The Accidental Crea/ve
Laura Vanderkam on Managing Time
Todd Henry: So your 'me is your most valuable finite resource. It’s the currency of produc'vity, but many of us have an unhealthy mindset about 'me. Today’s guest, Laura Vanderkam, is going to help us reclaim a healthy understanding of 'me and start to use it in more produc've ways.
So welcome, friends, to The Accidental Crea/ve Podcast. My name is Todd Henry. I’m the founder of Accidental Crea/ve and author of a couple of books, Louder Than Words, which is my brand-­‐new book, available now wherever books are sold, which is about how to step into and develop a compelling voice and make your work resonate, which, obviously, we all need. Also, the books Die Empty and The Accidental Crea/ve, all of them available now wherever books are sold. But we’re not here to talk about my books. We’re here to talk about our guest today, Laura Vanderkam, who’s the author of a brand new book called I Know How She Does It as well as What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast, What the Most Successful People Do on the Weekend. Fantas'c books about how to leverage your 'me more effec'vely. And so I wanted to have a conversa'on with Laura about how to use 'me effec'vely to accomplish our most important work. And I began by asking her how she became involved with this idea of 'me management. Here’s Laura Vanderkam.
Laura Vanderkam: I mean, as I look back on my life, I’ve always been trying to be more produc've with the 'me I have. But I think, like many people, I doubled down on how I was spending my 'me when I became a parent for the first 'me, which happened in May of 2007 (so, over eight years ago now). And as I had my older son, I was trying—you know, I realized that I was accountable for my 'me in a way I hadn’t been in the past, and partly that’s just the ques'on of, well, figuring out child care while my husband and I worked. But also just, well, how am I going to make sure that I spend the 'me I want to spend with him, and given that I can’t just automa'cally relax when I’m not working, how am I going to build in space for relaxa'on and fun and hopefully get enough sleep, too? And so as I started to examine these ques'ons, I decided to study how other people were doing it. And as part of studying how other people were making the pieces of their lives fit together, I also came to see that a lot of the stories we tell ourselves about how people spend their 'me today are not necessarily true. TH: So—it’s so funny that that is part of your story, because I hear that very oUen from entrepreneurs and from others who say, “I used to think I was really busy, and then when I had children I realized, ‘Oh, my goodness, I had no idea [laughs] how much 'me I actually had,’” right?
LV: Mm-­‐hm. [laughs]
TH: And we are busy. I don’t mean to beli\le that we are busy and we have a lot going on in our lives, but it’s funny how, when you reach an inflec'on point in your life, whether it’s children or something else—for some people it could be an illness, it could be any number of things—you suddenly realize that you have to get really serious about your 'me. And you men'oned in your response that there are some of these kind of beliefs that we have about 'me and—maybe there are some false beliefs that we have about how people spend their 'me. Can you share with us what are a couple of those beliefs that you think we hold and maybe could be destruc've to how we approach our 'me?
LV: Well, the first problem we have is we don’t actually know how much 'me there is. I mean, people know there are twenty-­‐four hours in a day, but we really live our lives in terms of weeks. And there are a hundred sixty-­‐eight hours in a week. And the reason this is important to know is that it starts to show us how much space is available for things other than work. Even if you are working extremely long hours—the numbers I ran for people, if you’re working forty hours a week (so, standard full-­‐'me job) and sleeping eight hours a day (so, fiUy-­‐six hours a week), that leaves seventy-­‐two hours for other things. So even with a full-­‐'me job, you have almost twice as much 'me that you are not working than you are working. Now, obviously, many entrepreneurs work more than forty hours, although we are some'mes a bit delusional about exactly how many hours. I once had somebody tell me that he was working a hundred eighty hours a week, which is not possible. TH: [laughs] Let’s be fair. Unless he has a 'me machine, right?
LV: If he has a 'me machine—well, if he’s an entrepreneur who invented a 'me machine, [inaudible]
TH: [laughs]
LV: But no, so we have these delusions about how many hours we work. But even if you’re working, let’s say sixty hours (which is an extremely long work week), if you were sleeping eight hours a day, which many people claim not to do, that would s'll leave fiUy-­‐two hours for other things, so that’s quite a bit of 'me. Clearly, the 'me is there to do other things, to have personal priori'es, to have a fulfilling personal life, even if you are working fairly extreme hours. It’s just that people don’t necessarily see that. TH: Why don’t we see that? I think would be the sort of natural follow-­‐up to that.
LV: Well, because partly 'me is mental, and because you don’t think that the 'me is there, you choose not to necessarily think about how you’re going to spend it, because—I mean, again, if you assume that I have no /me, then what’s the point, right? What’s the point even thinking about what you like to do with it? And so because we don’t think about what we want to do with it when the 'me appears, we don’t do anything par'cularly meaningful or enjoyable with it. But, you know, also it’s just this—things can take up mental space, even if they don’t take up physical space, and so I’ve had people try to convince me that—you know, they’ve kept track of their 'me and they’re working around the clock. I was like, “Well, it looks here like you’re watching a movie, you know, Talladega Nights. You’re claiming you’re working during that?” “Well, I was thinking about work.” [laughs]
TH: [laughs]
LV: So, it’s like, well, you never could win with this, but then people don’t subtract the—you know, if you’re hashing out a fight you had with your partner while you’re on a conference call, you don’t subtract that from your work total. So it is—it seems to be that we only get one direc'on with this. TH: Yeah. There almost—it’s almost sort of a psychological—we’re almost efficiency-­‐hoarders, you know, in our life. Like, we almost want to cram efficiency into every crack and crevice of our life, and I think when some people say, “Oh great, Laura’s going to help me think about my 'me differently so that I understand how much 'me I have,” I think that the natural response is “Oh, so basically you’re going to play drill sergeant with me”—and yeah, I mean, one of your books is called What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast, right? Tremendous book, and I really, really enjoyed it, and I think people hear things like that and they think, Oh, okay. What Laura wants me to do then is get up at 4 in the morning and work out and get an hour of solid work in before I go and reclaim that /me, and then I’m going to be sort of in this drill-­‐sergeant boot camp-­‐mode un/l I collapse into my bed at night. What would be your response to that?
LV: No. I think that—well, personally, I mean, you can do whatever you want with your life. [laughs]
TH: [laughs]
LV: I don’t care if people wake up at 4:00 or not. I sort of just am giving ideas that may work for different people. I don’t believe in sleep depriva'on. I also don’t think that life should be a death march from one thing to another. And people have this somewhat false percep'on of me that I schedule every minute, which I most certainly do not. I have a couple of big priori'es for any given day, and, you know, then I sort of roughly think about when those will happen, but I almost never schedule my 'me down to the minute. I’m just really not that busy. [laughs] I tried to make space for what ma\ers to me, but then there’s a lot of stuff that just doesn’t ma\er to me, and so we kind of forget about that. So yeah, I would say that 'me management is not about being a drill sergeant. It is about using the hours we have to build the lives we want, and oUen the lives we want have quite a bit of open space.
TH: So let’s talk about some of those mindsets, then, and how we can begin to maybe implement some principles that will help us use our life more effec'vely. What are maybe a couple of ways that people get off the rails, and what are some methods you would recommend for, you know, this audience of crea've pros, people who are going to—like you said, they’re distracted because work is always on their mind. I mean, they’re always having to figure it out, solve problems, and it’s hard to kind of disengage from that. But what are some principles you would encourage people to implement to help them reclaim some of the space in their life and use it to build the life they want?
LV: Well, I would say, “Don’t be afraid to schedule stuff in your personal life, because when you schedule things, and par'cularly if scheduling it involves other people too, those things have a tendency to rise up the priority list in a way that may be far outside their actual priority in your life, but you can use that reality to your advantage.”
So if you have 'ckets to a baseball game in the evening, you know, chances are you will figure out a way to get out of your inbox by 6:30 or whatever 'me you need to leave for the park. It’s not that you had any more or less work. It’s just that because you had something that was compelling in your personal life, you elected to make everything fit in the 'me that was available and get out the door. And this is honestly how, you know, something that many people do discover when they have families, is that all of a sudden there is something that is compelling enough to get them to look away from the work for a while and, you know, it’s always a trade-­‐off. But because you have this compelling thing in your personal life, because you do want to go to a kids’ soccer game, then you’re willing to carve out the 'me to do it. And so I think that even if that’s not what’s going on in your personal life, you can say, “Well, you know, I’m not going to be afraid to schedule things, like commiing to go on a 6 pm run twice a week with a local running club.” If you have that, you will get out the door in 'me to be there at 6 pm twice a week. So put those things in. TH: You know, it’s funny, because I think you’re correct in that we are more than willing to schedule work-­‐related commitments but we oUen hedge on the personal commitments, because they almost feel discre'onary. You know, in some ways, I think that personal things are the things that go on the back burner when something more urgent or more pressing comes along. But, you know, I’ve seen this kind of steady through line in your work, that the argument that it’s actually when we begin to put those important personal things on the back burner that our work becomes compromised as well.
LV: I think it does, and I think there’s also something psychological going on here. I mean, I think many of us could work more if we wanted to. I mean, we oUen work inefficiently and we could repurpose some of those hours to do more important things and actually get more work done if we wanted to. But I think there’s this element of being the kind of person who cancels personal plans because I’m just so busy at work is a way of showing how important you are. And, you know, no one would ever actually say to a friend, “I am just so important. I am more important than you. Look at the things I have to do.” [laughs] But being the kind of person who cancels personal plans because work is just so crazy is a nice way to convey that.
TH: It’s interes'ng because our 'me, really how we spend our 'me, is a reflec'on of our priori'es, you know, and, really, there’s probably no greater reflec'on of what we really care about than how we spend our 'me, I think, in some ways, because it is our most finite resource that we have. We can get more money. We can always replenish our energy. You know, some people would argue with the money part, right? But we can always get more money to spend, but we cannot reclaim more 'me. And so that argument really resonates with me, this idea that people spend their 'me in order to kind of bolster their self-­‐image, or to make themselves seem important, or to make other people feel like, you know, they are somewhat—they’re almost making an argument for posi'on in the marketplace. I don’t think I’m making my statement very, very well, but it seems like it’s almost like a self-­‐confidence or a self-­‐esteem or a self-­‐
valida'on thing in some ways.
LV: I think you’re definitely onto something that how we spend our 'me is a reflec'on of our priori'es. And that was one of my favorite quotes I got from one of the busiest people I ever interviewed. She told me, you know, “I don’t say I don’t have 'me. I say it’s not a priority because that is really more accurate language.” I mean, almost anything you think about that you say you don’t have 'me for would magically rise up the priority list if somebody, you know, offered to pay you, like, ten thousand dollars to do it. [laughs] TH: Right, right.
LV: Right, so... I mean, you know, it’s like if somebody—I don’t really feel like training for a marathon, but if somebody was going to pay me good money to do it, I probably would. TH: [laughs]
LV: It’s not going to happen, but that’s not because I don’t have 'me. Like, you could make it rise up the priority list through of a variety of different inducements. But in reality, it’s that it’s not a priority. And I think we should acknowledge that, and especially when people don’t have a fulfilling personal life if they tell themselves that “Work is just so crazy,” “Work is just so busy,” “I’m so important”—I mean, you could just say, “Well, that’s fine.” If your personal life is not a priority, acknowledge that. I mean, maybe that’s true. It would be probably a li\le painful to tell your spouse and children, “You are just not a priority,” but if that’s the way you’re ac'ng, then that’s true. I mean, acknowledge it. [laughs] And, you know, and if it’s not true, well then you can say, “Well, okay. Well, maybe I need to rethink things a li\le bit.”
TH: I believe that is so profound, what you just said, because I think we live one way and we speak another way. You know, we spend our 'me one way, but then we don’t acknowledge that that is a reflec'on of our priori'es. And, you know, we make all of these arguments for why we have to do what we do, but in reality, we’re making decisions about what’s important to us and what’s not. And simply stepping back and drawing those lines, I think, can give us a tremendous amount of freedom in our life to at least acknowledge and live authen'cally, you know, and live according to our principles—or if not according to what we espouse, at least live according to what it is we’re actually doing and just acknowledge what that is. Was there something (I’m curious, your new book is called I Know How She Does It)—
was there something that you discovered among incredibly produc've people, people who use their 'me well—is there something you discovered that surprised you?
LV: So I’ve studied 'me for a while, so a lot of the strategies were things that I had seen before. I mean, certainly a number of the women I studied managed to work longer hours while s'll preserving a lot of 'me for family by doing what I call split shiPs. They would leave work at a reasonable hour, spend the evening with their families, and then do more work at night aUer the kids went to bed. And I, you know, knew that people do that, but I was kind of interested to see just how high a propor'on of people did it. But I think what was even more interes'ng to me—so I’ve worked for myself for years (entrepreneur), and have control of my 'me, and so I do know that life—personal life and work life—stuff are oUen very intertwined. That’s just, you know, the upside and the downside of the flexibility. But I was kind of amazed to see how many people in very conven'onal jobs had pre\y much similar flexibility, in the sense that about three quarters of the women I studied (who had to keep 'me guards for this book) did something personal during work hours during the course of their diary week. And the flip side was true, too, that about three quarters did something work-­‐related during what were, you know, pre\y clearly personal hours—which makes sense. I mean, we have a whole lot of work-­‐life integra'on now, and some people don’t like that. Some people like to have strict dividing lines between work and home, say, “When I’m done I’m done,“ and, you know, “Weekends are mine and I don’t want to think about work, and I’ll just work my long hours when I need to, and when I come home I’m done.” But I think that for many people, having things go back and forth is what makes a full life more possible.
TH: Interes'ng. I would not have guessed that. I mean, especially—and you had men'oned before the split shiU thing—it’s funny, I think I’ve intui'vely been doing that for a while and didn’t realize that was what was going on. You know, it’s funny how we tend to think that life has to—you know, work has to happen between 8 and 6 or whatever it is, or for some people maybe 7 and 7, or, you know, [laughs] 6 and 8:00 pm. Whatever their schedule is, we tend to think that work has to happen between those hours, but, you know, most of us, our jobs don’t align with that necessarily. You know, we’re really being paid for the value that we contribute, not for the—very few of us probably punch a 'mecard these days, you know. So it’s interes'ng to consider that, you know, you can split your work in that way and that perhaps you can interweave some personal things with your work. That’s very interes'ng.
LV: Yeah. I mean, that’s how I live my life, and it turns out that’s how a lot of people live their lives. TH: So what would be, Laura—just as we kind of bring our conversa'on to a close, what would be maybe one or two things that you would suggest people start to do right away to help them be more effec've and be\er consider their 'me as they’re scheduling?
LV: The best way to spend your 'me be\er is to figure out how you are spending it now. So I always encourage people who want to use their 'me be\er to try keeping a 'me log. You know, a few days is great, a week is ideal, because then you can see how down'me and weekend 'me gets spent, and people oUen find that incredibly eye-­‐opening. You know, a lot of people don’t like the idea for the same reason that people don’t like keeping a food journal, but, you know, it does work. [laughs] Like, if you want to lose weight, there’s a reason that you should write down what you put in your mouth because it keeps you from being in complete denial about, you know, the eight cookies you grabbed from the kitchen every, you know, 'me you walk past. So it’s the same thing with 'me. But the thing is, I mean, when I tell people to do this, I’d say it’s also not just about catching yourself and all your wasted 'me. I mean, I waste 'me; everyone wastes 'me. We can all see wasted 'me as we’re tracking our 'me. But it’s oUen about not telling yourself stories that aren’t true. I’ve had a number of people sort of assume that, you know, if you’re working full-­‐'me you never see your family. Right? We all know that to be true, right? You can’t do two things; you can’t have it all, right? So you—therefore, if you’re working full-­‐'me, you never see your family. And yet, they look on their 'me logs that whole thing about, you know, work forty hours, sleep eight hours, leaves seventy-­‐two hours for other things. They’d be spending the bulk of those seventy-­‐two hours with their family. It’s like, well, that was kind of a lot of 'me, wasn’t it? You know, maybe that story you’re telling yourself is just not true. And once you know that, then you can start to ask, “Well, how could I spend that 'me be\er, knowing that I do have all this 'me that’s available with my family? Could I turn it into good memories and ways that can build our rela'onship?“ So keeping a 'me log is also about that.
TH: Fantas'c. Well, the new book is called I Know How She Does It. Laura Vanderkam, thanks so much for sharing your 'me and your wisdom and your insights with us today. Where can people find you?
LV: So I blog close to daily at lauravanderkam.com. Also, on Twi\er, @lvanderkam, and I love to connect with people.
TH: Well, many thanks to Laura Vanderkam. You can find Laura, again, at lauravanderkam.com. Also, remember my new book, Louder Than Words, available now wherever books are sold. Remember, friends, cover bands don’t change the world. Don’t be a cover band. You need to find your unique voice if you want to thrive. We’ll see you next 'me.