Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio.
Good morning. This is Laura.
Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast.
Today's episode is going to be a longer one, just like we do every Wednesday.
Only, because this episode is first running on New Year's Day, today we are going to do something just a little bit different.
I am going to be sharing my thoughts on the first step to spending your time better.
Lots of people resolve to be better about managing their time and their life in the new year.
I have some thoughts about how to do just that.
I'll also be sharing some news about a challenge that I am running in mid -January that will help you make the most of your time.
My goal is that by the end of listening to today's episode, you will have a plan for getting some data, celebrating what is worth celebrating, and making some changes in your life, if that is what you would like to do.
I am excited to talk about this topic, so thank you for listening.
Alright, well here we go.
So people sometimes say to me, Laura, I would like to spend my time better.
What is the first thing I should be doing?
And I always say, well let's figure out where the time is going now.
Because if you don't know where the time is going now, how do you know if you are changing the right thing?
Maybe something you thought was a problem really isn't.
Maybe something you haven't even considered is taking more time than you've imagined.
We want to make sure that we are working from good data.
Same as any business decision, right?
If you are figuring out where to open a new store, you'd be looking at foot traffic and how neighboring retailers are doing and anything else you could figure out.
You wouldn't just decide, well I think this is a good spot, so here we go.
You want to make sure you're working from good data.
And it is the exact same thing with our time.
We want to figure out where the time really goes.
And the only way to do that is to actually try keeping track of our time.
There are lots of ways to do this.
I track my time on weekly spreadsheets.
I know that makes me sound like a ton of fun, but I'm sure there are a few people listening to this podcast who really enjoy a good spreadsheet, kind of an art form.
It gets even worse.
I've been doing this since April of 2015 tracking my time, but I promise it is not too onerous and you don't have to do it for 10 years.
Just a week would be good.
But I track on weekly spreadsheets with the days of the week across the top, Monday through Sunday, half hour blocks down the left -hand side, 5 a .m.
to 4 .30 a .m., so we have 336 cells representing the 168 -hour week.
If you'd like to use one of these spreadsheets yourself, you can just go to my website, lauravandercam .com, and you'll be able to find and download one.
But that's not the only way you can track your time.
Some people use one of dozens of time tracking apps that are on the market these days, or you could even walk around with a little notebook if you want to look all artsy, writing down what you are doing.
The tool itself doesn't actually matter.
What matters is that you do it.
And when I suggest that people track their time for a week, you may or perhaps may not be surprised to hear that I get a little bit of pushback to this idea, like, hmm, Laura, if that is the first thing I should do to spend my time better, what is the second thing I should be doing?
So I have explored this resistance with people over the years, and I think it's a couple of things.
Sometimes people have worked in legal or accounting fields and other places where they have to track their time in six -minute increments, and the experience has left them a little bit traumatized.
But I promise you don't have to do it forever, and it will be helpful to even look at your time outside of work.
You may know exactly where your work time goes in those six -minute increments, but my guess is that you don't know where the other, you know, hundred -some -plus hours of the week happen to go, and that might be useful information for you to figure out.
So even if you have had to bill your time in excruciating detail for work, just try this for a week.
I promise it will be useful.
Sometimes people tell me, well, I'm too busy to track my time, and I guess that is its own special problem, but I really, really promise it is not that difficult.
I would not have stuck with this for almost 10 years now if I found it challenging.
What I tend to do is just check in three times a day, write down what I've done since the last time I checked in, and it's fine to use broad strokes, or even if you forget sometimes, you just approximate and keep going on.
Three minutes a day to do this is the exact same amount of time that I spend brushing my teeth.
That is an activity that I have yet to declare myself too busy to do.
But I think that the most common reason that people resist tracking time, it's the exact same thing.
If anyone has ever resolved to lose weight or to eat more healthfully, you know that a nutritionist will tell you to keep a food journal.
And that is because it works.
Like there is pretty good evidence, studies, and peer -reviewed journals finding that people who write down what they eat lose significantly more weight than people who do not.
So you think we'd be all over that.
But the truth is that we often don't want to know.
We don't want to know that we grabbed six chocolate chip cookies from the kitchen next to our home office over the course of a day, which is purely a hypothetical example.
And it is the same thing with time.
We don't want to know how much time we are wasting.
So let's get this out of the way right now.
We all waste time. Everybody wastes time.
I waste tons of time.
No one spends all their time on things that are meaningful or enjoyable for themselves or the people they care about.
Figuring out where the time really goes is not about making sure that we're not wasting time here or there.
Like, oh, you think you were so busy and I saw you watch Netflix.
It's not about playing gotcha.
It is about making sure that we are not telling ourselves stories about our lives that aren't actually true.
And when it comes to time, we have all sorts of stories we tell ourselves, not all of which are 100 % accurate.
So we're going to take a quick ad break, and then I'm going to come back and talk a little bit more about what people find when they actually track their time.
Well, I am back. This is Laura, and this is a longer episode of Before Breakfast as we run every Wednesday these days.
But instead of bringing you a guest this week because it is New Year's Day and decided to do something a little bit different, talking about the first step to spending our time better, which is figuring out where the time really goes.
So before the break, I mentioned that keeping track of our time is not about figuring out how much time we are wasting, because all of us waste time.
It's about making sure we are not telling ourselves stories about our lives that aren't actually true.
When it comes to time, we have all sorts of these stories.
I've seen many of these over the years, as I've explored thousands of people's time logs.
One of the most common stories we tell ourselves that may not be 100 % accurate is how many hours people are working.
Now, to be clear, I know everybody is working hard.
Everybody is working long.
But we also live in a competitive world.
And so often there is a tendency to try to one -up each other over just how many hours we happen to be working.
Perhaps you have heard some of these scintillating conversations over the years, as people are comparing how many hours they happen to be working, like, oh, I worked 60 hours last week.
Ooh, 60. I wish I worked 60.
I worked 70. Ooh, 70 is my light season.
And so on it goes. I once met a young man at a party who told me he was working 180 hours a week at his startup.
Now, that is pretty impressive if you actually multiply 24 times 7.
There was once a study comparing people's estimated work weeks with time diaries and found that people who were claiming 75 -plus -hour work weeks were off by about 25 hours.
And you can guess in which direction they were off.
Now, I find this all a little funny, although it's also a little tragic at times, too, because I'm sure there are jobs that people have not taken because everyone says, oh, it's an 80 -hour a week job.
Now, if you knew it was actually a 55 - to 60 -hour a week job, maybe people would consider things differently.
But even though I laugh about it, I know I am guilty of this, too.
So, many years ago, I used to talk about my 50 -hour work weeks.
And that is because I had tracked my time here and there various points over the years when I was writing my books or in solidarity with other people as they were tracking their time, and I usually worked about 50 hours a week.
But then I started tracking my time continuously in April of 2015.
And I realized something quite quickly, which is that in the past, I had chosen very specific weeks to track, namely weeks when I was working 50 hours a week, because I wanted to see myself as the kind of person who was working 50 hours a week.
When I tracked all my time, all my weeks, I saw that it was just as likely that I might have a short week.
I was off for some reason.
There was a vacation day.
Somebody was sick and I was dealing with it.
There was something that had to happen during the workday.
So, many weeks were shorter, which means that the long -term average was a lot closer to 40.
I now know over 10 years or so that my average is pretty solidly between 35 and 40 when I look at all 52 weeks of the year.
I think if I subtracted three or four vacation weeks, it would be a little closer to 40, but it is not 50.
And here I write and speak about time management.
And there were 10 hours going somewhere completely different than I thought there was.
And again, this is not about playing gotcha.
Ooh, you thought you worked 50 hours a week and you were working 38.
It's that when we are trying to decide how to spend our work weeks, if we don't know what a work week truly looks like, we're just guessing with how much time we assign to different things.
How much time should you spend on administration?
How much time should you spend on the stuff of your job or on drumming up new work or on mentoring younger colleagues or anything like that?
I don't know what the answer is.
But if you don't know the denominator for your work week, it's pretty hard to make rational choices of what the numerator should be of these different proportions of things that we are assigning to different tasks.
We want to make sure that we are working from good data.
Incidentally, people do this in the opposite direction with free time.
People will tell you, I have absolutely no free time whatsoever.
And you can be having this conversation at a party.
It's like, okay, maybe just a tiny amount of free time.
But what people mean when they say, I have no free time whatsoever, is that they don't have as much free time as they want.
Now, that is a true story.
Absolutely. We don't have as much free time as we want, but not as much as I want.
That is a very, very different story from none.
Not as much as I want implies some very good questions right there.
Like, how could I scale this up over time?
How could I make good choices within the limited leisure time I do have so I feel most rejuvenated?
Whereas none is just defeatist.
Everyone has some amount of discretionary time, even if it isn't much.
And sometimes people get a little bit funny about this.
One of my favorite examples of this is someone who wrote in to Real Simple many years ago.
Real Simple magazine asked their time -starved readers to tell what they would do if they had an extra 15 minutes in the day.
And someone wrote in that 15 minutes of uninterrupted writing time would be a priceless gift.
Which, of course, left me wondering how she found 15 minutes to write Real Simple with this elusive dream of hers, right?
We have some amount of leisure time, but it's probably not as much as I want, and that's fine.
But when we track our time and see how much time we do have, we can make good choices with this limited time.
We're going to take one more quick break, and then I'll be back talking a little bit more about how we can track our time.
Well, I am back. This is Laura.
This is one of the longer episodes of Before Breakfast, as we run every Wednesday.
But today, since it is New Year's Day, instead of bringing you a guest, I'm talking a little bit about one of the best ways to spend your time better in the new year.
And that is to figure out where the time really goes.
We're going to try tracking our time for a week.
In the last segment, I talked about all the stories that people tell themselves about their time that may not be entirely true.
We want to make sure we are working from good data.
So it's not about playing gotcha.
It's about making sure that we really know what our lives look like.
I think the truth sets us free.
So if you decide to do this, and I really hope you will, that is tracking your time for a week, it's pretty simple.
You can just write down what you're doing, as often as you remember, in as much detail as you think will be helpful.
You try to keep going for a week, and then at the end, you can add it up if you would like.
How much time do you spend on the major categories?
How much time do you spend working, sleeping, in the car, hanging out with family members, watching television, reading, exercising, volunteering, doing housework, errands, all the things you happen to do.
If you'd like, you can make really cool pie charts of all this, but I promise you don't actually have to make pie charts for it to look decent.
But anyway, keep going for a week and see what you think.
I really hope you will try this, and if you would like a little bit of accountability, then you might consider participating in my annual time tracking challenge.
Every January, thousands of people usually track their time together for a week.
This year, the challenge will be running from Monday, January 13th, to Monday, January 20th.
You can sign up to get a time tracking spreadsheet and daily emails from me at my website, LauraVanderKam .com.
Just go right to the homepage, and there will be a big box where you can sign up.
You will also be able to read my time logs by following along on my blog that week.
Each day, I will post how I am spending my time.
And you can read it and comment and see what you think.
Now, of course, if you'd like to track your time before January 13th to January 20th, you are welcome to do that.
You could certainly track the week starting Monday, January 6th, and then you will be a real pro by the time January 13th rolls about.
I can tell you from doing this for 10 years now that it absolutely does get a lot easier over time.
Many people are not used to describing time in words, and so the first few days are a little bit rough.
But that's why it might be helpful to be getting those reminder emails from me.
I will have lots of tips, and I'll also be reminding you to check in.
You might want to set an alarm a couple times a day so that you know to go back to your spreadsheet.
It can be a little bit challenging on the weekends.
I definitely suggest people track their time on the weekends, because weekends are real days, too, and this time really counts.
But, of course, you might not be with your spreadsheet all the time on the weekend.
I often just jot down notes somewhere or email parts of my time log to myself, just notes on what I was spending my time doing, and then I can reconstruct it after the fact.
It absolutely does not need to be perfect.
If you forget what you are doing for a while, it's okay.
You can just approximate it later.
It is far better to keep going for a week than to only have a day or two because you are obsessed with it being perfect.
I really hope you will try it.
After you do, after the week, you add up the questions, you know, the categories, how much time did I spend on all these different things, and then you can ask yourself a few questions about your time.
First, what do I like most about my schedule?
It is your life. Hopefully something is going really, really well.
Maybe you have a regular date night with your spouse.
Maybe you love your early morning exercise routine where you listen to before breakfast.
Maybe you have good systems for checking in with your direct reports and meeting with them regularly and making sure that nothing goes off the rails.
We should celebrate whatever is working well in your life.
Then you can ask the second question, what do I want to spend more time doing?
And then the third question, what do I want to spend less time doing?
What do I want to get off my plate as I look at my schedule?
People often have lots of thoughts about that, things we want to spend less time doing, whether it is emptying the dishwasher, even though you will probably see it only takes five minutes each time, or driving around in the car.
Maybe there would be ways to shave off a trip here or two in the course of the week.
You know, I think we spend a lot of time thinking about that, and both questions are important, but the first is probably more important.
Even the best, you know, email management system for spending less time cleaning out our inboxes in the world won't suddenly give you an amazing life.
We don't want to just build our lives by spending less time on the bad stuff.
We want to figure out what the good stuff is and then put that in first.
My experience is that when you put the good stuff in first, that will naturally make the less fun stuff just take less time.
And I am a big fan of that.
So today's tip has been to track your time for a week.
If you want to figure out where the time really goes, that will help you spend your time better because you will be working from good data.
And you can make rational choices instead of simply assuming that you must be spending your time a certain way based on how you feel or even based on how you spent today.
Because today is not the only day in your life.
We tend to live our lives in weeks.
And so we want to track an entire week to see where the time really goes.
So today we have been talking about time tracking and why it is so important and why it is the first step to spending our time better.
It's really not that hard.
And here's the thing, you know, you don't have to do it for 10 years like I've been doing, but the fact that I have been doing it for 10 years now is actually kind of cool in its own right.
Because having a complete time log for a week really helps cement your memories of that week.
If you track your time from January 13 to 20 or any other week, you will remember what happened during that week.
When you look at your time log in the future, some random date in the future, you want to pull up January 13 of the year, you can see what you were doing.
What did life look like?
I mean, maybe you'll have particular memories of what you did with your family or things that were going on with work.
And that can be really cool.
These days, I can call back up a week from, say, seven years ago and see what I was doing with every half hour.
Now, of course, I know full well that the rest of the world does not care at all what I was doing with a half hour on January 6, 2017 at 2 .30 p .m.
But I guess I could look it up and I could tell you.
It's just a complete sort of memory keeping that is turning priceless the longer I keep doing it.
But anyway, no one is saying you have to track your time for 10 years.
Just do it for a week.
I promise you will learn something.
I've seen thousands of people doing this now, and everyone finds at least something they might want to tweak a little.
I promise it will be helpful.
Because when you know where the time is going now, you can make wise choices about how to spend your time in the future.
So thank you for listening to this longer episode, even though it has just been me.
We'll be back with guests soon.
But in the meantime, this is Laura.
Thanks for listening.
And here's to making the most of our time.
Thanks for listening to Before Breakfast.
If you've got questions, ideas or feedback, you can reach me at laura, at lauravandercam .com.
Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia.
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