168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think

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Her insistence that everyone has enough time to do anything they want if they manage their time better may grate some people wrong, and her emphatic crusade against time spent watching television became a bit lecture-y at times. However, I respond well to blunt facts and her point that “everything you choose to do is a choice” forced me to consider how exactly I’m using each of the minutes in my 168 hours. hours is the number of hours you have in a week. Thinking about time from this more macro perspective is the secret to doing more of the things you value, and less of the things you don’t. Vanderkam shows how most of us have enough time to do everything that is really important to us. The most successful people manage their time by prioritizing the things that matter most to them and letting other things (e.g., perfectionism, what other people think they should be doing in their stage of life with their time, the things they aren’t that good at) go. She encourages you to list your 100 dreams and core competencies and then arrange your schedule to reflect your aspirations, values, and strengths. New home economics has changed how we juggle time among children, work, and housework. The change began when women started getting into the workforce and their time became billable. If you’re serious about your career, it should not be hard to find two or three senior people in your organization or industry who honestly like you. But it is your responsibility to seek these people out.”

While 168 hours takes a slightly more condensed approach to time management than Gates' Law (see the quote above), the point is the same. You can get more done than you think if you understand how you are utilizing your time now, and make the necessary changes. This book presents a new way of viewing and organizing time: 168 hours in a week (instead of 24 hours in a day, 8 hours at work and the other hours commuting or at home, 16 hours awake and 8 hours asleep, etc.) But the book's title is misleading. It's less about thinking creatively about your limited time and more about self-fulfillment. Some may argue that those are the same thing, but I think there's a subtle difference. Trying to make the best use of your time might include doing some things you don't really want to do. Self fulfillment is trying to only do things that fulfill you - which is what the author advocates. She argues that you "outsource, minimize, or ignore" anything you don't like doing, and that you focus your time exclusively on things that you do better than anyone else. I felt this left little wiggle room for exploration or growing underdeveloped skills. We see and hear that number often enough, but does anyone ever do the math? 24/7 adds up to 168 hours—one week—and, according to Laura Vanderkam, author of 168 Hours, it is the ideal unit by which to examine our lives. Most of us complain about not having enough time to do what it takes to feel successful at home or at work. 168 Hours posits that if we look at the data objectively—how we really spend each hour in an average week—we all have “enough.” After keeping a log for one week, readers can conduct their own Time Makeover: identify dreams and the “actionable steps” they require, optimize “core competencies” and, my favorite, outsource or minimize all the stuff left over. With allowances for downtime and “bits of joy” thrown in, time can finally be on our side, 24/7.”There were also several insulting references to families that chose to have the wife/mom stay at home, which admittedly made continuing to read more difficult for me (I'm a stay-at-home mom). I also felt that, while she's clearly devoted to nurturing her children and advocated that strongly, the references made to nurturing one's spouse/partner were a nod-and-wave at best. this inspired a conversation between me & my partner. i asked him what he would do with an extra 15 minutes a day & he said, "tidy the house." we decided that we would each spend 15 minutes a day tidying up. as a result, our house is almost always pristine, like something from a magazine. it was eye-opening to realize how little time it really takes to do something that seems so insufferable but ought to get done anyway.

So, let’s dig a little deeper into how you can go about implementing this time management strategy in your life. When I flip over to the reports tab, the first thing I do is change the report so that I only see data for the week of April 26 - May 2. This author had a few good ideas, but I was very disappointed in most of it. This book is hardly worth it unless you already earn six figures, as her biggest advice was to outsource all the things you don't want to waste your time with such as laundry, cooking and cleaning. I can see where this might make sense to her as she has very small children, but what is she teaching them? Nothing! She talks about spending all her free "kid time" playing, how about doing the chores together? This will not only save her money, but she will be spending time with her boys AND teaching them something valuable and worthwhile to their future. Even a 2 year old can help do chores. As a busy mom of 4 who home schools and works at night after they are in bed, her advice offered me nothing towards time management. Another gem in this book is that time with friends is time wasted unless you are multi-tasking. Go out to eat with a friend (since you have to eat anyway) or somehow schedule time around something you need to do. Don't knit; she calls that a "cliche" forgetting that perhaps knitting's emerging popularity stems from the fact that people find happiness and a sense of accomplishment in doing it. She recommends watching less TV; I agree with that. She recommends watching no more than one hour of TV per day; I think that's unreasonable. If we are home, we watch Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy! and an episode or two of something on Netflix. If we're out, we're out; no TV. Over the course of a week there's an OK balance. Her point is that TV gets you nowhere toward your goals. That's true. What she neglects to understand is that the human brain needs a certain amount of downtime. Other things she asserts: Kids are actually underscheduled and have too much spare time. (Citation needed, but not proffered.) You should schedule exciting dinner outings with your kids a couple of days a week. (A terrible idea if your kid has an early bedtime, or is fond of routine.) You can make a "homecooked" dinner in fifteen minutes by opening a few jars and taking advantage of pre-prepared (and more expensive, but that's okay because you can afford it) foods.

Hours does, indeed, contain a lot of food for thought. There are ideas in here that can truly make an immediate difference in your life, and various statistics that will put your mind to rest. And once you read it, you’ll no longer have to struggle to find an excuse for avoiding things: as author Laura Vanderkam says, if you don’t like to do something, own the truth.” You should now have a good understanding of why thinking about your time in 24-hour increments is not always the best solution. After all, I don’t mow my lawn every 24 hours, and therefore wouldn't normally think about reducing the frequency of mowing. What a waste of several of my precious 168 hours! Like many people, I struggle with motivation and focus so I'm always looking for wisdom or advice on topics like time management, productivity. This has to be one of the worst how-to/self-help books I've ever read.

In the first section of the Reports I see how many hours I scheduled (104) and how many I logged (115). I will note that I only scheduled time for sleep, work and eating. The idea that we’re under a ‘time crunch’ is a myth. The real crisis all of us are under is more along the lines of misuse of time. We spend our time doing things that aren’t very high on our real personal priority list. It’s not just the time we waste doing unimportant stuff. It’s also the time we spend being productive towards ends that really don’t mean very much in our life.” Choose a small number of activities that bring you the most happiness. Make sure that one of the activities involves breaking a sweat given that your health is non-negotiable If you aren’t a creative genius perhaps you could be a professional flunky. See if www.flunkies-are-us.com is available.

There has to be a better way...and Laura Vanderkam has found one. After interviewing dozens of successful, happy people, she realized that they allocate their time differently than most of us. Instead of letting the daily grind crowd out the important stuff, they start by making sure there's time for the important stuff. When plans go wrong and they run out of time, only their lesser priorities suffer. hours is a time management strategy designed by Laura Vanderkam, author of 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think. Most of us are used to thinking about time in terms of only a handful of hours—eight hours of work a day, seven hours of sleep, 24 hours in a day. We plan our lives around these small time slots, becoming ever more harried and stressed as we struggle to do the things we say we will do, or want to do, in the allocated time.