Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 606: 9 Strategies for Managing Your Time | Laura Vanderkam

Episode Date: June 5, 2023

So many of us suffer over the issue of time management. Our guest today approaches the topic from research and personal experience and dives into how we can think more strategically about our time and aspire to build resilient schedules, rather than perfect ones. Laura Vanderkam is the author of several time management and productivity books. Her latest is Tranquility by Tuesday: 9 Ways to Calm the Chaos and Make Time for What Matters. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and Fast Company. Laura’s TED Talk on “How to Gain Control of Your Free Time” has been viewed more than 12 million times, and she also hosts the podcast Before Breakfast. Her previous books include Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done, I Know How She Does It: How Successful Women Make the Most of Their Time, What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast, and 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think. In this episode we talk about: Why time is the great levelerWhy time management strategies aren’t only for people lucky enough to set their own schedules Why Laura’s number one rule in her book is to “give yourself a bedtime” Why she is a big believer that that weekends and evenings do not have to be work free zonesHow to use exercise as a reset button during your dayWhy creating a habit doesn’t have to mean doing it everydayThe time management rule that Laura gets the biggest pushback on And the rule Laura says all the other rules are jealous ofFull Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/tph/podcast-episode/laura-vanderkam-606See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

This is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey everybody, so many of us do so much suffering over the issue of time management. I put myself firmly in this bucket, managing my time is one of the trickiest issues I face. Many of us field pulled in a million directions, frayed and frazzled. We try to prioritize, and maybe it works for a little while, but then we fall behind inevitably. And then we're again left self-flagulating for being insufficiently productive. It is a toilet vortex to borrow a phrase from my friend Evelyn Tribbley, who borrowed it from Nabaka, if I believe it's a toilet vortex that can make us very unpleasant to

live with, degrade the quality of our relationships, which then can reduce our capacity for time management and then down you go. I know this is a hugely resonant issue and not just for me because every time we do episodes on this subject, the download numbers spike. So much ink has been spilled on time management. So many books have been written. In fact, my guest today has written six of those books

and her latest widdles down all that she's learned over so many years of obsessing over time management to nine strategies or nine rules, although she uses that word rules in a very loose way. Laura Vandercam approaches the topic of time management from both personal experience, as well as research. She was initially drawn to this subject matter, and you'll hear her talk about this, because of her own personal experience,

juggling her career with the raising of five children. She went on to write such books as the new corner office off the clock, and what the most successful people do before breakfast. She also hosts a pair of podcasts on this subject. One of them is called Before Breakfast. The other is Best of Both Worlds, and her latest book is called Tranquility by Tuesday, Nine Ways to Calm the Chaos, and

Make Time for What Matters. In this conversation, we talked about why time is the great leveler of humans, how to begin thinking strategically about your time, why time management strategies are not only for people who are lucky enough to be able to set their own schedules. Why rule number one in Laura's book is give yourself a bedtime. Why she's a big believer that weekends and evenings do not have to be work-free zones. This is actually a big issue for me because I do do some work on the weekends and sometimes

I feel guilty about it. Using exercise as a reset button during your day, why creating a habit does not mean you have to do something every single day, why we should aspire to build resilient schedules rather than perfect ones. This is actually a big and important rule that made a big difference for me in this conversation.

The time management rule that Laura got the biggest pushback on in the process of her research and why. And the rule Laura says all the other rules are jealous of. We'll get started with Laura van der Kam right after this. Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do?

What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the great meditation teacher, Alexis Santos. To access the course, just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10%.com. All one word spelled out. Okay, on with the show.

Hey y'all, it's your girl, Kiki Palmer. I'm an actress, singer, and entrepreneur. On my new podcast, Baby This is Kiki Palmer. I'm asking friends, family, and experts, the questions that are in my head. Like, it's only fans only bad. Where did memes come from? And where's Tom from, my space? Listen to Baby. This is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. Laura Vandercam, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be here. I'm excited. You're here. By my count, you've written six books on this subject. Is my math on here. I think that sounds about right. Yeah. I love time.

It's such a fascinating topic. Well, okay. So six books, you call it fascinating, when's the fascination? What's going on here? I think it's because we all have the same amount of time. It's one of the only things like that in the world. So, you know, when you encounter people who are doing amazing things with their lives, professionally, personally, they may be smarter than us, richer, better looking, whatever else, but they don't have more time. And so I am fascinated about how successful people use these same building blocks that we all have to create these

amazing lives and what the rest of us can learn from that. So that's what I've spent those six books more or less exploring. Well, when you say we all have the same amount of time, obviously we have different life spans. You mean there are, nobody has 25 hours in a day. Nobody has 25 hours in a day or even 169 hours in a week, except for, you know, when we fall back in the fall with the time change. So in the way we experience life,

we have the same amount of space. Now, yes, obviously some people have longer life spins than others. And there are many other things that come into play too. Obviously some people have lives that are a lot more privileged than others or less. And the basic things we're working with, what we've been given to work with are different. But fundamentally, we all do have the same amount of time. And there are things that other people simply can't do for you. I mean, much as people might like,

no one can sleep for you. So even the most amazing people out there are still figuring out how they can get enough sleep, how they can do other things that only they can do. So that's why I find the topic so interesting. How much can we learn from people who are using their time more effectively, more successfully, more efficiently than we do. Given the structural issues at play here, given that, I don't know, privilege is just a

loaded word, but luck is a real, you know, the luck of whatever womb we happen to emerge out of. Can I really glean lessons from people who have been way luckier than I have? Well, I certainly think we can, but a lot of my work has explored maybe not the people I really glean lessons from people who have been way luckier than I have. Well, I certainly think we can, but a lot of my work has explored maybe not the people who are the name brands out there, but the people you might meet in your normal life.

So your neighbor who seems to have a thriving career and also a wonderful relationship with her family. Like what is she doing, right? Or someone at work that seems to always be able to meet their deadlines yet doesn't appear incredibly stressed. What is that person doing? And those are the people that made

we can learn the most from, although I'd say even the big name brand people, if there are things that are very functional about their lives, something like building relationships, I mean, you can't really outsource the relationship building with your spouse aspect of life, for instance. I mean, you could try, but it probably wouldn't go very well. So there are still things that those people have to do in their time, and I find that fascinating

to study. So is your work focused mostly on how we use our free time, or do you also look at how we prioritize within our work day? I really think it's both because we're always working from the same pot of hours. And so you might have more free time if you are able to manage your work hours more effectively. So no matter what your goal is, you're still working with the hours that you are experiencing every day and figuring out how you can allocate those so you can spend more time on the things that matter and less time on the things that don't. So certainly within the category of work, many people feel like they spend so much time on the things that are not particularly meaningful, whether that's

hours on email or in meetings that could have been an email or something like that, we'd like to spend more time on maybe learning and professional development or mentoring younger colleagues and networking and doing the core of your job, whatever you are hired to do. So it's a question of time management there. And then obviously the same thing happens in our personal lives too. And many times people don't approach their personal lives with the same mindfulness that we might approach work, and that work has a bit more accountability to it.

But, you know, I'm always trying to encourage people to think of their leisure and family time as precious as well, and worthy of thinking through what would I like to be doing with this time, what would be most meaningful for me and the people I care about, most enjoyable for me and the people I care about, and how can I spend more time on those things and more time on those things and less time on the things that are maybe not as important?

I wanna come back to this issue of intentionality, but just staying with luck for a second. Within the work day, your math basically is, we have 168 hours a week. If you sleep eight hours a night and you work 40 hours a week, that's what, 50 something hours. 72 hours that you're neither asleep nor working,

so non-working waking hours. So I've just exposed my math. It took me a long time to figure it out too. I was carrying the ones or whatever it is you have to do. Yeah, exactly. I think there's a word that I only recently came across. There's obviously illiterate, but there's also enumerate.

And I think I may be the latter. Anyway, so I get your argument that before all working, even if we're working 60 hours a week, that's still quite a bit of free time that we have. And so luck or privilege is maybe a little less of an issue in this sphere, but within the work day, within our work lives, it does seem to me that luck slash privilege does play a role. I mean, I am incredibly lucky. I don't have a boss. I really do set my own schedule very infrequently or requests coming over the transom that I

can't say no to. So I'm just wondering, before we get into your nine rules in this new book, just what about people who really have to work two jobs and aren't in control don't have as much agency within their days? Yeah, well certainly different people have varying amounts of agency within their time, different amounts of discretionary time. I mean, even people who may have shorter work days may have more responsibilities on the home front, right? And that's, it's certainly not all leisure time in the sense of having complete control over it. That said, I do feel we all have some. I've had thousands of people track their time for me over the years.

I haven't come across anyone who doesn't have some discretionary time in their life. It may not be as much as they wish. And in many cases, it's not as much as we wish. But it is some. And the question in life is, not as much as we wish. But it is some. And the question in life is, well, how can we use that some time that we have to feel most rejuvenated or happy with that time? And how can we make changes to ideally scale it up over time? And I've certainly have seen people within jobs

where a lot is dictated to them. A lot of their time is dictated to them. Slowly carve out bits where they can work on the things that they find most interesting, that they're the most passionate about. Generally, as you wind up having good results with that, generally, people want you to do a little bit more of it, because that's what you're showing results in. But even if not, there might be times when you know that things going to be dictated to you. There may be other times where you have a little bit more control. It was right after a big deadline has passed, and then there's a little bit more leeway

then. So it's about learning to recognize within your schedule when these things happen, being aware of it, that same intentionality. If you track your time for a while, you do start to see these patterns. When you see these patterns, then you do start to see these patterns, and when you see these patterns, then you can start to use them. I think another issue in this may not be strictly a time management skill,

but another skill for people who have demanding bosses that can be used is communication skills. To be able to say clearly without a lot of blame or a lot of dysregulation, to say, look, I can't do all of these things. You have this new request you're presenting to me. And so how would you, dear boss, like me to prioritize all of the things on my list? So that seems, and not to put all of the onus on the employee here because it's really

kind of the boss's fault. But there are things that the employee can do that kind of may step out of the range of pure time management and get into communication. Would you agree with that? Absolutely. I mean, there are always things we can do to try to make things better. And I know that self-help sometimes gets a bad reputation for this, of being about what we can control, but we can't control other people. We can control our reactions, we can control our actions to things, and so it may not change everything, but if we can change things on the margin to make work feel more sustainable, to make our personal lives more enjoyable, then that is a big win. And so even if you can't solve all problems, being able to make some a little bit better

can give people a massive improvement in their quality of life. Yeah, no, I completely agree with that. I just, I guess maybe a self-help writer too. And the balance that we, people who do what you and I do is that we're, you want to acknowledge the structural issues and also give people some strategies before the structures get changed that they can work more effectively within the current structures and within their life. Absolutely.

It can work for larger things to change, but at the same time, control what we can control. So let's just go back to intentionality because you brought it up, and I think it's a big theme for you. And I've heard this before from guests who really look at time and how we approach it, that it's in having an approach that we begin to start to see results. It's having a sense of, oh, yes, time is something I need to think about strategically

and decide what is most important to me, et cetera, et cetera. That just seems like a foundational insight from you. Am I heading in the right direction here? Absolutely. And it's funny that we don't think of it necessarily that way. Like, we don't automatically have that sense of apportioning time to different things that we would with money.

I mean, most people at least think about roughly how much they should be spending on housing or transportation or can I afford this or can I not. Whereas with time, it's almost assumed to be infinite. Like people aren't necessarily asking like, can I afford this with my time when we take things on or we put things into our lives? We just don't have that same mindset about how much time there may be that we have available to work with.

And partly that's because time keeps passing. I mean, no matter what you do, the day will be over. There are 168 hours ahead of us in this next week, and eventually we will be on the other side of those 168 hours, and they will have been filled with something. No matter what you do, I mean, even if you were just shutting a closet for the entire week, the week will pass. And so because it does keep moving like this giant rolling river, it is hard to direct its course.

And so in order to even start thinking about how you could maneuver your craft down this rapidly moving river, you have to have an approach to it. As you said, be mindful, be intentional about it. Actually ask yourself, well, where is my time going now? Where would I like it to go? What strategies can I use in my life in order to make those changes possible? As I said, we're going to get to the nine rules in your new book. But while we're talking about this on a high level here about thinking strategically about time, how would we even begin to start thinking

strategically about our time? One of the first things that I always recommend people do is to keep track of their time. Because often, you know, people say, well, I want to spend my time better, but if you don't know how you are spending your time now, it's pretty hard to know if you are changing the right thing. I mean, maybe something you thought was a problem really isn't, or maybe something you haven't considered is taking far more time than you imagined. And so you want to make sure that you are working from good data. So I suggest that people try tracking their time for a week because that is the cycle of life as we actually live it. If you track a Tuesday versus tracking a Saturday, you'll get a very different picture of your life. So we want a unit of time that encompasses both Tuesday and Saturday. So track your time for a week, see what you're doing,

see where it goes, see what time is fully accounted for, what time you have no idea what's going on, time, what the patterns of your life look like. And then you can start to say, well, what would I like to be spending more time on? What would I like to be spending less time on? What's going really well in my life? Because often, we've chosen things for a reason. So we want to make sure that we are just aware of the full picture, and then we can start making more mindful choices. Is there an app or an Excel spreadsheet

or some tech that you recommend for most effectively tracking our time. So I tracked my time on weekly spreadsheets. I've actually been doing this for seven years now, which nobody else needs to do. A week is perfectly sufficient. I just again find the topic fascinating. So I've been tracking my time for seven years. But yeah, it's a pretty simple spreadsheet. It's got the days of the week across the top Monday through Sunday, half hour blocks down the left-hand side, 5am to 4.30am. So, 336 cells representing a 168 hour week. I check in three times a day, more or less, and write down what I've done since the last time I've checked in. If you don't want to do that, you can use one of dozens of time tracking apps on the market. There are lots of sort of free versions and paid versions.

You can get, you can just walk around with a notebook if you want to look all artsy, like writing down what you're doing. The tool itself doesn't really matter. What matters is that you stick with it and do it. Don't try to make it perfect. If you forget to check in, that's fine. Just check in again when you remember and reconstruct the time as best as you can. But by doing this, you start to get a better sense of reconstruct the time as best as you can, but by doing this,

you start to get a better sense of where the time goes, what choices you are making, whether you know you are making them or not, what you are satisfied with, what feels like a waste of time. And when you know those things, you can start to see the scope of what is possible to do differently. What humiliating things have you learned over seven years of tracking your time? I spend way too much time on sort of random scrolling, which I'm sure I am not the only one,

I know I'm not the only one because I've seen other people's time logs, but it's so easy. And that's why we do it. This forms of effortless fun. You have your phone with you, spot of time opens up. You could do something else, but the phone is right there.

The apps are right there. And so I find myself scrolling through Instagram, looking at other people's gorgeous family photos, wondering why my family doesn't have a photographer following us around everywhere and are matching outfits and such. And next thing you know, 30 minutes has gone by and that's on my time logs. So the humiliating truth of it is that it is there. So you see this in your time logs, but have you made any changes

as a consequence? I do. Although it's a constant work in progress. When I see that it is getting a little bit out of hand that I am doing too much of this, what I judge to be too much in my mind of what I should be doing with my time. Then I try to figure out what I could substitute, and often what's going on when I'm spending a lot of time online is that I don't have a good book, I'm reading, right? And so I need to go find something that I want to read,

and that doesn't feel like a huge lift for me to pick it up and start reading. And if there's something I'm genuinely looking forward to picking up, then the phone becomes marginally less interesting by comparison. Another thing I do to fill that time when I'm often hanging out with my toddler and he's doing something independently so he doesn't need me interacting with him, but I can't leave because as soon as I leave, he'll do something that's disastrous for him and everyone else. So, I do puzzles. I buy thousand-piece white mountain puzzles and put them on my dining room table, and it's

something that I can do other than scrolling, and it feels pretty relaxing. And you wind up doing them pretty quickly, they get kind of addictive. So that's another thing that I will substitute for it. I probably should have said gotten to this earlier, but you are, as time challenged, if not more than the rest of us, you have five children and have written six books. So it's not like you're sitting in some ivory tower contemplating these issues. Yeah, there's no ivory tower. There are people around constantly. I have five children who are range and age from 15 to two. So we get the whole range of experiences

from teenage life to toddlerdom. It's always an adventure, but yes, it does take time. And a lot of my time management strategies have come out of trying to figure out how to manage my life to get my writing done, get my podcasts recorded, give my speeches and the other things I'm doing and have a full family life too, where I'm enjoying time with my kids, with my husband enjoying hobbies as well. And I feel like there is enough time for all these things. I just need to be strategic about using my time. And so that's partly why I've studied all these people who

are making various pieces of work and life fit together to see how I can do it in my own life as well. Okay, so let's get to this new book, which is built around nine strategies that you have come up with after these many years of really paying a lot of attention to this issue. Let me first point out that you kind of ran a study in the course of writing this book. Can you describe the study? Yeah, so tranquility by Tuesday is based on nine of the time management rules that I found I was recommending to people most frequently. So I've seen thousands of time logs over the years, people have sent them to me, ask me for advice on what should I do differently with my time.

And I found that I was often giving people the same advice, even though people's lives look very different. And so I decided to hone these strategies down to sort of nine rules that I think are broadly applicable and will help most people spend more time on what matters and less on what doesn't. And since I write self-help for busy people, I wanted to make sure that they worked. So I recruited 150 people to participate in what I called the

Tranquility by Tuesday project. And each week, they would learn a new rule for nine weeks. And I would ask them questions about how they plan to implement it in their lives. I would ask questions a week later about how it went. I could measure them on various dimensions. I developed a time satisfaction scale looking at various different things of people were happy with how they were spending their time professionally, personally, were they getting enough sleep? Did they regularly have time just for them, were they making progress on their goals, all these questions? And I could measure them on those various dimensions over the course of the nine weeks. And I found that when people followed these rules over nine weeks or at least tried to, their overall time satisfaction scores rose by 16% over the

course of those nine weeks. So that was cool to see, you know, with 150 people, that's a statistically significant rise. And most of the book is made up of their observations as they tried to implement these rules in their lives, what worked, what didn't, what challenges did they face, how did they overcome those challenges, and hopefully people will find that helpful as they try to put these rules into their lives. Would this qualify as like peer reviewed science, or is it just no? I don't think so.

I mean, I did have, I have a professional research team. I mean, people who do have PhDs and publish things in peer reviewed journals. But that wasn't necessarily how we set this up. I don't know that the people who sign up for a study that Laura Vanderkam is running are representative of the entire universe of humanity, for instance.

So there's that. But they were pretty normal people, albeit those who are interested in self-development. One of the things I thought was cool is that many of these people, why do they find me? It's probably because they have read time management and productivity books or listen to such podcasts in the past.

And yet they still saw improvements in their lives, even people who were pretty good students of time management literature to start with. Okay, so with that context provided, let's dive into the nine strategies. The first is, give yourself a bedtime. Say more. Say more. Yeah. Well, this was rule number one for a reason, which is because sleep is so foundational to our lives. And I know we talk a lot about sleep deprivation, and we should, because it's a terrible thing, and people are not productive when they are sleep deprived. But the curious thing to me has always been

that when I study people's time logs and I've looked at other time diary studies, many people are getting enough sleep from a quantitative perspective. The problem is that it is not orderly sleep. So people will get a lot of sleep on one day and much less sleep on another. And people can, I'm sure see this in their own lives. Like you sleep in on Sunday morning, you're not tired on Sunday night. You're up late Sunday night. And then Monday morning, you have to be up at the crack of dawn.

And so you started the week with a very short week. And maybe Tuesday's short, too. But then by Wednesday and Thursday, people are crashing and making it up, sleep in on weekends, the cycle repeats itself. And so people's sleep totals for different days will wind up being all over the map. And so it might look from a weekly perspective like they're sleeping enough, but they are undershooting or overshooting. And that can really mess with your ability to build good routines, to feel functional on

the days when you have undershot your sleep needs, it is so much better to get the amount of sleep you need every single night. And most adults need somewhere between seven and eight hours. Some people need more, some people need less, but that's generally roughly where most people are. Many adults cannot actually move the time they wake up in the morning. All that much people have to be up for work responsibilities, family responsibilities. So the time that can move is when you go to bed the night before. And so this is just a math problem.

Like if you have to wake up at 6 a.m., and you need seven and a half hours of sleep, your bedtime is 10.30. All right. If you have to wake up at 7 and you need eight hours of sleep, your bedtime is 10.30. All right, if you have to wake up at seven and you need eight hours of sleep, your bedtime is 11. But you figure out what this is and then commit to getting into bed at that time, most nights unless you have a really good reason not to. And part of that is setting some sort of reminder to yourself

to wind down 30 minutes before that bedtime, whatever it happens to be. But when people did this, it's not rocket science, but when people did this for a week, their energy levels rose considerably. They felt more functional. They felt like they were well rested. They had good weeks. It's simple, but it really does work. I don't think this is a controversial issue because I am totally convinced of the importance of sleep. And we've had many guests on the show talk about him. We will have many more because it is such an important issue. So I totally agree with you. And I was glad to hear you had a kind of asterisk in there, set a bedtime and less something really important has

come up. Because one fear I have about the emphasis on sleep, and this is a minor fear, but it's I think worth airing, is that it can run capture to another really important piece of advice, which is while you should be very intentional about your time and your sleep, you should also be very intentional about making sure you've got a lot of social interaction in your life. And so for me, I am very intentional about my sleep and my time. And I am also I put a high premium on seeing my friends, because I know how happy it makes me. And so I went to see LCB sound system the other night and I didn't get to bed on time and I the next night I went to see an orchestral rendition of big e-smalls music at Lincoln center was unbelievable and so I didn't get as much sleep and I try not to do that tonight in a row but I did because that's the way life went and I feel good about that sacrifice. So is anything I'm saying offensive to you? Absolutely not.

That sounds fantastic. I totally would have made those choices too. And if you have something on offer like that, you should take it. I mean, I will talk later, I'm sure about having adventures in your life. That's a great idea to do these things that will be wonderful memories that you can look back on.

But that's it. That's not why most people wind up staying up later than they probably should most nights. We're not at Lincoln Center every night. It's more that we're hitting next in the Netflix queue or we're scrolling around on Twitter or we just are puttering around the house and sort of can't get ourselves organized to get to bed.

And that's why we blow through the bedtime. And if that is what is going on, then by setting some sort of reminder to yourself, my bedtime is 11 p.m. So at 10.30, it's my moment of truth. Like, am I going to get in bed by 11? And if I don't have a good reason to stay up, then I go wash my face, brush my teeth,

read for a little bit, turn off the light. But if we're hanging out with my husband or having a grand old time, I will stay up a little bit later for that or if I am out with friends or at a concert or something like that, absolutely, stay up late and make up the sleep some other time. It's all about balance.

And I call these rules and tranquility by Tuesday. They are guidelines and you are still in charge. You do them when they make sense. When they don't, you do something else. Coming up, Laura Vandercam talks about planning your upcoming week on Friday to help minimize the Sunday scary. Why, she's a big believer that weekends and evenings do not have to be work-free zones and using exercise as a reset button during the day to manage your energy and take a brain break. Hey, I'm Aresha and I'm Brooke.

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So let's get to the second quote-unquote rule. Plan on Fridays. So do your planning on Fridays. I'll say this again. Say more. So this rule is really about two parts. One is just two plan, and I'm sure people I will, of course, yes, you should plan. But I talk about it a little bit more. I think everyone needs a designated weekly planning time where you look at the upcoming 168 hours and ask yourself, what is most important? What steps am I taking toward my goals, both professionally in my relationships for myself?

When can I make those things happen? What else is going on in my life? How can I solve any logistical problems? What am I looking forward to over the next week? So we need some time where we think through our time in general holistically. Fridays, maybe a slightly bigger ask of people like why am I asking people to plan on Fridays? And I know there's many times people plan some people do it Sunday night, some people do it Monday morning, both of you know, are reasonable

options. But Friday has a lot going for it. It tends to be a time many people are not using all that well. If you have a Monday through Friday job, many people are kind of sliding into the weekend by Friday afternoon. It is very hard to start anything new, but you might be willing to think about what future you should be doing. And so by taking a few of those Friday afternoon minutes to plan the upcoming week,

you can turn what might be wasted time into some rather productive time. It's during business hours, so it has an upside over Sunday night in that if you need to set up an appointment or set up a meeting with someone, like you're more likely to get them on Friday afternoon than you would be on Sunday night. It allows you to use all of Monday. People who plan on Monday morning for the week can't really get started until later in the day on Monday. If you need to set up an appointment or meeting

with someone, it's probably not going to happen till Tuesday. So you've just shortened the work week considerably, whereas if you plan on Friday, you can get started on Monday morning. And then finally, it helps solve that issue of what people call the Sunday Scaries, which a lot of that is not really knowing what is waiting for you on Monday morning. So on Sunday afternoon, evening, people start to feel a little bit anxious about what's coming out. Even people who really like their jobs. And it's because you don't necessarily know how you'll deal with all the stuff you've got to deal with that week. But if you set a plan on Friday for how you will deal with the critical things that are happening in the next week,

then you can mostly relax over the weekend and enjoy yourself and then hit Monday ready to go. You know how I've solved the Sunday's carries. How have I just worked seven days a week? That's one approach. And then you know, you never give yourself a chance to get into it. So, no, it's a stupid approach. And actually, I try not to work seven days a week. However, I will say, and I don't know if I don't know if I've ever said this aloud, so maybe you can tell me if this is a story I'm telling myself. So please take pot shots at it, which is that I tend to do a little bit of work at least one day on the weekend. And sometimes I don't want to do this, but sometimes both days. However, my work days are again, because I don't have a boss. I'm gonna have to really set my own schedule.

My work days are not that intense. I am, some days are intense, but I am scheduling a lot of time from meditation and exercise and playing with the cats. My rule is my son comes in, he's about to turn eight if he comes in in my office and asks for something unless there's a really good reason why I can't do it, I will go play catch with him.

And that's a Tuesday, not just a Saturday work day. So anyway, please take pot shots at this story. I'm telling myself, which is a justification for working more than five days. I think it's fine. I mean, there's nothing sacred about weekends. Obviously, some people have sacred days on the weekends that they do need to take completely off for work. And that's great.

I think everyone would benefit from taking at least 24 hours off from work at some point in the course of their week. But in many cases, those of us who do have more flexible schedules during the week may decide to do a little bit of work on what are traditionally days off in order even to have more flexibility during the week. So if there's a certain amount of stuff you have to get done and you don't do it on Tuesday, because you're having some adventure with your kid, which is a totally wonderful thing to do, then there's nothing wrong with doing it during two hours on Saturday. I mean, that's totally fine as well. That's certainly something I've wound up doing a lot of in my life. I mean, with my kids, inevitably there is something that comes up during the work day in the course

of the week, whether it's doing something at a kid's school or somebody's home for some reason, doctor's appointments, dentist's appointments, whatever it is. And so some of that time might get moved to the weekend while the kids are doing something else or the little guy is napping or whatever it happens to be. So I'm a big believer in moving time around and I think a lot of schedules do these days look less traditional than in the past. That said, I think you just want to be aware of why you are doing. Right? And if we're working on a weekend afternoon just because the home office is there, then that's worth asking. Well, what am I hoping to accomplish? And certainly one of the things I try to do

when I am working in non-traditional hours is ask the same questions you would with a workday. Like, what are the things I need to get accomplished in this chunk of time I plan to work? So I've worked at night after the kids go to bed, for instance. It's like, okay, well, these are the three things I want to get done in this 930 to 1030 chunk that I am working. And when I'm done with those, I'm going to sign off as opposed to thinking I'm going to get through a 1000 email backlog at night

after the kids go to bed, which is not going to happen. It won't happen on the weekend, either. You want to approach these things with goals in mind. Yes, everything we've just said is really wise. Before I say more on the subject, I will say that the one thing I've seen increasingly in my own meditation practice is that the depths of my capacity for delusion appear to be bottomless. So I want to just have humility that I'm maybe doing some justification here that is inaccurate. But I really do think that this thing about giving yourself permission to work a little bit on the weekends so that the rest of your week is saner and has the flexibility that

I value immensely, the flexibility to meditate, the flexibility to exercise, the flexibility to end the work day early because I want to go see a friend in the city, all the things that I really know lead to a well-rounded life and also the flexibility to leave. And I know we'll get to this soon, room for error because as we'll discuss, nothing ever happens as quickly as we think. Nothing ever gets done as quickly as we think. Final thing I wanted to say, after now that I'm done with this self-justification, which again, you can, when I finally shut up, you can take patch-outs at it.

The final thing I wanted to say that's really helped me in terms of, because historically, I've been really bad at time management and setting priorities and not burning myself out. It's been a major project of mine to get better at this, not just for my own benefit, but for the benefit of everybody around me. The one other tool that's been really helpful for me in this is self-compassion. And that's a big term. It means a lot of things or a lot of practices under self-compassion. But specifically, I'm talking about what has been described to me by one of the prime

movers in the field of self-compassion research as the quintessential self-compassion. A question you should ask yourself on the regular, which is, what do I need right now? And I have found, again, this is possibly delusion, that if I was to try to pack my work week into 40 hours, I wouldn't be able to get what I need, which is breaks. And again, time for meditation, exercise, torturing cats, and chasing my son. And if I try to get it all done in that shorter time span, I'm not doing the kind of work that I want to do and I'm not doing it in the way that I want to do it. So again, I'll give you the mic to see if you agree or disagree with the foregoing.

I think that is totally accurate. And part of the freedom of being able to design your own schedule And part of the freedom of being able to design your own schedule is asking that question, what do I need now? What do I want to do now? Sometimes we want to be outside on a lovely Tuesday afternoon doing something that doesn't particularly look like work. And maybe it's a rainy Saturday and that seems as appealing as anything else. And also many of us like our work. I mean, there's nothing inherently bad about work. I think

sometimes people refer to work as being something that they don't want to do. It's like by the definition that work is something you don't want to do. And so you have to avoid it and put it into small categories in your time. But if you enjoy what you're doing, I certainly find writing more appealing than the vast majority of things I might be watching on television. So I'm not really sure why it would be worse for me to be writing in a chunk of time versus watching something that looks like it should be relaxing that would be classified as leisure.

You just have to be aware of it, right? Now are you feeling burnt out? Are you feeling overwhelmed? And then that's a sign that you need to figure out something else and put something else in your life, some sort of leisure or break or whatever else that will help you get back on track. Not everybody listening to this conversation will be in a management position or a leadership position as it's traditionally understood within an organization. While I'm not anybody's direct manager, I'm obviously in a leadership position,

my name's on the show. I do think about the impact my work style and work hours have on my colleagues, or I guess it's not the right word technically in my case to say employees, but if you're a leader in an organization and you have a style that involves working on satires and Sundays, how do you ensure that doesn't have deleterious effects on the people around you because

they may feel like they need to answer your emails or whatever it is? Well, one of the reasons I suggest people plan on Fridays is often you are reaching out to your colleagues or the people you're managing as you're trying to organize the next week. And if you are managing people, it's much better to have those messages going on Friday than Sunday night, because people will respond to their managers. That's human nature. Like, they will be checking their email to see what you're sending them on Sunday night. If they know that you are doing that, and if you don't necessarily want them to feel like they need to do that, then it helps to confine your outreach to other people to the sort of more traditional hours.

And part of this is just communication as we talked about earlier, that you can tell people, I work non-traditional hours, I do not expect you to do that. Groups can set communication norms that we will respond relatively quickly to each other within these hours,

whatever you decide those are going to be. We will understand that there's more leeway outside of that. If something's urgent, people can use the phone. I mean, you can always call somebody if something's terrible is going wrong and you need to reach them urgently. And, you know, I've seen people do things like write a bunch of emails on Saturday, save them as drafts and have them all go out at 8 a.m. Monday, right? And that way people aren't getting them as you are sending

them, taking away a little bit of what email was originally supposed to be. It's this asynchronous communication, but because of how people naturally react to things from their supervisors, you do need to keep that in mind. Good stuff. All right, let's get back on track here. Rule number three, we talked about exercise. You say move by 3 p.m. Rule number three, we talked about exercise. You say move by 3pm. So exercise is one of the most effective ways we have to just put a general reset button into your day. And people can be completely dragging low energy, feeling down, overwhelmed. And you go outside and walk briskly for 10 minutes, you feel completely different.

It's so effective, yet it's surprising to me how little we avail ourselves of this opportunity that physical activity will boost energy levels. Tremendously, it makes people more optimistic. You can go for a 10 minute walk at 2.30 p.m. and power yourself through for the rest of the work day. So move by 3 p.m. the rule is basically do 10 minutes of physical activity at some point in the first half of every day. And if you're the sort of person who's going to a 6 a.m.

boot camp class every morning, that's awesome. I'm not telling you to change anything about that. Even if you're a person who's like on the treadmill at 8 p.m. every night, I mean, that's great too. I'm not arguing with that. But this is more about putting in small bursts of physical activity into your day as a way to manage your energy and make yourself feel more positive and optimistic. And by putting breaks into the day,

you mentioned that you need breaks in the course of your day. Everybody does. And by putting breaks into the day, you mentioned that you need breaks in the course of your day. Everybody does. And people take them. It's just sometimes we take them mindlessly. And that's what happens when you're really tired after an intense meeting and you find yourself reading the same email six times in a row. And then somebody has posted an alert and you get something on your phone like, oh, yeah, somebody posted a photo and you're over on some social media platform. You're looking through the photos of people you didn't like in high school anyway. And it's just, this is a break.

Like you are taking a break. Your brain needed a break. And if you don't give it a real one, it will take a fake one. So it's so much more efficient to proactively plan in a real conscious break at some point during the day. And the buy 3PM is just that's when people's energy tends to dip the most in the course of a normal day. And so if you haven't gotten your 10 minutes of physical activity in by 3PM, that would be a reminder to go do it around 3PM. And since that's the time when many people find themselves reaching for coffee,

candy, cigarettes, other things to make themselves feel more alert. This is something that you can substitute with zero side effects. Coming up, Laura Vandercam talks about why creating a habit. Does not mean you have to do something every day and why thinking in this way can help us avoid all or nothing thinking. Why we should aspire to build resilient schedules rather than perfect ones and The time management rule that Laura got the biggest pushback on and why? Okay rule number four Three times a week is a habit. What does that mean? so my three times a week is a habit. What does that mean? So my thought process on this one, I mean, we talked about

there being 168 hours in a week that a week is the unit of life as we are actually living it. Things don't actually have to happen daily. Nor do they have to happen at the same time every day in order to count in our lives. And oftentimes people get very discouraged about whatever it is that they would like to be doing more of in their lives, whether it's eating family meals or weight training or practicing their skills with singing or doing one-on-one celebratory feedback with team members. There's all sorts of things we want to spend more time doing. And then we feel discouraged because we are not doing it every single day. You get to

the end of the day, you're like, I didn't do it today, I feel like a failure. But things don't have to happen every day. I maintain that anything that happens three times a week is a habit. It counts regularly in your life. It can be a part of your identity. And this, it's very helpful for people to have this mindset.

It keeps us a little bit away from the all or nothing mindset that I find a lot of people fall into. But often when people look at their lives, they track their time, they find they are doing whatever this thing is that they want to do more of once a week, maybe they're even doing it twice. So getting to three just involves small tweaks. It doesn't involve a total lifestyle overhaul. I mean, so for example, eating family meals, many people discover due to their work

schedules, their kids activity schedules, like they're not sitting down to a giant feast at 6 p.m. every night, Monday through Friday, but it doesn't have to look like that. Maybe you know, you have family pizza night on Friday night, you have a pancake breakfast on Saturday morning, and like there's one other meal that happens during the week somewhere, I said, wow, you eat together regularly. Family meals are a habit. You are a family that eats together. So by encouraging people to think about something that they want to have regularly in their lives

and then schedule it in for three times a week, we find that these goals tend to be a lot more doable. I do wanna say to my eight year old son, Alexander, if you're listening, almost certainly you're not. Three times a week brushing your teeth is not a habit, my view. Having said all that, I totally agree with you. And one of the things I often say to people

who are worried about booting up a meditation habit is you should aim at least at first for daily-ish. Ish, yes, ish. And three times a week is pretty often. I mean, yes, I believe you should aim at least at first for daily ish. Ish. Yes. Ish. And three times a week is pretty often. I mean, yes, I believe you should brush your teeth more often than that too. But if somebody did three times a week, that would be a lot better than nothing. So if we're carrying it to nothing, three times a week is great for many things. Yes. And it really your sort of calling things a win that other people might call, self-critical,

people might call a fail, really comports with what we know about behavior change in the science there that actually the most effective strategy for many of us when trying to create a habit is to start small. And no, I would say with that, that people often think about daily habits, but many of the times when people are talking about their daily habits, they aren't doing them daily. Many people will call something a daily habit that they are doing Monday through Friday. But that isn't daily, right? That is five times a week. And we take two days off from whatever it is. And don't even bat an eyelash about, but that's not daily. Like to me, daily is seven times a week,

holidays, vacations, everything else. And if people who call something at daily habit aren't doing that, then we're really just arguing about how many times per week is acceptable to call something regular in our lives. And so three strikes me as as good a number as any. That's what I certainly try to aim for.

And I've seen this in my own life too, that I've been getting back into playing the piano. We moved about a year ago and the gentleman we bought this house from left his piano and we bought it off of him. It was great. So now I have a wonderful piano that I can play. And I set a goal to play three times a week. And that has been very motivational for me off. And I find that I've played twice in the course of the week as I review a week. And that has been very motivational for me off. And I find that I've played

twice in the course of the week as I review my week. And I'm like, I could fit in one more time. And so that nudges me to go do it a third time. And so I'm playing more. Whereas if I think I said I have to find this space for this every single day, it just wouldn't happen. I mean, I travel, like my piano doesn't travel with me. Days get busy. By the time I sit down to play, somebody's asleep, that wouldn't really work. So by setting it as a reasonable goal, we are more likely to stick with it. And I honestly, I had people who tried this rule out,

find themselves actually doing something all seven days of the week because they had taken the pressure off. Right, right. And it was no longer like, I have to do it daily. And then, oh, but it was like, no, I'm just aiming for three times a week, everything else is a bonus and they've found that they liked it.

So they did more. Yeah, that's what happens when you switch from extrinsic motivation, doing it because we, you know, the society or some author or podcaster has told you to do it to intrinsic motivation of, oh, yeah, I did it a few times. I really like it. I'm just going gonna keep doing it because I like it. And so it no longer has as much pressure or you're just doing it for fun. Exactly.

Rule number five, create a backup slot. Yeah, this is a real mindset shift for some folks. I am somewhat of a pessimist. I assume things will go wrong. And I try to build my schedule to account for that fact. But I have learned over the years that many people are wildly optimistic. And I wish I lived in their worlds

where you always get to work on time. There's never traffic, it's never raining, flights are never delayed, no one ever gets sick. Your vendor doesn't forget to show up. There's so many things that can go wrong in life. And if your schedule requires everything to go perfectly in order to work, you're going to get off track very quickly. And people can get very frustrated about this. And you know, it is frustrating. We make time for our goals theoretically. And then life happens, life intervenes, and we can't do it for one reason or another. But I always say that anyone can create a perfect schedule. The true time management masters

make a resilient schedule. And building in a backup slot is key to this. If anyone has been invited to anything that happens outdoors in the summer, you've probably seen on invitations for bigger things that sometimes they'll put a rain date. And this is really an incredibly brilliant scheduling concept if you think about it. The organizers of your outdoor event are acknowledging that much can go predictably wrong outside.

Like it's right there in the rain date name. Like, rain could happen. But there's no question of whether the event will be rescheduled or for win. Like, it will be on the rain date. So if you want to go to this thing, not to put anything unmovable in the second slot. And by setting a rain date, you vastly increase the chances that the event happens, even if not when originally scheduled. And so in life, if we want to make time for the things that matter to us, we need a lot more

rain dates. We need second spots, backup spots for anything that is truly important to us. And so I encourage people to really think about this. Don't just carve out a time for whatever your priority is., carve out a backup time. So, you plan to meet with an employee at 10 a.m. on Tuesday about something you really want to do. It's not urgent, but it's important that you're talking about. And of course, you have some major client emergency at 9.30 a.m. on Tuesday.

Well, when does it get rescheduled to? Like, if you both know that ahead of time and you both block that time out, it's gonna happen. Whereas if you don't happen that, it just keeps getting pushed forward week to week and people find this incredibly frustrating. Now obviously it gets a little bit unwieldy to have backup slots for absolutely everything we're doing.

So you can approximate this by just building in more open space in general. The more open space, the better. People feel like, oh, I should schedule every minute, but then stuff gets bumped and stuff doesn't happen and stuff runs over. I mean, if you have open space,

you can not only get caught up, so you're not late in rushing, or if emergencies happen, you have somewhere to put what the emergencies bumped or put the emergencies itself. But it also allows you to seize opportunity. Like, something cool comes into your life that week. And if somebody wants to have a conversation that you didn't know what's going to happen,

you've got a spot to put it. Or if you want to, some big project lands in your lap, you don't push it away, you've got a spot to put it. This is acknowledging that we do not know at the start of the week everything that we will need to do by the end of it. So by building open space, we can accommodate life as it actually happens.

Yeah, I really like to say, I find that I'm looking at my calendar a lot, thinking about what's coming up and can I get everything in that I want. And when I see open space, especially if I'm trying to figure out what's my date looking like tomorrow, when I see open space, it just reduces the Sunday scaries or the Tuesday scar carries or whatever it is because the day doesn't look as torturous.

So I've gotten really disciplined. And again, I wanna acknowledge that very lucky, et cetera, but I've gotten pretty disciplined about not even having any meetings on my calendar, ideally until one so that I can write and get in my exercise and meditation. And then in the back half of the day when my brain isn't as sharp,

I can like talk to you and let you do most of the work. Yeah, or that's a great idea for people who do have that level of control. As you said, making Fridays more open, often people work in organizations where Fridays tend to be a slightly lighter day. So if you can carve out open space on Fridays, that might be helpful.

If you are the sort of person who has a lot of meetings through the day, if you can kind of block off an hour or 90 minutes in the afternoon, even just to get caught up from the stuff in the morning that has run over, that can be really helpful. But just figure out what is possible. I mean, people often say, well, I can't do this. I mean, and probably most people listening to this cannot block off until 1pm every day. And that's fine. You don't have to. But can you block off some time? Can you leave some time unscheduled and resist the urge to give it up just because it's there? If you don't have a really

good reason to do so. But one of the best images I have that somebody who participated in the project told me that when they did this for a week that they just actively put more open space in their life said no to more things or just didn't push in more meetings that weren't urgent to happen, they said they felt almost too relaxed. That's like that okay she said but I got everything done for the way like there's it's not like there's some big project that didn't happen. Like I actually got everything done I needed to. So the feeling of being too relaxed was just, she had been living the equivalent of paycheck

to paycheck in her life, where time was concerned. And if anyone has had that experience in terms of money, it's obviously very stressful. And then if you suddenly get a little bit more money coming in or a big bill is suddenly gone, you just have a little bit more breathing room. Like it's just the level of relaxation that you get from that tiny extra bit of margin is just amazing. And so having that space allowed her to experience far less stress. And I think other people will find the same thing. It's like that joke about the guy who's banging his head up against the wall and somebody says, why are you doing that? And he says, because it feels so good

when I stop. So it might be better if you weren't banging it in the first place, but if you are figuring out how you can stop is a great next step. Rule number six, one big adventure, one little adventure. Yeah, so I always say I don't have favorite rules, like I don't have favorite children, but this is probably the rule that the others are all jealous of because this has been really important in my life. And I think a lot of people probably experience this as you get to be middle aged and so as end of the day, collect everyone, go through the evening routines, homework, bath, putting people to bed, television, whatever it is. And there's nothing wrong with routines because they make good choices automatic. But when too much of the sameness stacks up, you wind up feeling like whole years are disappearing into these memory sinkholes where you have no idea where the time went to. People

are like, where did the time go? Where, you know, is it January again already? Whatever it is, say, well, you don't say where did the time go when you remember where the time went? And key to that is putting memorable things into your life. And so this rule of doing one big adventure and one little adventure a week is about having a good cadence

where you're not gonna be exhausted or bankrupt. Like if you're trying to fly internationally every week that would not be sustainable. But by doing some adventures in your life, you create memories. So a big adventure three to four hours, something you could do on half a weekend day, little adventure less than an hour,

doable on your lunch or a weekday evening, just as long as it's out of the ordinary, something novel, something you'll enjoy, something that's memorable. And this rule does a couple great things for people. I mean, one is you start looking for opportunities to do cool stuff because you need to have your two adventures in the course of the week. But you also find that time moves a little bit more deliberately.

Like, you don't, the week didn't just disappear. It's like, well, that week was like every other week. And so, no, that's the weekend that we went hiking on the beach. Sure, that's the weekend that we tried that new Italian place or that week that we had a picnic with our friends. And when you have those memories, time feels a little bit more rich and full.

Why is this the one that all the other rules are jealous of? What is it about you and your life that makes this so resonant? Well, I do try to create memories. I think there's time is not just about what we are doing right now. There's dimensions of it that are moving forward and that are moving backward, that we have the self that is looking forward to what we will be doing in the future, the self that is remembering what we have done in the past. And these selves all have different motivations. Like I would love to have memories of having done awesome things, but that means

that currently has to get up off the couch and do them, right? So there's always that bit of attention going on. And so I'm always in this project of convincing current me to get up off the couch and do cool stuff so that future me can be the kind of person who did go ice skating outdoors on a Thursday night or who, I don't know, went to, this isn't going to happen now, but like Atlantic City for the weekend, just overnight or something. It's just anything that would make life a little bit more interesting and make you feel looking back like you have done cool stuff.

I guess I still struggle to a match. I only have one kid, with five kids, how do you have any leeway to do any adventures or can you just count diaper changing as an adventure? Well, sometimes that is an adventure with a very active toddler who doesn't want it changed. So that's a so in special adventure. I'm generally thinking adventures I might want to do,

something that is novel, interesting out of the ordinary, makes a good story afterwards. It's where the planning really comes in handy that I have very intense, developed schedules for everyone's activities where things are going, but as part of that,

when you plan out like who goes where at what point on the weekend, you might see that hey, Saturday from 4 p.m. on is actually open for everyone. And we could do something. Is there something we want to do? And so we're going to go to an outdoor light display on the weekend we're having this interview because that's something that I looked at the schedule

and figured could fit in a time. So that will be an adventure that we can all have together. Now, you can have individual adventures, of course, as well, they don't have to involve everyone. And certainly as some of my kids get older, the teenagers have their own lives to a degree as well. And so they're not always participating in all the adventures.

But it's about having a bias toward doing cool stuff and making memories and asking what might make life more interesting. And so yes, it does involve a fair amount of logistics and planning and summoning the energy to do stuff. But what am I saving my energy for? Exactly. Okay. So number seven on your list is the one that apparently you got the most pushback on and it's take one night for you.

Yes. And the whole concept of self care and put it in the quotes, it gets its own stuff around it all the time. People have their own connotations to it. But what I'm suggesting people do, and this rule, is choose something that is not work and is not caring for family and is intrinsically fun for you, and ideally make a commitment to it.

To do it, hopefully at about the same time, every single week. So, I sing and acquire. We made it Thursday nights, 7 p.m. So, Thursday at 7, I gotta be there. And it doesn't matter if I am tired, if the family is busy. I mean, I will miss it sometimes if there's something that if I'm on a plane somewhere else, that might happen.

But I've made sure that travel schedules have been such that I will be on the ground before 7 p.m. on Thursday and so I can be there. And the reason to make a commitment to something is people like, well, I need more time for myself. I'd love to have time that's not work, not caring for other people. I need some time to myself.

And then they decide to do things like take a bubble bath. And there's nothing wrong with bubble baths, but it can happen whenever. And so if you're like, oh, I'm gonna take a bubble bath tonight and then your boss wants you to work late, and I'm gonna be like, yeah, I've gotta take my bath. Like you're not gonna say that. Or if your kid wants you to drive them to the mall

at seven o'clock on Thursday and your thing you wanna do is take a bubble bath, you're probably gonna go drive them and then you're not gonna get your bath because it can happen whenever your bathtub isn't going anywhere. Whereas a choir that meets at seven p.m. on Thursdays, like it will happen. It has something that can push everything else away. And so it happens, and because it happens, you reap the benefits of this more active form of self-care. And yes, a lot of people hated this idea.

Why? They hated the idea of having more commitments, and I get it, but a lot of the times when people feel over-committed, it is because their lives are full of commitments of things they don't want to do. And I would love to have you get rid of as many of those things as possible over time. Like maybe you can't get out of it tomorrow, but maybe over a year you could, I don't know. But you should choose something that you really truly want to do. And people like, well, I can't, you can insert, you know what the excuses people come up like, well, I can't control work. Okay. Well, do you think you could work out an agreement where one of your colleagues

covers for you on Tuesday, you call her on Wednesday or maybe you and your spouse, like if you've got young kids, you trade off. Each of you gets one night off for something. Okay, well, my spouse works all the time. Okay, hopefully your spouse is being well compensated for all these extra hours they're working. Do you think you could pay babysitter for an hour and a half so you could go do something? Or if not, can you swap care with a neighbor,

or a friend, or another family member, or something? But, you know, it's about recognizing that what you want to do has value and should be a priority in your life. And see, other objection people has, they're like, I have no clue what I do. And that was its own special issue. I, I, I've always loved to sing. So for me, it was like, oh, well, join a choir. That's what I do.

But, you know, a lot of people had to really do some work to think through what did I like? What is there to me that is not work and is not caring for family members and might take some effort, might take some trial and error to figure it out. But I do think that over six to 12 months, you can probably find something. And when people did this, they became pretty evangelical about it because it winds up being a focal point of your entire week. You have a rough night on Wednesday and Thursday is your night off. You're looking forward to it. You can paste yourself through Wednesday because you know you're getting there. You said this to my colleague, Gabrielle, who's producing this episode, you and Gabrielle chatted before this interview. And I saw the notes from

that chat and you said something that resonated with me to gab, which was that we, when we're having outsized reactions to something, when we're really resisting something, it, that is usually a signal that we should take a look as my executive coach, Kerry Kologna says, if it's hysterical, it's historical. And so I think you're right. I think when people are having this resistance to this take one night for you, it may be a sign that we should take a look

at what's underneath that resistance. Yeah, and there's many things that play. I mean, sometimes it's just arrogance that no one in my life can function without me. If I'm not actively involved in this, that everything will fall apart. And the flip side of arrogance is fear, which is that I worry if things operate without me smoothly, then what's the point of me? And I'm sure there's a lot of stuff there that we could unpack for all of us.

You can unpack that and maybe hopefully get past it. Then there is a lot of fun to be had in a world where you don't have to be actively managing absolutely everything all the time. You get to do stuff that isn't work and isn't family and it's fun just for you. And it can make life feel entirely different. Rule number eight, batch the little things. So this is about creating a designated time for all those tasks that have to be done, but aren't our top priority. And I think many of us feel pulled in a million directions, because we have stuff we want to do or need to do.

And yet, we have to fill out these permission forms. You have to call the plumber and you have to make an appointment and you have to fill out that form from HR and you have to schedule that meeting. And people can feel like they never have time for anything that their entire lives disappear into this minutia.

And there's a couple of things going on. I mean, yes, they do have to be done. But by setting a designated time where you tackle all of these, you can leave other time open for either deeper work or for relaxation, right? So on the weekend instead of jumping from thing to thing, you like designated chore window,

like I'm gonna do everything between 10 and noon on Saturday, and if you find yourself looking at a dirty floor at some other point, I'm like, no, no, there's a time for that. Now is not that time. I can relax. And so this allows people to have more space that they don't feel like they have to be doing

something else, but there's another side of this, which is that many of us are telling ourselves we would like to be working on this deeper project or whatever it is. And then we're like, oh, I'm getting frustrated with it. Let me just go order that present on Amazon. Let me just go fill out that form from HR. And by removing that temptation to get the easy win, we allow ourselves to sit with the more difficult stuff and hopefully get our bigger wins in time. That makes a lot of sense

as somebody who writes and unlike you hates writing, the temptation to go off and do other things is immense. And I like this idea of taking some of the temptation, even if it's just filling out an HR form off the table in the name of time, just because we're running out of it in our encounter here. Let's get to rule number nine, effort full before effort less. So we talked about this a little with my scrolling online, many of us, even incredibly productive people

can wind up falling prey to the temptation to spending more of our precious leisure time on these sort of low-value activities that in the abstract, we wouldn't necessarily choose. I mean, people look at the screen time function on their phones and are just appalled. I did not spend three hours a day on my phone, it's like, well, I don't think it's lying.

It's just that it happened in little chunks of time or in low energy times, or while I was waiting for something else, and you don't recognize how much of this time is adding up. In the abstract, people would love to read more, do hobbies, crafts, connect with friends, but when leisure time appears for many of us, it is either uncertain in duration,

like you don't know how much time you'll have, or it's low energy times, like at night after the kids go to bed or things like that. And screens fit these constraints incredibly well. You don't have to plan ahead, your phone's always with you. You don't have to do anything, actively engage with it. So we might have spending more time on that. And there's nothing wrong with it.

Passive leisure has its place. But in order to tilt the balance a little bit and spend more time on those things like reading and hobbies that people say they would like to do, challenge yourself to do just a few minutes of that effortful fun before you get to the effortless stuff. So if you are picking up your phone to go on to social media, read an ebook for two minutes and then you can spend as much time on Twitter as you want. Or at night, the kids have gone to bed, you're about to load up Netflix, say, okay, I'm going to do a puzzle for 15 minutes and then I can watch Netflix for the rest of the evening. And one of two things will happen, either you get so into your effortful fun

that you'll just keep going. And I had people try this, they're like, well, I caught myself about to go on Facebook. I started reading this mystery novel. And like 30 minutes later, I'm still reading the mystery novel because you want to find out what happened. And that's fine.

Like Facebook will still be there if you ever want to go back to it. But even if you do wind up switching over to the screens or the passive leisure afterwards, you still have gotten the chance to do both, right? And it changes the balance, and that tends to make people feel far more satisfied with their leisure. I mean, one of the biggest changes in my study, I measured people's agreement with various statements, and one of the statements was, yesterday, I didn't waste time on things that weren't important to me. And the skit, you know, on a one to seven point scale,

how much you disagree or agree. And scores on that rose 32% over the course of the nine weeks. Like when people were substituting reading or hobbies or other things first before they did the passive scrolling or television watching or things like that, they just felt more aware of their leisure time. They felt like they were spending it better

and they felt more rejuvenated. So that was a pretty big win. Lots of big wins in this menu you've set out for us in this conversation. We covered a lot of ground. Let me ask you my two traditional final questions. One is, is there something I should have asked but failed to ask?

I think we mentioned about how I called them rules. And I want to assure anyone that I am not standing over you like with a ruler saying, no, no, no, you have to do this right now. These are guidelines. If you don't like the word rules, just call them suggestions. Stuff Laura came up with and tried on other people and they found effective.

And so maybe you will too. And if something doesn't work for you, that's fine. But maybe it does. And if part of it works and you modify a rule, that's great. So I want to assure people, so the question I guess we could ask is like, do you have to do all this exactly? Absolutely not. Now, if you try any of it and it's helpful, that's awesome.

If it doesn't work, well, move on with your life. I'm glad to see you share my commitment to non-dogmatism. I think that's a good persuasion technique, actually. Final question is, can you please plug your latest book, any of your previous books you want to plug, anything else you're putting out into the world? Please just give us, for anybody who wants more of you, give us some options. So Tranquility by Tuesday is my most recent book. It's about nine rules to calm the chaos

and make time for what matters. We've talked about those rules here. So hopefully people will find it interesting and helpful for their lives. I host two podcasts. One is called Before Breakfast. It is a short, every weekday morning tip, five minutes. Hopefully help you take your day

from great to awesome. I also co-host one with Sarah Hart Unger called Best of Both Worlds. We talk about the intersection of work and family from the perspective of people who truly love both. And if you wanna learn about any of my other books, just come visit my website, loravandercam.com.

You can find out about them there and I blog several times a week. I'm still in 2006 when it comes to the internet. Like, I like blogging. I just write about my life a couple times a week and put it up there. We have a great comment section. People are very nice. So please come join the conversation. Thank you for joining this conversation. It was a pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. Thanks again to Laura Vandercam. Thank you as well to everybody who works so hard for having me. of ultraviolet audio. We'll see you soon.

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