Managing Your Time to Get More Done with Laura Vanderkam
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Hello, and welcome to another episode of All the Hacks, a show about upgrading life, money, and travel, all while spending less and saving more. I'm Chris Hutchins, and I'm on my own quest to find every hack there is. But all this research takes time, and there are only so many hours in the day. So today, I'm so excited to be talking to Laura Vanderkam, who helps people spend more time on what matters and less on what doesn't.

She's the author of several time management and productivity books, including What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast and 168 Hours. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and Fortune. She hosts two podcasts, Before Breakfast and Best of Both Worlds, and blogs at lauravandercam.com. I have no idea how anyone could have time for all that, and she has five children, but that's exactly why we're here today. Laura, thank you for being here. Thanks so much for having me.

I just wanted to kick this off and ask, like, what is the biggest misconception you think people have about time management?

Well, that it's about doing more with your time. Many people are interested in hacks, as why we listen to a podcast like this, where, you know, we're going to save time by, I don't know, cleaning the shower while we're in it or soaking our pasta before we boil it so it takes less time to boil or sending emails where instead of saying, OK, you just write K because we feel like we are somehow more efficient when we don't use the letter O. And that's

Fine. I mean, there's no point in spending more time on things than we need to. But fundamentally, time management is about using the time we have to build the lives we want. And sometimes that is about being very efficient with things and getting through quickly. And sometimes it's about throwing gobs of time against something because that's what you really want to do.

Yeah, one of the things that stood out to me, I had a chance to read a couple of your books. You've written a lot. So I apologize, I didn't get to all of them yet. But in every single one, you emphasize that when people say they don't have time, it's not really true. They have time, it's just not necessarily a priority. And you emphasize a lot that people actually have 168 hours every week.

which leaves them with somewhere between 60 and 70 non-waking, non-work hours, depending on how much they work. And so I'm curious, when you talk to people about how much time they have, how do you suggest people start to...

get started just thinking about what that means in their own life? Yeah, well, first switching to that 168 hour perspective is huge for most people. We are accustomed to thinking in life in terms of days, which is 24 hours. But in fact, you live life in weeks. So that's 24 times seven or 168 hours, which is, by the way, a number I didn't know until I multiplied it through and I started writing about this. I don't know why we don't know that number, but that's the number of hours in a week.

And the reason this is important, I mean, it gives us a more complete picture of our time. Like, is Tuesday a normal day for you or Saturday a normal day for you? They both occur just as often and they both have the exact same number of hours. But many people spend them very differently. And if we only look at one of them, then we have a misleading perception of time. So so thinking about 168 hours is.

gets rid of that issue and also just shows us how much time we have. Like you said, if you are working a 40 hour a week full-time job, so standard full-time hours, if you are sleeping eight hours a night, which is 56 hours per week,

That leaves 72 hours for other things, which is quite a bit of time. And obviously, people have different levels of responsibility within that 72 hours. I mean, some people have nothing else they need to do within that. Some people have more intense caregiving responsibilities, for instance, which can certainly take a lot of that time. But one way or the other, I have not seen anyone's schedule where they don't have so

some discretionary time. Maybe it's not as much as we want, but it is some. And when we have that perspective that we probably have some, then we can change our narrative from I have no free time whatsoever. I have no time for anything. I'm a victim of circumstance too. I have some amount of time that I have autonomy over. What would I like to do with it? What kind of life would I like to create within this time that I have?

Yeah, I can't imagine anyone listening says, okay, I have all this time, I want to change that narrative, or I don't want to change that narrative. What is the kind of first step to start changing that narrative?

Well, I am a big believer in actually tracking our time, which before your listeners flee is really in keeping with the whole life hacking mindset. You know, we want to know the data so we can make the best of it. So I have actually been tracking my time on weekly spreadsheets for six years. You do not have to do that. Nobody has to do that. I'm a bit of a time management freak, but I do think it is helpful to try tracking your time for one week. See

See where the time really goes. Many people are quite surprised about where the time goes, because, again, if you don't know there are 168 hours in a week, it is very hard to figure out the proportions. I mean, you don't know the denominator. So we're just kind of flying blind. If you get paid by the hour, you know how many hours you work. If you don't get paid by the hour, this can be a far more nebulous concept. And people put all sorts of numbers on it that are more based on how they feel about their work than the actual number.

usual hours. Same thing with sleep. If we feel tired, we tend to put a low number on it as opposed to actually tracking it. If we feel like we don't have a lot of free time,

we'll decide we have zero or have very little amount. And then you track and say, well, oh, I do have some. Maybe it's like two hours after my young kids go to bed and before I do. But because we're not thinking in that mindset, we don't see that it's there. And when we tell ourselves we have no time, then we don't think about what we want to do with it. We spend it in effortless ways. So try tracking your time for a week. I promise it will be worthwhile. You will discover interesting things and then you can decide what you want to do with that data.

Yeah. And I assume if you've tracked your time for six years, you found that there isn't an app that's better than a spreadsheet. It sounds like spreadsheet is just the easiest, simplest way. Yeah.

You know, I think there are probably different schools of thought on this. There are definitely a lot of time tracking apps on the market. And if any of your listeners are particularly into apps or think it would be more straightforward or easy for them to stick with it with an app, then by all means use that. I like the spreadsheets because it forces me to account for my time. Like I actually have to write it down similar in the way people who are into budgeting, for instance, often like to manually track their spending so they know where it goes.

It also serves as a diary because I'm writing what I'm doing. And so there's a little space for narrative there as I write things. And I also don't have to be quite as good about what category does this fall into because my spreadsheets are a bit less exact than I think an app would force you to be in terms of categorizing because the app wants to make a pie chart.

out of your time. And so all your categories have to be mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive. And on my spreadsheet, if I'm just manually adding things up, I don't have to do that.

Yeah. And what are the most common things you think people find as things that they need to get rid of or things that are wasting their time? Well, I think the biggest thing that wastes time is just being mindless about it, not thinking about how we would like to spend our time. And so when we do have time that could be discretionary, we are not prepared to seize it. So as an example, if you don't think about what you want to do on the weekend, you're

Like you'll sit there on Saturday morning sort of hemming and hawing, be like, oh, I don't know what I want to do. What does everyone else want to do if you're with another group of people, if you have a family or other people you might spend weekends with?

Like you don't get started on this decision until midday and then half the time you could have used for something on Saturday is already gone. So many of the things that you could have chosen are not there. Or you had this time from the morning until midday that could have been devoted to something really fun that if you'd thought about it ahead of time and, you know, had the logistics in place to do it. And so that's what winds up happening to people or, you know, at the end of the day, particularly if any of your listeners have

you know, jobs and young kids, a lot of your during the week leisure time will occur at night, right? After young kids go to bed. And so, you know,

Like, it could be a reasonable amount of time. It could be, you know, 90 minutes, two hours. But if you're not really thinking of it as I have this chunk of time, I can choose to do something that I want to with this time, then you'll just start scrolling around online or like resorting the mail pile or puttering around the house or doing nothing of any, you know, interest to you, really. It's not really relaxing you. It's not rejuvenating you. It's not what you would have chosen if you'd actually thought about like, hey, I have two

two hours. I don't have childcare responsibilities. I have this as leisure time. What would I like to do? So being mindful allows you to seize the time that is there. And if we think about how we'd like to spend our time, we vastly increase the chances that we use it for things that are meaningful to us.

Yeah. Do you think it's more helpful to start with, okay, so I've time tracked a week and I've looked at everything in the calendar or in the calendar, the spreadsheet. Do I start with what are the things that are meaningless and remove them? Or do I start with what are the things that I should prioritize? I actually think you should start with that question of what you want to spend more time doing in your life. And that is because it, you know,

When we fill our lives with the stuff that we want to have there, everything else just naturally takes less time. I mean, we can spend...

All sorts of time coming up with these hacks of like sending our emails that say K instead of OK, right, to save a few minutes. But then, you know, what are you doing with that time? Whereas if you have a project at work that you are so excited about and that you have put big chunks of time into your work schedule to work on, like you are naturally sending fewer stupid emails because you don't want to.

Like you don't want to devote the time to it. You have other things that have a bigger claim on your time that you really want to do. Same thing in our personal life. I mean, there's all sorts of hacks to spend less time on housework to do it more efficiently. But if you are, you know, meeting with your bowling league every Tuesday night and going out and doing that, like,

You're not going to be spending all that time puttering around the house, randomly cleaning stuff up that just gets dirty again five minutes later because you have something that's worthwhile and enjoyable to you. And so everything else fills in around the craps.

Yeah, I think we have a 10 month old and we have an au pair and she ends her day at 530. And I'm like, so efficient to be done at 530 in a way that I feel like I would would have spilled over till 630. So you phrased it in the book, create a life so exciting, you want to work faster at some point. And I've seen that come to life. So what are the things that you think people get the most value from prioritizing?

Well, I think there are three main categories that I kind of put priorities into that I find many people find helpful. Obviously, there's the professional stuff. So your career, hopefully something that you find exciting and meaningful that how you're making this big impact on the world.

relationships. So that would be your family and friends, the things that you wish to prioritize in building those relationships and making them stronger. And then finally, in the category of self. So those are the things that are enjoyable for you, nurturing your health, maintaining energy, your spiritual development, or any hobbies that you wish to do. So those three categories that

tend to be the ones that are most worth prioritizing. Yeah. And the one kind of small thing you mentioned in the book was that exercise kind of which falls into that third category of prioritizing yourself can actually sometimes make time.

Yeah, I really think that sleep and exercise don't take time so much as they do make time. Because whatever time you devote to those things within reason is going to be paid back to you in terms of more energy, better focus. Whereas if you deliberately skimp on those things, thinking that you are going to save time somehow, I think we have all had the experience. I mean, particularly if you have a 10-month-old, if you had a bad night,

Everything takes longer the next day. You just don't have the resources to get through hard stuff when you are tired. And it's not that you did something wrong. It's just that that's the nature of the energy. Or people be like, oh, yeah, I'm going to work hard, work through lunch. I'm at my desk all day. I'll get through everything. I mean, yes, we want to be efficient, but

You know, you don't get up and move or anything like that. Don't take any breaks. And come to 33 o'clock in the afternoon, you're reading the same email six times in a row like you're following a link in there. And next thing you know, you didn't mean to be. But you're somewhere on social media lost, like reading headlines about stuff you totally didn't mean to. And looking at photos of people you didn't like in high school anyway.

And all this time can disappear because you needed a break and you didn't take a break. So it's far better to decide, like, I'm going to go for a brisk walk at two o'clock in the afternoon. Come back. You can actually focus. So that 30 minutes was technically not working. But if you are able to work much more efficiently afterwards, then you didn't lose time in the process. Right.

And do you think people should schedule those breaks or just kind of be try to be aware that they need to happen? It depends what kind of job you have. If you have a very flexible job where you don't have a whole lot of scheduled commitments, then sure, do it whenever you really notice yourself getting into that moment of being low energy and needing some sort of break. On the other hand, you know, if you have

different patients you're seeing every 20 minutes. Obviously, you're going to have to be more proactive about scheduling that in in order to have that break whenever that would be possible within your schedule.

And so I tried to go through a lot of these exercises in advance of speaking with you because I thought it'd be helpful. And I thought about, okay, career, family, yourself. And then I thought, what about all these things that we all have on our kind of to-do list, if you will? Like, I need to go to the DMV sometime before my license expires. I want to organize the garage. Things

Things that never seem to be a priority that I want to do now, but I know sometimes have to happen. How should people kind of think about prioritizing them and when to do them? They feel like they always just get pushed off. Yeah, well, I mean, these are things that you can, in fact, put on your to-do list. I suggest people, as much as possible, try to batch things like that and put them all on a certain day, a certain chunk of hours, because then it forces prioritization within that.

right? Like if you have all weekend to run errands, like it can take all weekend to run your errands. Whereas if you say, okay, I had to get everything done in this two hour block, two and a half hour block, whatever it is you wanted to devote to it, you will be more efficient within that time or within, you know, cleaning your house. Same thing. If you say, okay, we're going to clean this whole thing in 90 minutes, everyone's focused on it. Everyone's doing it. We're going to get it done. And then the upside of that too, is not only does it force efficiency within that,

Like if you find yourself looking at a dirty floor at some other point, you don't have to be like, oh, I should go do that instead of whatever I'm doing right now. And be like, oh, yeah, there's a time for cleaning the floor. Now is not that time. Right. And that allows us to relax. So whenever we can batch things together.

It forces the prioritization within the batched window and then also allows our brains to relax and let go of that constant loop of I should be doing X. That keeps us from relaxing. It keeps us from focusing on things that we have chosen to do during any given time. Because, yeah, you know, there's a time to go to the DMV. You've set it up. It's for, you know, Friday morning. You're going to do all these things and that's when you're going to go. And now it's not Friday morning, so I can stop thinking about it.

So a lot of the things we've been talking about take a good portion of your time. But what about when you just have three to five minutes, whether a meeting ends early or you're waiting in line? Is there anything you can do with that time to make it more productive? I think you should use that time to read.

I mean, most of us pick up our phones and check email or scroll through social media or check headlines in those little bits of time. And it makes sense because our phones are there. They are convenient. These are things we can interact with in short and uncertain amounts of time. But there are other things you can do too. If you have an e-reader app on your phone and put e-books on your phone, then you can use those little bits of time to read. Now, you may not want to choose like

the most gripping novel ever for five minutes of time, because then you'll be very, very sad when the person calls you and you're like, darn it, I have to put it down. But like a lot of nonfiction, for instance, could be read in those small chunks of time. And those small chunks of time really add up. It is not at all unusual for people to have

30 minutes of these small chunks of time through the day. And hey, if you use that to read, that's 30 more minutes of reading you get done per day. That's, you know, 210 minutes a week, which is three and a half hours. And that's a lot. Like you could be getting through an extra book a week in that amount of time. So consider doing that with your little bits of time instead. What about people? So you talked about family and relationships. I find that sometimes people, you know, can turn...

turn into, at least for me, what I'll call the human version of email, where you can meet up with someone and next thing you know, you're talking for four hours. And it's not that I don't want to spend time with people. It's not that I don't want to build these relationships. But there's also only 168 hours in a week. And I may only want to prioritize an hour of spending time with someone, but it just always ends up falling into three hours to do dinner or go out for drinks or have someone over. Yeah.

Do you have any kind of tips for keeping relationships strong, but not throwing the whole week into it? Yeah. Well, I mean, if you have people like that, that you do want to see, but you want to limit the time, your best bet is coming up with stuff that is more naturally limited. So, yeah.

you know, you meet the person for a walk, you probably aren't going to walk for three hours. Like it's just, you know, we're going to do this loop around this lake, which is two miles. When we are done with the two miles, we are in fact done. And so that is something that might more naturally limit it. Or if you know you have a scheduled commitment afterwards, you can be very clear about this. Be like, hey, you know, as we're talking, I wanted to make sure I caught up with you. Just, you know, by the way, I...

said I'd have to call my mom at whatever time just so you know. But anyway, it's something that you know there is an end to it. Because I think that's totally fine. There's certainly people that we want to spend time with. We don't want to spend all our time with. And if it gets to that, then you can sort of say, you know, I'm willing to spend within this window. Like,

five minutes to 60 minutes. That is the upper limit. We will always end it around that time. You know, and as long as you're nice about it, I think people are going to roll with it. And especially if it seems like there's a real circumstance that is ending it. It's not like, yeah, I've had enough of you.

Yeah. And one of the quotes that was probably, it might be my favorite quote was, it can take hours to buy back the goodwill burned in a two second glance at your phone while someone's trying to tell you something important. Yeah. And my takeaway from that quote kind of ties in here, which was, if you know that you're spending 30 minutes with someone and you've said, look, this is the time I've decided I want to spend with you, it kind of makes it more easy to say,

I want to be here. I'm going to be present. I'm going to turn everything else off because I've prioritized it versus get a random phone call, answer the phone call while you're cleaning the house. Now you're like in the middle of one activity trying to do another. It's probably not even the most productive hour on either task at hand, talking to the friend or cleaning the house. So I don't know that quote really stuck with me as, as a inspiration for when you are doing something, just focus on that. Yeah. And,

I would also say, because people may want to do that, but what often happens is like, what time is it? Because they do have something they have to do afterwards. And so one thing you can do is set alarms. And I've seen my husband do this for like business situations. Like if he's talking to a client, he wants the person to feel like he is fully focused on them, but he has to leave to catch a train or something. So he has an old-fashioned watch, like a digital wristwatch.

And he sets an alarm for like, you know, if the meeting was at two and he has to leave at three, it's like 255, it goes off. So he's totally relaxed until 255 when that alarm goes off, which sounds like something totally separate. You know, it wasn't him. He didn't do anything. He wasn't looking at the clock to see what time it was. So that's something you can do so that you know you won't have to think about it. You won't have to sneak glances at your phone or something else when you're talking to the person. And yet, you know, it will be stopped when you need to stop.

Yeah, mine is I've turned off all vibrations for notifications and messages and anything. So, you know, I don't someone told me, oh, just turn off, turn your phone in airplane mode, turn it off. You don't see the screen. Well, that means that if there's something that you need to check, it's like a big hassle. But if you could turn off all the vibrations, all the noise, then your phone could sit in your pocket. It might as well be on airplane mode as far as you're concerned until you take it out.

But there is nothing more frustrating than trying to be present. And then it's like, and it's usually nothing. I mean, it's like the group text from the people that always are group texting. Exactly.

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Don't miss the chance to maximize your happiness and save money. Join over 37,000 people getting my newsletter by going to allthehacks.com slash email and signing up for free. Again, that's allthehacks.com slash email. That kind of comes back to this idea of trying to do two things at once. Do you have a stance from all of the kind of

studying you've done, people you've talked to, whether people can productively multitask and do email during a meeting or have a conversation while they clean the house, or what's your stance there? So in general, you can't do two related things at the same time. If they're using kind of the same part of your brain, it will be very inefficient. You'll just wind up switching back and forth between the two. So if you can check

email while you're in a meeting, like, why are you in that meeting? Like, clearly, you're not that needed in that meeting if it is possible for you to do this. So it would have been better on the front end to be like, I don't need to be here. I only need to be here for the first 15 minutes or something like that, rather than waste the time of...

acting like you're in two places at once. So that's for that. Now, on the other hand, some things it doesn't really matter if we're all that efficient. Like if you don't particularly care if you do the world's best job folding laundry and it would make it more pleasant to talk to a relative on the phone while you're doing it, like that sounds great. Like that's a great way to multitask.

Because, yeah, it doesn't matter what your towels look like. You're not trying to go for the hotel crease in the towel folding. So by all means, make it more pleasant. Or, you know, there's also ways we can kind of deepen our time by combining things, usually something that you were intending to do anyway.

and bringing another person into it. So exercising with a friend, for instance, is a great way to nurture a relationship while also nurturing your health or running an errand with a kid. Like if you have multiple kids, taking one on an errand is a great way to spend some one-on-one time together. So yeah, these are just ways that you can do things with another person. And so you are in fact

multitasking, but in a much better way than being in an email and being in an email, being in a meeting and checking email at the same time. Sometimes I feel like I'm in an email. All the time. All the time. One tip I have for multitasking with a partner is make sure you're on the same page about how devoted you might be to a certain activity. I think for me,

I, if I watch a television show for me, I'm like, I want to be all in. I don't want to miss anything. Like I, it's just really engaging. And sometimes my wife is like, I just want to have a show on. And if I miss a piece of the show, it's not a big deal. So she's fine if she sends a text to her family and it,

it would drive me nuts because I was like, no, why aren't we paying attention? And then I was like, oh, you're not trying to have the same experience with the television as I am. And I think that's helped a bit though. I still have these, it's still tough, but it's helped to say, what are we doing together? What are we trying to achieve? Make sure we're on the same page about what we want before kind of

maybe judging what someone else is doing. So that's something that I'm continuing to work on. But I think what was helpful was understanding what people were trying to get out of an experience before. Yeah. I mean, although in general, I don't know. I feel like if you're watching something for entertainment value, I mean, I'm kind of with you, like you may as well get the full enjoyment of it. Whereas if

the goal was spending time with you, which is why she's sitting next to you, then maybe watching a show together isn't the best way to do that. Like maybe you two should be interacting. And so being clear on what that time is and why you are spending it doing what you're doing is in general a good idea. I mean, yeah, you want to be good about communicating these things. Yeah. So let's say I, which I did, I went through, I said, okay, these are the things I want to prioritize. This is my week. How do I start getting the things off that aren't important things?

Things like I have to prepare dinner. I have to clean the house. You know, I have all like what are what are your tips for removing things that are not important? Yeah. Well, when you don't think something is the best use of your time, you have three options. You can ignore it. You can minimize it and you can outsource it.

Now, obviously, outsourcing is going to involve other people. We do it all the time. I mean, I've gotten all sorts of people being like, well, I can't afford to have my house cleaned or whatever, and that's fine. But if we recognize that we already outsource so much, I mean, most of us are not churning our own butter. We are not sewing our own clothes. So this is all just a matter of degree of what we choose to outsource versus what we do not. Right.

then maybe people can approach it a bit more rationally and say, okay, well, what are the things that would be easiest to get to somebody else that would cost the least amount to do? Or if they have multiple family members, for instance, older children, that may be a great idea for sharing the load there. But ignoring and minimizing are the two that really should be getting the bulk of the attention because there is so much that doesn't actually need to get

done or doesn't need to get done to the standard that people might assume that it needs to. And many of these things are

We don't even think about them. It's just sort of how we've grown up with the stories we have about what we should be doing with our time. You know, I see this all the time on time logs. People tell me like, oh, you know, my mother always did a small load of laundry every day, so I'm never behind on it. I'm like, wow, you are doing laundry every single day. And in your mind, that's what you should be doing. That's like what people do and not even question it or

The idea that like small children need to be bathed nightly, like if you want to, great, but they don't. Unless there's like a medical reason, like you've been told it's absolutely critical for your child's, you know, skin condition or something like no, most small children do not need that nightly. So if you don't like it, and it's not something that helps them sleep, and therefore you're doing it, don't.

Get rid of that. It's fine. You don't have to do it. Packing lunches. You know, if kids are old enough to go to school where there's a cafeteria, then they can either buy or they can pack their own lunch. That's not something you really need to be doing. Or, you know, in general, lunches.

various personal care things. I mean, I'm glad we're not sharing too much of the video of this, but I try to minimize how much personal care you do as well. And I'm sure some of your female listeners may get more of this than maybe all your male listeners. But many of the beauty standards aimed at women seem to assume that we just have all the time in the world to devote to these things.

I occasionally read these articles in women's magazines, like how to do an eight minute face and save tons of time. I'm like eight minutes. Really? Are we supposed to be spending eight minutes on makeup every day? Like how about, how about 30 seconds? Can we, can we just do that? Would that be better? You know, I,

Like there's people who won't face the world unless their hair is perfectly coiffed and blown out. And it just it takes time. And we should really question, like, is that necessary? I think we've learned in the past year of so many of us working from home that a lot of this is maybe less necessary than than we may have thought. So ignore and minimize as much as possible when something is not the best use of your time. One of the tips you mentioned at the end of your book was not to overthink dinner.

And I feel like when I first read that, my instinct was, well, yeah, you could just order dinner or get microwave meals. But I would be curious if that's the actual process you follow or how do you have healthy meals without spending an hour sitting there preparing and chopping?

and all that. Yeah, this is another one that really gets me because I know that a lot of people grow up with the message that if you are going to get your family ready for the week, you need to spend all Sunday prepping meals for the week ahead. And what happens is that people spend all this time

preparing meals and then they still spend time getting them ready during the week. It's like, cause I got to thaw the lasagna and then let me make a salad to go with the lasagna that's pre-made. It's like, you're still spending 20, 30 minutes getting dinner on the table. It's like, well, you could actually do a whole dinner in 20 to 30 minutes, right? You can, you know, pick up a rotisserie chicken in a bag salad. Like that's, that's made. You don't even have to do anything. But even if you're cooking, I mean, you could just throw some veggies and

make an omelet with scrambled eggs. Like that's a dinner, you know, that is like a quick cooking piece of salmon and some veggies, like on a sheet pan in the oven, 20 minutes or so. Again, not overthinking it. There are all sorts of incredibly simple meals and having a few of these available to you and always having the ingredients for these things on hand, you

can make life a lot easier. Having rotating dinners, like the idea of Taco Tuesday is really brilliant if you think about it. Because if it's Tuesday, you're having tacos. And you can switch it up within that. Like, I don't know, this week it's chicken tacos, next week it's steak tacos or shrimp tacos or whatever. Or you put different toppings on week to week and people choose their own.

But you always have the stuff for tacos when you go to the grocery store and then you never think about it because it's Tuesday and you're having tacos. And that removes a lot of mental energy and allows you to just do what else you're doing until it's time to have dinner. Yeah, I think one of the best things to save time on dinner for us this past year where there's been a lot of cooking at home was we just found some meals that we're like, you know what? We could eat this every week. And we just the coolest thing is not only does

Does it take out the overhead of what are we eating this week to reduce that? But also, we've ended up just basically memorizing these recipes such that you can do it completely on autopilot. You're like, I know exactly what needs to be chopped. I started to figure out, oh, well, we need these ingredients for these two things. So let's batch those together back at night after night.

And then we also just started doubling every dinner so that we didn't have to think about lunch. Yeah, leftovers are great. I mean, leftovers are wonderful. I said, don't make all your meals on Sunday. But whenever you are cooking something, if you make enough for the next day to have lunch, then you've solved two meals at once. So that's great. Yeah.

Exactly. So, okay. So now we've kind of got this week that we're, we know what we want to do. We've taken off the things we don't want to do. Actually, I have one last one on the last one, which is, are there, you know, I know you said that minimizing and ignoring can be the most powerful, but when it comes to outsourcing, are there things that are less obvious that you think people could benefit from considering outsourcing? Yeah.

Well, I think that food prep is something that might be more worth outsourcing than many people consider. If it is a source of stress in your household, like who's making dinner, if you have some sort of child care, for instance, like if this is the situation people are in because they have young kids and two working parents, if perhaps a babysitter could start dinner, that

would save you various time, you know, before you get home from work or if the meals can be pre-prepped during a toddler's nap time, for instance. That could be one way to take it off your plate, so to speak, for a few nights a week. So that's something that many people don't do, but can in fact do.

be a real benefit. I mean, more than like having a cleaning service come in to dust your baseboards. Like, I mean, you could just not dust the baseboards. That's another idea. Whereas you do have to eat. So if that is the source of stress and you don't want to be doing takeout all the time, it may actually be something that would be available as part of child care or

I mean, heck, hire somebody to come in and cook for you a couple of times a week. It might, in fact, be cheaper than restaurant meals and takeout if you run the numbers on it. And that could solve that problem.

Yeah, just someone just sent me a site called chef.com, but chef with an S. And it's kind of like not quite meal delivery where you, you know, you can do it on the night of you say, okay, next Friday, I want to order from this person who lives, you know, in your kind of vicinity, who's going to cook dinner.

in this case, like Persian food, and you pick your meal and they deliver it at much less than you would pay from a restaurant because you're planning in advance. They're going to make this for lots of people. It's actually person to person, not necessarily restaurants. And it's something that I've queued up to do next week is to have two or three meals delivered in advance. And we'll see how that goes. Yeah, that sounds like a great idea. Look forward to hearing how it works. That would certainly be an option for people as well.

Yeah, I'll link it out in the show notes because it is not spelled as it sounds. So if I've decided the things that I want to prioritize and I've decided the things that I want to deprioritize, I've kind of have a plan. Is there a good time to do that planning? Is there a good way to stick to those routines? So I think that

weekly planning will get most of the job done for most people. I plan my weeks on Fridays. I find that Friday is a really good week, good day to make this happen because it tends to be slower. It's also really hard to start anything new on Friday, kind of like drifting into the weekend by Friday afternoon. So we have a tendency to waste a lot of time on Fridays.

Whereas if you spend the time planning what future you should be doing, you turn what might be wasted time into some of your most productive minutes of the week. So Friday, usually Friday afternoon, I make a three category priority list for my upcoming week. Career, relationships, self. The same three categories we talked about before. What would I most like to accomplish in these categories over the course of the next week?

I make that list, figure out roughly when those things can go, look at what is already on my calendar for the upcoming week, figure out any logistics that need to happen, or if I want to ignore or minimize or get rid of something, how I could do that for what is already on my calendar. And this whole process...

takes 20 minutes, maybe. And I say that as somebody with a family of two working parents, five kids, a dog, a lot of logistics around here. I think, you know, many people are like, oh, I'm too tired on Friday to plan. It's like, really? Like, what do you think it looks like? It's not running a marathon. Like we're talking 20 minutes max where you think about your upcoming week. But if you do this week after week,

then you start to get a much better sense of control of your time. Like you know what is coming up, you know you have a plan to deal with it. And that can make your weekends far better too because part of that Sunday night blues people experience is that they know there's a lot of stuff waiting for them Monday, like professionally, probably personally too. And they don't know what they're gonna do about it. So their brain is going over and over again trying to figure out what am I gonna do about it? But if you know, because you had a plan that you made on Friday, then you can relax.

And what about weekends? It was really exciting to read, because I'd never done the math, that there are 60 hours between cracking a beer on Friday afternoon and going to work on Monday. Do you plan those weekends on Friday night? Or are they part of the previous week's plan? How do you make weekends the best they can be? So usually they are part of the previous Friday. So I kind of view my...

Friday planning as mostly looking to the upcoming week, the upcoming week being Monday through that Sunday. However, because I am planning on Friday, it allows me to take a second glance at what is on the calendar for that upcoming weekend. And so if I haven't sorted something through, that's a last minute chance to do it. Or if the weather has changed or something new has come up, that allows me to also take a secondary look at the weekend that is just starting.

And, you know, other people may not need to do it that way. Again, because of the five children, two working parents, like there, I cannot let the weekend just be until last minute Friday night, because there might be three children in different sporting activities at different places. And if there's only two drivers, well, we've got to sort something out. So

Other people might not need to do that, but I do. So that's where that comes in. But I would say you do need to plan your weekends. I think a lot of people are like, oh, planning weekend. That's totally a contradiction in terms. That sounds terrible, horrible. I don't want to do that. Okay, that is fine.

But if you just think of a few, what I call anchor events, like things that would be exciting to you to do over the course of the weekend, and when roughly you think those should go, like three things over the course of the weekend that would genuinely excite you or rejuvenate you,

You will have so much better weekends because the rest of the time can be whatever. I'm not nothing. It's impossible to do nothing. You'll do something. It just may not be what you would have chosen if you thought about it. But if you know you have these three anchor things in your weekend, you will hit Monday feeling like, yeah, that was great.

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I just want to thank you quick for listening to and supporting the show. Your support is what keeps this show going. To get all of the URLs, codes, deals, and discounts from our partners, you can go to allthehacks.com slash deals. So please consider supporting those who support us. Yeah, you mentioned putting together your list of either 100 or 1,000 dreams. I guess it depends on the person on how many they want. 1,000 is probably too many. That's ambitious. 1,000,000 dreams.

Yeah. But how I found that doing that makes it easier to plan the weekend. So having a list of things that you want to do that are exciting, whether that's restaurants to go try now that

You know, we're opening things back up, whether that's hikes you want to go on or a museum to see. And so I love that idea. I started batching mine together and separating it from what's usually often thought of as like my bucket list, which is like, I want to go, you know, to Greece, which is not something I'm going to do next weekend. Yeah, well, the upside of it's a list of 100 dreams, which was it was an exercise shared with me by a career coach great many years ago. And a lot of people have really responded well to this idea.

You can do a thousand. That'd be great too. But people will find that even a hundred is really, really hard because the bucket list that you're talking about, it is stuff like go to Greece and then you get like 20 places you want to visit. And then you're like, huh? Okay. Now what? Yeah.

So with 100, you have to keep going. And so you can list like the dozen local restaurants you want to try. And then you're still only at 32 items. And so then you're like, OK, well, here's these 15 state parks in, you know, within two hour drive that I want to go see. And you're only at 47. So like you still have to keep coming back to this list over and over again and asking friends and family like what they recommend.

But having made this long and unedited list of anything you might want to do does make future planning easier because then you say like, oh, well, we do have half a weekend day on this upcoming Saturday. And oh, hey, I want to do strawberry picking with the kids and it's strawberry season. We should do that. Right. Whereas if you haven't articulated that desire yet,

It may not occur to you to be like, oh, yes, we should go strawberry picking with this few hours we have until it's, you know, strawberry season has come and gone. Yeah. One other weekend, I guess, hack that I've started using already is you said if you use weekends for chores, it's less ideal because if you use weekdays for chores, you'll spend less time on them because you just have less time. Yeah.

I thought this is great. So we just started saying, let's do all our chores on the weekdays and then they won't expand to fill the entire weekend. So that hack I thought is worth sharing. Okay, good. Well, I'm glad you like that. I mean, yeah, if you have the ability to, you know, well, obviously people can order groceries too, but if you're going to go to a store, I mean, there's nobody in the store at like nine 30 on Wednesday. So if that's an option, you know, you have young kids, one parent stays home with them and the other goes to the store. Yeah.

Like you can be in and out so quick because there's no line, nothing going on there. So that, that works. And everything is stocked. And everything is stocked. That's true too. I, you know, yeah, I've had, I've gone at like 5 a.m. once when I pass up early with the baby and it was like,

This is the magical time at the 24-hour store where everything is there. I'm the only person here. It's great. But yeah, doing things at unorthodox times. If you think about when would everybody do something and then do it at another time, you can generally save a lot of time because you won't be having to deal with everyone else being there. Same thing with like, you know, throw a load of laundry in in the morning, move it in to the dryer room.

if you're working at home, do it at lunch. But if you're not, just do it when you get home from work later in the day. It's like do that twice a week and then you don't have to spend your Saturday by the laundry machine. And that's great. You can just do quick touch ups. If you are making dinner, for instance, and you're

cleaning the kitchen, like, you know, say, okay, we're going to get this kitchen clean in, say, the next 15 minutes and just do a quick sweep through of everything else, the common areas. Do that once or twice a week, the extra stuff. And again, you don't have to spend the whole weekend cleaning as well while you are maintaining at least a reasonably clean home. As

Yeah, people have very different standards of what constitutes clean. And if you are a person for whom it has to be spotless, like you just have to acknowledge that either that's going to take a ton of time or a ton of money. Whereas if you can allow yourself to lower your standards a bit, then that can save a lot of time and money. So, you know, figure out what's worth it.

I thought that tip was great. I proposed lowering our housekeeping standards, but it did not go well. There are certain gendered aspects to this. It is often harder for women to let go of

housekeeping standards because it has been drilled into our heads that that is what people will judge us on. I even once heard this articulated that somebody had been told, like, you think you're such hot stuff, but there is dust under your beds. I just love that. Like, who would say that? But somebody did to somebody. But that's what people have in the back of their minds. So, you know, it might help to realize that

That many of us don't have all that many other people in our house these days anyway. And if you were going to have people in your house, you could deal with it like you could do a quick hour blitz and get through like you'd probably have noticed like not that many of us have these situations where judgmental people are showing up at our house with no notice to come inspect under our beds.

So for most of us, there's no home inspection coming up. Like a lot of people will be like, oh, I can't go to... I have to clean the house before I go to bed at night. It's like, well, why? You know, is there an 11 p.m. home inspection? Like, no, there is no 11 p.m. home inspection. Nobody is coming to give you demerits for having toys on the floor. And in fact, those toys will just come out again next morning. So you'll never get that time back. They come out every day, multiple times. So I feel like, and maybe this is a result of...

you know, a young child in the house. But sometimes at the end of the week, my wife and I are like, what do we want to do this weekend? And we're like, I just don't want to do anything. I feel like we did so much and we didn't stop for a second. What do you do when you have those feelings or how have you avoided having those feelings? Well, the one thing I would say is that having time at home with no plans with a small child is often way more exhausting than getting out and doing something. And

I have learned this in many cases the hard way that if there are a bunch of kids arguing and fighting and throwing things around all Saturday morning, it feels hellish. Whereas if we go to the zoo, people have other things to look at.

to direct their energy. And rather than punching your sister, you can look at the monkeys. And then you come home at lunch and then people can have quiet time afterwards because they're tired or the people who nap can nap. And then, you know, go out again at 3.30, 4, do something little then and then the day is over. And that is a much better way to manage your energy than facing like

12 hours of nothingness on a Saturday, which won't be nothing. It'll be you guys chasing around the 10 month old and trying to keep the 10 month old from sticking up. Was it a boy or girl? Sorry. A girl from sticking a fork in her eye. And then, you know, be like, well, I had I was with her more during this amount of time. And you were with her more for this amount of time. Yeah, it's just have a plan. It's so much better for managing energy.

So we talked a lot about weekends. One of the books that I did read before this was about what the most successful people do before breakfast. Could you talk a little bit about what you've learned about mornings and why they can be so valuable? So mornings are a really good time for getting stuff done. For people who have traditional in-the-office jobs and particularly who have families who are going to need and want to see them after work, morning is a

another chunk of the day that can be discretionary time. There's that time and then there's the late at night time. The problem is that the late at night time is harder to use for certain sorts of activities. Like most people are not going to leave the house and go for a run at 9 p.m. Most people do not have the energy to write a chapter in their novel at 10 p.m. Now, there are some people who do. That's great. More power to them. Most people are not going to be able to do that. And that's why we tend to do the more low energy stuff at night.

Whereas morning, most people have more discipline and energy and focus in the morning. Again, not everybody, but most people. And so if that sounds like it might be you figuring out that there is something that you would like to do, that life has a way of crowding out, maybe you can make time for it in the morning.

And so I kept seeing this on time logs, like if there was somebody who had a huge job and a family they were raising, and then they also, you know, exercise five times a week, or they also, you know, had a great meditation practice or a spiritual practice they were doing frequently or who, you know, was doing creative writing or some sort of hobby like that.

it tended to be that they were doing it first thing in the morning. And so I started seeing this over and over again on time logs and decided I had to investigate further. And have you had mornings yourself? I know I have where you wake up and you're like, gosh, I wanted to get up at six. I just feel awful. Like, can you jumpstart that productivity? Or is that a day where you just say today, I'm just going to give myself another hour of sleep? Well,

Well, usually that's a decision that could be made the night before, because the reason you feel bad waking up at 6 a.m. often has to do with what time you went to bed the night before. So this is just math. Like if you need seven and a half hours of sleep and you're in a position which, again, you may not be with a 10 month old baby, but let's say that's not part of your life at the moment. You know, if you're waking up at six and you went to bed at

1130, well, that's six and a half hours. So that explains why you are tired at 6am. Whereas if you went to bed at 1030, then you would have gotten your seven and a half hours and you probably would feel pretty good at 6am. But you can then make that decision the night before if you have any sort of control over when you can get up in the morning. It's like, well, I didn't get to bed till 1130. So I actually do need to sleep.

until closer to seven, if that is at all possible in my life. So I really do think that that the wake up decision should be a function of when you went to bed, as opposed to being like, no, no, no, I have to do X at 6am. And then you'll just crash the next night and not be able to do anything to I mean, people, people will get to the amount of sleep they need. The question is whether it is disorderly or orderly. And it's much better in our life if it's a more orderly matter.

Yeah. And part of recreating mornings, which is something I'm kind of trying to do, it's like, OK, we're going to introduce exercise. That's a new routine. Not that I haven't exercised, but in the mornings as frequently and consistently. Any tips for when you're trying to introduce new habits? Well, start small.

I also think that for many people, it would help to not view the morning routine as something they need to do every single day. And there may be people who disagree with me because they're like, it's a routine. But I've found over the years of talking to people that many people do not do their same morning routines on, say, Saturday and Sunday.

and they don't do it on vacations. And if you're not doing it on those days, then it isn't, in fact, a daily routine. It is a five times a week routine, or maybe even a four times a week if they're only doing it Monday to Thursday, because Friday is different for some reason. So a lot of these people with daily routines, I'm putting daily in my quote marks, um,

are doing it four times a week. So if you want to aim for three to four times a week, that's great. That can still be count as a routine. And then that also makes it possible for people who need to trade off with a partner in terms of like kid coverage in the morning. Like, you know, I'm going to exercise three times a week in the morning. You're going to exercise two to three times a week in the morning. It's fine that you can trade off for each other. Start small, like do something that you will enjoy.

And that you will stick with. So if you hate running...

don't choose running as your morning routine exercise because you will not get out of bed to do it. Whereas if you love it, then you will. If you'd prefer to do a exercise video or lift weights or get on your Peloton bike or maybe there's a class you'd love to go to at 6 a.m. two days a week. Those are the sorts of things people will stick with. But if it's like, I have to exercise and I have to do X that I hate, but I'm just going to power through it. It's like, okay, well, you will for a few days and then something will happen

to derail you and you won't get back into it because you don't want to do it. Yeah. One of the things that I think gets a lot of people in the morning is, you know, your phone's right there and all of a sudden you're looking at your email and you're not getting out of bed to do the exercise you even love and want. So one thing that I've tried to do and it works sometimes and then I fall out of it, but is I just try to plug my phone in somewhere where I have to get out of bed to grab it. It doesn't have to be the, I leave it in the kitchen, but it's like, I

Like I have to stand up and once I'm standing up, I'm like, I should probably use this time to go on a run. I'm already out of bed. Yeah. But the nights where the phone just ends up on the nightstand the next morning, I feel like I instantly lose 20 or 30 minutes. Yeah, that can definitely happen. You know, and it's so easy to look and check. So, you know, if you need to check the weather, yeah.

But still, you're just like, oh, but it's right there. I could just look so easily. So yeah, doing as much as you can to keep yourself on your routine. Probably whatever it is can be dealt with after you've gone and exercised for 20, 30 minutes too. So you might even just stick the phone in your pocket in case there's an emergency, but not look at it.

Yeah. And, you know, we talked about 168 hours. A lot of them are sleeping. A lot of them, hopefully, we can redefine after this. But a lot of them are at work. And I'm curious, are there, especially in light of, you know, lots of work from home and your new book, The New Corner Office last year, are there kind of common tips people should take to work with them for better productively managing their workday? Yeah.

Well, I think being mindful about time is important for leisure time and it's important for work time. Now, in terms of work time, people do think about their time because we have appointments we have to do. We have things we have to accomplish and those can make time feel bigger than it is, which is one of the reasons that people think they work more hours than they tend to. But.

On any given day, think like, well, what would make for a good day? Like what three to five things do I really need to accomplish today? That can be your to-do list for the day. And then when you've done those things, you know you've had a good day. I mean, maybe other things happen, maybe other things don't.

But by setting limited but well-chosen goals for any given day, you can make progress and you can feel accomplished. And then you know when things will be done because you view your to-do list as a contract with yourself. I mean, I think that's one of the key things is that we do each day what we set out to do. And yes, stuff comes up, which is why you have to make the list of things you absolutely will get to very, very short.

But when you choose them well, then you will make progress. Yeah. I just listened to the episode of your podcast where you talk about email. And I saw that you wrote a review in the Wall Street Journal for Cal Newport's A World Without Email book. I feel like email, like I know you do, is kind of this thing that sucks up all time. Are there a couple quick tips or hacks about how to rethink about email so it doesn't end up eating your whole day?

Yeah, I enjoyed Cal's book. I mean, I think we're not going to have a world without email, but I think a world with a lot less email is within our ability to get. And some of this is organizational. If you work for yourself, then you can set your own parameters on it. I tend to just not check it for a while if I don't want to check it. And that's fine. Nothing's really, you know, nobody can do anything to me. But yeah.

Yeah, if you work in an organization, you really need to set these parameters as a group and come up with ways to not be sending each other random emails back and forth constantly. Maybe it's that you do short check-ins on the status of things. Maybe it's that you use project management software. Maybe it's that you tell people to pick up the phone. It's a crazy idea, but that's often a much more efficient way to get a bit of information than having like a 12 email back and forth chain.

Yeah, yeah, I I'm trying to reduce my email time because it's just it's taking over. Okay, last big thing I want to talk about. So I have this 10 month old and you've gone through five children and I know that you've learned a lot. Is there obviously I feel like I've lost a lot of time and I've gained a lot of happiness. But are there hacks you have for managing time with kids that a new parent should really be thinking about?

Well, I think it's the same mindfulness that we've been talking in all other aspects of life that you think about your days ahead of time. You think about what would make for good additions to your life, like things you want to do with your kids when you can make those happen. And it's, you know...

So I think entering the kids' worlds from time to time, and certainly as they get older, you start to see more of the things that they are really interested in. And it doesn't take much time, but having little bits of time that you are devoted fully to those things that they are interested in.

can be some of the more fun parts of parenting. I've done every summer, I try to do what we call mommy days with each of my kids. I take my older kids, each kid gets a one on one day with me, we go do something that the kid really wanted to do. And it's just so pleasant, because they're not fighting with some other kid about like, who gets to do what and we I wanted to do this, but we did this. And so now I have to do this. And so it's

You can't do it all the time. I wouldn't claim that people who are only children, it's like all of life is like that because it isn't because their parents get like exhausted with just dealing with them. But when we are managing a crowd like we are having just little bits of time focused on each kid can be great. And I sort of try to think about my weeks that way, too. Like if I've built in some small chunk of time with kids.

each kid one-on-one with them. And if I have, then it's been good. So trying to take advantage of that as much as possible. Yeah. And the last thing you said about kids that really stuck with me is that part of making over your mornings has been investing time to make your children more self-reliant.

Are there tips for helping make children more self-reliant? They might not be relevant at 10 months, but as much... No, if you're 10 months old, it's not going to be that self-reliant. You shouldn't hold it against her. But as she gets older, things you've done that have helped there? Well, I think just expecting them to do... I think the more you kind of...

do for your kids, the more they then expect you to do that for them. So I'm certainly not the kind of person who chooses my kids outfits. I feel like you know, that's your business, your fashion statements, not my problem. It has nothing to do with me. If you wear something like, you know, I mean, I'll stop you if it's 30 degrees out and you're leaving without a coat. But

Other than that, kind of your call, having kids learn how to make lunches. For instance, when we were doing hybrid and virtual schooling for a long time, there was definitely lessons on how you get your own food because I can't make lunch for everyone every day. You know, we're working on various things in terms of getting clothes put away and helping with household chores and managing your own schoolwork. I definitely think that's something that...

You just have to decide as a parent, like I already did sixth grade. I don't need to do sixth grade again. And if things go wrong in sixth grade, it won't be the end of the world and they will learn from it. So that's generally been my philosophy. Hopefully it won't go horribly wrong, but we'll see. That's the one thing I mean, you know, I don't like to give a whole lot of parenting advice. I'd have to say because

I feel like it's just asking for your kid to do something terrible. And it'd be like that person claimed to be a parenting expert. And you have no control over it, ultimately. I mean, people are their own people and they make their own choices in life, ultimately. And so you just have to do your best to make sure everything goes well.

That's what we're trying. Any other fun life or money or any kind of hacks that you love that you want to share? I know you said it's not about getting back those five, 10 minutes here and there, but it is something that I know listeners love to hear. Any tricks to feel more optimized and efficient?

Well, one thing I would say is that hunting for lost items feels like the biggest waste of time in the world. So as much as possible, having a set location for anything you use frequently, and if it is ever found not in that location, it needs to be immediately returned. So all my kids' shoes, backpacks, coats, sports equipment are in the mudroom.

in certain, you know, they don't have to be nicely lined up. This isn't something you'll see on Pinterest. But if shoes are ever found elsewhere, they are immediately returned there. And so that way you're not spending 10 minutes every morning looking for shoes, which if we were doing would just make life impossible. So, you know, find a home for spots, find a home for things, keep them in that spot, train everyone that it never goes anywhere else. And hopefully you'll spend a lot of less time looking for stuff.

Great. This has been fantastic. Thank you so much for being here. Where can people read more, learn more about you and everything you're learning?

Yeah, well, please come visit my website, which is lauravandercam.com. You can learn about my various books there and about my podcast. I have Before Breakfast, which is an every weekday morning short productivity tip, help you take your day from great to awesome. I also have a podcast I co-host with Sarah Hart Unger called Best of Both Worlds about the intersection of work and family from the perspective of two people who really enjoy both. So that airs every Tuesday. Awesome. Thank you for being here. Thanks so much for having me.

I really hope you enjoyed that. And thank you for listening. I've been tracking my time for the past week, and it's been really eye-opening. I'm already starting to minimize, ignore, and outsource things to be more intentional. And fortunately, that means more time for all the hacks. So I'm excited to see where this goes. If you're enjoying the show, you can always help out by sharing an episode with a friend or leaving a five-star review. I know I say it every time, but the more this show grows, the more incredible guests I'll be able to have on, and the more hacks we can all learn together.

So thank you in advance for all your help. If you want to get in touch, I'm Chris at allthehacks.com and at Hutchins on Twitter. See you next time.