September 12, 2021 • 27 mins
Time is democratic. We all have the same amount of hours in a week. Laura Vanderkam studied how the most successful people allocate their time and shares it with you! She also has 2 podcasts. The one I produce is called Before Breakfast and it's jam packed with useful information.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Prodigy is a production of I Heart Radio. Have you
ever tracked your time, like seriously measured all the things
you do on a weekly basis and quantified it so
you can get perspective. I haven't, and the concept is
so foreign to me that I doubt I ever will.
But I am curious about how much time I've wasted. Wait, actually,
(00:21):
hang on, Okay, Oh my god, I've played eleven hundred
hours of a single computer game called Overwatch and I
still suck. Wow, let's move on. When I first started,
I heard, they taught me the basics, then gave me
my first show. They gave it to me because I
didn't know much and it was supposed to be a
(00:42):
light lift. I actually still produce it, and after working
on like thirty other shows, I realized why it's so easy.
It's called Before Breakfast and it's about time management, productivity,
and work life balance. The creator and host is Laura Vanderkam,
and she obviously actuses what she preaches. Each episode is
(01:03):
bite sized, about five minutes each weekday about a single
topic that will improve how you spend your time. Laura
sends me a week's worth of episodes almost a month
in advance. She also notes the time code anytime she
makes a speaking error. She quite literally might be the
most efficient host in the entire industry, and the show
(01:23):
is incredibly successful. It gets over ten million downlards a
year and has more sponsor requests than anything I've ever seen.
Her podcast vocal delivery is so measured, and her listeners
don't hesitate to let us know any time I make
an air, which we actually really appreciate. Laura is incredibly
smart and a genuinely good person. Every time I listened
to an episode, I learned something, So of course she's
(01:44):
the perfect person for this show. My name is loeber Ante,
and this is Prodigy. Laura vin Cam is the author
of several time management and productivity books, including Juliet's School
(02:05):
of Possibilities, Off the Clock, I Know How she does it,
what the most successful people do, Before Breakfast and One
sixty eight Hours. Her work has appeared in publications including
The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company,
and Fortune. She's the host of the podcast Before Breakfast
and the co host with Sarah hart Unger, of the
podcast Best of Both Worlds. She lives outside Philadelphia with
(02:28):
her husband and five children. Here's a clip from a
Ted talk she did. When people find out I write
about time management, they assume two things. One is that
I'm always on time, and I'm not. I was once
(02:49):
late to my own speech on time management. We all
had to just take a moment together and savor that irony.
I'm fascinated by the concept of time, mostly because it
is such a democratic element of our lives, Like everybody
has the exact same amount of time, and yet we
(03:11):
do entirely different things with it, um and and so
when you meet these people who are doing amazing things
with their lives, I mean amazing things professionally, and then
they also have really cool personal lives too, I mean,
who knows what else they have going for them. I'm
not denying they might be smarter or richer or whatever
else than anyone else, but they don't have more time.
(03:34):
And so I have long been fascinated by how these
people are spending their time and what the rest of
us can learn from their allocation of twenty four hours
um to see what changes we can make in our
own lives as well. So I began exploring that topic
probably about a dozen years ago. And then once you
(03:54):
start writing about a topic, and talking about a topic,
you you know, learn more about it. And so that's
what I've been doing. Ever so, so you were studying
these like habits and time management of some successful people,
I guess, so, yeah, I mean I started having people
track their time for me. And I noticed that in
the past when I was doing interviews of folks because
(04:15):
I spent a lot of years writing for different publications UM,
I would often ask people about their schedules and it
just seemed to be such a practical way to get
an insight into their lives UM. And and as I
wrote about this, I realized that people also have stories
about their lives UM that seem interesting to them, like
(04:36):
they think they explained what's going on. But even so
these stories can be wrong. UM. You have to have
people actually keep track of their time, and then you
start to see, oh, no, they're really doing this, or
you know, they say they're doing X, but they're really
doing well. But those are both very interesting things. So
I time is, you know, we all experience time, and
(04:58):
yet what we think to do with our time is
often very different from what we actually do with our time.
And that gap, that mismatch between ideas and lived reality
is so large that I find it fascinating. And that's
another thing that that drew me to this topic too. Well,
what's weird for me. It's like, you know, you're supposed
(05:18):
to work, what eight hours a day, but I don't
think I could do very high quality for like literally
eight straight hours a day. Yeah, well nobody does. I
mean that's the uh, the funny part about it. Um.
I mean people take all kinds of breaks. They shift tasks, um,
they go in and out of concentration, and and that's natural.
(05:39):
I mean, that's human nature. We all need breaks. Um.
We cannot focus on anything for eight hours straight um.
And and that's also one of the reasons that people
think they work longer hours than they do. Um. You know,
they do other things and come back to it, but
somehow the other things are just never there. Um. So
(06:01):
people like, no, I work around the clock, so well,
you probably don't. People track their time. They think they
were eighty hours a week or something. You track it,
it's like fifty, well fifties a lot, you know, but
it's not eighty um. And so you know, we want
to make sure we're working from accurate data if we
want to make wise choices about our time. Yeah. Well,
we'll say that you're definitely a good example, at least
(06:23):
in my opinion, because um, you're by far the most
organized host and get everything like to me very early
and with notes and stuff. So um, a bit spoiled there.
But um, I was curious because you have four kids
or five. I have five now, the youngest was born
during the course of Before Breakfast being a podcast, so
(06:43):
oh that's right. Yeah wow wow, So that I imagine
requires a lot of careful time management. Well I guess, um.
I mean I've I've had kids for a long time now,
so I don't really know any different way of working. Um.
And you know, for any of your listeners, I have
very good childcare for my kids as well, um, you know,
(07:05):
and my my husband's equally involved with them too, So
it's it's not like I'm trying to work with five
small children sitting around me the whole day. Um. But
you know, it's I think what many people have have
figured out is that kids can can force certain efficiencies
and certain um ways of looking at productivity if you
want to keep getting things done, and you become a
(07:28):
lot more aware that stuff can go wrong. Um. And
when you know that stuff can go wrong, you build
a lot more space, you build a lot more backup
plans into your life. But when you do that, your
schedule can be much more resilient. Um and and so
you know, that's why we've been able to keep putting
(07:48):
out a Before Breakfast podcast every weekday morning for the
past two and a half years. Um. Is you know,
we work ahead, have ideas for the next month of
episode oodes. I'm usually recording two to three weeks ahead
of time. UM. If I know I have something coming
up that will preclude working for a while, I work
(08:08):
even further ahead and try to record, um. You know.
And it's a lot of evergreen content, so it's not
like I have to react to the day's news. Um.
So that's what's made it possible, just that thinking ahead
and planning for that, and making sure we have enough
of a buffer so that if something does come up
in in my life, for instance, I still have several
weeks before I actually have to, you know, deal with
(08:30):
that reality of getting back to recording. Yeah, that planning ahead.
I mean, it's supposed to be like a symptom of
a d h D, but like it's very very difficult
for me to work on things that aren't sort of
like immediate. But I feel like once I get to
that part where it's doing, I'm like, dang, I wish
I'd started on this a while ago. Yeah. I mean,
I often find that doing a little bit every day
(08:54):
is helpful, and it doesn't have to be a lot,
um which can be helpful if if we're you know,
interested by all sorts of things, or you know, like
to flip from thing to things like well, even you know,
doing say fifteen minutes on a project, but enough ahead
of time, um that you're doing multiple days of fifteen
minutes on a project can can build a lot of
open space into that time before a deadline. Um so
(09:17):
it doesn't feel like such a crush at the end.
Have you figured out there certain ways that you particularly
like work best. I like to write um in the morning,
and then I can do other things that don't require
quite as much intensive creativity later in the day. Um
(09:40):
So I've really tried to structure my work hours such
that I'm working on the things that require the most
concentration in the morning and then you know, clear the
little er things off my to do list in the
afternoon or you know, right before lunch, when when my
brain is a bit more tired and I still face
temptation to do it differently. And maybe a lot of
(10:02):
your listeners can sympathize with this, that we have a
long to do list. What do we think, like, oh, well,
I could not five of these things right off in
the next half hours, So why don't I just do
those five things first and then get to the big thing?
Right Like, I'll just do myself a favor, do the
little stuff, and then I'll get to the big thing.
You know exactly where this is going. You're gonna run
out of steam, You're gonna be tired, you're gonna be
(10:23):
needing to take a break by the time you've gotten
through those five small things, and you won't get to
the big thing until you are less fresh and less
able to focus. Um So, don't clear the decks, save
that stuff for later, batch the little things. Do your
toughest work when you are best able to handle it.
Um So that's, you know, really been one of my
(10:45):
my biggest things. I would say. The one other thing
that a lot of people find useful and that I
really do myself, is I plan my upcoming weeks on Friday's.
So I take about twenty minutes every Friday to think
through the week ahead and say, well, what is most
important for me to accomplish professionally, What is most important
(11:05):
for me to accomplish in terms of like my relationships,
so family, friends, things like that, and what do I
want to do um personally over the course of the
next week. And just figure out, you know, what are
the big things in all those categories, When do I
plan to do those things or if they're going to
require multiple steps work and those little steps to get there.
Go um, make a rough map of the week. You know.
(11:27):
It only takes me about twenty minutes to do this,
but when I do this every Friday, I have a
far better sense of the landscape of what's coming up.
You know, what I've committed to do in the future,
and also what I want to do in the future. Um,
And so it just vastly increases the chances that time
(11:47):
is spent on those things that I consider priorities. So
I'd suggest anyone who's feeling a little like I've got
so much going on, I feel overwhelmed. I don't even
know what I have on my plate take that time
every Friday, just twenty minutes outside your life, looking at
your life, saying what am I doing, what would I
like to be doing, what do I need to be doing,
what logistics have to happen. You build the habit of
(12:10):
doing this, and life will feel a lot more calm. Well,
I love that. I was about to, Yeah, ask you
about list, but I never really thought about the idea
of having like lists for things other than like work stuff,
you know, like personal personal life and stuff too. Doing
those three categories and the idea of making a three
category priority list is in and of itself powerful because
(12:32):
like you sit there and make a list with three
categories career, relationships, self, it is so hard to make
a three category list and then leave a category blank,
Like our brains just don't work that way. They're like, well,
there's three categories. I better put something in all of
these categories. And that right there can nudge you to
have a far more balanced life because you are actually
(12:55):
thinking about it. Yeah, that's really interesting. Your other podcast,
could you tell me about? Yeah? So, it's called Best
of Both Worlds, and I co host it with Sarah
hart Unger, who is a friend of mine who is
a practicing physician, mom of three, um blogger. She has
another podcast that's called Best Laid Plans. So very Busy
(13:16):
Lady UM. I really, you know, enjoy talking with her.
But the two of us talk all things work and
family from the perspective of being people who really love both.
And I feel like a lot of the literature, a
lot of you know, podcasts, everything out there, tends to
pitt work against family, like these are two opposite sides
(13:39):
of a scale. If one goes up, the other must
go down. And I haven't really found that to be
the case much in my own life that I mean
to me, they sort of it's all one part of
my time, and there's also other things I do with
my time. It's not like if I for every given
hour I spend at work, I must spend like one
less on family. I mean, maybe I spend one less
doing laundry. I mean that's also possible. UM. So we
(14:01):
we come at it from that perspective, and we've built
a good following of other people who view time that way.
So people who generally have, you know, jobs they're into
they really like, they enjoy UM and who are also
enjoying making the most of their their personal lives too,
and we release episodes every Tuesday. Um and would love
(14:22):
to have people come listen to us. Yeah, great, because
before breakfast is great um advice. But the other one
it's like two people, so it's like more of a conversation.
So I'm sure that one's great too. All right, let's
take a quick break and set some goals. Be right back.
Welcome back to Prodigy. You can find more info about
Laura at Laura Vanderkam dot com. That's Cam with a K.
(14:44):
I wanted to ask about, would you like short term
and long term goals? Um? Like, sort of how you
how you work around, like I guess, figuring them out
and scheduling them, especially with long term ones when it
seems like there's so much stuff to do Like short
term Yeah, I mean, goal setting is a very inexact science,
(15:05):
and lots of people have different ways they approach it. Um.
I think there's a difference between this sort of long
term bucket list type goals and then the ones we
have actually decided to put into our lives in the
near future. Um and and so by separating these out
a little bit, you can feel far more productive in
your progress toward goals, so sure, please make the bucket list. UM.
(15:29):
I have an exercise I sometimes do with people in
workshops that's called the list of a hundred dreams. Um.
It's just anything you want to spend more time doing,
like a hundred things you want to spend more time doing.
The idea is it won't just be big stuff, because
you know, bucket list people come up with like twenty
countries they want to visit and then they stop doing it. Um.
But a hundred items is pretty hard to get to,
so you have to keep coming back to it. But
(15:51):
then once you've got a long list of stuff you
might want to focus on spend time doing, you can
do another exercise to kind of drill down two things
you want to focus on in the next six to
twelve months. And that kind of depends what time of
year it is, it would but I like to think
of it this way, like in the professional front and
picture yourself at the end of the year and you
(16:12):
are giving yourself a performance review. So we're we're talking
in early August. You could pretend it's December of this
year and you're looking back over the past year, giving
yourself a performance review and let's say it's been just
an absolutely amazing year for you professionally, Like, if that
were to be the case, what three things would you
have done in the course of the year that made
(16:34):
it so awesome for you? Right, so you can write
those things down and do this for your personal life
as well. Um, you know, picture yourself as a guest
at a holiday party at the end of the year
and you're you're telling people about the amazing things you
did in your personal life over the course of the year,
and you think about, well, what would those say three
things be that you would keep telling people about because
(16:54):
you were so excited and think that they were such
amazing things that happened in the course of the year.
And so now between those three professional things and those
three things you're talking about at a holiday party, you
have a list of six goals for the rest of
the year. Like, these are the things you want to
be talking about at the end of the year. And
if you haven't done them by this point in the year,
maybe you can use the next four five months to
(17:16):
do them. But now you know them and you know
that those are the things that should actually start informing
your time. Um, you know, the bucket list items are
great like, yes, go to Fiji at some point. That's awesome,
spent three weeks there, I think you would have an
amazing time. Um. But a more immediate goal might be
you know that you've landed this particular client that you
(17:38):
have talked to occasionally but haven't really put the work
into getting and you know in the next five months
you are going to start your first project with them. Great, Well,
that's something you can start putting on your schedule, like
call them, have lunch with the people you know they're
you know, pitch something to them like this. These are
things you can actually do that will be far more
likely to lead to the end of your result. Yeah,
(17:58):
how do you How does your list like that and
your schedule like manifest? Are you writing it down and
on post it notes? Are putting it in your calendar? Well?
Certainly you can. I mean you can make the list
of end of your goals on whatever you want. Um.
You know some people have fancy planners or you know,
but I don't know. You could cross stitch it or
whatever you want to do. Um. But it's more that
(18:20):
you know what these things are and and refer to
it frequently, because then when you do that Friday planning
we talked about, you know, Friday afternoon, looking to the
next week, you can keep asking yourself, well, am I'm
making steps over the next week toward those larger six
to twelve month goals? Like if you want to run
a marathon by the end of the year, probably you
(18:40):
need some runs on the calendar for the next week.
And on Friday you can look to the next week
and say, well, when am I going to do that?
You know, when am I gonna do my longer run?
When am I going to do um some of my
speed work. Put that onto your calendar. UM. And if
you keep doing this Friday after Friday, making sure that
there is space um to make steps towards your long
term goals in the week you are from are likely
to actually achieve those long term goals. Yeah, that's great.
(19:05):
I definitely need to do that. What are some of
the things that you hear a lot from your listeners
or just things that really resonate with people. I guess
um throughout you know the course of making before breakfast. Yeah,
there's a couple of things I've I've said, I talked
about that I think really flip switches for people, Um,
what is to think of life in terms of weeks
(19:28):
rather than days? Um, A lot of us are sort
of operating on a twenty four hour mindset, whereas you know,
anything that is important to you is supposed to happen
in the next twenty four hours, and if you haven't
done X, Y or Z in twenty four hours, you
are in some way of failure. And yet many things
in life don't actually have to happen every day in
(19:48):
order to still be important in your life. I mean,
most people say their jobs are important, but they don't
do their jobs all seven days of a week. So
why are we only you know, why do we consider
them important if we're only doing them, say five days
a week, Well, you know, there's seven days in a week.
I just think people need to view life in terms
of one sixty eight hours, which is twenty four times
seven rather than I mean, there's just a couple of
(20:12):
things just to think about with that. If there's a
hundred sixty eight hours in a week, and you work
forty hours a week, so pretty standard full time job,
and sleep eight hours a night, which is fifty six
hours a week, you have seventy two hours for other things.
Which is a lot of time. I mean, it's almost
twice as much time as you are working. And yet
(20:33):
almost anything you read about full time jobs and full
time work, it emphasizes the full like it takes the
full amount of your time. Like clearly it doesn't, right,
And yet this semantics has us thinking in terms of like, oh,
only Tuesday, like the Tuesday is the only day that
matters or something, and so we don't see the week
in its entirety. Um. So I find that that's something
(20:55):
that has really shifted a lot of people's thing ging um,
just about how they view time. Anything you do three
to four times a week is important in your life,
but that doesn't mean it has to happen Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.
I mean it could happen Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday and
it would be just as important. Um. But you know,
we don't have to focus on only only the week
(21:17):
days to to make something, um, seem important to us. Yes,
so thinking of things in sort of like a broader
scale as opposed to just like immediate because we don't
live our lives in days like I mean we you know,
Tuesday and Saturday both have twenty four hours, and yet
they look very different for people. Um whereas a week
(21:37):
is a repeating cycle of life as it is actually lived,
Like you can start to see what life might look
like because that is, you know, the unit of repetition. Um.
So it just is a better way to view time
than any given twenty four hours, which might be highly
unrepresentative depending on which twenty four hours you pick. Yeah,
(21:58):
that's really interesting and I never thought about that, but yeah,
that does make a lot of sense. But yeah, there
is there other stuff or anything else. Um. Well, you know,
I've had people track their time, and a lot of
people do not want to do this, which I understand.
I mean it sounds tedious, it sounds not fun, and
I know, I mean I've I've actually been tracking my
time on weekly spreadsheets for six years now. Um, so
(22:19):
I know how I've spent every half hour of my
time for the past six years. And I am not
about to tell anyone about like, you know, it's boring
for anyone else other than me, But um, I find
it worthwhile because we do tell ourselves all sorts of
stories about where the time goes, and these stories may
or may not be accurate. So in order to get
the most out of our time, I think we need
(22:40):
accurate data, and the only way to really get that
is to actually track your time. UM. I'd suggest people
do it for a week again, because a week is
the cycle of life as we live it, and you know,
how you spend Tuesday needs to be, you know, viewed
alongside how you spend Saturday, if you really want to
see what your life looks like. UM. But almost everyone
(23:03):
who has tried this has been like, oh, that is interesting. Um,
I never knew I did X. I never knew I
spent that much time on why. Um, I thought I
worked this amount and I have worked this amount. Or
I thought I was always emptying the dishwasher and it
turns out I spent less than half an hour on
(23:24):
it in the course of the week. Like, these are
just various things people see. Um. And And once you
see the data, you can adjust your story to reflect
the data. UM. Well, as long as you want to
adjust your story. Sometimes people don't, but that's a different matter. UM.
But but I feel like when we have accurate data,
then we can make wise choices about our time. This
(23:45):
may be sort of like a broad, difficult question, but
like I imagine a lot of people want to be promoted,
um you know and or like you know, get a
better job or what, and they may be working towards that.
Like have you seen any things that have worked for people,
UM that are like for for trying to do that
thinking about sort of paying into your career, like building
(24:07):
in time that is not just about doing your day
to day deliverables, but thinking about the broad picture of
your career. UM, what skills you have and how you
can spend time developing those skills who you know, like
what your network looks like because UM, that is honestly
the way it's going to wind up happening is that
(24:28):
you know, you've worked with a manager tangentially and a
different part of the company and they have a better
role that opens up they think of you. It's it's
not like it's magically gonna happen. It's that you met
them UM through the course of doing something, or somebody
at a different organization that you met UM at a
conference a year ago, and they think of something and
you kept in touch and now you go apply for
it and you've got a leg up for that. UM.
(24:50):
So it's thinking about how you can build in time
for making and maintaining those relationships, UM, for figuring out
what skills are generally important, and and just sort of
being open to trying things. UM. You know that aren't
just what is immediately in front of you. UM. So
stepping back and taking that broader perspective of what else
(25:12):
would I like to see in my professional life? Where
can I find space for that? Um? And and and then
making that happen? Is there anything else that you want
to mention? I wasn't gonna ask any more questions? UM,
Oh no, you know, I well I think that. UM.
You know, when it comes to time, we spend a
lot of time thinking about what we don't want to do,
(25:32):
like what we want to spend less time doing, and
and so much of time management is kind of focused
on this, like how can I spend less time in
my inbox? How can I shorten my meetings? How can
I you know, like spend less time washing the dishes
or whatever it is some hack we're going to find
for this that magically is going to shave thirty seconds
off your dish washing time, which would be awesome, but
like it's not going to change your life. UM. What
(25:54):
changes your life is thinking about what you want to
spend more time doing and figuring out how you can
scale those things up. Um. So, whether that's the deep
work at work or the networking or skill development, whether
it's more um time spent quality relationship building, whether it's
more time for hobbies or exercise, anything that's you know,
(26:16):
boosting your own personal or spiritual health. Like, these are
all things that we might want to spend more time
doing and figuring out how we can scale those things up.
It's just going to be so much more likely to
change your life then figuring out how you can spend
two minutes less on washing the dishes or getting ready
in the morning or anything like that. So you know,
(26:38):
I challenge people to really think about time with that
in mind, that if you put in the important stuff first,
everything else kind of shrinks um to allow for those
big things to be there. God, every time we talk
or I work on your show, I just always feel
like I'm learning something, So I really appreciate it. Well,
thank you, I appreciate I'd appreciate you having me on
(26:59):
Thanks to Laura. Highly recommend our podcast Before Breakfast and
Best of Both Worlds for actionable tips delivered directly to
your inbox. You can subscribe to our newsletter at Laura
Vanderkam dot com. That's Cam with the k Prodigy was
created in produced by me lober Ante. The executive producer
is Tyler Klang. For more podcasts in My Heart Radio,
visit the I Heart Radio app or wherever you get
(27:19):
your podcasts
Prodigy is a production of I Heart Radio. Have you
ever tracked your time, like seriously measured all the things
you do on a weekly basis and quantified it so
you can get perspective. I haven't, and the concept is
so foreign to me that I doubt I ever will.
But I am curious about how much time I've wasted. Wait, actually,
(00:21):
hang on, Okay, Oh my god, I've played eleven hundred
hours of a single computer game called Overwatch and I
still suck. Wow, let's move on. When I first started,
I heard, they taught me the basics, then gave me
my first show. They gave it to me because I
didn't know much and it was supposed to be a
(00:42):
light lift. I actually still produce it, and after working
on like thirty other shows, I realized why it's so easy.
It's called Before Breakfast and it's about time management, productivity,
and work life balance. The creator and host is Laura Vanderkam,
and she obviously actuses what she preaches. Each episode is
(01:03):
bite sized, about five minutes each weekday about a single
topic that will improve how you spend your time. Laura
sends me a week's worth of episodes almost a month
in advance. She also notes the time code anytime she
makes a speaking error. She quite literally might be the
most efficient host in the entire industry, and the show
(01:23):
is incredibly successful. It gets over ten million downlards a
year and has more sponsor requests than anything I've ever seen.
Her podcast vocal delivery is so measured, and her listeners
don't hesitate to let us know any time I make
an air, which we actually really appreciate. Laura is incredibly
smart and a genuinely good person. Every time I listened
to an episode, I learned something, So of course she's
(01:44):
the perfect person for this show. My name is loeber Ante,
and this is Prodigy. Laura vin Cam is the author
of several time management and productivity books, including Juliet's School
(02:05):
of Possibilities, Off the Clock, I Know How she does it,
what the most successful people do, Before Breakfast and One
sixty eight Hours. Her work has appeared in publications including
The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company,
and Fortune. She's the host of the podcast Before Breakfast
and the co host with Sarah hart Unger, of the
podcast Best of Both Worlds. She lives outside Philadelphia with
(02:28):
her husband and five children. Here's a clip from a
Ted talk she did. When people find out I write
about time management, they assume two things. One is that
I'm always on time, and I'm not. I was once
(02:49):
late to my own speech on time management. We all
had to just take a moment together and savor that irony.
I'm fascinated by the concept of time, mostly because it
is such a democratic element of our lives, Like everybody
has the exact same amount of time, and yet we
(03:11):
do entirely different things with it, um and and so
when you meet these people who are doing amazing things
with their lives, I mean amazing things professionally, and then
they also have really cool personal lives too, I mean,
who knows what else they have going for them. I'm
not denying they might be smarter or richer or whatever
else than anyone else, but they don't have more time.
(03:34):
And so I have long been fascinated by how these
people are spending their time and what the rest of
us can learn from their allocation of twenty four hours
um to see what changes we can make in our
own lives as well. So I began exploring that topic
probably about a dozen years ago. And then once you
(03:54):
start writing about a topic, and talking about a topic,
you you know, learn more about it. And so that's
what I've been doing. Ever so, so you were studying
these like habits and time management of some successful people,
I guess, so, yeah, I mean I started having people
track their time for me. And I noticed that in
the past when I was doing interviews of folks because
(04:15):
I spent a lot of years writing for different publications UM,
I would often ask people about their schedules and it
just seemed to be such a practical way to get
an insight into their lives UM. And and as I
wrote about this, I realized that people also have stories
about their lives UM that seem interesting to them, like
(04:36):
they think they explained what's going on. But even so
these stories can be wrong. UM. You have to have
people actually keep track of their time, and then you
start to see, oh, no, they're really doing this, or
you know, they say they're doing X, but they're really
doing well. But those are both very interesting things. So
I time is, you know, we all experience time, and
(04:58):
yet what we think to do with our time is
often very different from what we actually do with our time.
And that gap, that mismatch between ideas and lived reality
is so large that I find it fascinating. And that's
another thing that that drew me to this topic too. Well,
what's weird for me. It's like, you know, you're supposed
(05:18):
to work, what eight hours a day, but I don't
think I could do very high quality for like literally
eight straight hours a day. Yeah, well nobody does. I
mean that's the uh, the funny part about it. Um.
I mean people take all kinds of breaks. They shift tasks, um,
they go in and out of concentration, and and that's natural.
(05:39):
I mean, that's human nature. We all need breaks. Um.
We cannot focus on anything for eight hours straight um.
And and that's also one of the reasons that people
think they work longer hours than they do. Um. You know,
they do other things and come back to it, but
somehow the other things are just never there. Um. So
(06:01):
people like, no, I work around the clock, so well,
you probably don't. People track their time. They think they
were eighty hours a week or something. You track it,
it's like fifty, well fifties a lot, you know, but
it's not eighty um. And so you know, we want
to make sure we're working from accurate data if we
want to make wise choices about our time. Yeah. Well,
we'll say that you're definitely a good example, at least
(06:23):
in my opinion, because um, you're by far the most
organized host and get everything like to me very early
and with notes and stuff. So um, a bit spoiled there.
But um, I was curious because you have four kids
or five. I have five now, the youngest was born
during the course of Before Breakfast being a podcast, so
(06:43):
oh that's right. Yeah wow wow, So that I imagine
requires a lot of careful time management. Well I guess, um.
I mean I've I've had kids for a long time now,
so I don't really know any different way of working. Um.
And you know, for any of your listeners, I have
very good childcare for my kids as well, um, you know,
(07:05):
and my my husband's equally involved with them too, So
it's it's not like I'm trying to work with five
small children sitting around me the whole day. Um. But
you know, it's I think what many people have have
figured out is that kids can can force certain efficiencies
and certain um ways of looking at productivity if you
want to keep getting things done, and you become a
(07:28):
lot more aware that stuff can go wrong. Um. And
when you know that stuff can go wrong, you build
a lot more space, you build a lot more backup
plans into your life. But when you do that, your
schedule can be much more resilient. Um and and so
you know, that's why we've been able to keep putting
(07:48):
out a Before Breakfast podcast every weekday morning for the
past two and a half years. Um. Is you know,
we work ahead, have ideas for the next month of
episode oodes. I'm usually recording two to three weeks ahead
of time. UM. If I know I have something coming
up that will preclude working for a while, I work
(08:08):
even further ahead and try to record, um. You know.
And it's a lot of evergreen content, so it's not
like I have to react to the day's news. Um.
So that's what's made it possible, just that thinking ahead
and planning for that, and making sure we have enough
of a buffer so that if something does come up
in in my life, for instance, I still have several
weeks before I actually have to, you know, deal with
(08:30):
that reality of getting back to recording. Yeah, that planning ahead.
I mean, it's supposed to be like a symptom of
a d h D, but like it's very very difficult
for me to work on things that aren't sort of
like immediate. But I feel like once I get to
that part where it's doing, I'm like, dang, I wish
I'd started on this a while ago. Yeah. I mean,
I often find that doing a little bit every day
(08:54):
is helpful, and it doesn't have to be a lot,
um which can be helpful if if we're you know,
interested by all sorts of things, or you know, like
to flip from thing to things like well, even you know,
doing say fifteen minutes on a project, but enough ahead
of time, um that you're doing multiple days of fifteen
minutes on a project can can build a lot of
open space into that time before a deadline. Um so
(09:17):
it doesn't feel like such a crush at the end.
Have you figured out there certain ways that you particularly
like work best. I like to write um in the morning,
and then I can do other things that don't require
quite as much intensive creativity later in the day. Um
(09:40):
So I've really tried to structure my work hours such
that I'm working on the things that require the most
concentration in the morning and then you know, clear the
little er things off my to do list in the
afternoon or you know, right before lunch, when when my
brain is a bit more tired and I still face
temptation to do it differently. And maybe a lot of
(10:02):
your listeners can sympathize with this, that we have a
long to do list. What do we think, like, oh, well,
I could not five of these things right off in
the next half hours, So why don't I just do
those five things first and then get to the big thing?
Right Like, I'll just do myself a favor, do the
little stuff, and then I'll get to the big thing.
You know exactly where this is going. You're gonna run
out of steam, You're gonna be tired, you're gonna be
(10:23):
needing to take a break by the time you've gotten
through those five small things, and you won't get to
the big thing until you are less fresh and less
able to focus. Um So, don't clear the decks, save
that stuff for later, batch the little things. Do your
toughest work when you are best able to handle it.
Um So that's, you know, really been one of my
(10:45):
my biggest things. I would say. The one other thing
that a lot of people find useful and that I
really do myself, is I plan my upcoming weeks on Friday's.
So I take about twenty minutes every Friday to think
through the week ahead and say, well, what is most
important for me to accomplish professionally, What is most important
(11:05):
for me to accomplish in terms of like my relationships,
so family, friends, things like that, and what do I
want to do um personally over the course of the
next week. And just figure out, you know, what are
the big things in all those categories, When do I
plan to do those things or if they're going to
require multiple steps work and those little steps to get there.
Go um, make a rough map of the week. You know.
(11:27):
It only takes me about twenty minutes to do this,
but when I do this every Friday, I have a
far better sense of the landscape of what's coming up.
You know, what I've committed to do in the future,
and also what I want to do in the future. Um,
And so it just vastly increases the chances that time
(11:47):
is spent on those things that I consider priorities. So
I'd suggest anyone who's feeling a little like I've got
so much going on, I feel overwhelmed. I don't even
know what I have on my plate take that time
every Friday, just twenty minutes outside your life, looking at
your life, saying what am I doing, what would I
like to be doing, what do I need to be doing,
what logistics have to happen. You build the habit of
(12:10):
doing this, and life will feel a lot more calm. Well,
I love that. I was about to, Yeah, ask you
about list, but I never really thought about the idea
of having like lists for things other than like work stuff,
you know, like personal personal life and stuff too. Doing
those three categories and the idea of making a three
category priority list is in and of itself powerful because
(12:32):
like you sit there and make a list with three
categories career, relationships, self, it is so hard to make
a three category list and then leave a category blank,
Like our brains just don't work that way. They're like, well,
there's three categories. I better put something in all of
these categories. And that right there can nudge you to
have a far more balanced life because you are actually
(12:55):
thinking about it. Yeah, that's really interesting. Your other podcast,
could you tell me about? Yeah? So, it's called Best
of Both Worlds, and I co host it with Sarah
hart Unger, who is a friend of mine who is
a practicing physician, mom of three, um blogger. She has
another podcast that's called Best Laid Plans. So very Busy
(13:16):
Lady UM. I really, you know, enjoy talking with her.
But the two of us talk all things work and
family from the perspective of being people who really love both.
And I feel like a lot of the literature, a
lot of you know, podcasts, everything out there, tends to
pitt work against family, like these are two opposite sides
(13:39):
of a scale. If one goes up, the other must
go down. And I haven't really found that to be
the case much in my own life that I mean
to me, they sort of it's all one part of
my time, and there's also other things I do with
my time. It's not like if I for every given
hour I spend at work, I must spend like one
less on family. I mean, maybe I spend one less
doing laundry. I mean that's also possible. UM. So we
(14:01):
we come at it from that perspective, and we've built
a good following of other people who view time that way.
So people who generally have, you know, jobs they're into
they really like, they enjoy UM and who are also
enjoying making the most of their their personal lives too,
and we release episodes every Tuesday. Um and would love
(14:22):
to have people come listen to us. Yeah, great, because
before breakfast is great um advice. But the other one
it's like two people, so it's like more of a conversation.
So I'm sure that one's great too. All right, let's
take a quick break and set some goals. Be right back.
Welcome back to Prodigy. You can find more info about
Laura at Laura Vanderkam dot com. That's Cam with a K.
(14:44):
I wanted to ask about, would you like short term
and long term goals? Um? Like, sort of how you
how you work around, like I guess, figuring them out
and scheduling them, especially with long term ones when it
seems like there's so much stuff to do Like short
term Yeah, I mean, goal setting is a very inexact science,
(15:05):
and lots of people have different ways they approach it. Um.
I think there's a difference between this sort of long
term bucket list type goals and then the ones we
have actually decided to put into our lives in the
near future. Um and and so by separating these out
a little bit, you can feel far more productive in
your progress toward goals, so sure, please make the bucket list. UM.
(15:29):
I have an exercise I sometimes do with people in
workshops that's called the list of a hundred dreams. Um.
It's just anything you want to spend more time doing,
like a hundred things you want to spend more time doing.
The idea is it won't just be big stuff, because
you know, bucket list people come up with like twenty
countries they want to visit and then they stop doing it. Um.
But a hundred items is pretty hard to get to,
so you have to keep coming back to it. But
(15:51):
then once you've got a long list of stuff you
might want to focus on spend time doing, you can
do another exercise to kind of drill down two things
you want to focus on in the next six to
twelve months. And that kind of depends what time of
year it is, it would but I like to think
of it this way, like in the professional front and
picture yourself at the end of the year and you
(16:12):
are giving yourself a performance review. So we're we're talking
in early August. You could pretend it's December of this
year and you're looking back over the past year, giving
yourself a performance review and let's say it's been just
an absolutely amazing year for you professionally, Like, if that
were to be the case, what three things would you
have done in the course of the year that made
(16:34):
it so awesome for you? Right, so you can write
those things down and do this for your personal life
as well. Um, you know, picture yourself as a guest
at a holiday party at the end of the year
and you're you're telling people about the amazing things you
did in your personal life over the course of the year,
and you think about, well, what would those say three
things be that you would keep telling people about because
(16:54):
you were so excited and think that they were such
amazing things that happened in the course of the year.
And so now between those three professional things and those
three things you're talking about at a holiday party, you
have a list of six goals for the rest of
the year. Like, these are the things you want to
be talking about at the end of the year. And
if you haven't done them by this point in the year,
maybe you can use the next four five months to
(17:16):
do them. But now you know them and you know
that those are the things that should actually start informing
your time. Um, you know, the bucket list items are
great like, yes, go to Fiji at some point. That's awesome,
spent three weeks there, I think you would have an
amazing time. Um. But a more immediate goal might be
you know that you've landed this particular client that you
(17:38):
have talked to occasionally but haven't really put the work
into getting and you know in the next five months
you are going to start your first project with them. Great, Well,
that's something you can start putting on your schedule, like
call them, have lunch with the people you know they're
you know, pitch something to them like this. These are
things you can actually do that will be far more
likely to lead to the end of your result. Yeah,
(17:58):
how do you How does your list like that and
your schedule like manifest? Are you writing it down and
on post it notes? Are putting it in your calendar? Well?
Certainly you can. I mean you can make the list
of end of your goals on whatever you want. Um.
You know some people have fancy planners or you know,
but I don't know. You could cross stitch it or
whatever you want to do. Um. But it's more that
(18:20):
you know what these things are and and refer to
it frequently, because then when you do that Friday planning
we talked about, you know, Friday afternoon, looking to the
next week, you can keep asking yourself, well, am I'm
making steps over the next week toward those larger six
to twelve month goals? Like if you want to run
a marathon by the end of the year, probably you
(18:40):
need some runs on the calendar for the next week.
And on Friday you can look to the next week
and say, well, when am I going to do that?
You know, when am I gonna do my longer run?
When am I going to do um some of my
speed work. Put that onto your calendar. UM. And if
you keep doing this Friday after Friday, making sure that
there is space um to make steps towards your long
term goals in the week you are from are likely
to actually achieve those long term goals. Yeah, that's great.
(19:05):
I definitely need to do that. What are some of
the things that you hear a lot from your listeners
or just things that really resonate with people. I guess
um throughout you know the course of making before breakfast. Yeah,
there's a couple of things I've I've said, I talked
about that I think really flip switches for people, Um,
what is to think of life in terms of weeks
(19:28):
rather than days? Um, A lot of us are sort
of operating on a twenty four hour mindset, whereas you know,
anything that is important to you is supposed to happen
in the next twenty four hours, and if you haven't
done X, Y or Z in twenty four hours, you
are in some way of failure. And yet many things
in life don't actually have to happen every day in
(19:48):
order to still be important in your life. I mean,
most people say their jobs are important, but they don't
do their jobs all seven days of a week. So
why are we only you know, why do we consider
them important if we're only doing them, say five days
a week, Well, you know, there's seven days in a week.
I just think people need to view life in terms
of one sixty eight hours, which is twenty four times
seven rather than I mean, there's just a couple of
(20:12):
things just to think about with that. If there's a
hundred sixty eight hours in a week, and you work
forty hours a week, so pretty standard full time job,
and sleep eight hours a night, which is fifty six
hours a week, you have seventy two hours for other things.
Which is a lot of time. I mean, it's almost
twice as much time as you are working. And yet
(20:33):
almost anything you read about full time jobs and full
time work, it emphasizes the full like it takes the
full amount of your time. Like clearly it doesn't, right,
And yet this semantics has us thinking in terms of like, oh,
only Tuesday, like the Tuesday is the only day that
matters or something, and so we don't see the week
in its entirety. Um. So I find that that's something
(20:55):
that has really shifted a lot of people's thing ging um,
just about how they view time. Anything you do three
to four times a week is important in your life,
but that doesn't mean it has to happen Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.
I mean it could happen Thursday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday and
it would be just as important. Um. But you know,
we don't have to focus on only only the week
(21:17):
days to to make something, um, seem important to us. Yes,
so thinking of things in sort of like a broader
scale as opposed to just like immediate because we don't
live our lives in days like I mean we you know,
Tuesday and Saturday both have twenty four hours, and yet
they look very different for people. Um whereas a week
(21:37):
is a repeating cycle of life as it is actually lived,
Like you can start to see what life might look
like because that is, you know, the unit of repetition. Um.
So it just is a better way to view time
than any given twenty four hours, which might be highly
unrepresentative depending on which twenty four hours you pick. Yeah,
(21:58):
that's really interesting and I never thought about that, but yeah,
that does make a lot of sense. But yeah, there
is there other stuff or anything else. Um. Well, you know,
I've had people track their time, and a lot of
people do not want to do this, which I understand.
I mean it sounds tedious, it sounds not fun, and
I know, I mean I've I've actually been tracking my
time on weekly spreadsheets for six years now. Um, so
(22:19):
I know how I've spent every half hour of my
time for the past six years. And I am not
about to tell anyone about like, you know, it's boring
for anyone else other than me, But um, I find
it worthwhile because we do tell ourselves all sorts of
stories about where the time goes, and these stories may
or may not be accurate. So in order to get
the most out of our time, I think we need
(22:40):
accurate data, and the only way to really get that
is to actually track your time. UM. I'd suggest people
do it for a week again, because a week is
the cycle of life as we live it, and you know,
how you spend Tuesday needs to be, you know, viewed
alongside how you spend Saturday, if you really want to
see what your life looks like. UM. But almost everyone
(23:03):
who has tried this has been like, oh, that is interesting. Um,
I never knew I did X. I never knew I
spent that much time on why. Um, I thought I
worked this amount and I have worked this amount. Or
I thought I was always emptying the dishwasher and it
turns out I spent less than half an hour on
(23:24):
it in the course of the week. Like, these are
just various things people see. Um. And And once you
see the data, you can adjust your story to reflect
the data. UM. Well, as long as you want to
adjust your story. Sometimes people don't, but that's a different matter. UM.
But but I feel like when we have accurate data,
then we can make wise choices about our time. This
(23:45):
may be sort of like a broad, difficult question, but
like I imagine a lot of people want to be promoted,
um you know and or like you know, get a
better job or what, and they may be working towards that.
Like have you seen any things that have worked for people,
UM that are like for for trying to do that
thinking about sort of paying into your career, like building
(24:07):
in time that is not just about doing your day
to day deliverables, but thinking about the broad picture of
your career. UM, what skills you have and how you
can spend time developing those skills who you know, like
what your network looks like because UM, that is honestly
the way it's going to wind up happening is that
(24:28):
you know, you've worked with a manager tangentially and a
different part of the company and they have a better
role that opens up they think of you. It's it's
not like it's magically gonna happen. It's that you met
them UM through the course of doing something, or somebody
at a different organization that you met UM at a
conference a year ago, and they think of something and
you kept in touch and now you go apply for
it and you've got a leg up for that. UM.
(24:50):
So it's thinking about how you can build in time
for making and maintaining those relationships, UM, for figuring out
what skills are generally important, and and just sort of
being open to trying things. UM. You know that aren't
just what is immediately in front of you. UM. So
stepping back and taking that broader perspective of what else
(25:12):
would I like to see in my professional life? Where
can I find space for that? Um? And and and then
making that happen? Is there anything else that you want
to mention? I wasn't gonna ask any more questions? UM,
Oh no, you know, I well I think that. UM.
You know, when it comes to time, we spend a
lot of time thinking about what we don't want to do,
(25:32):
like what we want to spend less time doing, and
and so much of time management is kind of focused
on this, like how can I spend less time in
my inbox? How can I shorten my meetings? How can
I you know, like spend less time washing the dishes
or whatever it is some hack we're going to find
for this that magically is going to shave thirty seconds
off your dish washing time, which would be awesome, but
like it's not going to change your life. UM. What
(25:54):
changes your life is thinking about what you want to
spend more time doing and figuring out how you can
scale those things up. Um. So, whether that's the deep
work at work or the networking or skill development, whether
it's more um time spent quality relationship building, whether it's
more time for hobbies or exercise, anything that's you know,
(26:16):
boosting your own personal or spiritual health. Like, these are
all things that we might want to spend more time
doing and figuring out how we can scale those things up.
It's just going to be so much more likely to
change your life then figuring out how you can spend
two minutes less on washing the dishes or getting ready
in the morning or anything like that. So you know,
(26:38):
I challenge people to really think about time with that
in mind, that if you put in the important stuff first,
everything else kind of shrinks um to allow for those
big things to be there. God, every time we talk
or I work on your show, I just always feel
like I'm learning something, So I really appreciate it. Well,
thank you, I appreciate I'd appreciate you having me on
(26:59):
Thanks to Laura. Highly recommend our podcast Before Breakfast and
Best of Both Worlds for actionable tips delivered directly to
your inbox. You can subscribe to our newsletter at Laura
Vanderkam dot com. That's Cam with the k Prodigy was
created in produced by me lober Ante. The executive producer
is Tyler Klang. For more podcasts in My Heart Radio,
visit the I Heart Radio app or wherever you get
(27:19):
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