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This is Laura Vanderkam from Before Breakfast.
A good summer morning starts at the sink, and that's where Hello comes in with toothpaste that brightens your routine and brings a little yay to your every day.
Some days you may reach for Hello's anti-plaque and whitening toothpaste where tartar doesn't really stand a chance.
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Find your everyday yay with Hello.
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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 slightly longer one, but instead of interviewing a fascinating guest about how they take their days from great to awesome, I'm going to talk about some ways that I try to take my days from great to awesome and that I hope will be helpful for you as well.
Longtime listeners know that I have spent the past three years working on a book called Big Time A Simple Path to Time Abundance.
That book is on sale this week.
If you enjoy the tips on this show, I hope you will consider picking up a copy.
And to pique your interest, I thought I'd share what I have learned about time while writing the book and some of the practices from the book that I've adopted that I think help make my life better.
First, just so people know where I am coming from.
My life sometimes bears a bit of a to a circus, though I have learned to embrace that for reasons we'll talk about soon.
I have five kids ranging from ages six to 18, and four of whom are still living at home.
My husband and I both work and both travel for work.
We have all the usual complement of activities playdates, community events During the week.
I'm recording this episode.
For instance, my Tuesday afternoon resembled one of those multi-person acrobatic tricks you might see in a circus.
For various reasons, we've needed to move the six-year-old from taking the bus home from school to getting picked up at school.
We have a nanny who helps us after school, so that is fine.
She can usually pick him up.
But then this means she can't drive the other kids places from about three thirty to four pm on weekdays.
So on Tuesdays, my 11 year old son has a pottery class at three forty five that he absolutely loves.
This past Tuesday I was going back and forth with another podcast that wanted to interview me about the schedule and what would work.
They offered me 3 p.m. or 6 p.m.
Now, normally, I would have just grabbed 3 p.m.
After all, it's during the workday.
But then I remembered I would need to drive the 11-year-old.
So I took the 6 p.m.
But of course, then I realized that we had an alto sax lesson that would usually be running from 545 to 630 on Tuesdays and a trombone lesson running from 630 to 7.
The house was not going to be quiet during this window.
The good news, our garage is detached from the house.
That's an upside of an older home, it turns out.
So I made a mini recording studio out there, and it all worked.
But you know, The layers of different contingencies are just sometimes a bit intense.
So I will not claim that my life is some sort of minimalist, simple thing.
It simply can't be.
But that is okay.
A complex life isn't inevitably chaotic.
Turns out that chaos and complexity are not the same thing at all.
Time is big enough for whatever matters to us.
And even amid the complexity, there are all kinds of strategies we can use that can make life feel calm and time feel more spacious.
So in today's episode I'm going to talk about a few of my favorite strategies that I learned while writing big time.
The first is that to run a good circus, you really need to know where the time is going.
Now, I have tracked my time for 11 straight years.
Yes.
I know how I have spent every half hour for the last 11 years of my life.
I promise you, no one else needs to do that.
But I do think it's a good idea to track your time for a week.
A week will give you a fairly good sense of where your time truly goes.
I find that time tracking keeps me accountable and helps to cement memories.
The memory part is especially fun.
I can look back on say, a Monday evening from six years ago and see what I was up to like playing out in the yard with kids who were a lot younger then.
I feel like I have more time because I can see my time quite clearly.
I see how much time is required for the things I have to do and how much time is available for the things I want to do.
But this was just my general belief before writing Big Time and my impression from what other people had told me about tracking their time.
Of course, anecdotes mean nothing on their own.
So for big time, I decided to look more systematically at time tracking.
I had 279 people track their time for a week.
I asked them various questions designed to measure time satisfaction before and after the week they tracked.
What I found is that people's time satisfaction levels rose significantly after they tracked time for 168 hours.
Indeed agreement with the statement generally.
I have enough time for the things I want to do.
Rose 25 in just one week.
Now, I think there are a few reasons for this.
An obvious one is that time tracking inspired better time choices.
People didn't want to document a three-hour YouTube binge on their time logs.
So they chose more fulfilling leisure time activities and thus felt better about their time.
But I don't think it's just that.
Think the deeper reason is that seeing where the time goes helps us rewrite our stories.
Many of us are telling ourselves quite negative stories about our time, like I'm working around the clock, I never sleep, I never see my family, I have no free time whatsoever.
But Even if you work long hours, you probably don't work around the clock.
If you have a bad night, that doesn't mean all seven nights of the week were just as terrible.
You probably do see your family.
Indeed, even people who work long hours are pleasantly surprised at how much family time Makes it onto the time logs.
I'm willing to bet that you also have some free time.
It might not be as much as you want, but it isn't zero either.
Whether it is spent well or not is up to you.
That is the nature of discretionary time.
But for just about everyone, there is at least sometime.
It is there.
When you see all this, you start to see that life is pretty reasonable.
Maybe you want to change some things.
I mean, many of us look at our time logs and want to change a few things.
But we are generally talking tweaks, not a total lifestyle overhaul.
Seeing where the time goes makes us happier with our time.
If you track your time, I think you will find the same thing.
So another idea from big time that I embracing. is that I am the ringmaster of a three ring circus.
When people say my life is a circus, they tend to mean it is chaotic.
But I think this is a slander against circuses.
A circus is incredibly well organized.
All the acts happen when they are supposed to happen.
Tricks are executed with split-second precision.
We should aspire for life to be like a circus.
As I think of myself as the ringmaster, I also like to picture that the circus of my life has three rings career relationships, self.
A good ringmaster knows what is going on in all three rings at all times.
Perhaps a bigger act is currently going on in one than the others, but there are highlights in all three.
And a good ringmaster keeps her eye on all of them.
Now, the best way to keep on top of all of this is to have a designated weekly planning time.
When you look at what is most important in all three rings of the circus and make sure that you have worked out the logistics.
I have always liked my weekly planning ritual, but as my life has grown more complex, I have found that I almost come to crave it.
I look forward to Thursday mornings, which is when I now sit down with my planner and my calendar and think what do I need to do to make progress on my professional goals next week?
What do I need to do to make progress on the goals I have for relationships with friends and family?
What is most important for my own physical, mental, spiritual and emotional health?
I also look at the things that are already on my calendar for the upcoming week, even if they don't rise to the level of being a top priority.
Do I have a plan for dealing with all these things?
This is when I sort out the logistics for something like the Tuesday afternoon with the driving and the podcast recording and the music lesson.
That way, I am not blindsided by any of it.
I am not suddenly remembering on Tuesday that the house will be loud.
I am not racing over to the garage trying to find a good spot because I had looked at my week ahead of time and thought about it.
And so I'd already built in time earlier on Tuesday to scope out the garage and make sure there was something that would work acoustically.
Now there is another part to this circus metaphor that we have talked about here on Before Breakfast before, which is the importance of a net.
I used to think that a net is a net, but as I have interviewed circus performers, I have come to learn that a net has to be exactly where the performers think it should be.
They train themselves. to land properly in the net.
They certainly don't plan to land there during a performance, but the net can't be an afterthought.
And so, as I am trying to make my life feel more calm and time feel more spacious, I spend some time thinking about what I will do if things go wrong.
I build an extra time.
I work ahead.
That way, if something big comes up on a Tuesday and displaces what I plan to do on that Tuesday, there is somewhere to put the spillover.
Everything stays on track and the circus keeps humming along.
There is no need to feel rushed and frantic.
And when you don't feel rushed and frantic, time can feel a lot more abundant.
We're going to take a quick ad break, and then I'll be back with more tips from Big Time.
Hey listeners, today's tip is powered by National University.
As a listener of Before Breakfast, you know my goal is to help you make the most of your day without sacrificing work or family time.
That's why I'm so happy to introduce an institution that shares the same values.
If you are thinking about going back to school, you're probably wondering how to fit it all in.
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Well, I am back talking a few tips from my new book, Big Time, A Simple Path to time abundance.
So a third strategy for making time feel bigger and making time feel more spacious is to actually try to do big things in your time.
Big things are quite doable in small enough steps.
But when you do big things, you feel like the kind of person who has the time to do big things.
And that's a good story to go through life with.
For instance, this year I am listening to all the works of Mozart.
Mozart wrote a lot of music, but he also died fairly young, at age 35.
So it is a finite amount of music.
I have been listening to about 30 to 60 minutes of his music each day, going through his work.
Chronologically based on the list in Wikipedia.
I just have it going on in the background or while I'm driving around in the car.
It's not too much each day.
I can tell you from my time logs, I am definitely in the car for more than 30 minutes a day.
But it doesn't have to be too much each day.
Because days keep passing.
And there are 365 days in a year.
And so I know that if I continue at this pace, I will make it through the entirety of Mozart's catalogue by the end of December.
So it goes for many things in life.
While writing big time.
I interviewed people doing all sorts of projects, like seeing all of America's national parks, walking a pilgrimage route, listening to the entire Bible as an audiobook, learning Latin, and so forth.
These are all very big undertakings.
But if you break any big thing down into small enough steps, then each day it feels about as simple as brushing your teeth.
Most of us don't feel much resistance to that.
Brushing teeth is easy and just takes a tiny bit of time.
So if you want to build anything big into your life, break it down into small enough bits that it feels easy, like it's just a bit of time.
That's how I read War and Peace a few years ago.
This 1,400-plus page epic is big.
There's no other way to describe it.
But it also contains 361 extremely short chapters.
I read one chapter a day, which usually took me five to ten minutes.
Hardly worth commenting on.
But the difference between nothing and just a little more than nothing is cumulatively great.
I finished War and Peace on December 27th, just as the calendar said I would.
When you do something big, it changes the story you tell yourself about your time.
If you have time to read War and Peace, then you can't be starved for time.
You have tons of time. as evidenced by the fact that you read War and Peace.
Of course, it only took a few minutes a day to read, but we don't need to dwell on that.
Instead, we can just enjoy the feeling of big time and what big time makes possible.
So another strategy I am adopting for making time feel more abundant is to embrace the golden hours.
This is truly one of my favorite strategies from big time.
People often talk about the golden years.
That is the time after working when retirees can enjoy family and leisure.
We get a miniature version of this every weekday evening during what I call our golden hours, the time after work and before bed.
This is often the bulk of the leisure time people have during the week.
But these hours are incredibly hard to use well.
People are tired.
We are out of energy and out of sorts.
Still, I think it is possible to make choices that allow us to feel like these hours actually happened.
And when we feel like these hours actually happened, we feel like we have a lot more time in our lives.
The key is to set one small intention each day for something you want to do during your golden hours.
We are talking about 30 minutes here.
Your intention should be something that is not work, and is not housework or the physical care of family members, and is something you would genuinely love look forward to doing.
Now that I am thinking about this, I try to put something on my to-do list each day for my golden hours.
What fun thing would I like to do tonight?
It can truly be just 30 minutes.
Often it's that I like to spend 30 minutes doing a puzzle. or reading a book.
Some people like to sit outside or go for a walk.
Make a special treat for dessert.
Call a friend, do a hobby.
Maybe in fall it's sitting by a fire pit.
Maybe it's looking up at the stars or watching the sunset.
We do what we call toad time in my family, which stands for time outside after dinner.
Everyone is happier outside.
It really doesn't have to be much.
But when I had people try this out for a week as part of writing big time their sense of time satisfaction rose significantly.
Interestingly enough, when people started setting golden hour intentions, they also started getting better sleep.
It turns out that a lot of people stay up late in order to get some me time in their schedules.
But if you build in 30 minutes of me time somewhere else during the evening, you won't need to stay up so late to get it.
And this can make all of time feel better.
I know I have been finding this to be true in my life.
When I sit down and do a puzzle instead of scrolling, I feel like my evening actually happened.
There is something memorable in there or at least more memorable than our electronic hobbies.
And I can go to bed when I need to go to bed.
No need to borrow time. from the next day.
We're going to take one more quick ad break and then I will be back with more tips from Big Time.
Hey listeners, today's tip is powered by National University.
As a listener of Before Breakfast, you know my goal is to help you make the most of your day without sacrificing work or family time.
That's why I'm so happy to introduce an institution that shares the same values.
If you are thinking about going back to school, you're probably wondering how to fit it all in.
National's flexible online formats, four and eight week courses and monthly class starts help you begin your degree sooner, finish faster and do it all on your own schedule.
So you have more options for managing work, family, and school.
With over 150 degrees, credentials and certificates to choose from, They have a program that fits your career goals.
Learn more today at nu.edu.
Hey, listeners, we've all been there.
You're trying to get dinner started or just need 10 minutes of peace to finish a phone call.
You want to give your kids something to do, but you want it to be good content.
That's where Lingo Kids comes in.
It's an app for kids two to eight that focuses on pure interactive joy.
It turns their time into an adventure, where they're exploring and playing in a safe space built just for them.
You get a moment to breathe and they get an experience they're actually excited about.
It's the kind of win-win experience.
Every parent needs.
Lingo Kids.
Everything kids love.
Give your kids the play they love.
Download the Lingo Kids app now on your phone or tablet.
And it's free.
Hey listeners, my mornings are busy.
I need simple routines.
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It's an easy way to get fruits and veggies in first thing without having to think about it.
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These powerful cold pressed fruit and vegetable juices and daily wellness shots prove you don't need a fancy wellness retreat to feel like you took one.
They really have something for everyone.
I like berry lemon gut health in the afternoon or a wellness shot like immunity turmeric pineapple when I'm traveling and need a boost.
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Well, I am back talking tips from my new book, Big Time, A Simple Path to Time Abundance.
The last strategy I want to talk about today that helps make me feel like time is more spacious is to say some judicious yeses.
These yeses can help us be open to serendipity.
So if you read a lot of productivity literature, and trust me, I do.
You know that a key tenet is that we should all say no more often.
And I understand.
Expectations are infinite.
Time is finite.
We are always choosing.
Choose well.
Bonus points if you know which of my books that statement is from.
Many people feel overscheduled in their lives, and I don't want anyone spending time on things that aren't meaningful or enjoyable for ourselves or the people we care about.
But if you think about it, you soon see that almost all new opportunities, adventures and relationships come out of saying no.
Yes.
After all, if you knew about something great, you'd already be doing it.
New things come from talking to someone new, following up, putting some effort in and seeing where things go.
That is really the whole reason this show exists.
I got an email in the fall of 2018 from a publicist at my publisher asking if I wanted to talk about elevating and monetizing my Best of Both Worlds podcast.
That's the other one I have.
She said it might be a refresher of stuff I already knew, but I agreed to a conversation.
And then it became clear that this was not actually about best of both worlds, but that my publisher had an agreement with a podcast network about trying to launch some new shows.
More conversations revealed that the network wanted to launch a show of short episodes about productivity tips.
After many iterations. iHeartMedia launched this show as Before Breakfast in early 2019.
We've been around for seven years now.
We get millions of downloads a year.
Absolutely none of that was obvious from the first email, which I might not have answered if I'd been swamped or trying to say no to more things.
In general.
I think saying yes makes life more interesting, and I try to do this in my personal life too.
So last spring, as part of writing big time, I decided to go on a three-week yes quest where I would say yes to things that sounded interesting.
And as part of that, I wound up swimming with sharks in Hawaii.
My oldest son really wanted to do this as part of our family's already planned vacation to Oahu.
He asked me to go with him and wisely timed this request to my yes quest.
Now, I will tell you, I was going to be swimming with sharks.
That's a little bit anxiety producing.
But the truth is, I had no real reason to say no.
And since I was trying to say yes to things, we did it.
And yes, it was a little nerve wracking, but it was also such a memorable experience.
Sharks are magical.
So is a day when a teenager wants to spend time with you.
On the way back from swimming with those sharks, our boat passed some whales surfacing in Hawaii's waters.
Talk about a bonus seeing those.
I mean, I remember that for sure.
And that definitely wouldn't have happened for me if I hadn't said yes to something outside my comfort zone.
Now, I know we can't say yes to everything, but one way to think about this is that, in general, we want to spend less time doing things that we need to talk ourselves into.
You are not initially excited, but you start going, well, you know, it won't be too hard.
It might look good on my resume.
This is how we fill our lives with things that are a five or a six on a 10 point scale of excitement.
This is how we start to feel overscheduled with things we don't really want to do.
And we feel like we can't take on anything else.
Where you want to sit up and pay attention. is when you start talking yourself out of something.
You are initially excited, but then you start telling yourself that the logistics are going to be complicated.
Maybe it is outside your comfort zone.
You'll have to call in a favor from a friend, your partner, or a colleague.
But that initial excitement is telling. you can probably figure everything else out.
So I try to say yes to interesting things, because I know that it is doing interesting things that makes time feel big and abundant, not cutting things out, adding them in.
Yes, it might be counterintuitive, but I promise you, It's true.
There are a great many more practical strategies in big time for falling in love with your schedule and feeling like time is big enough for all the wonderful things you want to do.
If you enjoy this show, I hope you will pick up a copy and check it out.
If you do, please let me know what you think.
You can always reach me at laura at lauravandercam.com.
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 Laura Vanderkam dot com.
Before Breakfast is a production of I Heart Media.
For more podcasts from iHeart Media, please visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Hey, listeners.
Today's tip is powered by National University.
So you have more options for managing work, family, and school.
Learn more today at nu.edu.
This is Laura Vanderkam from Before Breakfast.
A good summer morning starts at the sink.
And that's where Hello comes in with toothpaste that brightens your routine and brings a little yay to your every day.
Some days you may reach for Hello's anti-plaque and whitening toothpaste where tartar doesn't really stand a chance.
Other days, it's the Hello Vitamin C Whitening Toothpaste.
See you later, stains!
Thoughtfully designed with no SLS dyes or artificial flavors, these toothpastes are a no-brainer to have on hand this summer.
Find your everyday yay with Hello.
Shop in-store or online at helloproducts.com.
Hey, listeners.
There's a lot of noise in the business world today.
Leaders like you need clear insights from professionals you can trust.
Navigating Beyond the Expected is a new podcast from Truist Securities featuring conversations with investment banking experts at the center of financing deals in manufacturing healthcare, entertainment and more.
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Member FINRA and SIPC.
This is an iHeart Podcast.
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