Young and Profiting with Hala Taha - Laura Vanderkam: Level Up Your Time Management Skills | Productivity | E4

Episode Date: August 9, 2018

Level up your time management skills so you can do more of what you love! Have you ever wondered why some people manage to do it all, while others claim they are too busy to do XXX (fill in the blank with any excuse). The fact is, time is a great equalizer. We all have the same 24 hours a day and 168 hours a week. So, why do some people feel like they have less time than anyone else? In this episode, Hala interviews Laura Vanderkam, best-selling time management author and media personality, on being mindful of our time and how we can work towards spending our time better on the things that matter most to us. Enjoy!   Young and Profiting podcast is brought to you by audible. Get your FREE audiobook here: www.audibletrial.com/YAP Want to connect with other YAP listeners? Join the YAP Society on Slack: http://bit.ly/yapsociety Follow YAP on IG @youngandprofiting and Twitter @YAP_Podcast Reach out to Hala directly at [e-mail] Follow Hala on Linkedin: www.linkedin.com/in/htaha/ Follow Hala on Instagram: www.instagram.com/yapwithhala Check out our website to meet the team, view show notes and transcripts: www.youngandprofiting.com

You're listening to Yap, Young and Profiting Podcast, where anything goes if it makes you grow. I'm your host, Halitaha, and this episode is focused on time. Time is much more valuable than money. You can use your time to make more money, but you can't use money to buy more time. Time is also a great equalizer. We all have the same 24 hours in the day, whether you're Elon Musk or a regular Joe Schmo. We use up these hours. one after the other, every day. And once time has passed, it's gone for good. People often say,

I don't have time to, or I'm too busy to, exercise, or go on a vacation, or spend time with my friends, or start that side business I've always dreamed of. But what makes these people think they have less time than anyone else? We all have the same 24 hours in each day, and we make our own decisions about how we spend that time. Too many of us waste hours every day, and so this episode focuses on being mindful of our time and how we can work towards spending our time better on the things that matter most to us.

Joining us on Yap today is Laura Vandercam, author of several time management and productivity books. Her latest release, off the clock, feel less busy while getting more done, hits shelves back in May. In her book, Laura uncovers principles on how to feel less stressed while getting more done. through insights she learned studying 900 Time Diaries collected on a single March day.

Laura's work has appeared in mainstream platforms like The New York Times and the Today Show. Her TED Talk had to gain control of your free time has been viewed more than 5 million times. She's also the co-host of the podcast Best of Both Worlds. So without further ado, here's my conversation with Laura. Hi, Laura. Thank you for joining us on Young and Profiting Podcast. Thank you for having me. Can you tell us a bit about your background and how you got into time management and some of the research that you've done in relation to that topic? Well, I wish there were a really good story of hitting rock bottom and realizing something and coming out of it.

But, you know, it's nothing like that. I have always been interested in people's schedules. I worked as a journalist for many years. And so I got to interview lots of fascinating people about their lives. and I found that I was often asking them how they spent their time. And so, you know, it's really evolved out of that. But I think the thing that really draws me to time is that we all have the same amount of it. And so when you find people who are doing amazing things, both professionally and personally, it's not because they have any more time than anyone else. They may have other advantages that other people don't have, but they certainly do not have more time.

And so I'm very fascinated by where their time goes. And my research has focused on that and focused on having people actually track their time. Because another thing I found is that people will tell you all sorts of stories about how they spend their time. And those may or may not be true. We all have our stories. But if you track it, you can get the data and then you can go from there. Can you talk about in particular what research you've done? So from my understanding, you tracked like 900 people?

Yeah. So for Off the Clock, which is my most recent book, I had 900 people. with full-time jobs and families, so very busy people, track their time for a day, and then I asked them questions about how they felt about their time, 13 questions that were on a seven-point scale or strongly disagree to strongly agree. So I could get a score that gave a sense of how much sort of time abundance they felt they had, you know, if they had time for the things they wanted to do, if they felt like they were present, spending their time in ways that made them happy, relaxed about their time.

So I could compare the schedules of people who felt relaxed about their time, with people who felt starved for time. And again, these are all equivalently busy people. So what are they doing differently with their time that makes some people feel like they have a lot of time? And some people like they have none at all. Very cool. And so as you were getting this research back, what are some of the misconceptions that you realize that people have about their time? Well, I think one interesting thing is you might assume that people who feel starved for time or maybe working around the clock, that that wasn't the case, the people who had looked at the people who had lowest time perception scores were really not working that much more than the average. So that's

interesting to know. They were spending their leisure time, however, in different ways. So the people with the highest time perception scores were more likely to be doing things like reading, exercising, reflective activities, or spending time with family and friends. Whereas people with low time perception scores were more likely to be watching TV or scrolling around online. And can you explain what you mean by low perception of time? So these are people that feel like they have no time? Yeah. So when I was asking everyone in the study questions about their time, I asked them all 13 questions,

anywhere on a scale from strongly disagree to strongly agreed. So questions like yesterday, I felt present rather than distracted. So if you strongly agreed, you'd give yourself a seven for that. If you strongly disagreed, you give yourself a one. And various other questions along that about time, generally, time yesterday. So then I could get scores that were very high versus scores that were very low. And I could separate out the top 20%, top bottom percent. top 3%, you know, all those. So the people with very high time perception scores were in the top 3%.

People with very low time perception scores were in the bottom 3%. Those who felt most like they were distracted, like they weren't happy about how they spend their time. They felt rushed. They felt like they didn't have time for things they wanted to do. So what are some ways that we can evaluate our time? Well, one of the best things you can do to get a better grip on your time is to figure out where your time is really going now. Whenever people say, you know, I want to spend my time better, I always suggest that they try tracking their time for a week because that will give them a good holistic perspective on their time and also give them data that they can work with. Because often the stories we have, they're the stories we tell and they're based on stressful moments or something like that.

But, you know, by getting the data, we can see for sure where the time goes because we don't want to make changes without knowing if we're changing the right thing. It's always possible that something you thought was a problem really isn't. It's also possible that something you never even considered is taking a lot more time than you might have imagined. Lots of people have those revelations once they track their time for a week. So track your time, see where it's going, and then you can decide to make whatever changes are called for by analyzing the data. So when you say track your time for a week, some of the immediate thoughts that I have are excuses that people might have is, I don't have time for anything, let alone time to track my time, right? So do you have any tips or hacks for how to do this in maybe the least amount of time? Or do you suggest like really just making sure you take one week to track your time and then go from there?

Well, I've been tracking my time for over three years now continuously. Don't worry. Your listeners are listening. Like, no, not that. No one else has to track their time for three years. I'm a little bit intense on these things. But I've gotten it to the point where it really only takes me about three minutes a day, which is the same amount of time I've been brushing my teeth.

So, you know, just a small daily, healthy habit, more or less that makes life better when you do it. So I use spreadsheets with it. Anyone listening to this wants to come to my website. You can get emailed one from my website if you want. It's in half hour blocks, the ones I use. And I really just check in like three times a day. So maybe around lunchtime, around the time I'm done with work in the evening and then before going to bed. And I'll just write down what I've been doing in the slots on my spreadsheet since I last checked in.

And I'm not trying to get every five minute thing. I'm not recording every bathroom break. I'm not recording every time I got up to get a glass of water or anything like that. Just roughly, what was I doing during that time? So it can be broad categories, work, you know, drive somewhere, hang out with kids, eating breakfast, cleaning the kitchen, you know, watching TV, whatever it is. Because the point is more to get a good sense of where the time is going. The point is not to get a perfect sense of where the time is going.

So be okay with rough ideas, but it's really more about consistency. And if you can stick with it, even for a day or two is great, a week is better, but try it for a day or two if you get through that. It's great. Let me try another day. You know, just take it one day at a time. But I promise you, if you can get through a week, it will be eye-opening. I still learn new things all the time about where my time goes, and I have been doing this for a long time.

So why is it so important for us to be mindful of our time? Well, the thing about time is it keeps passing whether we think about how we are spending it or not. And so that makes it very difficult to direct it wisely. You know, you're in a canoe in the middle of a stream. it's kind of hard to see where you're going. You're just going with a rapid. So being mindful about it is doing as much as you can sort of get over to the side for a little bit.

Survey the course, see where you'd like to direct your craft as you're coming into these upcoming rapids and things like that. With my time diary study for off the clock, I found that people who felt like they had the most time were highly likely to engage in what I call reflective activities. So those are things like meditating, journaling, praying, just anything that has you pause and think about your life.

These sort of planning and, you know, taking it all in, pondering what you're doing. They engaged in these activities, the top people engage in these activities multiple times per week, whereas the people who felt like they had the least time, about half never did these activities, right? And the ones who did, it was very low, like maybe once a week. Again, these were all equivalently busy people. It doesn't take any amount of times, like write for five minutes in a journal or to take five minutes to look at your schedule and see what's coming up and ask what you'd like

to do. These things don't take a lot of time. It's just when you do choose to do them, it gives you an entirely different perspective on your time. You're no longer just rolling with it. You can roll with it at times, but you're also thinking about how you'd like that rolling to go. As we're looking at our time tracking sheets and we see our different commitments, how can we really determine whether a commitment is a burden or a benefit? I think a big chunk of this is how you feel about it.

Do you feel energized? Does you see it on your calendar coming up? when you're doing it, do you feel like you're doing something worthwhile and satisfying that it's meaningful for yourself for the people you care about? Because life is kind of short for doing too much stuff that we don't at least in some way see as meaningful. That doesn't mean that every second of it is going to be fun. Many of the things that have the most meaning for us are often things that have moments of not fun. But in the long run, they do add joy and meaning to our lives. You might think about something like playing a musical instrument. Probably

sitting down to practice is not immediately blissful in the way that turning on the TV might be. But once you start practicing, you start getting into it and you start feeling better about it as the song starts sounding better. And certainly if you're performing, that can be a complete and wonderful, joyous experience. So keeping your eye on the long-term goal, is it something that adds joy and meaning to your life in the lives of people you care about? And if so, then it's probably a good use of time. It's a good commitment. If it doesn't, if you find yourself dreading it and not from the sense of dreading because, oh, it's getting me outside my comfort zone. Maybe it's a little bit more challenging. Not that dreading. I'm talking about dreading. Like, this is not really how I see

myself spending my time in my life broadly. I'm going to be counting minutes during it, hoping it's over, you know, trying not to do it again if I can get out of it. Those are signs that it's probably something that needs to go. And it may not be something you can get rid of immediately. But I think a lot of life can be changed when we take sort of a three to six month perspective. Definitely over the next six months, you could make a lot of changes to your life if you felt like you wanted to. So as like a young professional, a millennial, I think in the workplace, we're often approached with some of more of the grunt work, I would say. So do you have any tips on how to say no and like some guidance on how to say no politely? Yeah. And I'm not one of those people who thinks you have to

do everything the first few years of your career because the truth is you don't. And sometimes when you get too busy doing stuff that you don't want to do or isn't leading anywhere. You don't have time for thinking about those bigger aspirations and making time for those. Broadly, early in your career, what you want to be doing is learning skills and you want to be meeting people. And so, you know, looking at this task that you're doing, the first thing is it, well, is it something that I can see how I could learn a skill by doing it? Because even if something's a grunt, you could definitely focus on the skill development aspect of it. Maybe it's about getting better at your writing. Maybe it's getting better at, you know, organizing information quickly. Maybe it's getting

better about making phone calls to difficult people, right? That's a sort of grant work that often to focus on the skill. And if you can see a skill, then yeah, of course, that's good. Also, people, if you are getting a chance to work with someone who is good for you to be working with, then it doesn't necessarily even matter what the work is. Like you want to take on anything that you can in order to make sure that that relationship gets developed. Now, if it's not something like that, one of the best things you can do. You can always talk with your managers and the people who are higher above you at work and ask them for help, right? That's how you do it. Like, I have these things on my plate and you're giving me this. I would like your help in prioritizing what you think would be the best thing for me to be doing and

when all of these things should be done. Like, please help me understand what would be the best timeline for all of these, which is pretty good for if you've got a rational boss, they're not going to take you away from something that is adding, you know, money to the bottom line to do something that isn't, right? Like, that's just not what people do if they are in any way rational about it. So that conversation can help make them clear on what you have on your plate so that it's making sure that your time is devoted to the things that are the best use of it. You can also be good about suggesting things that you want to do. One of the best ways to make sure that you spend more time on the things that you do want to do is to proactively bring them up. Be like, I had this idea.

I know that you said this was very important in our last meeting. I wondered if I I could spend a little bit of time looking at this issue. Again, if you have a boss who is in any way interested in people's skill and talent development, which hopefully you do, then that's the kind of conversation that managers love to have with employees, that people bringing ideas to them. That's great. Now, if you do these things and your boss is just not into it at all, that's a sign that maybe in the next six to 12 months, you might want to start looking at some other.

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Again, that's Framer.com slash profiting for 30% off Framer.com slash profiting. Rules and restrictions apply. And as you were looking at your research, evaluating your research, did you notice any themes with time suckers? And is there any time suckers that we should look out for when it comes to our schedule and the way that we spend our time? There are a couple of time sucks that are, you know, sort of universal for people who have kind of in the office jobs. Email is obviously a big one. Email will expand to fill all available space. So if you start your day with email and be like, oh, I'll get to the real work once I'm done with cleaning out my inbox.

Well, you'll never have a cleaned out inbox and you'll never get to the other stuff. So you generally are best off doing the important stuff first and having email fit within the small spaces around that because that means that you're not giving it your best time. The only way to spend less time on email is to choose to give it less time. There is no hack that makes it smaller. In fact, you know, people who have gotten to see a lot of time logs where people are attempting to get themselves down to inbox zero. And it basically never works because they're sending responses in order to, you know, clean out their inbox. They're responding to people. And then people respond back. And so then it keeps filling back up. Like you can't do it. So I don't think that's really a worthy

goal. The other thing, you know, at the workplace that sucks a lot of time is meetings, obviously. And meetings are particularly problematic because email tends to just waste your own time, whereas a meeting you can waste, you know, 10 people's time if you're all sitting in that room. That could be pretty expensive if you've got 10 people sitting in a room for a meeting that didn't really need to happen. There's also opportunity costs in the sense that, like, if you think about a 10 o'clock meeting, you're going to stop doing most other deep work by like 945 to get ready, and then you go to it, and then you come back to your death and you sort of cycle through these transition rituals people have, email and websites they like to check it.

So you're not back at anything else until like 1120 anyway. So it's taken almost two hours for a one hour meeting. The other thing is all meetings seem to take 30 or 60 minutes, which why? Like it seems improbable that all human stuff could occur in only 30 and 60 minute chunks. But that's just what the calendar says. So that's what we do. But like it doesn't have to be. I encourage people to don't default to having a meeting.

See if you can, you know, do it quicker, just like a quick conversation, a phone call with somebody to get an answer. You don't necessarily have to schedule a meeting. don't also have to accept a meeting. You can push back and say, well, what's our agenda for this? Why are, you know, what should I be prepared coming into that? If the person can't answer that, then maybe it needs to be pushed forward or shrunk or done as a call or not happen. Because, again, you're trying to be a good steward of everybody's time. How about time suckers in personal life? Yeah, I think the biggest time suck in our personal life is, is, this sounds big, but it's

being unintentional about our time. I like to do some numbers for people that there's 168 hours in a week, right? So 24 times seven is 168 hours. If you work 40 hours a week and sleep eight hours a night, so that's 56 hours per week, that leaves 72 hours for other things. But people are like, there are. Like, where are those 72 hours? I mean, I'm working full time. I can't have any idea. I have no idea where any of those 72 hours are. But what it is is people aren't being intentional about those 72 hours. And so it doesn't seem like it's almost twice as much time as they're spending at work. It seems like less than time that they're spending at work. So that's a lot of time that's passing without thinking about it.

And it's spent on different things, puttering around the house, social media, TV, but not intentional TV, just surfing around, or just, you know, being unclear what's going on, so you go back and forth to different things. If you set a few intentions of what you want to do in your personal life, maybe one thing in the evening that you would love to do, be it read 100 pages in a book or call a good friend or meet friends for drinks, on the weekend, maybe set three things,

but that you really want to do. Go to an art museum, go for a bike ride with a friend, go to worship services or volunteer somewhere, your personal time will actually start to feel like it is more fast because you are spending it more attention. And what would you say is a healthy breakdown for a young professional? So how should we spend our time? How many hours for sleeping, work, fun?

Any advice? I mean, there's no good number. But different people have different aspirations. Certainly if you're in the point of life where you, you know, don't yet have a partner in children, you might be able to devote a few more hours to work, especially the things like learning skills and networking that will help you be able to have a more reasonable life later when there are more people that you are caring for.

I think in general, most people don't work more than 60 hours a week. People often think they do, but if you look at their long-term average, it tends to be under that. They're remembering the longest weeks and then calling those typical in their heads, but they're not. It's just that it happens occasionally, and then that's what they remember. So, I mean, 60 at work, max, you know, sleeping seven to eight hours per night when you average it over the whole week, you're still leaving 50 to 60 hours for other things. I've always thought that a good balanced life might be 56 hours for professional and professional related stuff, 56 hours for one's personal life, and then 56 hours for sleep and personal care.

That's pretty much evenly split. And, you know, that would be a rather balanced life, even with fairly long work hours. Yeah, that sounds pretty nice. So in your opinion, is it possible to expand or stretch time? I do. I mean, not in the sense of getting more than 24 hours a day and 168 hours in a week because we can't do that. However, time can feel more expansive if we make certain choices with it. One thing I found while having people track time for off the clock is that the people with the highest time perception scores were highly likely to have done something very memorable or adventure.

with their time on the day that they tracked. So this was a normal March Monday that they kept track of. But one woman went to like salsa dancing lessons in the evening. Somebody went to a big band concert. Somebody took their family to a movie on a Monday night. Or even just like going for a walk after dinner with the family, just something that wasn't straight, you know, dinner TV bed, something that made the day seem a little bit different.

And what's going on there is that often when we say, you know, where did the time go? what we're actually saying is I don't remember where the time went. And the reason we're saying that is that our time wasn't memorable. The more memory units we form of any given period of time, the more vast, it seems in our recounting. If you think about like the first day of vacation, if you're traveling somewhere exotic, it seems like it's incredibly long. Your brain is taking in all these new and different things. And you can't do that with every day in your life. But if you at least have something in your life that is different and memorable about a day, then you're more. more likely to remember it. And that can make it feel like you have more time. And what kind of mind shifts do you recommend for those who feel like they never have enough time? You know, obviously, the first step where we talked about is tracking time, because often people do have time. It's just they're spending it in ways they don't care about. And once you see this, you can start trying to repurpose some time for things that are more exciting or meaningful. Another thing you can do is try

using little bits of time. Often we think we need big chunks of time in order to do fun stuff in our life, but that's not actually true. Like we have a lot of these sort of five-minute chunks through the day while you're maybe waiting for a phone call to start or waiting for the bus. And most people just, you know, get out their phones and start cleaning out their inboxes during this time. You can use those five-minute chunks to like read e-books, right? That's something you could do or listen to a favorite song or use that to meditate or journal or something like that. And if you do these things in small chunks of time, you start to notice them. And you start to see how they add up. You know, one other thing that people who feel like they don't have any time in life,

I often suggest, you know, try going to bed a little bit earlier and waking up a little bit earlier. Often the time before bed kind of gets away from us, we're, you know, watching TV, we didn't mean to watch, we're puttering around the house, we're on social media. If you can cut that off a little bit earlier, go to bed a little bit earlier, you might be able to wake up a little bit earlier. And morning for many people is their best, most focused time. And so if you get up a little bit earlier, suddenly you have this time in the morning that you can use for something that is important to you, whether it's exercise or reading or doing something creative, you know, but you have to sort of shift around your schedule to make that happen.

And I know you already touched on this a bit, but any other practical tips on how we can make more time to spend on things that matter to us? So whether that's being healthy like exercising or spending time with friends or, you know, making more money. One of the best things you can do is think through your weeks before you're actually in them. Because if you think through your weeks, then you can think about what you would like to be doing with your time. And you can plan those things in. So I tend to do this on Friday afternoons. On Friday afternoon, I will look at the week ahead. I will think about, well, what are my top professional priorities? What are my top relationship priorities? And what are my top personal priorities? Just a short list. I'm not talking like 80 things in age,

you know, just a handful in each. But then I look at the calendar and I see roughly where those things can go. And I find that by listing these priorities and giving them a time, I vastly increase the chances that they are going to. to happen. And so I'd suggest, you know, other people might want to try this, too. Think through the week ahead. Think about your priorities. Think roughly where they can go. And if you want to be like a real pro about this, you can try front-loading the week. Because stuff is going to come up. I mean, this is the nature of life. Stuff comes up. And if you're doing as much as possible toward the the beginning of the week, then these emergencies have yet to arise. Or if emergencies do arise at the beginning of the week, there's probably a spot later in the week where you can put your

priorities after, you know, that you still have time to get to them. Whereas if you've scheduled them all for Friday afternoon, well, you know, stuff's going to come up. and then you won't have any time. So put it toward the beginning of the week, and you vastly increase the chances that it happens. Happy New Year, Yap, gang. I just love the unique energy of the new year. It's all about fresh starts.

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restrictions apply, services not available in all areas. How about outsourcing? When should we think about outsourcing our tasks and the things that we have to do? Yeah, well, whenever there's something that you think needs to get done, but it doesn't seem like it's the best use of your time. Like you can see that it's taking you away from other things that you would rather be doing or is taking energy that you should be devoting to other things. then that might be a wide use of outsourcing or something that requires expertise and you really

don't think it would be the best use of your time to learn. So that, for instance, I have a podcast as well and we have a great team that does production of it. It's something you can do. Lots of people have figured out how to do that, but I've realized it would be better for me to pay someone rather than to learn it. That's something that somebody else has built up the skill and has a business doing so it's a wise use of my money to not take that on. Very good. And this is a little bit off topic, but in a similar vein. So some people feel like they have no time and they seem to be a little bit paranoid about their time. Well, I'm very optimistic about my time. I think I get a lot done. I'm super productive. You know, never had an issue with making a deadline or anything like that. But when it

comes to physically having to be somewhere on time, I have a ton of trouble because I always think I can fit a million things in my schedule before that's at time. Any advice on how to be a more prompt person and kind of be more realistic about your time? Yeah, the thing about being late is it often is this function of extreme optimism. I mean, people think it will take them 15 minutes to get somewhere because it did once. You know, most times they do it, it takes a lot more than 15 minutes, but they keep remembering that once and think that will happen again. Or, you know, they think, oh, well, I have so much time, you know, I can do this other thing before I leave. And then, you know, the other thing takes longer than they thought it would too. And so then they're running really late.

Again, tracking time is always good. But, you know, it keeps us from telling ourselves these stories about our time. Because if you think it takes you 20 minutes to get to work and yet it keeps taking you 40 day after day, well, that explains why you were always late to that nine o'clock meeting, right? Like, it's pretty hard to look at this 40-minute chunk and day after day and keep telling yourself that it takes 20 minutes. So track your time, but if you don't want to track your time, just build in a buffer. Add 15 minutes. And maybe you'll be early. My guess is you won't because people who are chronically tardy just have such off estimates of how long it takes to do things that adding in 15 minutes

it's more likely to make them on time or only slightly late as opposed to very late. But, you know, if you can get in that habit of leaving 15 minutes before you think you need to, then over time that can start to get you places closer to when other people are expecting you to be there. Very cool. So Laura, where can people find out more about everything that you do? Yeah, so people can come visit my website, which is laura vandercam.com, just my name. I hope people will check out my new book, which is off the clock, feel less busy while getting more done. I have a couple other books on time management and productivity too. If you, you know, get through that one and want to come read the rest, find yourself with some extra time now that you've read the first.

So I hope people will check those out. Thanks for tuning in to Young and Profiting Podcast. I hope after listening to this episode, you treat your time with the same care and consideration you would your money. Instead of wasting it, be mindful, make it memorable, and strive to use your time wisely on the things that matter most to you. Follow Yap on Instagram at Young and Profiting and Twitter at Yap underscore Podcast. And check us out on young and profiting.com.

Thanks to our amazing production team, Timothy Tan, Daniel McFefatting. Baba Hughes, John Sparks, and AK. We've got some awesome interviews lined up for the near future, so be sure to subscribe on your favorite platform to always keep up with Yap. We'll catch you next time. This is Hala, signing off.