A simple path to time abundance

Laura shares her favorite strategies for moving beyond a sense of time scarcity

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Before Breakfast, a production of iHeartRadio. Good Morning.
This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast podcast. Today's
episode is going to be a slightly longer one, but
instead of interviewing a fascinating guest about how they take
their days from great to awesome, I'm going to talk

(00:25):
about some ways that I try to take my days
from great to awesome and that I hope will be
helpful for you as well. Longtime listeners know that I've
spent the past three years working on a book called
Big Time, A Simple Path to Time Abundance. That book
is on sale this week. If you enjoy the tips
on this show, I hope you will consider picking up

(00:48):
a copy, and to pique your interest, I thought i'd
share what I have learned about time while writing the
book and some of the practices from the book that
I've adopted that I think helped make my life better. First,
just so people know where I'm coming from, my life
sometimes bears a bit of a resemblance to a circus,

(01:11):
though I have learned to embrace that for reasons we'll
talk about soon. I have five kids, ranging from ages
six to eighteen, and four of whom are still living
at home. My husband and I both work and both
travel for work. We have all the usual complement of activities,
play dates, community events during the week. I'm recording this episode.

(01:35):
For instance, my Tuesday afternoon resembled one of those multi
person acrobatic tricks you might see in a circus. For
various reasons, we've needed to move the six year old
from taking the bus home from school to getting picked
up at school. We have a nanny who helps us
after school, so that is fine. She can usually pick
him up, but then this means she can't drive the

(01:56):
other kids places from about three point thirty to four
pm on weekdays. So on Tuesdays, my eleven year old
son has a pottery class at three forty five that
he absolutely loves. This past Tuesday, I was going back
and forth with another podcast that wanted to interview me
about the schedule and what would work. They offered me

(02:16):
three pm or six pm. Now, normally I would have
just grabbed three pm, after all, it's during the workday,
but then I remembered I would need to drive the
eleven year old, so I took the six pm. But
of course then I realized that we had an alto
sax lesson that would usually be running from five forty
five to six thirty on Tuesdays, and a trombone lesson

(02:39):
running from six thirty to seven. The house was not
going to be quiet during this window. The good news
our garage is detached from the house. That's an upside
of an older home, it turns out. So I made
a mini recording studio out there and it all worked.
But you know, the layers of different contingencies are just

(03:00):
sometimes a bit intense. So I will not claim that
my life is some sort of minimalist simple thing. It
simply can't be. But that is okay. A complex life
isn't inevitably chaotic. Turns out that chaos and complexity are

(03:22):
not the same thing at all. Time is big enough
for whatever matters to us, and even amid the complexity,
there are all kinds of strategies we can use that
can make life feel calm and time feel more spacious.
So in today's episode, I'm going to talk about a
few of my favorite strategies that I learned while writing

(03:46):
Big Time. The first is that to run a good circus,
you really need to know where the time is going. Now,
I have tracked my time for eleven straight years. Yes,
I know how I have spent every half hour for
the last eleven years of my life. I promise you
no one else needs to do that. But I do

(04:10):
think it's a good idea to track your time for
a week. A week will give you a fairly good
sense of where your time truly goes. I find that
time tracking keeps me accountable and helps to cement memories.
The memory part is especially fun. I can look back
on say a Monday evening from six years ago, and

(04:31):
see what I was up to, like playing out in
the yard with kids who were a lot younger than I.
Feel like I have more time because I can see
my time quite clearly. I see how much time is
required for the things I have to do, and how
much time is available for the things I want to do.

(04:52):
But this was just my general belief before writing Big Time,
and my impression from what other people had told me
about tracking their time. Of course, anecdotes mean nothing on
their own, so for Big Time, I decided to look
more systematically at time tracking. I had two hundred and

(05:13):
seventy nine people track their time for a week. I
asked them various questions designed to measure time satisfaction before
and after the week they tracked. What I found is
that people's time satisfaction levels rose significantly after they tracked
time for one hundred and sixty eight hours. Indeed, agreement

(05:37):
with the statement generally I have enough time for the
things I want to do rose twenty five percent in
just one week. Now. I think there are a few
reasons for this. An obvious one is that time tracking
inspired better time choices. People didn't want to document a

(05:58):
three hour YouTube bin on their time logs, so they
chose more fulfilling leisure time activities and thus felt better
about their time. But I don't think it's just that.
I think the deeper reason is that seeing where the
time goes helps us rewrite our stories. Many of us

(06:19):
are telling ourselves quite negative stories about our time, like
I'm working around the clock, I never sleep, I never
see my family, I have no free time whatsoever. But
even if you work long hours, you probably don't work
around the clock. If you have a bad night, that

(06:41):
doesn't mean all seven nights of the week or just
as terrible. You probably do see your family. Indeed, even
people who work long hours are pleasantly surprised at how
much family time makes it onto the time logs. I'm
willing to bet that you also have some free time.

(07:02):
It might not be as much as you want, but
it isn't zero either. Whether it is spent well or
not is up to you. That is the nature of
discretionary time. But for just about everyone there is at
least some time. It is there. When you see all this,

(07:25):
you start to see that life is pretty reasonable. Maybe
you want to change some things. I mean, many of
us look at our time logs and want to change
a few things, but we are generally talking tweaks, not
a total lifestyle overhaul. Seeing where the time goes makes
us happier with our time. If you track your time,

(07:50):
I think you will find the same thing. So another
idea from Big Time that I am embracing is that
I am the master of a three ring circus. When
people say my life is a circus, they tend to
mean it is chaotic. But I think this is a

(08:11):
slander against circuses. A circus is incredibly well organized. All
the acts happen when they are supposed to happen. Tricks
are executed with split second precision. We should aspire for
life to be like a circus. As I think of

(08:32):
myself as the ring master, I also like to picture
that the circus of my life has three rings, career, relationships, self.
A good ring master knows what is going on in
all three rings at all times. Perhaps a bigger act
is currently going on in one than the others, but

(08:53):
there are highlights in all three, and a good ring
master keeps her eye on all of them. Now, the
best way to keep on top of all of this
is to have a designated weekly planning time, when you
look at what is most important in all three rings
of the circus and make sure that you have worked
out the logistics. I have always liked my weekly planning ritual,

(09:18):
but as my life has grown more complex, I have
found that I almost come to crave it. I look
forward to Thursday mornings, which is when I now sit
down with my planner and my calendar and think, what
do I need to do to make progress on my
professional goals next week? What do I need to do

(09:42):
to make progress on the goals I have for relationships
with friends and family? What is most important for my
own physical, mental, spiritual, and emotional health. I also look
at the things that are already on my calendar for
the upcoming week. Even if that I don't rise to
the level of being a top priority, do I have

(10:04):
a plan for dealing with all these things. This is
when I sort out the logistics for something like the
Tuesday afternoon with the driving and the podcast recording and
the music lesson that way, I am not blindsided by
any of it. I am not suddenly remembering on Tuesday
that the house will be loud. I am not racing

(10:26):
over to the garage trying to find a good spot,
because I had looked at my week ahead of time
and thought about it, and so I had already built
in time earlier on Tuesday to scope out the garage
and make sure there was something that would work acoustically. Now,
there is another part to this circus metaphor that we
have talked about here on before Breakfast before, which is

(10:48):
the importance of a net. I used to think that
a net is a net, but as I have interviewed
circus performers, I have come to learn that a net
has to be exactly where the performers think it should be.
They train themselves to land properly in the net. They
certainly don't plan to land there during a performance, but

(11:10):
the net can't be an afterthought. And so as I
am trying to make my life feel more calm and
time feel more spacious, I spend some time thinking about
what I will do if things go wrong. I build
an extra time I work ahead. That way, if something
big comes up on a Tuesday and displaces what I

(11:32):
plan to do on that Tuesday, there is somewhere to
put the spill over. Everything stays on track, and the
circus keeps humming along. There is no need to feel
rushed and frantic. And when you don't feel rushed and frantic,
time can feel a lot more abundant. We're going to

(11:55):
take a quick ad break and then I'll be back
with more tips from Big Time. Well, I am back
talking a few tips from my new book, Big Time,
A Simple Path to Time Abundance. So a third strategy

(12:18):
for making time feel bigger and making time feel more
spacious is to actually try to do big things in
your time. Big things are quite doable in small enough steps,
but when you do big things, you feel like the
kind of person who has the time to do big things.

(12:39):
And that's a good story to go through life with
For instance, this year, I am listening to all the
works of Mozart. Mozart wrote a lot of music, but
he also died fairly young at age thirty five, so
it is a finite amount of music. I have been
listening to about thirty to sixty minutes of his music

(13:00):
each day, going through his work chronologically based on the
list in Wikipedia. I just have it going on in
the background or while I'm driving around in the car.
It's not too much each day, I can tell you
from my time logs. I am definitely in the car
for more than thirty minutes a day, but it doesn't

(13:20):
have to be too much each day because daves keep passing,
and there are three hundred and sixty five days in
a year, and so I know that if I continue
at this pace, I will make it through the entirety
of Mozart's catalog by the end of December. So it
goes for many things in life. While writing Big Time,

(13:42):
I interviewed people doing all sorts of projects, like seeing
all of America's national parks, walking a pilgrimage route, listening
to the entire Bible as an audiobook, learning Latin, and
so forth. These are all very big undertakings. But if
you break any big thing down into small enough steps,

(14:05):
then each day it feels about as simple as brushing
your teeth. Most of us don't feel much resistance to that.
Brushing teeth is easy and just takes a tiny bit
of time. So if you want to build anything big
into your life, break it down into small enough bits
that it feels easy, like it's just a bit of time.

(14:29):
That's how I read War and Peace a few years ago.
This fourteen hundred plus page epic is big, there's no
other way to describe it. But it also contains three
hundred and sixty one extremely short chapters. I read one
chapter a day, which usually took me five to ten minutes.
Hardly worth commenting on, but the difference between nothing and

(14:54):
just a little more than nothing is cumulatively great. I
finished War and Peace on December twenty seventh, just as
the calendar said I would. When you do something big,
it changes the story you tell yourself about your time.

(15:15):
If you have time to read War and Peace, then
you can't be starved for time. You have tons of time,
as evidence by the fact that you read War and Peace.
Of course, it only took a few minutes a day
to read, But we don't need to dwell on that. Instead,
we can just enjoy the feeling of big time and

(15:35):
what big Time makes possible. So another strategy I am
adopting for making time feel more abundant is to embrace
the golden hours. This is truly one of my favorite
strategies from Big Time. People often talk about the golden years,

(15:55):
that is the time after working when retirees can enjoy
family in leisure. We get a miniature version of this
every weekday evening during what I call our golden hours,
the time after work and before bed. This is often
the bulk of the leisure time people have during the week,

(16:17):
but these hours are incredibly hard to use well. People
are tired, we are out of energy and out of sorts. Still,
I think it is possible to make choices that allow
us to feel like these hours actually happened. And when
we feel like these hours actually happened, we feel like

(16:38):
we have a lot more time in our lives. The
key is to set one small intention each day for
something you want to do during your golden hours. We
are talking about thirty minutes here. Your intention should be
something that is not work, and is not housework or

(16:59):
the physical care of family members, and is something you
would genuinely look forward to doing. Now that I am
thinking about this, I try to put something on my
to do list each day for my golden hours. What
fun thing would I like to do tonight? It can
truly be just thirty minutes. Often it's that I like

(17:23):
to spend thirty minutes doing a puzzle or reading a book.
Some people like to sit outside or go for a walk,
make a special treat for dessert, call a friend, do
a hobby. Maybe in fall, it's sitting by a fire pit.
Maybe it's looking up at the stars or watching the sunset.
We do what we call toade time in my family,

(17:44):
which stands for time outside after dinner. Everyone is happier outside.
It really doesn't have to be much. But when I
had people try this out for a week as part
of writing Big Time, a sense of time satisfaction rose significantly.

(18:04):
Interestingly enough, when people started setting golden hour intentions, they
also started getting better sleep. It turns out that a
lot of people stay up late in order to get
some me time in their schedules. But if you build
in thirty minutes of me time somewhere else during the evening.
You won't need to stay up so late to get it.

(18:26):
And this can make all of time feel better. I
know I have been finding this to be true in
my life. When I sit down and do a puzzle
instead of scrolling, I feel like my evening actually happened.
There is something memorable in there, or at least more
memorable than our electronic hobbies. And I can go to

(18:48):
bed when I need to go to bed, No need
to borrow time from the next day. We're going to
take one more quick ad break and then I will
be back with more tips from Big Time. Well, I
am back talking tips from my new book, Big Time,

(19:12):
a Simple Path to Time Abundance. The last strategy I
want to talk about today that helps make me feel
like time is more spacious is to say some judicious yesses.
These yeses can help us be open to serendipity. So
if you read a lot of productivity literature and trust me,

(19:34):
I do you know that a key tenant is that
we should all say no more often. And I understand
expectations are infinite. Time is finite. We are always choosing
choose well. Bonus points if you know which of my

(19:55):
books that statement is from. Many people feel over skied
in their lives, and I don't want anyone spending time
on things that aren't meaningful or enjoyable for ourselves or
the people we care about. But if you think about it,
you soon see that almost all new opportunities, adventures, and

(20:16):
relationships come out of saying yes. After all, if you
knew about something great, you'd already be doing it. New
things come from talking to someone new, following up, putting
some effort in, and seeing where things go. That is
really the whole reason this show exists. I got an

(20:40):
email in the fall of twenty eighteen from a publicist
at my publisher asking if I wanted to talk about
elevating and monetizing my Best of Both Worlds podcasts that's
the other one I have. She said it might be
a refresher of stuff I already knew, but I agreed
to a conversation, and then it became came clear that

(21:00):
this was not actually about Best of Both Worlds, but
that my publisher had an agreement with a podcast network
about trying to launch some new shows. More conversations revealed
that the network wanted to launch a show of short
episodes about productivity tips. After many iterations, iHeartMedia launched this

(21:21):
show as Before Breakfast in early twenty nineteen. We've been
around for seven years now. We get millions of downloads
a year. Absolutely none of that was obvious from the
first email, which I might not have answered if I'd
been swamped or trying to say no to more things.

(21:44):
In general, I think saying yes makes life more interesting,
and I try to do this in my personal life too.
So last spring is part of writing Big Time. I
decided to go on a three week yes quest where
I would say yes to things that sound did interesting.
In this part of that, I wound up swimming with
sharks in Hawaii. My oldest son really wanted to do

(22:09):
this as part of our families already planned vacation to Oahu.
He asked me to go with him and wisely timed
this request to my yes quest. Now. I will tell
you I don't particularly like going out in small boats
on big waves. It makes me seasick. I also don't
like sitting in cold water for long periods of time.

(22:29):
I get cold very easily. And sharks I was going
to be swimming with sharks. That's a little bit anxiety producing.
But the truth is I had no real reason to
say no, and since I was trying to say yes
to things, we did it. And yes, it was a

(22:51):
little nerve wracking, but it was also such a memorable experience.
Sharks are magic. So is a day when a teenager
wants to spend time with you. On the way back
from swimming with those sharks, our boat past some whales

(23:11):
surfacing in Hawaii's waters. Talk about a bonus seeing those
I mean, I remember that for sure, and that definitely
wouldn't have happened for me if I hadn't said yes
to something outside my comfort zone. Now, I know we
can't say yes to everything, but one way to think
about this is that, in general, we want to spend

(23:34):
less time doing things that we need to talk ourselves into.
You are not initially excited, but you start going, well,
you know it won't be too hard, it might look
good on my resume. This is how we fill our
lives with things that are a five or a six
on a ten point scale of excitement. This is how
we start to feel overscheduled with things we don't really

(23:56):
want to do, and we feel like we can't take
on anything else. Where you want to sit up and
pay attention is when you start talking yourself out of something.
You are initially excited, but then you start telling yourself
that the logistics are going to be complicated. Maybe it

(24:16):
is outside your comfort zone, you'll have to call in
a favor from a friend, your partner, or a colleague.
But that initial excitement is telling you can probably figure
everything else out. So I try to say yes to
interesting things because I know that it is doing interesting
things that makes time feel big and abundant, not cutting

(24:40):
things out adding them in. Yes, it might be counterintuitive,
but I promise you it's true. There are a great
many more practical strategies in Big Time for falling in
love with your schedule and feeling like time is bigger
enough for all the wonderful things you want to do.

(25:04):
If you enjoy this show, I hope you will pick
up a copy and check it out. If you do,
please let me know what you think. You can always
reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. In
the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and here's

(25:27):
to making the most of our time. Thanks for listening
to Before Breakfast If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback,
you can reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com.

(25:51):
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