Time Management: Trading Time Scarcity for Abundance with Laura Vanderkam

Speaker A: I don't personally think that a productivity tool can change your entire life, but I do think tools can lower friction and Brain FM falls in that category. It's a functional music app designed for things like focus, relaxation, meditation, and sleep. And it's definitely worth testing out like I did and got hooked on it years ago. What I did was I chose to try it during one real focused session of work just to see if it would help me focus my attention better. While I did that work and the time flew by, I got the work done and I've been been using it ever since for that mode and all the others I mentioned. And you can too try it out. Go to BeyondTheToDolist.com BrainFM and get 20% off or go to the link in the show notes of this episode. Again, try it out by going to BeyondTheToDolist.com BrainFM and you'll get 20% off and support the show. On the under $3 menu at McDonald's, a, uh, McChicken is $2, because when you're craving a McChicken, you deserve a McChicken. And now that McChicken is just two dollars with McValue limit time only, prices and participation may vary. Prices may be higher for delivery. Hello and welcome back to beyond the To Do List, a podcast about productivity. I'm your host, Eric Fisher, and today's guest has been on the show so many times, even the very beginning, and for good reason. It is Laura Vanderkam. She spent over a decade studying how people actually spend their time, and her new book, Big Time A Simple Path to Time Abundance, might be her most important argument yet that time isn't the scarce resource you think it is, and the story you tell yourself about having none of it is the thing actually costing you. We get into why you're probably not more overworked than you think, why complexity isn't the enemy, chaos is, and what it looks like to read War and Peace one chapter a day. So if you think that you don't have enough time for anything, I dare you to challenge that thought and listen in as you enjoy this conversation with Laura Vanderkam. Well, this week it is my privilege to welcome back to the show Laura Vandercam. Laura, welcome back.

Speaker B: Thanks so much for having me again. I really appreciate it.

Speaker A: Yeah, well, it's funny because the last time I talked to you, I was on your show, which I'll make sure to put that in the show notes, by the way, before breakfast. That was a great time. A unique show, a unique Format also,

Speaker B: so it's been a lot of fun to do interviews for that show. I've gotten to talk with so many fascinating people and, you know, share that with, with my listeners. So I'm glad you could come on.

Speaker A: Yeah. So. And if you ever. Hey, I'm, um, here I am publicly self inviting myself again. Yeah. Let me put it this. Let me reframe. If you ever need me to come back, I am more than willing, but under no contract to do so. So there, Eric.

Speaker B: Well, we'll find a week where I'm like, oh, gosh, I don't have any guests.

Speaker A: There you go.

Speaker B: What do we do? We're going to do Eric again.

Speaker A: In a pinch, when you really need somebody last minute, I'm your guy. There you go.

Speaker B: All right, we're good. We'll have that. We'll have that.

Speaker A: Because I'll make sure to make the time. And speaking of time, I mean, that's the thing you talk about. You've written 168 hours off the clock, uh, Tranquility by Tuesday. You've basically built your career on, um, how people spend their time. And you've been talking about it on your show and this show for over a decade. So my obvious question is your new book, Big Time, which I was a little disappointed to find out it's not all about Peter Gabriel's, one of his greatest songs ever. But you talk about time again, and I'm like, what was in this book and why now? And what hadn't you already been saying?

Speaker B: You sound like the question my agent asked when we were writing the book proposal.

Speaker A: So you're saying I should be a book book agent.

Speaker B: Why does the world need another Vanderfam book on time? Which is a good question. Perhaps. Uh, um, but I mean, there was more I wanted to say. What can I say? I find this topic so fascinating because you can come at, uh, just about any topic through the lens of time. Because everyone on this planet has 24 hours in a day, 168 hours in a week, 8,760 hours in a year. We are all playing with the same building blocks. Different people have various other resources, whether they are richer or smarter than the rest of us, but nobody has more time. And so it's just this topic that keeps giving. I can keep coming to this. Well, again and again. But the difference between Big Time and some of my other books, I really explore this theme of time abundance, that what happens when you move beyond a story of time scarcity and truly do start to see Time as a friend that we do have time for what matters to us in life. How does that change how we approach our lives, how we approach our work, how we approach day to day living? I do think with some smart strategies it is possible to fall in love with your schedule. So that is the goal of this book.

Speaker A: It's like one of those great subtle, non obvious sci fi movies that kind of shifts your perspective after you're done watching it, where the whole book turns on um, the idea that time is abundant, not scarce. And you use this imagery of being handed a winning lottery ticket that you never even bought. So where did that reframe come from for you? What was it the, was it like the years of the time diary data or something else in your own life?

Speaker B: Honestly it's because I have this bizarre obsession with the ancient Earth. And so I have been on a kick of reading books about, you know, how the earth formed and how life came to be on Earth and as part of that all sorts of, you know, things that happened or like the end Permian extinction was the particular obsession that was I was reading about at the time I was writing the introduction to this book which is that, you know, 252 million years ago, life was almost wiped out on planet Earth. People know about the extinction that took the dinosaurs 66 million years ago, but this was a big one before that, 252 million years ago. So you know, it's this idea like it could have gone so wrong, right? The idea that we're even here, life could have been wiped out right there as it was. It wasn't like the dinosaurs came out of that extinction after the next one, the mammals come out of that and then here we are, you know, 60 million years after that. And it's like all of this is so completely random that we exist and that we have time to manage. And so if you think of it from that perspective, it's like if somebody handed you a winning lottery ticket and it's not like you've been going to 711 trying to buy tickets every day, this just, just came to you and now you're like, you've got this pot of cash to manage now what? And ah, yes, you obviously you could complain that it should have been bigger. Like you could complain that you have some amount of taxes you have to pay on these winnings. But I hope we would approach these winnings with a sense of hopeful possibility. And I think there's certainly an argument to view time the same way that we have been handed this pot of hours to manage, however long it happens to be for each of us. We get to do so many things with it if we choose to. So let's approach from that angle and see what we make of it.

Speaker A: Now, here's something that's going to stop people, because I think you're arguing we are not, in fact, more overworked or more sleep deprived than we used to be. And I think that cuts hard against how almost everybody describe, including myself, describes their life right now. So I'm going to push a little bit and say, who is it that abundance that who is it that abundance story is hardest for where does that. You have more time than you think? Where does that stop being true?

Speaker B: I think all of us have moments in our lives where we feel incredibly busy, where we might feel rushed or frantic or behind or overwhelmed. Those are all very common human emotions when it comes to how we feel about our time. But, you know, I've been tracking my time for 11 years. I have had thousands of other people track their time for me. I've also studied lots of bigger time diary sets, you know, that different organizations have done. And, you know, the idea that we are not increasingly overworked is just looking at average workweek data. If you go back a hundred years, you look at how much people are working in like the late 1800s through to the 1920s or so before modern labor standards came to be, work weeks were considerably longer. If you think about, you know, when people were in the sort of world, uh, you know, farm work can take a ton of time, for instance, especially when it's done without, you know, labor saving machinery or in old factories or things like that. I think that's just looking at how people spend their time. You look at the average work week now, it's a lot closer to about 35 hours, which is very different from what you see 100 years ago. Are there some people who work a lot of hours? Sure. Are there occasions when all of us work longer than we would like also? Sure. But for many people, even in sort of extreme jobs, when you track your time over the long haul, you'll see that there often is some space outside of work. If you look at people with caregiving responsibilities, there's often still some space outside of caregiving responsibilities and housework. There are times that we are awake and not engaged in work of the paid or unpaid variety. And so the question is, well, you know, even if we have a limited number of hours, what do we want to do with it? And I think even if people don't buy the idea that we have time. It is a much more useful story to be telling yourself that you have time. Because when you don't think you have time, you don't ask what you want to do with it, because why would you? What would be the point? You have no time whatsoever, so why would you even bother to think about what you want to do with it? And so when a spot of time opens up, as it does for all of us, even if only in small bits, we'll do whatever is easiest, whatever is right in front of us, which these days tends to be reading headlines, checking email after you just checked it two minutes ago, scrolling through the WhatsApp threads and looking at social media comments. Whereas if you assume that you do have some time, if you are telling yourself a story that I do have time, even if it's not as much as I want, I have some, then you start to ask what you'd like to do with it. And then when time does appear, you have more fulfilling options. So it's just a much better story, even if you don't really believe it.

Speaker A: Well, and you're really clear about this, that it's not about catching people doom scrolling. You don't care about, you know, them watching two hours of Netflix. It's more about when they, where they're seeing the hours actually go, the data itself having something to look at versus it's gone and it's in the past and you didn't track it, so you don't know.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, and one of the things I'm always encouraging people to do is to put things into their leisure time that are noticeable. Right. Like if you sit down and read a book for an hour in the evening, maybe after your kids go to bed, after you've done the housework or anything like that, it's hard to tell yourself that that evening didn't exist. I mean you read a book for an hour, that was something. Whereas if you're kind of scrolling around, you're still on the device that you could be using to work. Like you haven't really noticed that this leisure time is happening. And uh, it's sort of less actively feeling like it's chosen. And so then we don't remember it and then we can persist in this story that I have no time whatso. So making the active choices where we see it reminds us that this time does exist.

Speaker A: Well, and there's this cultural pull these days that what you would do is you would, you would do the time tracking. You would then use the data to do a deep dive into minimalism, paring back, simplifying. And you plant a flag against that. You say that complexity isn't the enemy, chaos is. And that you can keep the big, full, complicated life, but you have to run it like a circus. There's. There's a ringleader, in other words, like you say, and somebody is going to say, I don't know that that's possible. So make the case for that, please.

Speaker B: Yeah, No, I mean, once I, you know, tell people, like, figuring out their time and all this, I mean, there's a big move toward, like, simplicity and minimalism, and I totally get it, and I love some of the ideas associated with it. But the truth is, I mean, some of us just have complicated lives. You know, I have five kids. Like, one kid would be more simple than five kids, but I have them now, so, like, what am I going to do with them? Like, I got to manage it. You know, people have jobs that are complicated. Somebody working, like, as a high school principal, you think about all the different moving parts and constituencies you have to keep happy. People are involved in many things in their communities, have family members that they're taking care of. Like, there's just so much going on in many people's lives that simplicity is not necessarily an option. And so I always say, well, you know, complexity is not the enemy. Chaos is the enemy. You can have a complex life and not feel it as chaotic. And you mentioned my use of the circus metaphor. And when people tell me my life is a circus, they mean it is chaotic. But that is a total slander against circuses because they are incredibly well organized. Like, if the tigers are supposed to be in one ring, they are in that ring. They are not in a different ring. Like, everything is happening exactly where it is supposed to be at the time it is supposed to be there. And so I think we should aspire to have our lives be like a circus. And we are the ringmasters, calmly in charge of it all. We know that there is this complexity, but we are sort of on top of it, viewing it, knowing where things are going to happen, knowing where the attention goes, making sure we're putting on a spectacular show. You know, so there's certain practices we can do to put ourselves more in that mindset. But I think having that image in your brain is the first step toward making a complex life feel more exciting rather than you're hanging on for dear life.

Speaker A: Well, speaking of circuses, you talk about a pastor in the book. Kurt and I have friends who are Pastors. So that's why I'm making that metaphor. He went from burned out and depressed to recovered and partly through weekly planning and a refrigerator magnet. How much of that is the system and how much of that is something deeper?

Speaker B: I think it's both. I mean, obviously I'm not going to tell anyone that like weekly planning and a refrigerator magnet are going to cure your depression, because that would be unlikely. But it is the case that sometimes life feels out of control when we are not able to handle all our responsibilities in a way that feels like we are showing up for them. Right. If people want more than you think, you can give both at work and at home. When you don't feel you can protect any time for rest and recovery, you can very quickly become burnt out and feel like it's impossible to do these things that I have set out to do. But, you know, he took some time off from, from work and then was able to sort of put in new systems before he started his next job where he was very clear about planning the different spheres of his life. You know, professional family and himself thinking through the week and what was important in each and then setting certain boundaries and having certain systems that made sure that time that was protected for one sort of life was not being impinged on by other things. So a pastor job could happen at any point. Obviously there are pastoral emergencies at any point, but you could have a good system in your church where, you know, different people are on call at different times. You can also decide as a pastor that if you have a meeting in the evening that could be running from 7 to 10pm Maybe that's a day you don't actually have to be at work at 8 in the morning. Right. And that it's okay for you to do more personal or family stuff in the morning, knowing that your day is going to run from noon to 10 that day. And you can make choices like that. There's nobody stopping you from doing that. It's just your own decision, uh, to have life be more orderly and planned out in terms of when you are doing things.

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Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, my big interests may be different from other people. I'm not sure everyone on the planet wants to read War and Peace or listen to all the works of Bach, but you know, they are masterpieces. So I think they might be worth making space for in your life. But we often tell ourselves a story that, you know, a big thing like that is for when you're retired, like when the kids are out of the house. But many big things can be broken down into very small doable steps and then spread over a long period of time. And as long as you are consistent about doing those steps, time is going to pass. I mean, uh, time passes one way or the other. But we can spend our bits of time ephemera on lots of different random things, or we could spend our bits of ephemera on one thing. And in doing one thing, we can make a lot of progress. So for instance, with reading War and Peace, it is a very big book, but it has 361 extremely short chapters. Right. Each chapter is like three, four pages. You could read it in a couple of minutes. So that is what I did. I read, started reading on January 1st a couple years ago and I finished on, uh, December 27th, as one would if you read a chapter a day. And it just was, it was so doable like that way. I mean, you know, it was taking about the same amount of time that I spent brushing my teeth. And I am sure that most people listening to this have brushed their teeth fairly consistently for the past 361 days. So if you could do that, you could probably make space to read Poet War and Peace if you want to. If you break it down into small enough steps that you don't feel a ton of resistance to doing it. And then just keep going, you will finish.

Speaker A: It's funny because you mentioned War and Peace. Some friends of mine and I, for months now have been reading much like this. The Odyssey or a translation of the Odyssey. The best known translation, the one in anticipation of Christopher Nolan's movie coming out this summer. And it's the version that he used to work on his own.

Speaker B: Which version did he do? Is it the Robert Faggles one or is it a different one?

Speaker A: Uh, it's a woman. Oh, uh, why am I blanking? It's, it's right here somewhere, but it's out of view of me, so I can't tell you. But I will make a note right now. I will put the link in the show notes. I'll let you know also afterwards, when we're done recording, I'll grab it. It's right here, but it's great. And again, each chapter, five to ten minutes tops, and it goes back to what you were saying earlier, that time's moving no matter what, and us having nothing to show for it. Well, this is, you can see that the bookmark moved after you've done a few. It impacts you more. You see it, it's visually accountable, so to speak.

Speaker B: So and here's the thing, I mean, you know, it's also, it's fun to just like be able to say, haha, I read War and Peace or I read the Odyssey or anything like that. But it also changes the story we tell ourselves about our time. And this is all part of achieving that sense of time abundance. Because when you do big things in your time, like when you have the time to read the Odyssey, it becomes very challenging to tell yourself the story. I have no time whatsoever. I am starved for time. I have no time for anything. Well, you have time to read the Odyssey, so clearly that is not true. It only took 10 minutes a day to read the Odyssey over a long enough period of time. But you don't have to tell your brain that. You can just change the story through showing yourself through evidence that I have done big things. And so then, uh, I can do more big things should I choose to.

Speaker A: Well, and it allows you to tackle these big projects, so to speak, in the midst of consistent, ordinary Tuesdays, you know, because so much of life is these ordinary work days and you've Got research about making those better without changing jobs. You build it on meaning like this, like meaning, belonging, autonomy. And I know I've experienced that the belonging one is very helpful. You know, go make a friend at work. I mean you had participants that were uh, that found that this was genuinely awkward. And I thought, why is that so much harder than take a break? As productivity advice, I had a couple

Speaker B: hundred people try out certain things to do during their workday to change the experience of how we feel about our time at ah, work. And it was, you know, one of them was to spend one more hour a week on the work you enjoy most. And one of them was to spend 15 minutes deepening a work friendship and the other was to take two intentional breaks a day. But the deepening a work friendship is true. It did bring up some issues of people's social awkwardness. And you know, like, honestly like sometimes you have to be coached on like, well, if you've convinced a colleague to hang out with you, what do you talk about? I'm like, well, I'm not sure that should be that challenging, but I guess it is, uh, you know, for sometimes. So somebody had the suggestion of like, well, okay, get them to hang out with you on a Monday and then you ask how their weekend was and like, what they, what's one thing they did over the weekend. You're like, oh, okay, I could do that. That's like practical. And then of course if the colleague has the social skill skills of like a first grader, they will. And then turn you ask you how your weekend was and if you are following my advice, hopefully you have at least one interesting thing you did over the weekend so you can talk about that. And then between these two stories now we have something we can try to come up with commonalities or to talk about, you know, like baby steps. Baby steps, yeah.

Speaker A: One of the things that I found is that again, building in that consistency and that anticipation because you've said anticipating a 10 minute coffee break makes people feel better for hours just anticipating it. And I found that same thing to be true with. It happens to be the same group of guys which I know I am privileged and uniquely blessed with. I will, I will call it that, that I have college friends that every Thursday night mostly we hang out. And, and then for the last six, seven months now, we've been doing trivia on the first Thursday, which we were lucky that that fell on the night we already hung out first Thursday of every month at a local brewery. And we've won a number of times gotten a bunch of free pizzas out of it. So that's been awesome. But it's just funny how all day on a Thursday, when I know I'm going to hang out with them, and especially so on a trivia night, I am just in a much better mood and my time is better spent.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, you want to make sure you're done with whatever you're doing. So you get to trivia night. You're definitely not going to miss that. And it doesn't much. Like two hours in the course of one week completely changes how you feel about your time. Like you have this thing on Thursday you are looking forward to. And so we can do this with all kinds of things. Even at work, you know, if there's a project you're really excited about, like you'll look forward to that. You're doing it at 3:00pm, you're like, oh, the day is good because at 3:00pm I have this, I'm looking forward to it. Coffee with a colleague or you know, something exciting you're doing on the weekend. We always want to have something that we are looking forward to because that keeps us, us excited about the experience of time.

Speaker A: Well, and to put this into something practical people can apply. You talk about weekday evenings being, or our weekday evenings being our golden hours and you've got this woman, Rebecca, who starts getting home 15 minutes earlier. She's got the same traffic, she's got the same workload. None of that's changed. But her whole evening transforms from being 15 minutes earlier. And if 15 minutes can do that, how much more of a, uh, I have no time at night is really just a perception problem.

Speaker B: I think it is totally a perception problem. Rebecca had written me about this bizarre mindset shift she had had that she switches jobs and you know, she's still in the same traffic. So she had been getting home sort of 6:30 stressed about it. Now she was getting home at 6:15 feeling more relaxed. Part of it was that, you know, her, her new job, like the team was made a point of wrapping up by 5 o'. Clock. So everyone's out in the parking lot at 5:15. And her hour long commute gets her home relatively relaxed. Whereas in the earlier job she was working right up until 5:30 and then kind of raced out at that and some people were still there. So she felt a little bad about it. Our home getting home 15 minutes earlier is not changing anything. We were trying to figure it out. Like, okay, if you're home at 6:30, is it because you feel like it rounds to 7 and so now the evening is gone, whereas 6, 15 rounds to 6 and so the evening is not gone. It's so ridiculous, right? It was totally 100% a mindset shift that she was starting to see the evenings as a time that was available to her as opposed to being just the afterthought where she was stressed and spent and was just the leftovers too little to do anything with. Now she was feeling like, oh, I have a whole evening. And so she was thinking about what she wanted to do with it and she was, you know, spending time sitting outside watching her dogs relax. And I think that's an option that is available to a lot of us. Even if you are stressed at work, even if you are getting home later than you would like, you can appreciate whatever time is there because it uh, often is a fair amount. Most people are done with work and work related responsibilities by 6pm Many people don't go to bed until sometime between 10 and 11pm so we're talking four to five hours in the evening. And yes, there are things you have to do. Obviously some people have long commutes. We have kids or other relatives we need to take care of, housework that needs to be done. But in general those things are not consuming the entire four to five hours of the evening. There is some space. And so I'm challenging people. Just put in 30 minutes of something that you would like, choose ahead of time what it is you'd like to do, think about where it can happen, make it happen, enjoy it while it's happening, reflect on it afterwards. And this time after work will start to feel more golden. These are your golden hours as opposed to this forgettable time that's just the scraps after, after everything else is dealt with.

Speaker A: Now you say kind of to piggyback off of this, you say to take one night for you. And funny enough, uh, again I'm describing what I already described for me was attach it to other people. Like you say a standing quartet rehearsal. So you can't bail, you know. So I've got my trivia night or my other Thursdays that are like that. And yeah, uh, I just think. And my wife for example, she's got Tuesday nights. So Tuesdays and Thursdays we flip. And now here's the thing.

Speaker B: Thing.

Speaker A: Totally understand for some people this is not going to be as easy. Our kids are mostly grown or very up, very much up in the ages. So they don't need, they have a lot of autonomy. They don't need a lot of hands on, constant supervision, although debatable with some of them. But anyway, so point being, I just think it's funny that we, we almost feel like we need to attach an obligation or accountability or something to fun to make it actually happen when we're adults.

Speaker B: Yeah, no, I'm a big fan of taking one night for you. And the swap you describe is actually the perfect idea for anyone who is in a, uh, two parent family with kids. You know, you would definitely. People could feel resentful if one party is getting to go to a night out with friends every Thursday and trivia and the other doesn't get anything like that, that's when you have the resentment. But if both of you get a night off that you can count on, like, you know, you cover Tuesdays, she covers Thursdays. You both get to do what you want. You're not having to for it. You're not negotiating every week, you're not apologizing for leaving on Thursday. It's just the expectation. Now obviously not all families work like that, but you know, you could do that swap with any other adult in your life. Right? You know, you and a neighbor could, could trade off. One of you gets Tuesday nights, one of you gets Thursday nights or a relative or anything like that. But, but uh, protecting some time that you know is going to be fun for something that is for you, that is not work, is not caring for family members, is not housework. It can change the entire experience of time and by making a commitment, it happens. Whereas if you're like, yeah, yeah, I want more me time, I'm going to read more. Well, you know that, that can fit around anything. And so it's going to be harder to sort of claim the time for it.

Speaker A: Now you say something that I think could be perceived as a little heretical for the productivity world. Everyone else says learn to say no and no is a complete sentence. I've heard so many people say. You've got a whole chapter telling people to say yes more. And honestly that sits in real tension. I think possibly with your own advice to set rules and plan tightly. So how do you hold those two things together? Where's the line between staying open and just over committing?

Speaker B: I think we want to say yes to the uh, right things. And the problem though is most stuff is less clear. Like people like, would you like a million dollars? Well, yes, yes I would. But many times, you know, opportunities, new adventures, new relationships come out of saying yes to something that we're not sure how it's going to work out. Because if we knew, we'd already be doing it, right? Like, you would have already made this happen in your life if you knew how it was going to turn out. And so you have to be open to these serendipitous new things that could lead to something exciting. Which means that you do need to occasionally say yes. Because boundaries and saying no, uh, these are walls. And walls are good because walls keep out bad things, but walls also keep out good things that don't have an explicit invitation. And a lot of the awesome stuff that we want to do in life is not going to come to you with an explicit invitation. It's going to happen because you have a conversation with somebody and then he decides to introduce you to someone else and you have a conversation with that. But you never would have even agreed to the first conversation if you had been like, yeah, I got to say no more often. I got to say no to everything. I'm too busy. I have to block this all off. So how do we get to this? Well, do you want to get rid of things that you don't want to do? I mean, as much as possible, we need to clear our lives of the things that feel like schedule clutter. And that's not saying no to new things. That's saying no to stuff you're already doing. Right. And that's harder. But I think it is worth it. Over the next six to 12 months or so, you could probably get rid of a lot because it's that feeling of spaciousness, that feeling of like, I could take on new things that I don't have. A packed schedule is when you say yes to that conversation, that leads to the second conversation that leads to actually something happening. And then, uh, just in terms of evaluating what you want to say yes to and say no to in general, I want people to say no more often to the things that you are trying to talk yourself into so you are not immediately excited. But then you start rationalizing it like, oh, well, you know, I've worked with Joe for a while. It would look good on my resume. You know, this would be the next step if I ever wanted to do X someday. And that's when you probably want to say no because you're not excited, right? You're just rationalizing at this point, this is like a 5 or a 6 on a 10 point scale. So, you know, now maybe that's something to pass on. Where you want to think about saying yes is when you're trying to talk yourself out of it. So that means you are excited like you're intrigued. You're like, ooh, that could be something. But I'm so busy. I'd have to call in a favor from a colleague. I'd have to call in a favor from my spouse. It's hard to travel when the kids are little. Uh, there's all these things. We're talking ourselves out of it, though. That's probably when you want to say yes, because all those things, you're talking yourself out of it. You know, it's logistics. You can figure out logistics.

Speaker A: Well, it means that you're not really fully committed and that that's okay. I mean, again, there's certainty is something that we think we have to have more often than we actually have it. But experimenting and being open is. Is completely different. And again, that's where the sometimes messy but sometimes serendipity awesome discoveredness happens.

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Speaker A: So in, um, the book, you talk about 8,760 hours a year. And you somewhat take on Oliver Berkman pretty directly from his book and you know, in his 4,000 weeks and saying basically, you know, you only get about 4,000 weeks is what he says, so make him count. Yours is kind of the opposite where you say like a lot of not last days. So is this a genuine disagreement with him or the two of you just answering different questions, him about meaning and you about like the texture of daily life?

Speaker B: I think we're all getting at the same thing. I mean, that time is the building block of our lives. And obviously you don't get an infinite amount, so you want to make what you have count. But we can plan for the future. We should assume that tomorrow is not our last day. Because if you assume that life could end tomorrow, you're not going to do things that build toward long term things, which is what you do want to do. And I know Oliver is very big into building for the future as well. I think we can make reasonable plans for much of the next year and we can assume that we will probably make it through the next year. Like, yeah, you might not, but the odds are pretty good. Like it's pretty good. Like I'm probably going to be here in a year now. I could get struck by lightning walking outside the door, but the odds are good that I won't. And so because of that, I can start to look forward a year and ask, you know, what do I want my next 8760 hours to look like? And the thing is, even with time being sort of of overall scarce in the sense that it's limited in the way we experience daily life. It is just vast, right? Like, even things that we think of as big in the doing are small in the overall context of each year having 8,760 hours. I mean, I feel, I see people talk themselves into all sorts of knots about doing something like taking a two hour pottery class on Tuesday nights or something. And you know, even if, let's say it runs for 15 weeks. Weeks, let's say you do it twice a year, spring and fall. Let's say it takes, you know, an hour around it to, you know, get there and get back. So we were talking 45 hours in the spring, 45 hours in the fall, that's 90 hours. Well, there are 8,760 hours in a year. Like so even this thing that feels so big, like, you know, three hours on a Tuesday, we're talking like 1% of your entire year. We're talking, you know, maybe 2% of your waking non working hours. Like it's still, uh, a very, very small chunk of time when look at the overall big picture, when we zoom out and look at big time. So I think, you know, we want to view time from that perspective. Yes, time is limited, but time in the experiencing it is quite vast. And when we have that zoomed out perspective, I think we can start to make choices that allow us to put more things in our lives and not fall prey to this idea that, oh, uh, I'll never get to, you know, the things that I want to get to.

Speaker A: Well, speaking of the experiencing of time, the last chapter on patience is, I think, the most personal. In the book, you write about a brutal year of chronic back and nerve pain and you land on this line, the key change was time. And that's a hard thing for a productivity author to admit that sometimes the answer isn't a system, it's waiting. Was that hard to write?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, I don't like to wait. I'm sure you don't like to wait either. And I don't like to know that, you know, I could do all the right things, right? I'm eating my vegetables and yet I'm still going to be in pain in another two weeks. Like, you know, it just. You don't like this, that there's nothing you can do about it but wait. But that was in fact the reality. Like, I just had to sort of slowly put myself back together. And the good news is that, you know, I did get better. And I was hopeful that I would, and I did. And that's what I'm encouraging people to think. Obviously there's something for all of us that we won't get better for. I mean, we do only have 4,000 weeks, as Oliver puts it, so there is something that we won't recover from. But a great many things you can, right? And a great many things with time can become better. And so I like this idea of active patience. You do what you can. So obviously you want to do all the exercises, all the stretching, all the healthy living, getting your sleep, doing what your doctor tells you to. And then you also let time do its job. And time working with you will lead to things that you can't do on your own. I, uh, mean, I was powerless to, you know, stop my chronic pain within, you know, a week or two. But over the course of six months, time and me working together got to a much better place. Over the course of 12 months, I was pretty much back to you know, feeling better than I had before. So, you know, patience is hard. It is certainly not my favorite virtue. There are other virtues I like much better, but, you know, if we have to go with patience, I guess we will.

Speaker A: Yeah. I love that you, you frame it as active, that it's you and time actively working as a team. For somebody who is in a hard middle that's listening right now of something, not looking back on it yet, how would you say they can actually practice that without tipping into, like, denial?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, yeah, you don't want to do denial. I think you can, you know, have the idea of I am holding the ultimate outcome in my mind, that I have faith that the ultimate outcome will be positive. You know, if you're trying to meet somebody special, like, you know, you can see yourself dancing at your wedding, you know, you're trying to find a job. You see yourself solving interesting problems with clever colleagues and getting paid well for your efforts, uh, you can see this ultimate outcome. And then you can also decide that you're going to hold the timeline lightly, that you are not going to expect that it's going to happen in a week, probably not in a month, but you can decide, you know, a long enough period of time, you could probably have a pretty good sense that it will happen. And then, you know, you do what you can. You'll send out your resumes, you do your informational interviews and decide the amount of time you're putting into it and then sort of relax the rest of the time. Like, I'm going to spend four hours a day on this, and then I'm going to, you know, go to the gym, I'm going to volunteer places, I'm going to have fun, going to see friends, knowing that time is putting in its effort as well. And the two of you together are going to lead to something that's going to be awesome together. You could even try writing this story and reframing any setbacks you are experiencing as, like, plot twists. Nobody wants to watch a movie where the hero just has awesome things happen to him the entire time. Like, that's pretty boring. Like, he has to face obstacles in the course of this. And each of the obstacles, it's some sort of outcome from that that leads to the next thing that ultimately gets him to the triumph. So, you know, you're trying to meet someone special and you, you have this terrible blind date. You're like trying to extricate yourself from the restaurant. You could sort of write that story like I was sitting there in the restaurant. Trying to get out of there. But then that's when I was home afterwards thinking about it. That's when I reached out to 10 of my friends and just asked them to set me up with people. And I had three great dates come out of that. Right. Uh, that's the kind of thing you could write as a story. And I'm not saying it's gonna come true exactly that way, but that is sort of how a movie plot works.

Speaker A: Ah.

Speaker B: And so you can write that story for yourself as well.

Speaker A: Yeah, Yeah, I love that. Makes me think of Donald Miller and all of the storytelling stuff that he talks about when, you know, uh, basically drawing life lessons from script writing, so to speak. So. And it ties into the perception thing as well, when you are kind of actively interacting with the timeline in a way. So I want to come back to something that runs underneath the entire show. The premise here has always been that productivity is supposed to give you a life, not the other way around. And your book genuinely means that. That the payoff is swimming with sharks or singing Bach or watching the sunset from the porch. Not necessarily more output. But my real worry is the. You can fit more in, can slide into an optimization culture awful fast. So. So how do you keep abundance from quietly turning into just doing more?

Speaker B: Well, I think you just constantly have to be asking yourself, is this what I want to be doing? Right. And as you said, there's no point to do stuff just to do stuff. It's that does it bring me joy? And I would argue that in many cases, we can fit in more joy than we are currently doing. You know, if we look at the screen time function on most of our devices, we might see that there's some space, at least for sitting on the porch watching the sunset, should we choose to do so. One of the reasons I decided I could start singing in a choir years ago is that I looked at how I was spending my evenings and I'm like, huh, huh. You know, I got pretty much like five weekday evenings a week of pretty much the same stuff. Right. I could extricate myself from this one night a week and do something else, and nothing big would change. I just feel a lot more purposeful in how I spending my leisure time. So, yeah, I think we. If you keep your eye on mostly putting in things that are meaningful and enjoyable for yourself and the people you care about and not putting anything in that you don't, you will avoid that optimization journey. It's experiment. Like you can try stuff and then decide you don't like it. And then you try something else and decide you don't like that. But that leads to a third thing that you like much better. If you view it that way, as lots of little projects. And you're not going to achieve this platonic ideal of productivity. You're just trying to live a life that you want to live of.

Speaker A: Let's bring it all the way down to earth here. So somebody's listening to this on a Tuesday night that's already too full to them. What's the single smallest thing they could do tonight to get a taste of what you mean by big time?

Speaker B: Well, if we're already in the evening, I think actively making a little bit of time, even if it's only 10, 15 minutes for something that you would enjoy and that you have chosen, will go a long way intentionally making that date. What's that?

Speaker A: Intentionally?

Speaker B: Yeah, you know, choose an intention for the evening instead of like, I'm so busy. It's like, uh, I'm so busy and I'm going to read this book for 15 minutes before I go to bed. You know, um, I'm so busy and I am going to call a friend for 15 minutes before I go to bed. I think that will start to change how you feel about time in general. And then maybe some other night this week you could find 30 minutes to do something that is enjoyable for you. And once you're regularly finding 30 minutes, that changes how we feel about time. As we've mentioned earlier in the show, like, it doesn't take a big thing to completely change how you feel about. You know, you go have the 10 minute coffee break in the afternoon with somebody you enjoy chatting with. The entire day feels different. And it's the same if you know you're reading that great book for 30 minutes before bed or doing a puzzle for 20 minutes in the evening. The day feels entirely different and more like it's this rich tapestry of cool stuff as opposed to all things that were just shoved upon you.

Speaker A: Well, Laura, the book is called Big Time, A Simple Path to Time Abundance. And I would like to know, where should people go to find the book and the rest of your work?

Speaker B: Well, uh, you can buy Big time wherever books are sold, but if you want to learn more about it and my other work, you can come to lauravanderkam.com it's my website. And you can read my blog posts there, find out about my newsletters, my podcasts, all that good stuff.

Speaker A: Time well spent.

Speaker B: I don't want to waste anyone's time.

Speaker A: Yes, Laura, again, as usual. I mean, you've been here since the beginning. It's been over, what, like 13 years now. Every one to two years you're back. I am glad to have you back again and looking forward to having you back again in the future. Thanks for being here.

Speaker B: Thanks so much. Yeah, uh, thank you for having me.

Speaker A: Well, that's another podcast crossed off your Podcast Listening to Do list. I keep coming back to that image Laura used being handed a winning lottery ticket that you never bought. It's a strange way to think about a Tuesday, but it sticks with you. So does the chronic pain Chapter A Productivity Author admitting flat out that sometimes the answer isn't a better system. It's just time. And that's not a small thing to put in a book like this. If you found something useful from this episode that you need to share, don't hesitate. Do it right now. Especially if you know someone who ends most days feeling like the whole evening just vanished. No idea where it went, nothing to show for it. Send them this episode. It might be exactly the reframe they need. So hit that share button in your podcast player app of choice or go to the Show Notes at Beyond the To Do List. Thanks again for sharing. Thanks for listening and I'll see you next episode. This episode sponsored by Mood okay, this is actually genius. Are you ever overwhelmed with choices at the dispensary? What if I told you that you could shop cannabis by the exact mood you want tonight? With Mood, you don't shop by strain names or confusion. You shop by how you want to feel. Want to relax after work, sleep better, feel more creative, or be more social. Mood makes it simple. Pick the Feeling and Mood recommends products to match. Mood has gummies, flour, pre rolls and edibles designed around your Mood. I tried Mood's Sleepy Gummies and within an hour I felt calm, settled and ready for bed. No dispensary run, no second guessing, just a smooth, relaxing experience delivered to my door. It's federally legal, third party tested and backed by a 100 day satisfaction guarantee. Go to Mood M M O O D.com that's M M-O O D.com however you want to feel tonight. Mood helps you get there.

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