Watch Laura Vanderkam's 2016 Ted Talk on time management.
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00:00 (Music)
00:05 (Applause)
00:12 When people find out I write about time management,
00:16 they assume two things.
00:18 One is that I'm always on time.
00:22 And I'm not.
00:25 I have four small children,
00:26 and I would like to blame them for my occasional tardiness,
00:29 but sometimes it's just not their fault.
00:32 I was once late to my own speech on time management.
00:34 (Laughter)
00:36 We all had to just take a moment together and savor that irony.
00:39 The second thing they assume is that I have lots of tips and tricks
00:44 for saving bits of time here and there.
00:46 And sometimes I'll hear from magazines that are doing a story along these lines,
00:49 generally on how to help their readers find an extra hour in the day.
00:53 And the idea is that we'll shave bits of time off everyday activities,
00:56 add it up, and we'll have time for the good stuff.
00:59 And I question the entire premise of this piece,
01:03 but I'm always interested in hearing what they've come up with
01:06 before they call me.
01:07 So some of my favorites -- doing errands in a way
01:09 where you only have to make right-hand turns --
01:11 being extremely judicious in microwave usage,
01:14 so it says three to three and a half minutes on the package,
01:16 we are totally getting in on the bottom side of that.
01:19 And my personal favorite, which makes sense on some level,
01:22 is to DVR your favorite shows so you can fast-forward through the commercials.
01:25 And that way, you save about eight minutes every half hour.
01:28 And if you're watching TV, you find 32 minutes to exercise.
01:31 (Laughter)
01:32 Which is true.
01:34 You know another way to find 32 minutes to exercise?
01:37 Don't watch two hours of TV a day, right?
01:39 (Laughter)
01:41 Anyway, the idea is we'll save bits of time here and there,
01:43 add it up, we will finally get to everything we want to do.
01:46 But after studying how successful people spend their time
01:49 and looking at their schedules hour by hour,
01:52 I think this idea has it completely backward.
01:56 We don't build the lives we want by saving time.
02:00 We build the lives we want,
02:02 and then time saves itself.
02:05 Here's what I mean.
02:08 I recently did a "Time Diary" project,
02:10 looking at 1,001 days in the lives of extremely busy women.
02:14 They had demanding jobs, sometimes their own businesses,
02:17 kids to care for, maybe parents to care for,
02:19 community commitments --
02:20 busy, busy people.
02:22 I had them keep track of their time for a week,
02:25 add up how much they worked and slept,
02:27 and I interviewed them about their strategies for my book.
02:30 One of the women whose timelog I studied,
02:31 she goes out for a Wednesday night for something.
02:34 She comes home to find that her water heater has broken,
02:37 and there is now water all over her basement.
02:40 If you've ever had anything like this happen to you,
02:42 you know it is a hugely damaging, frightening, sopping mess.
02:45 So she's dealing with the immediate aftermath that night.
02:48 Next day, she's got plumbers coming in.
02:50 Day after that, professional cleaning crew dealing with the ruined carpet.
02:53 Everything recorded on her timelog winds up taking seven hours of her week.
02:58 Seven hours.
03:01 That's like finding an extra hour in the day.
03:04 But I'm sure if you had asked her at the start of the week,
03:07 "Could you find seven hours to train for a triathlon?"
03:11 "Could you find seven hours to mentor seven worthy people?"
03:15 I'm sure she would have said what most of us would have said,
03:18 which is, "No.
03:20 Can't you see how busy I am?"
03:23 Yet when she had to find seven hours,
03:25 because there is water all over her basement,
03:28 she found seven hours.
03:31 And what this shows us is that time is highly elastic.
03:35 We cannot make more time.
03:37 But time will stretch to accommodate what we choose to put into it.
03:42 And so the key to time management
03:45 is treating our priorities
03:47 as the equivalent of that broken water heater.
03:52 And to get at this, I like to use some language
03:54 from one of the busiest people I ever interviewed.
03:56 By busy, I mean she was running a small business
03:59 with 12 people on the payroll,
04:00 she had six children in her spare time.
04:02 I was getting in touch with her to set up an interview
04:05 on how she "had it all," that phrase.
04:07 I remember it was a Thursday morning,
04:09 and she was not available to speak with me, of course, right?
04:12 But the reason she was unavailable to speak with me
04:15 is that she was out for a hike,
04:17 because it was a beautiful spring morning,
04:19 and she wanted to go for a hike.
04:20 So of course, this makes me even more intrigued,
04:23 and when I finally do catch up with her,
04:25 she explains it like this.
04:26 She says, "Listen, Laura, everything I do,
04:29 every minute I spend,
04:31 is my choice."
04:33 And rather than say, "I don't have time to do X, Y or Z,"
04:37 she'd say, "I don't do X, Y or Z because it's not a priority."
04:43 "I don't have time" often means it's not a priority.
04:49 If you think about it, that's really more accurate language.
04:52 I mean, I could tell you I don't have time to dust my blinds,
04:54 but that's not true.
04:56 If you offered to pay me 100,000 dollars to go dust my blinds,
04:59 I would get to it pretty quickly.
05:00 Since that is not going to happen,
05:02 I can acknowledge this is not a matter of lacking time.
05:05 It's that I don't want to do it.
05:06 Using this language reminds us that time is a choice.
05:10 And granted, there may be horrible consequences
05:13 for making different choices, I will give you that.
05:15 But we are smart people,
05:17 and certainly over the long run,
05:19 we have the power to fill our lives
05:21 with the things that deserve to be there.
05:24 So how do we do that?
05:27 How do we treat our priorities
05:28 as the equivalent of that broken water heater?
05:31 Well, first we need to figure out what they are.
05:33 And I want to give you two strategies for thinking about this.
05:36 The first, on the professional side.
05:38 I'm sure many people coming up to the end of the year
05:41 are giving or getting annual performance reviews.
05:43 They cover your successes over the year,
05:45 your opportunities for growth.
05:47 And this serves its purpose,
05:50 but I find it's more effective to do this looking forward.
05:53 So I want you to pretend it's the end of next year.
05:56 You're giving yourself a performance review,
05:58 and it has been an absolutely amazing year for you professionally.
06:04 What three to five things did you do
06:07 that made it so amazing?
06:10 So you can write next year's performance review now.
06:14 And you can do this for your personal life, too.
06:16 I'm sure many of you, like me, come December,
06:19 get cards that contain these folded-up sheets of colored paper,
06:23 on which is written what is known as the "Family Holiday Letter."
06:28 (Laughter)
06:30 A bit of a wretched genre of literature, really,
06:32 going on about how amazing everyone in the household is,
06:36 or even more scintillating, how busy everyone in the household is.
06:39 But these letters serve a purpose,
06:41 which is that they tell your friends and family
06:43 what you did in your personal life that mattered to you over the year.
06:47 So this year's kind of done,
06:48 but I want you to pretend it's the end of next year.
06:50 And it has been an absolutely amazing year
06:54 for you and the people you care about.
06:57 What three to five things did you do that made it so amazing?
07:02 So you can write next year's Family Holiday Letter now.
07:06 Don't send it.
07:09 (Laughter)
07:10 Please, don't send it.
07:13 But you can write it.
07:14 And now, between the performance review and the Family Holiday Letter,
07:18 we have a list of six to 10 goals we can work on in the next year.
07:21 And now we need to break these down into doable steps.
07:24 So maybe you want to write a family history.
07:26 Well, first, you can read some other family histories,
07:29 get a sense for the style.
07:30 Then maybe think about the questions you want to ask your relatives,
07:33 set up appointments to interview them.
07:35 Or maybe you want to run a 5K.
07:36 So you need to find a race and sign up and figure out a training plan
07:40 and dig those shoes out of the back of the closet.
07:42 And then, this is key.
07:44 We treat our priorities as the equivalent of that broken water heater
07:48 by putting them into our schedules first.
07:51 And we do this by thinking through our weeks before we are in them.
07:56 I find a really good time to do this is Friday afternoons.
08:00 Friday afternoon is what an economist might call
08:03 a low-opportunity cost time.
08:06 Most of us are not sitting there on Friday afternoon saying,
08:09 "I am excited to make progress
08:11 toward my personal and professional priorities right now."
08:15 But we are willing to think about what those should be.
08:18 So take a little bit of time Friday afternoon,
08:20 make yourself a three-category priority list.
08:23 Career, relationships, self.
08:28 Making a three-category list
08:30 reminds us that there should be something in all three categories.
08:35 Career, we think about.
08:36 Relationships, self, not so much.
08:39 But anyway, just a short list, two to three items in each.
08:43 Then look out over the whole of the next week
08:45 and see where you can plan them in.
08:48 Where you plan them in is up to you.
08:50 And I know this is going to be more complicated for some people than others.
08:53 I mean, some people's lives are just harder than others.
08:57 It is not going to be easy to find time to take that poetry class
09:01 if you are caring for multiple children on your own.
09:04 I get that.
09:05 And I don't want to minimize anyone's struggle.
09:07 But I do think that the numbers I am about to tell you are empowering.
09:12 There are 168 hours in a week.
09:17 24 times seven is 168 hours.
09:23 That is a lot of time.
09:26 If you are working a full-time job, so 40 hours a week,
09:29 sleeping eight hours a night, so 56 hours a week,
09:32 that leaves 72 hours for other things.
09:36 That is a lot of time.
09:39 You say you're working 50 hours a week, maybe a main job and a side hustle.
09:42 Well, that leaves 62 hours for other things.
09:45 You say you're working 60 hours.
09:47 Well, that leaves 52 hours for other things.
09:49 You say you're working more than 60 hours.
09:51 Well, are you sure?
09:52 (Laughter)
09:55 There was once a study comparing people's estimated work weeks
09:58 with time diaries.
09:59 It found that people claiming 75-plus-hour work weeks
10:02 were off by about 25 hours.
10:04 (Laughter)
10:06 You can guess in which direction, right?
10:09 Anyway, in 168 hours a week,
10:11 I think we can find time for what matters to you.
10:14 If you want to spend more time with your kids,
10:17 you want to study more for a test you're taking,
10:19 you want to exercise for three hours and volunteer for two,
10:22 you can.
10:24 And that's even if you're working way more than full-time hours.
10:27 So we have plenty of time, which is great,
10:29 because guess what?
10:31 We don't even need that much time to do amazing things.
10:34 But when most of us have bits of time, what do we do?
10:37 Pull out the phone, right?
10:39 Start deleting emails.
10:42 Otherwise, we're puttering around the house or watching TV.
10:46 But small moments can have great power.
10:49 You can use your bits of time for bits of joy.
10:55 Maybe it's choosing to read something wonderful on the bus on the way to work.
10:59 I know when I had a job that required two bus rides
11:02 and a subway ride every morning,
11:03 I used to go to the library on weekends to get stuff to read.
11:06 It made the whole experience almost --
11:08 almost enjoyable.
11:11 Breaks at work can be used for meditating or praying.
11:15 If family dinner is out because of your crazy work schedule,
11:18 maybe family breakfast could be a good substitute.
11:21 It's about looking at the whole of one's time
11:25 and seeing where the good stuff can go.
11:28 I truly believe this.
11:31 There is time.
11:35 Even if we are busy,
11:37 we have time for what matters.
11:39 And when we focus on what matters,
11:42 we can build the lives we want
11:44 in the time we've got.
11:46 Thank you.
11:47 (Applause)
11:52 (Music)