January 1, 2025 • 24 mins
In this longer episode, Laura discusses how to figure out where the time really goes, so you can spend more time on what matters, and less on what doesn't
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Episode Transcript
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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 longer one, just like
we do every Wednesday, only because this episode is first
(00:23):
running on New Year's Day. Today, we are going to
do something just a little bit different. I am going
to be sharing my thoughts on the first step to
spending your time better. Lots of people resolve to be
better about managing their time and their life in the
new year. I have some thoughts about how to do
(00:46):
just that. I'll also be sharing some news about a
challenge that I am running in mid January that will
help you make the most of your time. My goal
is that by the end of listening to today's episode,
you will have a plan for getting some data, celebrating
what is worth celebrating, and making some changes in your
(01:09):
life if that is what you would like to do.
I am excited to talk about this topic, so thank
you for listening. All right, Well, here we go. So
people sometimes say to me, Laura, I would like to
spend my time better. What is the first thing I
(01:29):
should be doing? And I always say, well, let's figure
out where the time is going now, Because if you
don't know where the time is going now, how do
you know if you're changing the right thing. Maybe something
you thought was a problem really isn't. Maybe something you
haven't even considered is taking more time than you've imagined.
(01:53):
We want to make sure that we are working from
good data. Same as any business decision. Right if you're
figuring out where to open a new store, you'd be
looking at foot traffic and how neighboring retailers are doing,
and anything else you could figure out. You wouldn't just decide, well,
I think this is a good spot, so here we go.
You want to make sure you're working from good data,
(02:16):
and it is the exact same thing with our time.
We want to figure out where the time really goes,
and the only way to do that is to actually
try keeping track of our time. There are lots of
ways to do this. I track my time on weekly spreadsheets.
(02:37):
I know that makes me sound like a ton of fun,
but I'm sure there are a few people listening to
this podcast who really enjoy a good spreadsheet. Kind of
an art form. It gets even worse. I've been doing
this since April of twenty fifteen, tracking my time, but
I promise it is not too onerous and you don't
have to do it for ten years. Just a week
would be good. But I track on weekly spreadsheets with
(02:59):
the days of the week across the top Monday through
Sunday half hour blocks down the left hand side five
am to four thirty am, so we have three hundred
thirty six cells representing the one hundred and sixty eight
hour week. If you'd like to use one of these
spreadsheets yourself, you can just go to my website, Laura
vandercam dot com and you'll be able to find and
(03:22):
download one. But that's not the only way you can
track your time. Some people use one of dozens of
time tracking apps that are on the market these days.
Or you could even walk around with a little notebook
if you want to look all artsy writing down what
you are doing. The tool itself doesn't actually matter. What
(03:44):
matters is that you do it. And when I suggest
that people track their time for a week, you may
or perhaps may not be surprised to hear that I
get a little bit of pushback to this idea, Like, hmm, right,
if that is the first thing I should do to
spend my time better, What is the second thing I
(04:05):
should be doing? So I have explored this resistance with
people over the years, and I think it's a couple
of things. Sometimes people have worked in legal or accounting
fields and other places where they have to track their
time and six minute increments, and the experience has left
them a little bit traumatized. But I promise you don't
(04:27):
have to do it forever, and it will be helpful
to even look at your time outside of work. You
may know exactly where your work time goes in those
six minute increments, but my guess is that you don't
know where the other you know, one hundred some plus
hours of the week happened to go, and that might
be useful information for you to figure out. So, even
(04:48):
if you have had to bill your time in excruciating
detail for work, just try this for a week. I
promise it will be useful. Sometimes people tell me, well,
I'm too busy to try time, and I guess that
is its own special problem. But I really really promise
it is not that difficult. I would not have stuck
with this for almost ten years now if I found
(05:11):
it challenging. What I tend to do is just check
in three times a day write down what I've done
since the last time I checked in, and it's fine
to use broad strokes, or even if you forget, sometimes
you just approximate and keep going on. Three minutes a
day to do this is the exact same amount of
(05:31):
time that I spend brushing my teeth. That is an
activity that I have yet to declare myself too busy
to do. But I think that the most common reason
that people resist tracking time, it's the exact same thing.
If anyone has ever resolved to lose weight or to
(05:53):
eat more healthfully, you know that a nutritionist will tell
you to keep a food journal, and that is because
it works. Like there is pretty good evidence studies and
pure reviewed journals finding that people who write down what
they eat lose significantly more weight than people who do not.
(06:14):
So you think we'd be all over that, but the
truth is that we often don't want to know. We
don't want to know that we grabbed six chocolate chip
cookies from the kitchen next to our home office over
the course of a day, which is purely a hypothetical example,
and it is the same thing with time. We don't
(06:36):
want to know how much time we are wasting. So
let's get this out of the way right now. We
all waste time. Everybody wastes time. I waste tons of time.
No one spends all their time on things that are
meaningful or enjoyable for themselves or the people they care about.
(06:57):
Figuring out where the time really goes is not about
making sure that we're not wasting time here or there,
like oh you think you are so busy and I
saw you watch Netflix. It's not about playing gotcha. It
is about making sure that we are not telling ourselves
stories about our lives that aren't actually true. And when
it comes to time, we have all sorts of stories
(07:19):
we tell ourselves, not all of which are one hundred
percent accurate. So We're going to take a quick ad
break and then I'm going to come back and talk
a little bit more about what people find when they
actually track their time. Well, I am back. This is Laura,
(07:40):
and this is a longer episode of Before Breakfast as
we run every Wednesday these days. But instead of bringing
you a guest this week because it is New Year's Day,
and decided to do something a little bit different talking
about the first step to spending our time better, which
is figuring out where the time really goes. So before
(08:02):
the break, I mentioned that keeping track of our time
is not about figuring out how much time we are wasting,
because all of us waste time. It's about making sure
we are not telling ourselves stories about our lives that
aren't actually true. When it comes to time, we have
all sorts of these stories. I've seen many of these
(08:22):
over the years as I have explored thousands of people's
time logs. One of the most common stories we tell
ourselves that may not be one hundred percent accurate is
how many hours people are working. Now. To be clear,
I know everybody is working hard, everybody is working long.
(08:45):
But we also live in a competitive world, and so
often there is a tendency to try to one up
each other over just how many hours we happen to
be working. Perhaps you have I've heard some of these
scintillating conversations over the years. People are comparing how many
(09:05):
hours they happen to be working, like, oh, I worked
sixty hours last week, ooh sixty, I wish I work sixty.
I work seventy, ooh, seventy is my light season, and
so on it goes. I once met a young man
at a party who told me he was working one
hundred and eighty hours a week at his startup. Now
(09:27):
that is pretty impressive if you actually multiply twenty four
times seven. There was once a study comparing people's estimated
work weeks with time diaries. I found that people who
were claiming seventy five plus hour work weeks were off
by about twenty five hours. And you can guess in
(09:49):
which direction they were off. Now, I find this all
a little funny, although it's also a little tragic at
times too, because I'm sure there are jobs that people
have not taken because everyone says, oh, it's an eighty
hour a week job. Now, if you knew it was
actually a fifty five to sixty hour week job, maybe
people would consider things differently. But even though I laugh
(10:12):
about it, I know I am guilty of this too.
So many years ago I used to talk about my
fifty hour work weeks, and that is because I had
tracked my time here and there various points over the
years when I was writing my books or in solidarity
with other people as they were tracking their time, and
I usually worked about fifty hours a week. But then
(10:34):
I started tracking my time continuously in April of twenty fifteen,
and I realized something quite quickly, which is that in
the past I had chosen very specific weeks to track,
namely weeks when I was working fifty hours a week,
because I wanted to see myself as the kind of
(10:56):
person who was working fifty hours a week. When I
tracked all my time, all my weeks, I saw that
it was just as likely that I might have a
short week. I was off for some reason, there was
a vacation day, somebody was sick and I was dealing
with it. There was something that had to happen during
the workday, so many weeks were shorter, which means that
(11:17):
the long term average was a lot closer to forty.
I now know, over ten years or so, that my
average is pretty solidly between thirty five and forty. When
I look at all fifty two weeks of the year,
I think if I subtracted three or four vacation weeks,
it would be a little closer to forty. But it
is not fifty. And here I write and speak about
(11:38):
time management, and there were ten hours going somewhere completely
different than I thought there was. And again, this is
not about playing gotcha, Ooh, you thought you worked fifty
hours a week and you were working thirty eight. It's
that when we are trying to decide how to spend
our work weeks, if we don't know what a work
(11:59):
we can, truly looks like we're just guessing with how
much time we assign to different things. How much time
should you spend on administration? How much time should you
spend on the stuff of your job, or on drumming
up new work, or on mentoring younger colleagues or anything
like that. I don't know what the answer is, but
(12:22):
if you don't know the denominator for your work week,
it's pretty hard to make rational choices of what the
numerators should be. Of these different proportions of things that
we are assigning to different tasks. We want to make
sure that we are working from good data. Incidentally, people
do this in the opposite direction. With free time. People
(12:44):
will tell you I have absolutely no free time whatsoever,
and you can be having this conversation at a party.
It's like, okay, maybe just a tiny amount of free time.
But what people mean when they say I have no
free time whatsoever is that they don't have as much
(13:06):
free time as they want. Now, that is a true story. Absolutely,
we don't have as much free time as we want,
but not as much as I want is a very
very different story from none. Not as much as I
want implies some very good questions right there, like how
(13:28):
could I scale this up over time? How could I
make good choices within the limited leisure time I do
have so I feel most rejuvenated, whereas none is just defeatist.
Everyone has some amount of discretionary time, even if it
isn't much. Sometimes people get a little bit funny about this.
(13:49):
One of my favorite examples of this is someone who
wrote in Too Real Simple many years ago. Real Simple
magazine asked their time starved readers to tell what they
would do if they had an extra fifteen minutes in
the day, and someone wrote in that fifteen minutes of
uninterrupted writing time would be a priceless gift, which of
(14:10):
course left me wondering how she found fifteen minutes to
write Real Simple with this elusive dream of hers. Right,
we have some amount of leisure time, but it's probably
not as much as I want, and that's fine. But
when we track our time and see how much time
we do have, we can make good choices with this
limited time. We're going to take one more quick break
(14:33):
and then I'll be back talking a little bit more
about how we can track our time. Well, I am back.
This is Laura. This is one of the longer episodes
of Before Breakfast as we run every Wednesday, but today,
since it is New Year's Day, instead of bringing you
(14:55):
a guest, I'm talking a little bit about one of
the best ways to spend your time better in the
new year, and that is to figure out where the
time really goes. We're going to try tracking our time
for a week. In the last segment I talked about
all the stories that people tell themselves about their time
that may not be entirely true. We want to make
(15:17):
sure we are working from good data. So it's not
about playing gotcha. It's about making sure that we really
know what our lives look like. I think the truth
sets us free. So if you decide to do this,
and I really hope you will, that is tracking your
time for a week. It's pretty simple. You can just
write down what you're doing as often as you remember,
(15:39):
in as much detail as you think will be helpful.
You try to keep going for a week and then
at the end. You can add it up if you
would like. How much time do you spend on the
major categories? How much time do you spend working, sleeping
in the car, hanging out with family members, watching television, reading, exercising, volunteering,
(16:01):
doing housework, errands, all the things you happen to do.
If you'd like, you can make really cool pie charts
of all this. But I promise you don't actually have
to make pie cart charts for it to look decent.
But anyway, keep going for a week and see what
you think. I really hope you will try this, And
if you would like a little bit of accountability, then
(16:24):
you might consider participating in my annual time tracking challenge
Every January. Thousands of people usually track their time together
for a week. This year, the challenge will be running
from Monday January thirteenth to Monday January twentieth. You can
(16:48):
sign up to get a time tracking spreadsheet and daily
emails from me at my website, Laura vandercam dot com.
Just go right to the homepage and there will be
a big box where you can sign up. You will
also be able to read my time logs by following
along on my blog that week. Each day I will
post how I am spending my time and you can
(17:12):
read it and comment and see what you think. Now,
of course, if you'd like to track your time before
January thirteenth to January twentieth, you are welcome to do that.
You could certainly track the week starting Monday, January sixth,
and then you will be a real pro by the
time January thirteenth rolls about. I can tell you from
(17:33):
doing this for ten years now that it absolutely does
get a lot easier over time. Many people are not
used to describing time in words, and so the first
few days are a little bit rough. But that's why
it might be helpful to be getting those reminder emails
from me. I will have lots of tips, and I'll
(17:53):
also be reminding you to check in. You might want
to set an alarm a couple times a day so
that you know to go back to your spreadsheet. It
can be a little bit challenging on the weekends. I
definitely suggest people track their time on the weekends, because
weekends are real days too, and this time really counts.
But of course you might not be with your spreadsheet
all the time on the weekend. I often just jot
(18:16):
down notes somewhere or email parts of my time log
to myself, just notes on what I was spending my
time doing, and then I can reconstruct it after the fact.
It absolutely does not need to be perfect. If you
forget what you are doing for a while, it's okay.
You can just approximate it later. It is far better
to keep going for a week than to only have
(18:37):
a day or two because you are obsessed with it
being perfect. I really hope you will try it after
you do. After the week, you add up the questions,
you know the categories, how much time did I spend
on all these different things? And then you can ask
yourself a few questions about your time. First, what do
(18:59):
I like most about my schedule? It is your life.
Hopefully something is going really, really well. Maybe you have
a regular date night with your spouse. Maybe you love
your early morning exercise routine where you listen to before breakfast.
Maybe you have good systems for checking in with your
(19:21):
direct reports and meeting with them regularly and making sure
that nothing goes off the rails. We should celebrate whatever
is working well in your life. Then you can ask
the second question, what do I want to spend more
time doing. And then the third question, what do I
(19:45):
want to spend less time doing? You know, what do
I want to get off my plate? As I look
at my schedule, people often have lots of thoughts about
that things we want to spend less time doing. Whether
it's emptying the dishwasher even though you'll probably see it
only takes five minutes each day time, or driving around
in the car. Maybe there would be ways to shave
off a trip here or too in the course of
(20:06):
the week. You know, I think we spend a lot
of time thinking about that, and both questions are important,
but the first is probably more important. Even the best
you know email management system for spending less time cleaning
out our inboxes in the world won't suddenly give you
an amazing life, right. We don't want to just build
our lives by spending less time on the bad stuff.
(20:28):
We want to figure out what the good stuff is
and then put that in first. My experience is that
when you put the good stuff in first, that will
naturally make the less fun stuff just take less time.
And I am a big fan of that. So today's
(20:50):
tip has been to track your time for a week.
If you want to figure out where the time really goes.
That will help you spend your time better because you
will be working from good day and you can make
rational choices instead of simply assuming that you must be
spending your time a certain way based on how you feel,
or even based on how you spent today, because today
(21:11):
is not the only day in your life. We tend
to live our lives in weeks, and so we want
to track an entire week to see where the time
really goes. So today we have been talking about time
tracking and why it is so important and why it
is the first step to spending our time better. It's
really not that hard. And here's the thing. You know,
you don't have to do it for ten years like
(21:33):
I have been doing. But the fact that I have
been doing it for ten years now is actually kind
of cool in its own right, because having a complete
time log for a week really helps cement your memories
of that week. If you track your time from January
thirteen to twenty, or any other week, you will remember
what happened during that week. When you look at your
(21:55):
time log in the future, some random date in the future,
you want to pull up January thirteen of the year,
you can see what you were doing, what did life
look like. I mean, maybe you'll have particular memories of
what you did with your family or things that were
going on with work, and that can be really cool.
These days, I can call back up a week from say,
seven years ago, and see what I was doing with
(22:17):
every half hour. Now. Of course, I know full well
that the rest of the world does not care at
all what I was doing with a half hour on
January sixth, twenty seventeen, at two thirty pm. But I
guess I could look it up and I could tell you.
It's just a complete sort of memory keeping that is
turning priceless the longer I keep doing it. But anyway,
(22:41):
no one is saying you have to track your time
for ten years. Just do it for a week. I
promise you will learn something. I've seen thousands of people
doing this now, and everyone finds at least something they
might want to tweak a little. I promise it will
be helpful, because when you know where the time is
going now, you can make wise choices about how to
(23:05):
spend your time in the future. So thank you for
listening to this longer episode, even though it has just
been me. We we'll be back with guests soon, but
in the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and
here's to making the most of our time. Thanks for
(23:30):
listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback,
you can reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com.
Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts
from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
(23:53):
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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 longer one, just like
we do every Wednesday, only because this episode is first
(00:23):
running on New Year's Day. Today, we are going to
do something just a little bit different. I am going
to be sharing my thoughts on the first step to
spending your time better. Lots of people resolve to be
better about managing their time and their life in the
new year. I have some thoughts about how to do
(00:46):
just that. I'll also be sharing some news about a
challenge that I am running in mid January that will
help you make the most of your time. My goal
is that by the end of listening to today's episode,
you will have a plan for getting some data, celebrating
what is worth celebrating, and making some changes in your
(01:09):
life if that is what you would like to do.
I am excited to talk about this topic, so thank
you for listening. All right, Well, here we go. So
people sometimes say to me, Laura, I would like to
spend my time better. What is the first thing I
(01:29):
should be doing? And I always say, well, let's figure
out where the time is going now, Because if you
don't know where the time is going now, how do
you know if you're changing the right thing. Maybe something
you thought was a problem really isn't. Maybe something you
haven't even considered is taking more time than you've imagined.
(01:53):
We want to make sure that we are working from
good data. Same as any business decision. Right if you're
figuring out where to open a new store, you'd be
looking at foot traffic and how neighboring retailers are doing,
and anything else you could figure out. You wouldn't just decide, well,
I think this is a good spot, so here we go.
You want to make sure you're working from good data,
(02:16):
and it is the exact same thing with our time.
We want to figure out where the time really goes,
and the only way to do that is to actually
try keeping track of our time. There are lots of
ways to do this. I track my time on weekly spreadsheets.
(02:37):
I know that makes me sound like a ton of fun,
but I'm sure there are a few people listening to
this podcast who really enjoy a good spreadsheet. Kind of
an art form. It gets even worse. I've been doing
this since April of twenty fifteen, tracking my time, but
I promise it is not too onerous and you don't
have to do it for ten years. Just a week
would be good. But I track on weekly spreadsheets with
(02:59):
the days of the week across the top Monday through
Sunday half hour blocks down the left hand side five
am to four thirty am, so we have three hundred
thirty six cells representing the one hundred and sixty eight
hour week. If you'd like to use one of these
spreadsheets yourself, you can just go to my website, Laura
vandercam dot com and you'll be able to find and
(03:22):
download one. But that's not the only way you can
track your time. Some people use one of dozens of
time tracking apps that are on the market these days.
Or you could even walk around with a little notebook
if you want to look all artsy writing down what
you are doing. The tool itself doesn't actually matter. What
(03:44):
matters is that you do it. And when I suggest
that people track their time for a week, you may
or perhaps may not be surprised to hear that I
get a little bit of pushback to this idea, Like, hmm, right,
if that is the first thing I should do to
spend my time better, What is the second thing I
(04:05):
should be doing? So I have explored this resistance with
people over the years, and I think it's a couple
of things. Sometimes people have worked in legal or accounting
fields and other places where they have to track their
time and six minute increments, and the experience has left
them a little bit traumatized. But I promise you don't
(04:27):
have to do it forever, and it will be helpful
to even look at your time outside of work. You
may know exactly where your work time goes in those
six minute increments, but my guess is that you don't
know where the other you know, one hundred some plus
hours of the week happened to go, and that might
be useful information for you to figure out. So, even
(04:48):
if you have had to bill your time in excruciating
detail for work, just try this for a week. I
promise it will be useful. Sometimes people tell me, well,
I'm too busy to try time, and I guess that
is its own special problem. But I really really promise
it is not that difficult. I would not have stuck
with this for almost ten years now if I found
(05:11):
it challenging. What I tend to do is just check
in three times a day write down what I've done
since the last time I checked in, and it's fine
to use broad strokes, or even if you forget, sometimes
you just approximate and keep going on. Three minutes a
day to do this is the exact same amount of
(05:31):
time that I spend brushing my teeth. That is an
activity that I have yet to declare myself too busy
to do. But I think that the most common reason
that people resist tracking time, it's the exact same thing.
If anyone has ever resolved to lose weight or to
(05:53):
eat more healthfully, you know that a nutritionist will tell
you to keep a food journal, and that is because
it works. Like there is pretty good evidence studies and
pure reviewed journals finding that people who write down what
they eat lose significantly more weight than people who do not.
(06:14):
So you think we'd be all over that, but the
truth is that we often don't want to know. We
don't want to know that we grabbed six chocolate chip
cookies from the kitchen next to our home office over
the course of a day, which is purely a hypothetical example,
and it is the same thing with time. We don't
(06:36):
want to know how much time we are wasting. So
let's get this out of the way right now. We
all waste time. Everybody wastes time. I waste tons of time.
No one spends all their time on things that are
meaningful or enjoyable for themselves or the people they care about.
(06:57):
Figuring out where the time really goes is not about
making sure that we're not wasting time here or there,
like oh you think you are so busy and I
saw you watch Netflix. It's not about playing gotcha. It
is about making sure that we are not telling ourselves
stories about our lives that aren't actually true. And when
it comes to time, we have all sorts of stories
(07:19):
we tell ourselves, not all of which are one hundred
percent accurate. So We're going to take a quick ad
break and then I'm going to come back and talk
a little bit more about what people find when they
actually track their time. Well, I am back. This is Laura,
(07:40):
and this is a longer episode of Before Breakfast as
we run every Wednesday these days. But instead of bringing
you a guest this week because it is New Year's Day,
and decided to do something a little bit different talking
about the first step to spending our time better, which
is figuring out where the time really goes. So before
(08:02):
the break, I mentioned that keeping track of our time
is not about figuring out how much time we are wasting,
because all of us waste time. It's about making sure
we are not telling ourselves stories about our lives that
aren't actually true. When it comes to time, we have
all sorts of these stories. I've seen many of these
(08:22):
over the years as I have explored thousands of people's
time logs. One of the most common stories we tell
ourselves that may not be one hundred percent accurate is
how many hours people are working. Now. To be clear,
I know everybody is working hard, everybody is working long.
(08:45):
But we also live in a competitive world, and so
often there is a tendency to try to one up
each other over just how many hours we happen to
be working. Perhaps you have I've heard some of these
scintillating conversations over the years. People are comparing how many
(09:05):
hours they happen to be working, like, oh, I worked
sixty hours last week, ooh sixty, I wish I work sixty.
I work seventy, ooh, seventy is my light season, and
so on it goes. I once met a young man
at a party who told me he was working one
hundred and eighty hours a week at his startup. Now
(09:27):
that is pretty impressive if you actually multiply twenty four
times seven. There was once a study comparing people's estimated
work weeks with time diaries. I found that people who
were claiming seventy five plus hour work weeks were off
by about twenty five hours. And you can guess in
(09:49):
which direction they were off. Now, I find this all
a little funny, although it's also a little tragic at
times too, because I'm sure there are jobs that people
have not taken because everyone says, oh, it's an eighty
hour a week job. Now, if you knew it was
actually a fifty five to sixty hour week job, maybe
people would consider things differently. But even though I laugh
(10:12):
about it, I know I am guilty of this too.
So many years ago I used to talk about my
fifty hour work weeks, and that is because I had
tracked my time here and there various points over the
years when I was writing my books or in solidarity
with other people as they were tracking their time, and
I usually worked about fifty hours a week. But then
(10:34):
I started tracking my time continuously in April of twenty fifteen,
and I realized something quite quickly, which is that in
the past I had chosen very specific weeks to track,
namely weeks when I was working fifty hours a week,
because I wanted to see myself as the kind of
(10:56):
person who was working fifty hours a week. When I
tracked all my time, all my weeks, I saw that
it was just as likely that I might have a
short week. I was off for some reason, there was
a vacation day, somebody was sick and I was dealing
with it. There was something that had to happen during
the workday, so many weeks were shorter, which means that
(11:17):
the long term average was a lot closer to forty.
I now know, over ten years or so, that my
average is pretty solidly between thirty five and forty. When
I look at all fifty two weeks of the year,
I think if I subtracted three or four vacation weeks,
it would be a little closer to forty. But it
is not fifty. And here I write and speak about
(11:38):
time management, and there were ten hours going somewhere completely
different than I thought there was. And again, this is
not about playing gotcha, Ooh, you thought you worked fifty
hours a week and you were working thirty eight. It's
that when we are trying to decide how to spend
our work weeks, if we don't know what a work
(11:59):
we can, truly looks like we're just guessing with how
much time we assign to different things. How much time
should you spend on administration? How much time should you
spend on the stuff of your job, or on drumming
up new work, or on mentoring younger colleagues or anything
like that. I don't know what the answer is, but
(12:22):
if you don't know the denominator for your work week,
it's pretty hard to make rational choices of what the
numerators should be. Of these different proportions of things that
we are assigning to different tasks. We want to make
sure that we are working from good data. Incidentally, people
do this in the opposite direction. With free time. People
(12:44):
will tell you I have absolutely no free time whatsoever,
and you can be having this conversation at a party.
It's like, okay, maybe just a tiny amount of free time.
But what people mean when they say I have no
free time whatsoever is that they don't have as much
(13:06):
free time as they want. Now, that is a true story. Absolutely,
we don't have as much free time as we want,
but not as much as I want is a very
very different story from none. Not as much as I
want implies some very good questions right there, like how
(13:28):
could I scale this up over time? How could I
make good choices within the limited leisure time I do
have so I feel most rejuvenated, whereas none is just defeatist.
Everyone has some amount of discretionary time, even if it
isn't much. Sometimes people get a little bit funny about this.
(13:49):
One of my favorite examples of this is someone who
wrote in Too Real Simple many years ago. Real Simple
magazine asked their time starved readers to tell what they
would do if they had an extra fifteen minutes in
the day, and someone wrote in that fifteen minutes of
uninterrupted writing time would be a priceless gift, which of
(14:10):
course left me wondering how she found fifteen minutes to
write Real Simple with this elusive dream of hers. Right,
we have some amount of leisure time, but it's probably
not as much as I want, and that's fine. But
when we track our time and see how much time
we do have, we can make good choices with this
limited time. We're going to take one more quick break
(14:33):
and then I'll be back talking a little bit more
about how we can track our time. Well, I am back.
This is Laura. This is one of the longer episodes
of Before Breakfast as we run every Wednesday, but today,
since it is New Year's Day, instead of bringing you
(14:55):
a guest, I'm talking a little bit about one of
the best ways to spend your time better in the
new year, and that is to figure out where the
time really goes. We're going to try tracking our time
for a week. In the last segment I talked about
all the stories that people tell themselves about their time
that may not be entirely true. We want to make
(15:17):
sure we are working from good data. So it's not
about playing gotcha. It's about making sure that we really
know what our lives look like. I think the truth
sets us free. So if you decide to do this,
and I really hope you will, that is tracking your
time for a week. It's pretty simple. You can just
write down what you're doing as often as you remember,
(15:39):
in as much detail as you think will be helpful.
You try to keep going for a week and then
at the end. You can add it up if you
would like. How much time do you spend on the
major categories? How much time do you spend working, sleeping
in the car, hanging out with family members, watching television, reading, exercising, volunteering,
(16:01):
doing housework, errands, all the things you happen to do.
If you'd like, you can make really cool pie charts
of all this. But I promise you don't actually have
to make pie cart charts for it to look decent.
But anyway, keep going for a week and see what
you think. I really hope you will try this, And
if you would like a little bit of accountability, then
(16:24):
you might consider participating in my annual time tracking challenge
Every January. Thousands of people usually track their time together
for a week. This year, the challenge will be running
from Monday January thirteenth to Monday January twentieth. You can
(16:48):
sign up to get a time tracking spreadsheet and daily
emails from me at my website, Laura vandercam dot com.
Just go right to the homepage and there will be
a big box where you can sign up. You will
also be able to read my time logs by following
along on my blog that week. Each day I will
post how I am spending my time and you can
(17:12):
read it and comment and see what you think. Now,
of course, if you'd like to track your time before
January thirteenth to January twentieth, you are welcome to do that.
You could certainly track the week starting Monday, January sixth,
and then you will be a real pro by the
time January thirteenth rolls about. I can tell you from
(17:33):
doing this for ten years now that it absolutely does
get a lot easier over time. Many people are not
used to describing time in words, and so the first
few days are a little bit rough. But that's why
it might be helpful to be getting those reminder emails
from me. I will have lots of tips, and I'll
(17:53):
also be reminding you to check in. You might want
to set an alarm a couple times a day so
that you know to go back to your spreadsheet. It
can be a little bit challenging on the weekends. I
definitely suggest people track their time on the weekends, because
weekends are real days too, and this time really counts.
But of course you might not be with your spreadsheet
all the time on the weekend. I often just jot
(18:16):
down notes somewhere or email parts of my time log
to myself, just notes on what I was spending my
time doing, and then I can reconstruct it after the fact.
It absolutely does not need to be perfect. If you
forget what you are doing for a while, it's okay.
You can just approximate it later. It is far better
to keep going for a week than to only have
(18:37):
a day or two because you are obsessed with it
being perfect. I really hope you will try it after
you do. After the week, you add up the questions,
you know the categories, how much time did I spend
on all these different things? And then you can ask
yourself a few questions about your time. First, what do
(18:59):
I like most about my schedule? It is your life.
Hopefully something is going really, really well. Maybe you have
a regular date night with your spouse. Maybe you love
your early morning exercise routine where you listen to before breakfast.
Maybe you have good systems for checking in with your
(19:21):
direct reports and meeting with them regularly and making sure
that nothing goes off the rails. We should celebrate whatever
is working well in your life. Then you can ask
the second question, what do I want to spend more
time doing. And then the third question, what do I
(19:45):
want to spend less time doing? You know, what do
I want to get off my plate? As I look
at my schedule, people often have lots of thoughts about
that things we want to spend less time doing. Whether
it's emptying the dishwasher even though you'll probably see it
only takes five minutes each day time, or driving around
in the car. Maybe there would be ways to shave
off a trip here or too in the course of
(20:06):
the week. You know, I think we spend a lot
of time thinking about that, and both questions are important,
but the first is probably more important. Even the best
you know email management system for spending less time cleaning
out our inboxes in the world won't suddenly give you
an amazing life, right. We don't want to just build
our lives by spending less time on the bad stuff.
(20:28):
We want to figure out what the good stuff is
and then put that in first. My experience is that
when you put the good stuff in first, that will
naturally make the less fun stuff just take less time.
And I am a big fan of that. So today's
(20:50):
tip has been to track your time for a week.
If you want to figure out where the time really goes.
That will help you spend your time better because you
will be working from good day and you can make
rational choices instead of simply assuming that you must be
spending your time a certain way based on how you feel,
or even based on how you spent today, because today
(21:11):
is not the only day in your life. We tend
to live our lives in weeks, and so we want
to track an entire week to see where the time
really goes. So today we have been talking about time
tracking and why it is so important and why it
is the first step to spending our time better. It's
really not that hard. And here's the thing. You know,
you don't have to do it for ten years like
(21:33):
I have been doing. But the fact that I have
been doing it for ten years now is actually kind
of cool in its own right, because having a complete
time log for a week really helps cement your memories
of that week. If you track your time from January
thirteen to twenty, or any other week, you will remember
what happened during that week. When you look at your
(21:55):
time log in the future, some random date in the future,
you want to pull up January thirteen of the year,
you can see what you were doing, what did life
look like. I mean, maybe you'll have particular memories of
what you did with your family or things that were
going on with work, and that can be really cool.
These days, I can call back up a week from say,
seven years ago, and see what I was doing with
(22:17):
every half hour. Now. Of course, I know full well
that the rest of the world does not care at
all what I was doing with a half hour on
January sixth, twenty seventeen, at two thirty pm. But I
guess I could look it up and I could tell you.
It's just a complete sort of memory keeping that is
turning priceless the longer I keep doing it. But anyway,
(22:41):
no one is saying you have to track your time
for ten years. Just do it for a week. I
promise you will learn something. I've seen thousands of people
doing this now, and everyone finds at least something they
might want to tweak a little. I promise it will
be helpful, because when you know where the time is
going now, you can make wise choices about how to
(23:05):
spend your time in the future. So thank you for
listening to this longer episode, even though it has just
been me. We we'll be back with guests soon, but
in the meantime, this is Laura. Thanks for listening, and
here's to making the most of our time. Thanks for
(23:30):
listening to Before Breakfast. If you've got questions, ideas, or feedback,
you can reach me at Laura at Laura vandercam dot com.
Before Breakfast is a production of iHeartMedia. For more podcasts
from iHeartMedia, please visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
(23:53):
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Before Breakfast News
Host
Laura Vanderkam
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