Laura Vanderkam How to gain control of your free time
When people find out I write about time management, they assume two things.
One is that I'm always on time, and I'm not. I have four small children,
and I would like to blame them for my occasional tardiness, but sometimes
it's just not their fault. I was once late to my own speech on time management.
We all had to just take a moment together and savor that irony. The second
thing they assume is that I have lots of tips and tricks for saving bits of
time here and there. Sometimes I'll hear from magazines that are doing a story
along these lines, generally on how to help their readers find an extra hour
in the day. And the idea is that we'll shave bits of time off everyday activites,
add it up, and we'll have time for the good stuff. I question the entire premise
of this piece, but I'm alwasy interested in hearing what they've come up with
before they call me. Some of my favorites: doing errands where you only have
to make right-hand turns -- Being extremely judicious in microwave usage: it
says three to three-and-a-half minutes on the package, we're totally getting
in on the bottom side of that. And my personal favorite, which makes sense on
some level, is to DVR your favorite shows so you can fast-forward through the
commercials. That way, you save eight minutes every half hour, so in the course
of two hours of watching TV, you find 32 minutes to exercise. Which is true.
You know another way to find 32 minutes to exercise? Don't watch two hours of
TV a day, right? Anyway, the idea is we'll save bits of time here and there,
add it up, we will finally get to everything we want to do. But after studying
how successful people spend their time and looking at their schedules hour by
hour, I think this idea has it completely backward. We don't build the lives
we want by saving time. We build the lives we want, and then time saves itself.
Here's what I mean. I recently did a time diary project looking at 1,001 days
in the lives of extremely busy women. They had demanding jobs, sometimes their
own businesses, kids to care for, maybe parents to care for, community
commitments -- busy, busy people. I had them keep track of their time for
a week so I could add up how much they worked and slept, and I interviewed
them about their strategies, for my book. One of the women whose time log I
studied she goes out on a Wednesday night for something. She comes home to
find that her water heater has broken, and there is now water all over her
basement. If you've ever had anything like this happen to you, you know it
is a hugely damaging, frightening, sopping mess. So she's dealing with the
immediate aftermath that night, next day she's got plumbers coming in, day
after that, professional cleaning crew dealing with the ruined carpet. All
this is being recorded on her time log. Winds up taking seven hours of her week.
Seven hours. That's like finding an extra hour in the day. But I'm sure if you
had asked her at the start of the week, "Could you find seven hours to train for
a triathlon?" "Could you find seven hours to mentor seven worthy people?" I'm
sure she would've said what most of us would've said, which is, "No -- can't you
see how busy I am?" Yet when she had to find seven hours because there is water
all over her basement, she found seven hours. And what this shows us is that time
is highly elastic. We cannot make more time, but time will stretch to accommodate
what we choose to put into it. And so the key to time management is treating our
priorities as the equivalent of the broken water heater.