When it comes to time, most of us feel like there just aren’t enough hours in the day. Yet we’ve probably got more time than we think. It’s just that the way to win back more hours is counterintuitive.
That’s what Laura Vanderkam reveals in her latest book, Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done. In it, she shares research on how our brains perceive time, interpret new experiences, and make memories. She explains how this knowledge can change our relationship with time, especially if we analyze how we spend it.
Laura’s written 5 other books, including, What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast, and her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, and Fortune. Her TED Talk, How to Gain Control of Your Free Time, has been viewed over 5 million times, and she’s co-host of the podcast, Best of Both Worlds.
In this interview we discuss:
- Why knowing how we spend our time helps us enjoy our down time that much more
- How tracking our time — even for a few days — gives us the data we need to be more mindful
- Why, to change our relationship with time, we need to take charge of it
- How a program that tracked a veteran school principal’s time helped him focus more of his attention on instruction
- How we can each make every day a “realistic ideal day” within the framework of our lives
- How one way to stretch time is to add more memorable activities into your life
- Why we need to manage our experiencing selves in order to make more memories that expand our sense of time
- How we can woo good memories to make our lives feel fuller and richer
- Why we should leave blank spaces in our calendars, so that we can reflect, slow down, and connect with others in the workplace
- How savoring increases our enjoyment of an experience as we plan something enjoyable, take the time to anticipate it and then share it with others
- How we can invest in our happiness by examining the pain points in our lives and, wherever possible, spending wisely to alleviate them
- How taking the time to exercise gives us energy to enjoy our time more
- Why taking time to reflect can help us step outside the stream of time so we can ask ourselves if we like how we’re spending it
- How a better-than-nothing goal, or BTN, can help us accomplish big goals by committing to small daily activities that add up over time, like writing 400 words or running one mile a day
- How spending time with the people in our lives expands our sense of time and means we should deliberately build time with others into our schedules
- A simple way of building a network over the course of a year by reaching out to one person a day with a question, a tip, or a helpful article or piece of information
Episode Resources
National SAM Innovation Project
10 Steps to Savoring the Good Things in Life
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