's a mistake because we only have so much energy. I would prefer that people devote their most productive hours to the work that is most benefited

by that. And to create small windows of time during which you do all the other stuff that is less important. So that could be like filling out that form for HR or assigning your kids permission slips ordering that present responding to invitations, all those sorts of things. It feels often really good to do those things. Here's the other problem with little things. I mean, so sometimes it's like,

oh, I've got all these things I have to do. I can't get to anything until I get on the sun. No, no, batch it later. But sometimes we do this to ourselves, right? Or like, oh, I really should be writing this chapter, but I could just order that birthday present on Amazon, right? And I'm like, oh, I crossed it off my list. It's done. I have something off my list. Didn't it matter? No. What I needed to do was write that chapter. But I gave myself the easy win. Sometimes it's better to deprive yourself of having the option of the easy win and tell a time that you have designated. So you're forced to wrestle with deeper matters. Well, I did that just today. I have this upcoming trip

and I kept thinking in the back of my head. I need to buy airplane tickets. I got to do it today and I kept wanting to jump on that, but I knew I had to get my solo podcast done. So I'm pleased with myself that I put preparing for you and doing that podcast above buying the tickets, which I'll do shortly after we get off the air today. Yeah, exactly. I mean, and the promise, it like stuff like that, A, it can wind up taking more time than you think. Like, what if there are different choices than you thought there were available for that airline or sometimes when people are answering a question

from a colleague, they're like, oh, it'll only take two minutes, but then you're in your inbox and you find other email in there and you can wind up spending far longer on these things. So it's better to just not do them when you think of them. Choose the time, you're gonna do them. When it is, you're less good time. So for many people, afternoons, we have less energy so that makes it a good time for doing those things

that are not particularly urgent and not particularly important either. Well, another thing that caught my eye in that chapter that I think the audience might enjoy is, what is the three hour rule? Yeah, so that was just a suggestion one of my blog readers had. you need to focus on big tasks. And you also have all these little tasks.

So what can you do? Well, what her solution was is to spend three hours in the morning on her big task. Like she would try to limit inputs as much as possible. So no phone calls, not checking email, things like that. And then she would emerge at noon from this. And then she could tackle all her small tasks like guilt-free, basically. She knew she'd already done the big thing for the day. And so

there was time for both. Whereas if you spend the morning tackling all the little stuff, you get to the afternoon is like, okay, well, theoretically, now I could get to the big stuff. But most people have far less energy in the afternoon. And so you're not giving your best self to those tasks. So by switching her day to do that, to give herself the gift of focus for as long as she did, she was able to get the little tasks done for sure. But she also got the big stuff done. Well, and then your final rule is one of my favorite ones, which is learning how to be effortful about effortless.

Why is it so hard for us to choose effortful fun? Well the basic reason is that it takes some effort. So even the busiest people have some amount of leisure time. But the problem is either it comes in short spurts that we either can't necessarily plan for. We don't know when they're going to happen. We don't know how long they'll be. So five minutes while you're waiting for a phone call to start or you're waiting for the carpool to pick up your kids. Or they happen like at night after the kids go to bed or after you've done your chores, but you have very limited energy, right? Like most people are not going to do whole great things at 9 p.m. you're kind of done at that point. And so what we wind up doing is a lot of passive leisure, which this day and age means screens, right? We scroll around online in those little spots of time

during the day or we binge watch whatever at night. There's nothing wrong with screens per se. Like, I enjoy some shows. I enjoy social media too. It's just you don't want it to be the only thing you do. Most people have other stuff that they would like to do and often say, I would do that if only I had the time, right? I would read more if only I had the time. I would call my friends if only I had the time. I would do puzzles or crafts or hobbies if only I had the time. Well, I'm saying you do, but you have to choose to do those things instead of the effortless variety. It is hard, but challenge yourself to just do a tiny bit of effortful fun before you go to the automatic effortless fun. So if you've got a few minutes of time during the day,

read a book, an ebook for two minutes before you start scrolling around online. Or at night, you've gotten the kids in bed, you would go turn on the TV, challenge yourself to do a puzzle for 15 minutes, and then you can go binge watch for the rest of the time until you're bedtime. But by flipping the automatic order, a couple things happen. One, probably you'll be having so much fun with your effortful fun that you'll just keep doing it. Almost universally, people find things like reading and hobbies and crafting and talking to their friends to be more enjoyable than passive screen time.

It's just that it requires a bit of effort so we don't automatically do it. But if you do automatically do it, you will probably enjoy it so much that you'll never even get to the effort. It was fun. But even if you do, you'll make space for both and your life. And that will start to feel a lot more balanced. Okay. And then if you use all these rules, how do the benefits of being time focused,

accrue from being deliberate and investing in better ways to use our time? And do you find it's important that we should do this in alignment with one's personal values and does that help? Well, I'm always a big fan of knowing what your personal values are, but I find that many people are living in so much day to day

and in chaos that it's hard to actually make space for the things that we value. How we spend our time is a function of how common and control we feel. And so it's harder to say like, I really value, let's say serving at that homeless shelter you're talking about earlier. But if you're constantly feeling behind,

if you feel like everything's out of control, you're not going to make space to do it. Whereas if you have good systems in place, life is not going to get less chaotic, but you're going to figure out a way to make those things happen, even in the midst of all the moving parts. I think that by adapting these habits, building these strategies into our lives, we can actually live the life that we want, right? That is an alignment with our values, as opposed to just having a more reactive feeling to everything. Well, awesome.

Or one of the questions I always like to end the interviews on is, if there was one thing that you wanted a reader to take away from Tranquility by Tuesday, what would it be? Yeah, I think a lot of busy people keep repeating the phrase to myself, oh, like, next week when life is less busy, I'll do this. Or next month, when things calm down,

then I'll get to this. Or after the holidays, when everything is different, then I will finally get to this. And the truth is life is not going to be less busy next week. It probably won't be less busy next year. Like we need to build the lives we want now. But I really do think that by adopting these nine rules, these habits into our lives, we can build the lives we want right now, even on an average Tuesday. And

so that's what I'm hoping people get out of this book. Okay. And then for the listener who wants to know more about you, what are some of the best ways they can do that? Yeah, well, you can come visit me at loreofvandercam.com. I blog usually three or four times a week there, different thoughts on time management in my life as well, or you can listen to my podcast before breakfast or best of both worlds. I always looking to share more of this journey with people, so I hope I can hear from some of your listeners. Well, Laura, thank you so much for taking the time to join us here on the PassionStruck

podcast. It was a pleasure to have you and congratulations again on your brand new book. Thank you so much for having me. I thoroughly enjoyed that interview with Laura Vanderkamp. And I wanted to thank Laura, Lauren Monahan, Marissa Solomon, and all the folks at Penguin Random House for giving us the honor and privilege of having Laura on the podcast. A link to all things Laura will be in the show notes on passionstruck.com.

Please use our website links if you buy any of the books from the guests that we feature on the show. All the proceeds go to making this show free for you, our listener. Deals, advertiser deals and discount codes are in one convenient place at passionstruck.com slash deals. If you would prefer to watch this interview or short clips from it,

you can check out our YouTube channel at JohnRMiles. Please go there and subscribe. You can also find me, both on Instagram and Twitter at JohnRMiles, and I'm also on LinkedIn. And if you wanna know how I book amazing guests like Laura, it's because of my network. Go out there and build your network before you need it. You're about to hear a preview

of the PassionStruck podcast interview I did with Dr. Suzanne Gilbert Gleens, who uplifts women around the world by bringing her popular Menopause Bootcamp to the masses. She is the author of the brand new book, which releases this week, also titled Menopause Bootcamp, where she writes about how do you optimize your health, empower yourself and flourish as you age. So sex doesn't need to be over. It just needs to be reinvented. And I think the other thing is like, look, it's really sex for connection

and joy and intimacy only. I mean, it's fantastic. It can really be a wonderful intimacy building experience with a partner or with yourself just to get to know yourself. And it is, I will say this, it is use it or lose it. It is use it or lose it.

So if we don't use it, we are going to lose it. Remember, we rise by lifting others. So share this show with those that you love and care about. And if you found today's episode on time management and productivity useful, please share it with someone who can use the advice that we gave here today. In the meantime, do your best, practice what you hear on the show so that you can live what you listen. And until next time, live life-passion struck.

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