168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think

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When you focus on what you do best, on what brings you the most satisfaction, there is plenty of space for everything” Creating the Right Job In Vanderkam’s words, “… we spend massive amounts of time on things… that give a slight amount of pleasure or feeling of accomplishment, but do little for our careers, our families, or our personal lives… consequently, we feel overworked and underrated, and tend to believe stories that confirm this view.”

Get rid of non-core-competency tasks by ignoring, minimizing, or outsourcing them. Always seek work that improves your core competencies, and minimize the rest. Her insistence that everyone has enough time to do anything they want if they manage their time better may grate some people wrong, and her emphatic crusade against time spent watching television became a bit lecture-y at times. However, I respond well to blunt facts and her point that “everything you choose to do is a choice” forced me to consider how exactly I’m using each of the minutes in my 168 hours. And this is all not to mention that I think she just emphasizes career too much. For anyone. Of course, that reflects her audience, I suppose. Hours should be an eye-opener for every one of us who leads a busy, hectic life. Reading it made me appreciate how much “true” amount of time I really have and how to use it wisely and optimally to boost productivity, efficiency, and joy.” Prioritization is a little iffy: While I’d love to be able to prioritize all my tasks around my core competencies, the truth is I can’t. Sometimes there are just some things I have to do that I can’t outsource—certain activities at work, paperwork when I’m registering new students for a scuba class, etc.

Naturally, there are many more questions you could ask yourself. And if you want to, by all means do. What I learned was that it’s important to establish what you want to get out of life. So I recommend that people start by making a list of “100 Dreams.” The other problem with thinking about your time in increments of 24 hours instead of 168 hours, is that it is inherently more stressful (you feel you have “less time”), especially if you don’t take the planning fallacy into consideration—the phenomenon whereby an individual displays the “optimism bias” and thinks they need less time than they do to complete a given task, regardless of historical evidence to the contrary. actually log your time for a week, like you would a budget, and be truthful about what you do with it. Use that to help you decide if you’re spending your time the way you’d like and make adjustments if not.

Most of us are used to thinking about time in terms of only a handful of hours—eight hours of work a day, seven hours of sleep, 24 hours in a day. We plan our lives around these small time slots, becoming ever more harried and stressed as we struggle to do the things we say we will do, or want to do, in the allocated time. She is the host of two weekly podcasts, Before Breakfast and The New Corner Office and she is the co-host, with Sarah Hart-Unger, of the weekly podcast Best of Both Worlds.Meh. Some good ideas, but it's extremely frustrating to read this account of a working mother who has 1) a flexible work schedule, 2) assistants at work, 3) many home helpers including a nanny. Other things she asserts: Kids are actually underscheduled and have too much spare time. (Citation needed, but not proffered.) You should schedule exciting dinner outings with your kids a couple of days a week. (A terrible idea if your kid has an early bedtime, or is fond of routine.) You can make a "homecooked" dinner in fifteen minutes by opening a few jars and taking advantage of pre-prepared (and more expensive, but that's okay because you can afford it) foods. Even if you sleep 49 hours a week (seven per day), and work 40 hours a week, that still leaves you with a whopping unallocated 79 hours. We see and hear that number often enough, but does anyone ever do the math? 24/7 adds up to 168 hours—one week—and, according to Laura Vanderkam, author of 168 Hours, it is the ideal unit by which to examine our lives. Most of us complain about not having enough time to do what it takes to feel successful at home or at work. 168 Hours posits that if we look at the data objectively—how we really spend each hour in an average week—we all have “enough.” After keeping a log for one week, readers can conduct their own Time Makeover: identify dreams and the “actionable steps” they require, optimize “core competencies” and, my favorite, outsource or minimize all the stuff left over. With allowances for downtime and “bits of joy” thrown in, time can finally be on our side, 24/7.”