Reclaiming Your Time: A Guide to Owning Your Life

In the latest episode of Before Breakfast, host Laura Vanderkam addresses a pervasive challenge faced by many: the feeling that one’s time does not truly belong to them. While external responsibilities to employers, families, and organizations are inevitable, Vanderkam argues that fundamentally, "your time is your own," and the power to curate your life lies within your choices.

The Illusion of External Ownership

Many people live with a "vague sense of obligation" that permeates every aspect of their daily routine. Whether it is the pressure to maintain a perfectly clean home, the feeling that time spent with children is a loan rather than an investment, or the burden of overdue volunteer tasks, it is easy to feel as though "everybody else has a claim on your time." Vanderkam highlights a sobering observation: when people express a desire to "make over her schedule," it often reveals an underlying belief that they have lost agency over their own existence.

Strategies for Reclaiming Agency

To shift this mindset, Vanderkam suggests several practical approaches:

1. Track Your Time

Tracking your time is the first step toward reclaiming it. By auditing where your hours go, you can identify pockets of time that are "more obviously reclaimed as yours." For instance, if you limit housework in the evening or utilize the gap between your children leaving for school and your work calls starting, you can carve out meaningful segments for yourself.

2. Align Actions with Values and Priorities

When obligations feel overwhelming, it is essential to "articulate your values and priorities." If your commitments do not align with these core values, adjustments are necessary. However, if they do align, the solution is to reframe your perspective. Instead of viewing hard work as "owing time to your employer," view it as a way to have an "impact on your field." Similarly, maintaining a home should not be about meeting external societal standards, but rather ensuring your environment is "smooth" and "functioning" for your family's benefit.

3. Infuse Pleasure into Obligations

Even when responsibilities are unavoidable, you can maintain a sense of ownership. Vanderkam suggests finding ways to "insert some pleasure into moments of less pleasant obligation." By listening to music or audiobooks while performing tasks like driving children to soccer, you ensure that "at least some of that time can still feel like it is yours."

Conclusion

Ultimately, while we all have responsibilities that carry consequences, the long-term power to "fill our lives with the things we want to see there" remains in our hands. By intentionally connecting our time to our purpose and shifting our mindset, we can stop feeling like our time is borrowed and start living as if it truly belongs to us.