This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps.
I love Laura Vanderkam’s books about how to make the most of time.
It’s never about stuffing more into our days. It’s not about productivity. It’s about savoring and being creatively thoughtful about what we choose to do.
Her books 168 Hours and Tranquility by Tuesday changed how I think about my own weeks. For example, her argument for “effortful before effortless,” nudged me to spend more of my discretionary time on my hobbies.
Her latest book, Big Time, released last month, makes the case for time abundance: we have more time than we think, and there are surprising ways we can savor it.
Laura and I talked about why weeks matter more than days, how to make work more satisfying with small changes, and why your weekday evenings may hold more free time than you realize. Below, my favorite ideas from our conversation:
1. Your Life Is a Circus. Be the Ringmaster
When people say “my life is a circus,” they mean chaos. Laura says that’s a slander against circuses. A real circus is a super-organized performance. Nobody gets shot out of a cannon at the wrong time.
She thinks of life as a well-orchestrated three-ring circus: career, relationships, and self. You’re the ringmaster. Each ring may have a bigger or smaller act at any given moment. A good circus is managed for delight. You want to run a show you’d actually want to watch.
The circus also needs a safety net. Complex lives require backup plans so that complexity doesn’t descend into chaos.
2. Think in Weeks, Not Days
There are 168 hours in a week. That number matters more than 24.
If you work 40 hours and sleep 56, you still have 72 hours for other things. That’s not all free time. But we have much more discretionary time than we often realize. Laura says the time-crunch feeling often results from looking narrowly at today. Zoom out to the week and you’ll often see more room.
3. Track Your Time Simply
Laura tracks her time on a basic Excel spreadsheet. Half-hour blocks. Monday through Sunday. She checks in three times a day and jots down what she did since the last check-in.
She doesn’t make pie charts. She uses plain language: “Email.” “Cooking.” “Reading.” “Driving.” Whatever you’d casually tell a friend if they asked what you were doing right now.
At the end of each week, there’s room to reflect. What were the highlights? What did you enjoy most? What was most memorable this week? What was frustrating? She then archives the log and opens a new one.
Laura has been doing this long enough that she can now pull up an old log from the same week in a prior year. She recently compared this past April with April 2020. She now has a kind of personal time capsule. (My wife and daughters use Gretchen Rubin’s 5-Year One-Sentence Journal for a related time capsule).
Tip: You can use Laura’s simple, free time-tracking spreadsheet. If spreadsheets feel like too much work, try Toggl. I use Rize, which automatically categorizes my time so I don’t have to remember to log.
4. Enjoy Work More with 3 Small Experiments
Laura tested three tactics with hundreds of people over three weeks. Each tactic helped people feel more satisfied with their work to a statistically significant degree. The approaches don’t require that you change your job. They also don’t depend on you having a ton of autonomy. So they’re designed to work for all sorts of roles.
- Spend one more hour per week on the work you like best. Every job has tasks you prefer. Even a short conversation with a manager can shift the balance toward more of those. (This reminds me of “job crafting,” a tactic I once wrote about for Time Magazine).
- Spend 15 more minutes per week at work with someone you like. Friends at work are people you’d willingly spend time with outside the office. Social time at work matters more than we may realize.
- Take two intentional breaks per day. Everyone takes breaks. Most are unplanned. When you decide in advance how you’ll spend a break, you can choose something rejuvenating rather than defaulting to scrolling or other screen time.
One participant in Laura’s study told her: “I thought about leaving my job. I may still do that. But now I see ways to make work better whether I quit or not.”
5. Reclaim Your Golden Hours
Golden hours are what Laura calls the stretch of weekday time after work and before bed. For most people, that’s roughly 6 p.m. to 11 p.m. Five hours.
Laura’s challenge: set one golden hour intention each day. Thirty minutes of something you chose and genuinely enjoy. Not work. Not housework.
It might be: reading. A puzzle. A walk. A board game. Playing music. Even watching a movie with a loved one, if you chose that.
The point is awareness, and intention. Once you claim 30 minutes of chosen leisure, you’re less likely to tell yourself the story that you have no free time.
Laura also noted that Golden Hours is the title of her next book. Given that this book just came out, I’m impressed that she’s already ready for the next one.
6. Try Effortful Fun Before Effortless Fun
This was the most memorable and useful tactic I learned from Laura’s previous book. It pops up again in this one. Here’s the idea: when your schedule allows for a bit of leisure time, start with at least a few minutes of something that takes effort, before you default to screens or other mindless activity. Read three pages of a book before opening Instagram. Start drawing or playing an instrument (my choice) before picking up your phone.
One of two things will happen. You may get absorbed in the book and keep going. Or you might switch to Instagram anyway, but at least you’ve enjoyed a few minutes of something you care about first.
Laura likes taking on big, year-long projects, like listening to all of Bach or Beethoven, or reading all of Jane Austen or Shakespeare, all of which she’s done in years past. Those all require just 10 pages a day or listening to one piece. If you sprinkle your days with effortful moments, you’ll get deep into projects you care about over the course of a year. If not, you’ll have a year’s worth of scrolling or other mindless diversion that may not add up to something memorable.
Laura’s insight: effortful fun is especially enjoyable and valuable once you clear the initial hurdle of getting started. But when you start with effortless fun, it’s easy to get sucked in and hard to switch to something effortful with more friction.
7. Go Outside After Dinner
Laura’s family uses the acronym TOAD: Time Outside After Dinner. Once daylight extends past dinner, go outside. Walk. Play. Just be out there. It breaks the default drift toward screens during the post-dinner hours.
8. Practice Active Patience
Some things just take time. Laura talked about how her books reveal themselves slowly as she writes them. She may start with a detailed outline, but the nuances within each chapter emerge gradually.
A piece of music becomes part of you only after many hours of practice. I’ve spent years on some of my favorite violin pieces; I often find new wrinkles, like dynamics or articulation marks I hadn’t paid much attention to, even after I’ve spent hundreds of hours looking at the music.
After 11 years of tracking, Laura knows exactly what fits in 168 hours. Her weekly priority lists are short and realistic. If something is on the list, she’ll do it. If not, she’ll push it to a future week.
That precision eliminates guilt. She doesn’t assign herself things she won’t actually do. And she doesn’t feel bad about things she deliberately chose not to do this week. If you occasionally feel guilty about not doing enough, as I do, check out I Didn’t Do The Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt, by Madeleine Dore. It’s a brilliant take.
9. Leave Room to Say Yes
Most productivity advice is about saying no. Laura flips that. Almost all new opportunities, relationships, and breakthroughs come from saying yes to something you’re not entirely sure about.
The reason to clear your schedule isn’t just to have less going on. It’s to create the mental space to say yes when something unexpected appears. If you feel completely swamped, you might not even consider new possibilities. Managing mental load isn’t just about getting things done. It’s about staying open to what could come next, and allowing for serendipity. It’s about being open to what Laura calls little bets, giving time to something new that might end up being terrific.
Tip: In his book, Flourish, Daniel Coyle describes this approach as opening yellow doors. They’re yellow (like a yellow traffic light) because they aren’t a clear GO. You’re not sure where they’ll lead. You may instinctively resist them in favor of more obvious green doors. Coyle points out, as Laura does, that these yellow doors can lead you to surprising places you wouldn’t otherwise go.
10. This is Probably Not Your Last Day
“Live every day as if it’s your last” sounds inspiring. But it’s not practical for consistently making real decisions about how we spend our time.
If everything was about living for the moment, you wouldn’t save money, learn a new language, or practice cello. Planning would seem futile or foolish.
Laura prefers a different frame: ”Someday we will die. But on all the other days, we will not.” She attributes it to a Snoopy cartoon.
Most days are not the last day we’ll be alive. It’s worth investing in things that pay off later. Build skills. Start the long project.
The Social Security Administration publishes actuarial tables if you want reassurance about your own life expectancy. For most ages, your odds of making it to next year are excellent. That’s true whether you’re in your forties, like Laura, or 92. Interesting fact: Only when you’re 105 do your odds of dying within a year start to exceed 50%, according to those tables.
11. Make Fewer Decisions. Rely on Presets
Laura’s family has a routine meal schedule. Pasta on Mondays. Fajitas on Tuesdays. Breakfast for dinner on Thursdays. (They love bacon). Weekends are for trying something new.
That approach extends beyond food. Sticking to formulas frees up mental energy for things where decisions are crucial. You’re not being boring. You’re being strategic about where your decision-making efforts go.
Jeff Bezos and other visionary leaders talk about separating reversible small decisions from impactful ones that can’t be reversed. If you don’t like one lunch, you’ve got another one coming. If you fire someone or leave a partnership, you may not get an easy redo.
This article is republished with permission from Wonder Tools, a newsletter that helps you discover the most useful sites and apps.