Manipulate Your Sense of Time With 3 Steps | Laura Vanderkam on Impact Theory

I have huge switching costs. So, yesterday for the first time in my said, I've shut down all notifications. Um it changed my day so fundamentally. Like I was in shock. It felt unbelievably efficient. It probably was. Because we lose so much time every time we are looking at a notification and you then you have to get back to what you were doing and then by the time you're back in what you're doing, there's another notification. Imagine that. Um So, you know, and if you can go till the end of the day that is that is great. Um I a lot of people can't quite do that and so then if they think that's the goal, they're like, "Well, I can't even try. So, I'm I'm not going to bother." But, you can check in frequently. But, even if you just said, "Okay, 15 minutes on the hour, I'm going to be in responsive mode. I'm going to be looking at my texts, my emails, my phone calls, whatever. And then I'm off for 45 minutes. And then I'm back on for 15 minutes and then I'm off for 45 minutes. So, yeah, that if you can figure out ways to control the inputs for chunks of time during your day, you can you can get so much more done and not lose all that time on task switching. Hey everybody, welcome to Impact Theory. Our goal with this show and company is to introduce you to the people and ideas that will help you actually execute on your dreams. All right, today's guest is an author and speaker whose TED Talk, How to Gain Control of Your Free Time, has more than 5 million views. Her work has appeared in some of the most prestigious publications in the world including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fortune, and Fast Company. A natural skeptic and playful contrarian, her books including I Know How She Does It, 168 Hours, You Have More Time Than You Think, and Off the Clock include sharp, witty insights into how we can all get the most out of our precious time. She's also written two novels, sung at Carnegie Hall, and co-hosts her own podcast called Best of Both Worlds. But, before you assume that she lives a soulless, barren existence where she has chosen to sacrifice all joy for the sake of time efficiency, let me tell you that she also is a wife and mother of four young children who somehow even manages to write almost daily for her thriving blog. Additionally, she's appeared on countless television shows, including such mainstays as The Today Show and Fox and Friends, as well as being interviewed for hundreds of radio segments. So, please help me in welcoming the author of the upcoming time management fable, Juliet's School of Possibilities, the woman who is proving mathematically that you really can have it all, Laura Vanderkam. [applause] How's it going? Thank you for that. Thank you. Welcome. I have to say, you worked at Carnegie Hall and I have to say I have to Had to. That was [laughter] That was amazing. I loved that. And one of the things that I found really interesting in researching you was the quote on the cover of 168 Hours. And I'm going to paraphrase it, but it was basically, "Opening Laura's book convinced me that I had time to read it and that I had time to reread War and Peace in the original Russian. Thank you, Laura, so much for opening up my schedule." So, how is it that you're able to open up people's schedules? What is the insight that you've had that really shifts people's paradigm? Well, honestly, I think it is a paradigm shift. A lot of us are walking around with the story that I have no time for anything. Either, you know, if I'm giving it all at work, I have no energy for my personal life, or if my personal life is so complicated, I'm just going to have to coast for a while at work or give up up completely, or if I manage to do those things, I'll have no time for my own personal pursuits. And that lack mentality becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you think you have no time, you look for evidence to support that. And you know, we all have busy moments. We all have crazy moments. But if you walk around with the story that actually I do have time for the things that matter to me, well, you start to look for evidence to support that. And there are certainly moments when you know, life is going well. And I think we should celebrate that. And when people see that, then they start to find open time. One of the cool things about your approach is one, it's a pretty no BS approach in terms of the math and breaking it down for people how much time they have. But one of the things I found really empowering is this notion that you can actually extend pleasure. Explain that. What do you mean by that? How do we cultivate memories, which is another really powerful idea that you have? Yeah, so there's a couple ways of looking at time. I mean, one is very straightforward. It marches forward. We have 60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour. And once a second is gone, it is gone. You cannot get it back. So, there's that. But time also has this big relationship with our memory and how we perceive it. And when we think about how much time we have, that's actually a function of how many memories we have of any given unit of time. I mean, one way of thinking of this is if you go on a vacation somewhere exotic, you know, it can feel like a week has passed before breakfast. And you know, cuz your brain has no idea what it needs to remember. And so it's remembering all of it. And as it's remembering all these things, it's making you feel like you have more time. Whereas if you consider an average Tuesday, I mean, most people can't even remember getting dressed in the morning and getting to work. Somehow it happened, but it's just gone, right? It's not there at all. And so when you know that, you can start to manipulate this, your perception of time. You can put more memorable things into your life. One thing I tell people is to try to answer the question of why today is going to be different from any other day in your life. And if you can answer why it's different, you're more likely to remember it. And if you have more days that you remember, you start to feel like you have more time. Do you have advice for people on how to make an average day different? That was one thing as I was going through the research, I was like, "Wow, my days are so repetitive. It's crazy." And some of that is intentional. Some of that is me trying to be efficient. Um and then as I was thinking about how to really make the average day for me different, I was struggling to do like authentic things where I'd really be pursuing something I was interested in. So, how do you advise people around that? Yeah, so I mean routines are great things and and you talk about this and many of your guests have talked about this and the importance of routine because they make good habits automatic, right? So, we want to have good routines in our lives. But we don't want routines to be the only things in our lives because then every day is the same as every other day. Um so, ways to think about this sort of authentically, maybe think about like what am I going to do on this weekend? Well, I could just, you know, watch TV, putter around the house and then it will feel like I didn't really have a weekend. Or you can maybe make a list of, you know, anything in life or, you know, the world you might want to see or particular if we're thinking about a weekend, you know, things within 2 hours of your house probably that you're going to want to see. Uh but anything you might enjoy, things your family members might enjoy. And then you can look at say, "Well, what of those things could I put into my schedule?" And you know, on an average day, it might be something as simple as trying a new restaurant for lunch or having a conversation with a colleague that you've always just kind of waved to in the hall. Um it could mean participating in a meeting that you normally just observe. Like you actually speak up. But when you do little things like this, uh you feel like you have more time. And if you really pause and enjoy these things and take in what's happening, then you can stretch the experience of time you think if if we were going to go through somebody's diary and you've looked at a lot of time diaries with I've seen thousands at this point. Uh yeah, it's a ridiculous number. Do you feel like you're getting to know the person by looking at their time diary? Oh, definitely. I mean, although some people put in more details than others. But, uh you know, yes, you get to know them because you start to see like oh, well, this person, you know, always does lunch this way, or this person thinks about what he or she is doing in the morning before going to work. This person clearly likes hanging out with their family cuz they're coming up with fun stuff to do in the evenings together. You know, this person likes to do things with their friends and and thinks about that. And and you really do start to get to see what a person values in their lives because that's what's reflected in how they spend their time. Yeah, that leads me to priorities. And you have the story you've told a thousand times about, you know, the person whose water heater breaks and if you had asked them moments before they would have said there's no way I have seven free hours in my week. It breaks and they find the seven hours. But, that hits at something bigger to me, which is the priorities and taking control of that, which seems almost as important as the time itself. How do you think about priorities in your life and what have you learned about prioritization from all the time diaries you've seen? Yeah, it can be very difficult to prioritize things that we personally want to do or we know would be good for ourselves and that we want to, you know, do big in the world, but are not immediately deadline driven, or not, you know, doing for someone else, for our boss, for our families. And and of course, the story of the the water heater is, you know, when something big happens in our lives and we have to deal with it. There's a sudden disaster. It could be a client emergency, or you know, a family emergency. You find the time, right? You're going to deal with it. Um the question is, how can you make other things in your life feel that urgent? How can you treat the things that are priority to you as the equivalent of a broken water heater? You know, there's water all over my basement. I have to do something about this. Well, we don't think that like, oh, you know, training for a triathlon is water all over my basement. Got to get to it. Writing that book, water all over my basement. Got to get to it. Um you know, spending time with my family, water all over the basement, got to do it. It just it it's hard to make that um change in in our mindset, but if you can, if you can light at least a little bit of that fire under you, um I mean, there's there's no limit to what you can do. So, touching on that, I'm a huge proponent of cultivating something, whether that's really thinking about what you want or it's the expanding the pleasure, cultivating memories, deciding what you want. You have this notion of the micro memoirs. Um, walk people through that. I think that's pretty profound and I really want to hear more about how you are essentially constructing the way that you're going to remember something. Yeah, so memory is not just a straightforward thing. I think a lot of us think of memory as a filing cabinet. I mean, you just put something in it, it's there, you know, it kind of fades as time goes on, but but it's there, right? Exactly as you put it in. That's not the way memory works at all. Uh, if you think about telling a story of say, you know, your honeymoon, you and your spouse are going to tell it in different ways. It's going to change over time as you see how people react to it. And eventually, the story becomes the memory. Uh, it may not be exactly what happened, maybe it kind of pushes things together, that the characters become more pronounced, the plot is is more focused than it is in how real life happens, but that becomes the memory. And and so you can actually think about this as you are proactively creating memories. Um, you know, so if you're going to do something interesting, you might pause and think ahead about like how can I make sure I remember this? Like what could I do to cement this into my brain? And there's all sorts of things you can do. I mean, you can obviously pay attention during the time. Um, if there's somebody with you, you can talk about having this experience together. You can even manipulate your senses. Uh, I know probably people have had this experience of a certain smell is very associated with something in your life. I mean, it could be as simple as like a hotel bar of soap. Like you remember that hotel and every time you sniff that scent for the rest of your life, it immediately brings you back there. Or a song, you know, if you listen to a song over and over again during an experience, that song, when you hear it again, it will bring that experience back. So, you can actually do those things. How do people become present in that moment? I know you've you've talked about that bike ride that you took and and, you know, you're thinking about all the things you have to do. How did you become present in that moment? Well, sometimes, I mean, something is just so amazing that it forces the presence on us. If people have had that, you know, pure experience of awe, something is just so beautiful or you see, you know, you're driving around and you're seeing an amazing vista, you know, these things can stop you in your tracks. So, so there's that. But, you know, it's the nature of the human brain to think about something else. And it's almost comical. I mean, you can be looking at this amazing sunset and all of a sudden you're like, "Did I pay my electric bill?" Like, you know, it's just the way the human brain works. And and there's not you can't completely conquer that. But, you can kind of steer yourself back to it and take in more and say, "Okay, rather than think about my electric bill, let me just challenge myself to look at the colors. Let me describe the colors of the sunset to myself. Let me try to, you know, name the things I see in this picture. Let me think about writing this later. Let me just think about how I would describe it." And and by consciously putting your brain back in the the scene itself, that that can help with that. That's really interesting. Thinking about how you would describe something later to really force you to sort of pick out the details. I think that's really interesting. Talk to me about the the writing your Christmas card a year in advance, the notion of like planning where you want things to go. Yeah, so you can do this for both work and personal. I mean, figuring out what actually matters to you, figuring out what are your priorities and what steps you need to take to get there. It, you know, it's difficult, but but there's some practical ways we can think about doing this. So, in your personal life, you think about, you know, people don't do this so much anymore now that everyone sends photo cards, but but back in the day, those of us who are old enough to remember this, but people would send these letters that would describe what their family did during the course of the year. And you send this around to your far-flung friends and relations who somehow haven't followed you on Facebook or whatever. And you know, these letters are often horrible. I mean, they go on about how amazing everyone in the family is and how awesome the year has been, but they serve a purpose, which is that they tell your friends and family what you did in your personal life that mattered [clears throat] to you. So, the way you can use this is picture yourself in December of, you know, the end of the year. And if you were writing one of those letters, picture yourself, you know, writing that. And and think that it's been an amazing year. You're writing one of those obnoxious letters because it has been so amazing. What would be in it? Like what would you want to tell your friends and family you did that was so amazing? And so if you can write that letter many months ahead of when it you would be sending it, well, then you know what you want to do. I mean, this is the year you planned that extended family trip to Ireland over the summer. You know, this is the year you ran that 10K. This is the year that you joined a choir with your daughter, right? There's all these things you might put on a letter. And if you think about that ahead of time, then you can actually do them so that the letter can come true. I think at this point in the discussion is probably worth doing the math breakdown for people cuz I can hear people saying, "This is all amazing. This is great. I just don't have time for this." So, there are 168 hours in a week. I love to use that number because it's one people don't think about. The reason to know this number is well, one, it's a better depiction of life. I mean, we don't just live our lives in days. Tuesday and Saturday both have the same number of hours. They are both, you know, just as frequently occurring on the calendar, but they look very different for people. Whereas a week tends to be the more repeating cycle of life. But if you work 40 hours, so that is a full-time job, if you sleep 8 hours a night, so that is 56 hours per week. That leaves 72 hours for other things, which is quite a bit of time, you know? And that's with a full-time job. And people say, "Well, I don't work 40 hours a week. I work more than that." Okay, fine. If you work 50 hours a week, that leaves 62 hours for other things, for, you know, family commitments, personal commitments. You work 60 hours, that leaves 52 hours for other things. I mean, we're still talking a lot of time, you know, even if you you keep bumping up the work hours. So, is there time for spending time with your family? Sure. Is there time for exercising? Sure. Is there time for volunteering? Sure. You know, even if you are working long hours. Now, you might need to be creative about organizing some of those hours. You might need to think about how much energy you have at different points. But, mathematically, the time is probably there. What do you think about guilt? I think a lot of people have guilt around how they should be spending their time. They certainly have a narrative about their relationship to time. And I don't know how much you get into this, but like, whether it's in your personal life or in your blogging or speaking, do you talk to people at all about overcoming some of those emotional hurdles, which aren't based in math, but the pushback they'll give you makes it sound like it's based in math? Yeah, I mean, well, people will say, you know, there's just not enough hours in the day. You know, there there is often the feeling that we should be doing something else. Um, that you know, if you're at work, you should you're missing out on something at home. If you're at home, well, your you know, colleagues are covering for you, and therefore you should feel guilty about that. On the weekend, the house, you know, there's a million projects you need to do, and so if you're relaxing, well, that shows you're a lazy person or something. You know, there's all sorts of stories we can tell ourselves about that. And I think that does play into the narrative. And it encourages us to think that we have no time, because then that's an excuse, you know, I don't have any time, therefore I can't do all these things. And I say, "Well, that's fine if we can't do all these things, but we can still choose the ones that we wish to do." And how do people lose their time? So, if we all have these hours, I think that people would be a little bit surprised if they were to do a time diary about how much time sort of leaks out of their life. What are some of the big ways that people lose time without really being aware of it? So, honestly, the biggest way people lose time is by being unintentional about it. Um you don't think about what you'd like to do with your time. And so, you could do something, but you don't because you haven't thought about it. Uh one obvious thing of this is on on the weekend, you know, maybe you've could go for a bike ride that would require like getting up and doing it uh you know, going out somewhere in the in the morning. You don't think about what you want to do until it's like 1:00 p.m. on the weekend, and then by that point you you can't go do the longer ride, or you know, there there things your family needs to get to, so you're not going to be able to fit it in. Uh and and so, big chunks of time can sort of disappear because we haven't thought about what we'd like to do with it. I think that's so important. And I love the idea that you have about taking Friday's afternoons, which you have a whole really interesting thing about Saturday 5:00 a.m. is the midpoint of the week. Or Thursday 5:00 Thursday, sorry. Sorry. Sorry. I was I was I [laughter] was I was I was scandalized by that. Uh yes. What? Yes. So, um the the way that I combated this sort of what should I be doing, I created an important things list. Um but talk to people about that Friday afternoon and how they can build intentionality. Why Friday afternoon um and why it's important to realize that Thursday at 5:00 a.m. is the middle of the week. Well, so Friday afternoon is when I plan my upcoming weeks. And you know, people say, "Well, what's the one thing I can do to spend my time better?" I say, "Well, we should figure out how we're spending it now. You should do that." So, I take some time Friday afternoon, um make myself a short three-category priority list for the following week. Career, relationships, self. What are my top priorities in each of those three categories? The reason to make a three-category list is that it is very difficult to make a three category list and then leave one of the categories blank. Uh so that's just like a simple nudge right there. You make I can't leave that blank, you know, oh I got to put something in that. So then relationships gets a priority. Hey, great. Uh self gets a priority, great. Um but just, you know, a couple things in each. Look at the next week, see where they can go. Um and as much as possible, I try to front-load the week uh cuz if you put as many of those priorities as possible Monday and Tuesday, well, then when stuff comes up, because stuff will come up cuz that's life, uh you've either done it before the emergencies arise, or if the emergencies happen to arise on Monday and Tuesday, there's still time the rest of the week to get to it. Whereas if you plan all your priorities for Friday, you know, stuff happens and and you can't do it. The reason for Friday afternoon is pretty much that it's a low opportunity cost time. Most people are doing absolutely nothing of consequence by Friday afternoon. You're kind of sliding into the weekend. You're like, I I wonder if I can slip out of here. Like is anyone going to notice? Maybe I just will pick up my phone. But if you think about what future you should be doing, you can take what would be wasted time and turn it into some of your most productive minutes of the week. I love this concept of 100 dreams. What is that? How do people use it? Why is it important? Yeah, so this was a great exercise that a career coach shared with me many years ago, which is you know, it's a good answer to that question of [clears throat] people think they have no time and so they don't think of what they want to do with their time. And then when time appears, we do whatever is easiest because we don't think we have any time. We haven't thought about it. So that's why we wind up scrolling around on our phones all the time. The list of 100 dreams sort of helps to solve this. So, completely unedited list of anything you want to spend more time doing. Um so, the first third is easy cuz people often want to travel more. So it's like the 33 countries they want to visit. So we got that. All right. But after that, it starts getting a lot harder. People are like, oh well, there's that state park an hour away, you know, we've lived here for 6 years, we've yet to get to. Or I you know, I really want to bike more. There's a couple bike trails near my house I want to do or you know, I should read poetry or I I'd like to go try that restaurant somewhere or you know, get to the library and do whatever. Like you start to get far more doable um as you get toward a hundred. You have to come back to this several times um to to actually get to a hundred. But then having this list when you have open time or you're making your priority list for the upcoming week you say, well, let me pull something off that list. You know, maybe this is the weekend I will go to that state park or you know, I will go for that bike ride on you know, Tuesday over lunch if that's an option in your life. And then you're doing cool things, right? That intentionality aspect I think is so critical. You talked about how if um for a long time I wanted to read more but I didn't plan ahead and so I didn't have a good book and suddenly once I planned ahead and I had a good book and it really captured my imagination and it was a page turner. All of a sudden I found little spurts, three minutes here or seven minutes there and I was suddenly reading a lot more. Um I think that's really interesting. What other things like that have you found where just a little bit of intention can really dramatically shift the way that you use your time? Yeah, books are a big one because yeah, if you don't have a good book to read you will do whatever's easiest and you can get on Instagram in 30 seconds whereas if you can't get a to a book in 30 seconds then you won't do it, right? Um you know, thinking about things to listen to in the car. Um I spend a lot more time in my car than I thought I did. Uh I kept track of my time and I realized I'm in my car well over an hour a day on average so you know, if that is time. Um what can I do with it? And I was just listening to whatever was on the radio. And I was getting really sick of a lot of the songs that were on the radio. I you know, and so I started listening to more podcasts and you know, things like that and well, yeah, there's a lot of cool stuff out there but if I wasn't intentional about the time and thought about well, let me load up a podcast on my phone and then the time's completely gone. Yeah. How can people allocate a a usable amount of time to things that they're passionate about, but that are ultimately going to take a long time to do? How do they keep that from being overwhelming? How do they make sure that they have success so they're not discouraged? Do you encourage people to think of their life in in a year chunk, in smaller chunks? So, if it's a a big project like writing a book, you want to say in that year-end holiday letter that you wrote a book. Well, then you can start breaking it down and putting things related to that on each week's priority list, right? So, maybe this week you think, well, what step could I take toward doing that? Well, I'm going to write, you know, just what is the thesis of my book? All right, I did that. Great. That's all I have to do. All right, the next week I'm going to write maybe a couple chapters I think could be in that. Great, you've done it. The next week you're going to start writing little outlines in each of those chapters. Okay, done that. Moving forward. You don't want to overwhelm yourself. You want to don't want to bite off more than you can chew, but if you are writing 1,500 words a week for the rest of the year, you're going to have a book at the end of it. And not a short one, actually. Uh so, it's these little things done repeatedly. If you only you know, set yourself a very small goal, but you meet it, and then you just keep going. You can do amazing things. Why did the topic of time become such an obsession for you? I mean, you've really written a lot about this topic. Well, I mean, I have always been interested in productivity. Um and and I can sort of see that going back through my life. I think it became a real issue for me, something I truly cared about when I became a parent for the first time, um almost 12 years ago now. And I was trying to figure out, well, how am I going to make time for all these different areas of my life. Obviously, I want to be a good mom. I'd like to spend a lot of time with my kid. Um I also have these other things I want to do that I don't want to give up. And a lot of the story out there is that, well, you know, once you're parent, and particularly a mother, that should be your whole life. Like, nothing else. And I was like, well, but I like these other things. I want to do them, too. So, how am I going to make that work? And so, I started studying people who were doing a lot with their time. And you know, that's when I started to see that idea of thinking about a week instead of a day. You mentioned earlier that idea that 5:00 p.m. Thursday is the midpoint of the week. So, when I track my time, I start Monday at 5:00 a.m. That's my time diary. Seems like the start of the week, Monday at 5:00 a.m. So, it goes Monday 5:00 a.m. to Monday at 5:00 a.m. If that is the week, then the exact midway point is Thursday at 5:00 p.m. Which, you know, you think about a lot of people, Thursday at 5:00 p.m. kind of sounds like the end of the week, right? You know, that's we're we're we're done. That's that's it's all over at that point. But it's not. It is mathematically the exact midway point. And the reason I think this is important, particularly from this question like work-life balance, like, am I spending enough time with my family, or my, you know, career, or my working too much, or am I gone too much? A lot of the time when people are looking at their work-life balance, they're looking at their work-life balance from Monday at 5:00 a.m. to Thursday at 5:00 p.m. And I don't know what your work-life balance is during that window, but I'm guessing that your work-life balance from 5:00 p.m. Thursday to 5:00 a.m. Monday is entirely different. And it's possible that those two balances start to, you know, balance each other out. And and when we see that and look at time holistically, uh then we we stop viewing life so much as either or, you know, pitting work against family and work and family against self and all of that against, you know, community and friends. And you know, there's space for all of it. In your research, you were saying that very successful people actually have the least, what I'll call these aren't aren't your words, but the least abusive relationship with time. They actually feel in abundance. And how have they gotten to that point, especially and been as successful as they've been? Yeah, well, I think it's related because when you're telling yourself I have no time, well, then you don't have time for doing these important things. You know, you just have to react to everything. and and then you're only reacting. You're never moving forward. Um you know, I don't have time to start that business. I don't have time to do whatever. Uh whereas the people who have a more abundant perspective on time, well, they do have time to start that business cuz they've got all the time in the world. Why not? Why wouldn't I start that business? And and so I think that's a very important mindset shift. They're they're very careful about I mean, they're intentional with their time. So, they're only putting in things that they think are important for them to do. I would say the one other thing that I've seen a lot of and I think is so important um cuz it's a bit counterintuitive is that people who are really good with time um and who are doing a lot are very good about building in open space. And they do that for a couple of reasons. One is that it's practical um because everything takes longer than you think it will. Uh and nobody really likes to be late and rushing. It's very hard to feel good about life when you are always late and rushing everywhere. Um but it's also about how we get opportunity in our lives. Uh if you're having a really good conversation with someone, it's good to continue that conversation and see what great ideas come out of it uh rather be like, "Oh, yep, got to go." You know, looking at the time cuz I know I have another meeting. I have 10 more stacked up today. Um and and so they're very good about creating more open space so they can seize those opportunities. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. One thing that I found for me that's really been extraordinary and I just did yesterday an experiment with this and I think it's going to work. It's a little too early, but I have huge switching costs. And so, um historically, until yesterday, I would check my phone routinely cuz if somebody had a question, I wanted to make sure that I got back to them quickly. So, I just felt like I was getting nothing done. So, yesterday, for the first time, I said, "I've shut down all notifications." Um it changed my day so fundamentally. Like, I was in shock. And so, I told everybody, "Look, I will get back to you by the end of the day, but not until the end of the day. So, I didn't even basically come out of um my office until like 5:00 p.m. or something. And then I started getting back to people and responding to text message. It It felt unbelievably efficient. It probably was because we lose so much time every time we are looking at a notification. And you then you have to get back to what you were doing. And then by the time you're back in what you're doing, there's another notification. Imagine that. Um So, you know, and if you can go till the end of the day, that is that is great. Um I A lot of people can't quite do that. And so, then if they think that's the goal, they're like, "Well, I can't even try. So, I'm I'm not going to bother." But, you can check in frequently. But, even if you just said, "Okay, 15 minutes on the hour, I'm going to be in responsive mode. I'm going to be looking at my texts, my emails, my phone calls, whatever. And then I'm off for 45 minutes. And then I'm back on for 15 minutes. And then I'm off for 45 minutes." So, yeah, that if you can figure out ways to control the inputs for chunks of time during your day, you can you can get so much more done and not lose all that time on task switching. Now, I know if I ask or I assume if I ask you that you would say that what's important to one person may not be important to another. But, you've shown like some correlations between people doing a certain kind of thing and it really having a substantial impact on either the ability to create more memorable experiences and thusly the time essentially dilates and they feel like they have more of it. Um what are some universals where when people do that, it really seems to have a a profound effect? Well, one of the things that it is really good for feeling like you have more time is spending more time with people whose company you enjoy. And that seems very straightforward. Like, of course, we should see friends and family. That sounds great. And yet people don't do it um because it takes effort to do. So, I did a time diary project where I had 900 busy people track their time for a day. Um and then I asked them questions about how they felt about their time. And I could give them a score because I called it a time perception score. So people who felt time was abundant or people who felt time was scarce and they were starved for time. Time perception scores rose in direct correlation with how much time people spent interacting with friends and family. And it's not that the people who had the highest time scores had more time than anyone else. I mean these were all sort of equivalently busy people. And it turned out that the people with the lowest time perception scores spent more time watching TV and more time online than the people with the high time perception scores. So they all had leisure time. It's just they were spending it in different ways. And it turns out that being social tends to make you feel like you have more time. Whereas being social online often makes you feel like you have a little bit less. It sort of gets away from you. And you know, I say this as an introverted person. I'm not saying you have to be in a party every night. But there are people that you like even if you are very introverted. And and what you can do to spend more time with those people will will be time well spent. There's this idea of effortless fun and effortful fun. And getting together with people whose company you enjoy is effortful fun. Right? It takes a lot of work. You got to call them, make plans, you got to go do something together. You probably have to dress up or not dress up, but at least you know, wear clothes. Like you can't you know, necessarily be in in your pajamas. You know, you make a plan like you have to do it even if it was like not a great day at work. Like you're going to still go do it. Whereas you know, surfing the web doesn't demand any of that. Right? It's completely effortless fun. So that's the difference between throwing a dinner party which is effortful fun and looking on Instagram at photos of other people's dinner parties which is effortless fun. You know, they're both a reasonable way to spend an evening, but one is obviously going to be much more memorable and feel much more sort of profound like you have this time for doing awesome things in your life if you actually have the dinner party. So you know, you want to make sure you invest some in that kind of behavior. All right. So people have been listening to this and they're super intrigued. What do you hope people take away from Juliet School of Possibilities? I found it really interesting that you did it as a novel and I was surprised by the things that she struggled with. I thought it was going to be and maybe I feared it was going to be a little more straightforward. It actually ended up being quite nuanced. Um and I found the the breakdown of what she was struggling with to be very interesting. So, what do you want people to take away from that? Yeah, so I mean I've I've written a lot about time management and you know, strategies and ideas and time diary studies and it's like, well, if I'm going to keep writing about this, I have to try a different tactic. So, I decided to write a novella about how people spend their time. Um and Juliet School of Possibilities is about a young consultant whose life is falling apart on various dimensions because she is trying to do everything. Um and particularly as you move into management, you can't just do what's right in front of you. I should I think about what is the right thing to be doing. That's very difficult and so she's really struggling with it. And so, you know, her her company gives him her an ultimatum, her personal life is falling apart, too. Um and until she, you know, meets this mentor figure who helps her see how you can learn to choose well even when there are infinite demands on you. And so, what I hope people will take from this is a phrase that this this mentor, this Juliet woman, keeps telling her which is that expectations are infinite, time is finite. You are always choosing. Choose well. And the reason I like this phrase is is because you know, we have this idea, well, if I just work harder, I can I can get all this stuff done or maybe if I'm just a better person, I can do meet all the demands of my personal life. No, expectations are infinite. You cannot do everything. Even if you work 24 hours a day, even if you never slept, you still can't do everything that somebody might want you to do. But once you you that, you realize that you're always choosing how to spend your time, then you can start to make those choices more consciously. You can actually choose well. And think about how I might choose well in any given moment to create the life I want. I love that. All right, before I ask my last question, tell these guys where they can find you online. Yeah, well, I hope people will come visit my website, lauravanderkam.com. It's just my name. Um and you can find out more about my books and podcasts and stuff there and I blog, you know, at least a couple times a week. I guess I'm still stuck in 2006 with that, but I I started blogging and I realized I like it, so I'm just going to stick with it even if people stop reading blogs. Um so, hopefully people will check that out as well. Awesome. My last question, what is the impact that you want to have on the world? Well, I hope that I will help people realize that they do have time for whatever is important to them. I mean, we talk ourselves into this idea that, "Oh, I'll never be able to do X. I'll never be able to do Y. I just don't have the time." And I don't know if that's true. I believe we do have time in the 168 hours we all have each week for what matters to us. And particularly, I would like to help people see um that life is not either/or. That professional success does not need to come at the expense of having an awesome personal life, nor does an awesome personal life need to come at the expense of achieving, you know, great things in the world, changing the world in some way to make it a better place. So, I hope I can help people see that there's time for both. Awesome. I love that. Guys, I was really surprised at how much nuance and depth there is when you go and look at this one topic. I was I wasn't sure like how much it was going to be broad or if it was going to be something where you're really going to get the gist of quite quickly, and she's done an extraordinary job of really showing all the ways that your life is defined by the way that you think of time, and then how you think of time echoes through all of the choices that you make. She talked about it here. She goes into great detail in her works about that. Her books are phenomenal. They're really fantastic. It's actually super interesting to see one done as a novella, so that you get more of an emotional connection. You're there in the room as her life is falling apart, and you see the way that she begins to change that notion of time and begins to thusly rebuild her life. And it's really, really insightful and really interesting. And that is a hallmark of everything that she does. There's just a level of insight that's data-driven, which makes it all the more fascinating that I think you guys will really resonate with. And then, if you experiment with this stuff, it really will change the way that you approach your own life in profound ways. And yesterday, having had the experience of how making one little change about how often I checked my phone had an unimaginably big impact on my day. That That one change. This is important. And I think if you dive into her world and really put some of this stuff to use, it will have a radical effect on your life. All right. 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