An Interview with Laura Vanderkam
By Jose Palomino, September 2010

I recently read 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think by Laura Vanderkam and I found that it spoke a great and new truth regarding time and life management connected to time. Her book pulls out some seemingly obvious facts about time – and places them into a fresh context. It provides a new framework that is powerfully liberating for anyone (like me) who’s been trying to put 2 gallons of life and work into a 1 gallon jug.

I’ve mentioned this book on other blog posts and tweets over the last few months. It brings a fresh perspective to a topic every “do-er” wrestles with: time.

All the more reason I was so pleased that I recently connected with Laura and discussed her book and future focus.  The Interview is in three parts. (this is part 2)

Part 2: A New Old Idea

When looking at the idea of 168 hours, it seems like an idea that’s been around for anyone to observe. Nonetheless, it is the way YOU captured it that just clicked and made sense. I especially liked the way you annualize time – making the point that a motivated person can do a lot in a year. I found this to be a particularly powerful application as I looked at the examples from the book.

Is that a technique (annualizing time) that came naturally to you?  Or did you discover or “back into” it? It doesn’t seem to be covered in a lot of other time management literature.

When I started writing about this material, I didn’t know there were 168 hours in a week, and I am still amazed how few other people have thought about this either. How can we even think about managing our time if we don’t know how much time we have?

Even if many of us work for a set number of hours per day, we don’t think about how much can fit into that space. If you work 40 hours per week for 50 weeks, that’s 2000 hours. That’s a lot of time, and you can really do a lot in 2000 hours. On the other hand, it’s not an infinite amount of time, and seeing the total number in black and white can encourage us to ask whether any particular project is worth taking up some of those 2000 hours.

Among your suggestions is to leave work earlier and spend time with your family — then spend an extra couple hours working. What kind of feedback have you heard about that and other suggestions in the book? Anyone say that this is just too hard to do?

Certainly if your work has to be done from a particular location, this is more difficult. But those evening hours are often good for the planning and prospecting that even people with more traditional jobs need to do. If you’re managing a doctor’s office, you’d need to be in the office. But then at night, you can think through how to make things work more efficiently, how you might solve a personnel issue, etc.

The biggest barrier I’ve come across to this suggestion, frankly, is that people prefer to watch TV in the evenings after their kids go to bed. Which is fine, but we should realize that this is a choice, and not a matter of lacking time for family or work.

Even if you deduct 60 hours for sleep and basic maintenance a week and you’re left with 100+ hours to do something meaningful, they themselves are not equal hours. Do you have any particular insight or comment on how we can adjust to that fact and adapt to it?

Filling your hours with things that deserve to be there is much like putting together a puzzle. You may have free time between 10-11PM on a Tuesday, but you probably won’t go jogging then, or volunteer at a food bank, or go for a hike with your kids.

That’s why it’s important to think through what can be moved around and what can’t. For instance, if you feel you don’t have time to exercise, you can try going to bed an hour earlier, and then waking up an hour earlier and doing it then. So if you normally watch TV from 10-11PM, and wake up at 7AM, you could go to bed at 10PM, wake up at 6AM, and exercise from 6-7AM three days per week.

Previous…. Part 1: It’s a Choice
Next… Part 3: Energy and Creativity

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Laura Vanderkam is the author of 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think (Portfolio, 2010) and Grindhopping: Build a Rewarding Career without Paying Your Dues (McGraw-Hill, 2007). She is a member of USA Today’s Board of Contributors, and her work has appeared in Reader’s Digest, Scientific American, Wired, The American, Portfolio and other publications. Laura also blogs at http://www.my168hours.com/blog/