Table of Contents Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Introduction PART 1 - YOUR 168 HOURS • 1 • - The Myth of the Time Crunch • 2 • - Your Core Competencies PART 2 - @ WORK • 3 • - The Right Job • 4 • - Controlling Your Calendar • 5 • - Anatomy of a Breakthrough PART 3 - @ HOME • 6 • - The New Home Economics • 7 • - Don’t Do Your Own Laundry • 8 • - A Full Life PART 4 - 168 HOURS, DAY BY DAY • 9 • - The Hard Work of Having It All Acknowledgements Notes Index PORTFOLIO Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A. Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.) Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd) Penguin Books Australia Ltd, 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd) Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi - 110 017, India Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, North Shore 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd) Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England First published in 2010 by Portfolio, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. Copyright © Laura Vanderkam, 2010 All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Vanderkam, Laura. 168 hours : you have more time than you think / Laura Vanderkam. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. eISBN : 978-1-101-43294-5 1. Time management. I. Title. II. Title: One hundred sixty-eight hours. HD69.T54V36 2010 658.4’093—dc22 2009046867 Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrightable materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. http://us.penguingroup.com To Michael, Jasper, and Sam Introduction Tuesday, July 14, 2009, was a good day. I opened my apartment door around seven a.m. to find my Wall Street Journal delivered, with my byline in it. My two-year-old son, Jasper, woke up around the same time. We played with puzzles and had breakfast before I put him in the stroller at eight and walked in the easy sunshine to his preschool two blocks away. I spent the next 4 hours writing. Then I logged 45 minutes on the stationary bike, reading a book I needed to review to make the most of that time. After, I wrote for 3 more hours. I packed snacks for Jasper and picked him up shortly after four p.m., intending to take him to an exhibit I’d read about at the Museum of Modern Art. Alas, the museum was closed, as it is every Tuesday, so we had to regroup, buy a pretzel from a street vendor, and admire the more realist “art” of the Fifth Avenue bustle. At least during the expedition we found the new pair of sneakers he’d needed. We got home at 5:30 and played until the babysitter came an hour later. Then I zoomed out to Brooklyn to run a long-range planning meeting for the Young New Yorkers’ Chorus, for which I serve as president. My board talked about how to commission new music, how to improve our musical craft, and how to make people feel at home in this grand city. I zipped home and spent 45 minutes talking with my husband, Michael, about our projects and potential names for the second son we were expecting in two months. It was roughly a 17-hour day by the time I went to sleep, with 8 spent working (0.75 of those also spent exercising), 4 spent interacting with family, 3 spent on my volunteer work, and a few transitions and other things in between. It was a busy day, devoid of disasters, though devoid of spectacular triumphs, too. So why was it “good”? Much has been written about the good life—what it means to be happy or successful, in our own minds at least, and how people become that way. I am as much a student of these books as anyone else, and I have always been drawn to the stories of people who love what they do, who live full lives and have grand aspirations. As a journalist, I have interviewed many such people, and I often daydream about what I’d like to get out of life as well. Over the years, those daydreams have taken on some shape and substance. Since I was a child I’ve wanted to be a writer. I also wanted to be a mom. Growing up near the cornfields of Indiana, I wanted to live in a big city for at least a while when I was young enough not to mind the grit and noise. I love music, and I love to help create new things, be they songs or books. I love having health and energy. But all these things are abstractions. All are ideas people think about in phrases such as “when I grow up” or “someday,” or broadly as our identities and values. A few years ago, though, I had a realization: while we think of our lives in grand abstractions, a life is actually lived in hours. If you want to be a writer, you must dedicate hours to putting words on a page. To be a mindful parent, you must spend time with your child, teaching him that even though he loves the new shoes he picked out, he has to take them off so mommy can pay for them. A solid marriage requires conversation and intimacy and a focus on family projects. If you want to sing well in a functioning chorus, you must show up to rehearsals and practice on your own in addition to setting goals and attending to any administrative duties. If you want to be healthy, you must exercise and get enough sleep. In short, if you want to do something or become something—and you want to do it well—it takes time. What made that particular Tuesday a good day was the high proportion of hours I spent on things that relate to my life goals. For instance, I wanted to be a writer, and I am. That is what I spent big chunks of my time doing. July 14 was, of course, a 24-hour day, and this is the way most of us are accustomed to thinking about our time: as 24-hour blocks. But as I’ve pondered the question of how I want to live my life, I’ve come to believe that it’s more useful to think in terms of “24/7,” a phrase people toss about but seldom multiply through. There are 168 hours in a week. My busy Tuesday was a good day, but so was my slower Sunday spent going to church, walking for 2 hours in Central Park, and—yes—working for 4 hours during Jasper’s nap and after he went to bed. The way I see it, anything you do once a week happens often enough to be important to you, whether it’s church, a strategic thinking session at work, your Sunday dinner with your parents, or your softball team practice. The weekly 168-hour cycle is big enough to give a true picture of our lives. Years and decades are made up of a mosaic of repeating patterns of 168 hours. Yes, there is room for randomness, and the mosaic will evolve over time, but whether you pay attention to the pattern is still a choice. Largely, the true picture of our lives will be a function of how we set the tiles. This book is about how different people spend the 168 hours we all have per week. It is about where the time really goes, and how we can all use our time better. It is about using our hours to focus on what we do best in our careers and at home, and so take a life’s work to the next level while investing in our personal lives as well. I wanted to write this book for several reasons. For starters, despite the ongoing cultural narrative of a time crunch—a narrative often aimed at women like me, a working mom of small kids—I don’t feel like I’m forever falling behind. I’d be the first to admit that my life is inordinately privileged, something I am sure some folks reading this book will delight in pointing out. But I know that I’m not the only one who feels this way. Some of the busiest, most successful people I’ve ever interviewed have told me that they could cram more into their lives if they wished. Looking at life in 168-hour blocks is a useful paradigm shift, because—unlike the occasionally crunched weekday—well-planned blocks of 168 hours are big enough to accommodate full-time work, intense involvement with your family, rejuvenating leisure time, adequate sleep, and everything else that actually matters. Of course, there is also a political element in this portrait of time. I have written this book for men and women. It is for parents, nonparents, and people who never want to be parents. It is for people with all sorts of goals, careers, and interests. Still, I am particularly alarmed by how many of the brightest young women of my generation do not believe they can possibly weave together a Career with a capital C, motherhood, and a personal life in the hours the universe allots them without feeling frazzled, sleep- deprived, and pulled in ten directions at once. From time to time, pundits and bloggers set themselves howling over surveys that seem to show this. In September 2005, Louise Story announced on the front page of The New York Times that many female Yale undergrads planned to cut back on work or stop working entirely after becoming mothers. As she quoted one student, “My mother always told me that you can’t be the best career woman and the best mother at the same time.” The implication? You have to choose. Likewise, the Princeton University student Amy Sennett polled fellow members of the class of 2006 for her senior thesis and found that women were still quite likely to believe that “being a successful career woman and being a good mother are mutually exclusive.” Some 62 percent of women saw a potential conflict between career and childrearing; only 33 percent of men did. Of those women who saw a conflict, the majority planned to work part-time, and another high proportion planned to “sequence”—that is, take a few years off and then return to the workforce. A few young women did think combining a career and motherhood was possible, but they had stark ideas of other things that would have to go. As one history major told Sennett, “I plan never to sleep.” These dire predictions were certainly in the back of my mind when I decided to do something unusual for the Ivy League urban professional set and get pregnant for the first time at age twenty-seven. I won’t pretend that becoming a mother has been entirely rosy, or that my household is a scene of domestic bliss. However, motherhood did not ruin my career, and my work has not detracted from how much I love being a mom, particularly the small moments of seeing another human being figure out the world—small moments the universe grants in abundance when you choose to pay attention. If anything, the combination of work and motherhood has given me more things to write about. One of those things has been time use. Not long after I came back from whatever you call maternity leave when you’re self-employed, I discovered the American Time Use Survey and fascinating research from the University of Maryland and elsewhere about how people—moms and dads in particular— actually spend their time. I began writing about these findings in my columns for USA Today, in a nine- part series for The Huffington Post about “Core Competency Moms,” in features for Doublethink and the now-defunct Culture 11, in essays for the Taste page of The Wall Street Journal, and as a guest writer for Lisa Belkin’s “Motherlode” blog at The New York Times. The more I studied time use and talked to people who do amazing things with their lives, the more I came to see that this bleak notion of mutual exclusivity between work and family is based on misleading ideas of how people spend their family time now, and how they spent it in the past. On the flipside, I do want to demystify “work” a little, too. I put “work” in quotes here because, after studying how people spend their time, I believe that certain widespread (and self-important) assumptions about the way we work today are just as misplaced as our assumptions about how people lived in the 1950s: we assume we are all overworked, just as we assume everyone used to live like Ozzie and Harriet. In reality, neither of these perceptions is true. The majority of people who claim to be overworked work less than they think they do, and many of the ways people work are extraordinarily inefficient. Calling something “work” does not make it important or necessary. One of my missions in this book is to make people look at their time in all spheres of life and say “I hadn’t thought of it that way before.” There are other ways in which 168 Hours does not aim to be like many self-help or time-management books. I approach this not as a productivity guru, but as a journalist who is interested in how successful, happy people build their lives. I am particularly interested in how people who are not household names achieve the lives they want, and what we can learn from their best practices. There are plenty of books out there on Fortune 500 CEOs’ or celebrities’ tips for success. I’m more interested in the woman down the street who—without benefit of fame, outsized fortune, or a slew of personal assistants—is running a successful small business, marathons, and a large and happy household. As a corollary to that, real life is often messy, but I don’t believe there’s much value in tales of composite characters that I made up just to show that my methods worked. Everyone in this book is real, with their real names and real stories. I find footnotes distracting, but the endnotes provide backup for the facts or studies cited. While I’ve put interactive material at the ends of most chapters, I can’t promise 5- minute tweaks that will completely change your life. Certainly, everyone’s life can benefit from quick tune-ups, but getting the most out of your 168 hours takes discipline in a distracted world. Reading fiction as you commute to a job you don’t like will make you feel somewhat more fulfilled; being in the right job will make you feel incredible. Going for a 10-minute walk will lift your spirits; committing to run for 4 of every 168 hours for the next year will transform your health. Finally, 168 Hours is unlike many business- and life-management books in that—while I appear in the narrative—I can’t claim to be writing from a position of authority as a great success story. I am not writing this book to impart a lifetime of learned wisdom. I wrote the bulk of this manuscript when I was thirty years old. My life is definitely a work in progress. I don’t think I’m doing a bad job fitting the pieces together. Nonetheless, I have learned a lot during the process. I have tried to implement these findings in my own plans; 168 Hours is, at least in part, about that journey of trying to have more good Tuesdays. And Mondays. And Saturdays. And all the other days that make up the 168-hour mosaic of our lives.