119: Off the Clock—Finding Time Freedom with Laura Vanderkam

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What's next? This is a question we're all having to ask and answer more frequently. I'm Jenny Blake, your host of the Pivot podcast and author of Pivot. The only move that matters is your next one.

For show notes from this episode, visit pivotmethod.com podcast if Change is the only constant, then let's get better at it. Here we go.

Welcome back everybody. I am so excited to be here today with Laura Vanderkam, who is the best selling author of what the Most Successful people do Before Breakfast. All the Money in the world, 168 hours. Grind hopping. I know how she does it and her latest book, which is the subject of today's conversation, off the clock feel less busy while getting more done. I know Laura personally. We cross paths quite a lot in and out of the city, even though she doesn't live in New York. And I'm amazed at not only how prolific she is, but she's doing this with her husband and four children living just outside of Philadelphia. Laura also has a TED talk called how to gain control of your free time that has been viewed more than 5 million times and I also quote 168 hours and what successful people do before breakfast in Pivot. So Laura, you were an inspiration to me and Pivot before I even think I knew you in person. So thank you and welcome to the show.

Well, thank you for having me. That's awesome. I'm so glad to give people something to think about when it comes to time and I'm thrilled that you thought it was worth mentioning in your books.

As I was preparing for this interview and I read your bio, I actually had to read twice that you had written a book called Grind Hopping because a I didn't know that and I've known you now for several years and baby Grind Hopping. What is this? Can you fill us in?

Yes, well, that's the thing. Nobody knew what it was and so that didn't help with book publicity as you might imagine. You have to constantly explain it. So not surprisingly, no one has read it. This is a book I wrote and I was 26 years old and it was my first foray into publishing under my own name. I had done some ghost writing before that, but it was about the rise of self employment among young people. And so it was about hopping out of the grind and yeah, build a rewarding career without paying your dues I believe was the subtitle. So I profiled lots of people who were starting their careers running their own businesses with the idea that actually you can go back in afterwards if you would like to. There are people who work for themselves for years and then get normal jobs. It doesn't have to be the other way around, that you do your normal job first and then try the entrepreneurial path and that there are some real upsides actually to starting your career in a self employed fashion in that like you're running a business, you learn all sorts of skills. Yes, you can learn skills from other people, from your bosses and coworkers and all that, but there are certain skills involved in running your own business that will serve you well in other professional pursuits later. So that was what it was about. I still think it's a good idea, but you know, getting it out there is hard to do.

I feel like if side hustle became a thing, grind hopping should definitely be a thing. And it's also controversial. I would have thought it would split, spark a lot of conversation. Because of course the critique of especially the millennial and even Gen Z generations are that they don't want to pay their dues.

And then those same groups would say, well, why should I pay dues if I'm doing as. There's a new book out called Bullshit Jobs, like if I'm doing bullshit work, why does anyone need to be doing it?

Yeah, well, I do think that the idea of paying your dues is overrated as we normally think of it. I mean, yes, we all get better at stuff that the more we do it, there's also wisdom gained from the longer you're kind of in the world learning about how it works and how other people work. So there's something to that. However, I don't necessarily think that.

The idea of paying your dues at a big corporation for many years in order to then do what you want, it just doesn't make sense to younger people who can see that the corporation will spit you out on the street in an instant if they want to. There's no reason for you to feel loyalty to an organization that really doesn't have any long term loyalty to you. Now there's some Places that are different again, but a lot of places that aren't. And so you have to have that sort of sense of agency over your career from the beginning. And for many people, I think that early self employment can be a big part of that in terms of trying out stuff you really want to do, gaining skills in the fields you really want to do, instead of just trying to do something adjacent to it.

I also feel like one wouldn't want to categorically write off all entry level work. I remember when I was an intern in college and the manager I was working at Rock the Vote, and the executive director at the time got so mad at me when I didn't know how to do a mail merge. Like, I just remember her being very cranky about it. So I'm like, okay, I'm going to go teach myself how to do a mail merge and save myself all kinds of time. And, you know, maybe someone would say, oh, I don't want to be responsible for merging a list of names and addresses with printing labels, you know, shipping labels. However, I then went on to use this mail merge function for the next 10 years. So there is a lot of that stuff that if you can find the challenge and the joy, even in something that seems menial, that it does come through later on somehow. And that's what you're saying too, especially in running your own business, because usually there is no one else to do it.

Yeah. So you'll learn everything. So mail merge could be learned at a big corporation. Mail merge could be learned on your own. There's all sorts of ways to learn, or not learn. Mail merge. I confess I'm not sure I know how to do it. I think I'd probably figure it out. I could watch a YouTube tutorial, I suppose.

Okay. And before we get to off the clock, I have a feeling that listeners will want to know simply because I said it. In your list of books, what do the most successful people do before breakfast?

Yeah, well, that title worked a lot better than Grind Hopping. I gotta tell you, I remember when.

That book and your articles tore through Fast Company and it's just such a.

Viral concept, people couldn't help but click on it. It was funny to me. And I've had people report on that phenomenon later that people have included it in a list of other things. Wherever it is in the list, it will be the most clicked on thing because it's just like clickbait, you can't help yourself. What is it that the most successful people do before breakfast? Yes. Well, I mean, the long and short of it, it's anything that is important to you that life has a way of crowding out. And so I have written about time management for many years. And as I was studying lots of people's schedules, I would see that people who did have very full lives, who were somehow making time for maybe it's regular exercise, maybe it's spiritual pursuits like reading religious tracts or meditating or pray, people who had big jobs but also had creative pursuits like they were going to write that novel on the side, almost inevitably these people were getting up early to do it. And the reason is that for most people, this is a time of day that you can have to yourself before everybody else wants a piece of you, both at work and at home. It's also when most people, not all, but most people, have more discipline and energy and focus. So it's the time that you can focus on those things that are difficult but doable, that are important but not urgent. Whereas the stuff like deleting your email is probably best reserved for like 2:30 in the afternoon when you can't do anything else because you're in that mid afternoon slump. So yeah, whatever it is that matters to you that you can't make time for in the rest of your life, try getting up a little bit early and doing it. I don't believe that people should skimp on sleep necessarily to get up early to do great things. But if people look at how they're spending their time, most people are not spending their time immediately before bed in all that wonderful ways. A lot of people are surfing the web, puttering on the house, hitting next in the Netflix queue on Love Island. Yeah, it's nothing that is advancing their life in particular ways. If that is you, and I'm not saying it is, but if that is you, you might want to just cut that off a little bit, go to bed a little bit earlier, wake up a little bit earlier, then you can turn unproductive evening hours into productive morning hours. And so, you know, the people I've studied who managed to get a lot done besides the things they have to do for work and have to do for their families, it tends to be the mornings.

Yeah, I'm a fan of that. When I'm by myself, I've been known to go to bed at 8pm People make fun of me for it, but what am I doing between the hours of 8 and 10? It's usually watching reality TV. So if I'm going to squeeze in my Love island, it's usually going to Happen after dinner. But I still make sure to go to bed early because just either eating or killing time at that hour. But I know my night owl friends tend to be very productive in that window. Just I can't do it.

But you have to know that about yourself. And if you truly are doing your best, most creative work at night, then wonderful. Build your life around that many people. That means they have to get certain kinds of jobs with certain levels of flexibility or working for themselves and all that because unfortunately a lot of sort of normal jobs are set up around being functional at 8am and if that's not you, again, you've got to build your life. So it's possible to take advantage of your best hours if those are at night.

Well, that brings us to the subject of off the clock, which what I loved is that you say this is not a productivity book. It's not how to squeeze in more into less time and be obsessive about time and the clock. That really what you are curious about in this one is the sense of time freedom, which you say is magical and often tends to be rare and fleeting. That it's. And yet it's this key component of human happiness. And I just want to read a short excerpt you describe from your journal from a trip to San Diego. You say, I can't say I had any particularly deep thoughts, just a lot of staring at the ocean and reading and thinking. It was nice to feel unhurried. No clock ticking in the background, no one waiting for me so I could watch the sunset in peace. And that is time freedom. And yet here you are with four kids and a husband. I can imagine that time freedom has been a journey to figure out how to create that feeling in your day to day life, not just when you're on vacation.

Yeah. And well, for that matter, only specific sorts of vacations. Because if I have the four kids with me, it's pretty hard to relax and watch the sunset in peace because inevitably I have to go to the bath.

Anyway.

And they're all under eight still, right?

Well, no, no. Well, they keep growing. It's a funny thing. The oldest is now 11. Okay, 11, 8, 6 and 3.

Wait, so 11, 8, 6 and 3. And how many books in that time since you've had kids?

A lot.

Four. Right. Like an equal amount.

Yeah. Well, let's see. I mean, so 168 hours came out after I had, I mean I wrote it when I had one and it came out after I had the second.

Like I don't know how I would Write one book with one child. That already mystifies me.

Well, I mean, you still have the same 168 hours in a week. You just have to be good about getting your work done during the time when you have coverage for the kids. And that's pretty much been what I do.

I do sort of enjoy people lamenting of like, oh, I'm just not feeling creative today. I'm like, ha, ha. That's just not. We don't have that luxury. If I've set aside a day to write, I am definitely wr. There's no.

It's amazing that you can do that because I am probably of the category where I feel like. But if I'm just not feeling it, I can't. I don't know.

I just. You can still do something, right? And that's the thing. Like, you know, maybe it's not going to be your best work ever, but if you say, like, okay, like, I want to just. I'm going to get a thousand words of something down today. And then probably by the time you've done that, like, yeah, it wasn't so bad. Maybe I'll just do a little bit more and I'll come back to this later and see what I can do with it. Like, you just do that enough times. Then you. You have your book. You just do that a couple times. You have a couple of books. I mean, that's really what it comes down to. But, yeah, time freedom is. I mean, that sense of having no immediate obligations, like, you're off the clock. It is a rare and fleeting feeling for many people who have full lives between work or community commitments, volunteering jobs, or if it's family, whatever it is for you. But it does feel very awesome when we have it. The paradox of this and what I explore in the book is that in order for me to be on that beach in San Diego with no one asking for anything for me, there were all sorts of logistical considerations that needed to occur for that to happen. And a few other occasions I talk about in the book, too, of being off the clock. I had to arrange for where four little people are going to be, that no one needs me anywhere. I don't have any immediate work deadlines I'm dealing with. All of these things require me to plan ahead, to figure out lots of logistics. And I think that's the case for a lot of people with full lives, too. You have this discipline and mindfulness of where your time is going and so that you can make certain choices to then leave big chunks of it open, and then use those open chunks in ways that make you feel truly rejuvenated. That's what I mean by being off the clock. So not just, you know, like looking at sunsets, other people's photos of sunsets on Instagram. I had to actually get to that beach and watch the sunset myself. Right. You have to make a little bit more effort, but when you do, it feels really good.

Well, I like what you described in that time paradox. There's the discipline of preparing for the time freedom that it takes. It does require both.

Yeah. And I think sometimes we have a hard time getting our heads around that idea. I mean, that's the nature of paradoxes. But I think, you know, part of wisdom is understanding that paradoxes can be true. Like, you just have to view them from a broader perspective. Like, life is vast. There are moments that are more strictly scheduled. But then being mindful of my time and thinking about how my time is going to go means that I can enjoy these relaxed moments more. But because I've engineered them into my life to happen, and I don't have anything looming over me at the time that I know I need to get to, because I've taken care of that as well.

One thing you talk about in the book is one way to free up time is by letting go of problematic expectations. What does that mean?

Well, you know, our relationship with expectations can cause a lot of misery, really. I mean, again, we all have the same amount of time. So partly it's what we expect to be able to do with our time that leads to our feeling good about our time and relaxed about our time or feeling bad about our time. If you have a million things on your to do list and you get through 900,000, you feel bad, right, because you didn't get to everything. If you have three things on your to do list and you get through all of them, you feel good. And it's really, you did a lot less in that second world, but you did everything you expected to. And that makes you feel very different about your time than if you don't do what you expect to. So, you know, it's really about making sure that our expectations match reality as closely as possible. And sometimes that what has to happen for that to occur is for us to lower our expectations. But the key thing with this, we want to lower our expectations in the short run because that is what enables great things in the long run. So I really do think we overestimate what we can do on any given day. But we underestimate what we can do in the long run. If you think about something like writing an 80,000 word book, let's say you wanted to be done with that in a year. Well, that seems like a lot. Like, oh, that's a lot. If you're sitting there like, how am I going to get through 80,000 words? That seems like this huge project. You wind up putting it off and not getting to it and then crashing toward the deadline and feeling like life is crazy. Or you could say, well, that's 50 weeks from now. Why don't I write 1600 words a week? And if I write 1600 words a week, that means I could write 400 words Monday through Thursday during those weeks. Well, 400 words is nothing.

You send that many emails by 10:00am every day. You just write a little bit every day. So lower your expectations in the short run. So there's this almost nothing but you just keep going. And when you just keep going, that is when you are able to be incredibly productive in the long run.

I loved that where just everything you just said. And by the way, I did this exercise of trying to capture one anecdote of my life every day. It didn't last that long, but it was a little sprint I did in the summer. And yeah, 10, 15 minutes produced about 400 to 500 words. As in I wasn't trying to fill the page. It does happen very quickly. And I love how in the book you said you are very curious by people who seem relaxed and yet get so much done. As I am saying to you, four books and four kids. But that this secret of prolificacy where small things then repeatedly add up. And I know that was true for me working on pivot because although I was self employed, I had to keep my business going. I had to keep paying the bills. So it's not like I either was just romantically writing all day every day. I could squeeze in about 15 to 30 minutes at a time outside of a few really intense weekend, full weekend sprints.

But that'll do it, right? I mean, you're the one and that's it.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, you know, it does. You don't have to do much, but you just have to keep doing it. And that's really for anything in life. You know, people who lose large amounts of weight, for instance, it tends to be about a pound a week. But you know, a pound a week over a year is £50. That's a lot. You will definitely see that on someone. You know, people who are taking up running, you just try to Do a little bit more each week, you know, and it adds up. Like you could definitely be running, you know, half marathon in the first year easily by just a little bit more at a time. Or, you know, it's anything along those lines. You want to read a huge book, like just do it in five minute spurts here and there. You know, five minutes while you're waiting for a phone call to start, those add up and next thing you know, you're through War and Peace.

So it seems like the converse of this small things adding up is small tasks that aren't part of our biggest time values. You know, you talk about that people are a great investment of time, but and this is a common theme on the Pivot podcast because I don't feel like I've cracked this net of incoming messages. Like we have so many more inboxes nowadays, from texts to email, to every inbox, through every social media channel, whether it's Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn. And I'm curious because that also adds up. Small pings, small requests add up and can be, can feel very time consuming or for me, it creates a sense of times stress. Like I never feel I'm on top of it. I'm curious how you deal with this especially. You must get a lot of people reaching out through your work.

Yeah. And I thought it's worthwhile to still be reachable. Like I definitely, I respond to most, you know, if it's a thoughtful message, I will definitely respond to it. I won't respond instantly to most of them. And I think that's what you have to keep in mind is by stretching sort of the length of time in which it's okay to respond to something, you can sort of carve out time to get through things. It's the constant back and forth that I think contributes to the time stress and contributes to your feeling like you can't get through it all. So I will often carve out a bit of time like every three days or so to go back through my inboxes and get to current and respond to everything that I'm either going to respond to or put it on a two day to do list for later if I'm going to take more time to respond to it or I let it go. Like if I decide I'm not going to get to it. I don't really actually delete all this stuff my inbox looks like. I mean I probably have like 40,000 messages in it, which I'm sure is like horrifying. Some people who are listening to this, but anything past the first, the last week or two, I'm not doing anything with it, may as well not be there. It's just I don't feel like going back through and getting rid of it.

So, you know, that's if you go through every three days, you can carve out maybe two hours and get through it and then it's not getting to you every five minutes through the rest of those three days. So I think if you're willing to go a little bit longer before responding to things, that's fine. Now you might feel like people are expecting you to respond instantly and maybe they are, but the truth is you can't respond to everything instantly. Like you could not respond to everything instantly and still be the person that they want. Responding, responding like you could not be producing the stuff that people are interested in. You could not be maintaining the platform, running the business that you're running. You could not be the sort of friend who does fun stuff with people and be responding to everything instantly. So if you let go of that, realize you're always disappointing someone, then that kind of is liberating because then you're like, well, I'm choosing what to disappoint, what not to disappoint, and I'm still in control of my time.

So for you, it sounds like about every three days, about a two hour chunk. And is that after you've gotten your other top priorities done?

Pretty much. And I would say, you know, it's not really. I will probably glance down at it at the end of a day and maybe do more of a like 10 minute triage to see if anything I really thought should be responded to within 24 hours get to it. But most of it I'll let wait a couple days and then get to it then.

Yeah, it's what allows you to. The thing about email is cleaning out the inbox is a low energy task. You don't need to be your best self for most of it. And if there is an email that you need to send that you do need to be your best self for, then I would suggest scheduling that specifically for a certain time of day when you all are going to be your best self, that could be one of your priorities for the day and send that email. But don't do it as part of, you know, cleaning out your inbox of everything else.

What surprised you most while working on the book that you weren't expecting or since the book has come out?

Well, a couple things I've been tracking my time for several years now and I write in off the clock about doing this. Just trying to get a really good sense of where my time is.

For inquiring minds, that's 8784 hours in a leap year.

In a leap year, that Laura track.

That went into off the clock. So if you want to think about your time in a year, it's about 8,700 hours. What are you going to do with them?

8,760 in a normal year, 8,784 in a leap year. If you want to Suss that out.

168 hours in a week. I just love that you have these numbers right off the top of your head.

That's a big line of work. Those are my denominators for everything. So you keep seeing these denominators again and again as you're doing the calculations. You kind of get to know them.

But as I track my time, I did discover several things. I mean, one is that I'm not working as much as I thought I was. And I know this about other people. Like everyone has in their minds whatever week they were most at work in their minds because it becomes typical. And I had tracked my time here and there over the years and I always worked a certain amount. And then I realized once I started tracking my time continuously that in the past I had always chosen very specific weeks to track, which were weeks when my life looked the way I.

Wanted my life to look for public consumption. It's not that I was never working 50, 60 hour weeks, it's just that those were no more common than much shorter weeks when I tracked my time continuously. Then I realized that the average was far lower than I had been holding this picture in my mind.

You know, I realized for off the clock, I did a time diary study where I had 900 people with full time jobs and families track their time on a normal March Monday. And I asked them questions about how they felt about their time. And another surprising finding is that the people who felt like they had the most time, who felt had this most abundant perspective on time, were highly likely to have done something sort of memorable or out of the ordinary on that March Monday. So I'd look at their time logs and it would be stuff like going to a big band concert on a Monday night. Who are these people who are doing this on a Monday night? But what it is, is again, time is all about perception. And in your mind, if you are the kind of person who can go to a big band concert on a Monday night, well, look at me. I have all the time in the world. Clearly I'm the kind of person who can do that. And that sense of time freedom, time autonomy carries over into everything. I mean, you feel like you have plenty of time. You feel like you have time for the things you want to do. And so you can kind of approximate that by going ahead and putting in the stuff like the big band concert. Do something memorable and life becomes, well, memorable. Your time becomes memorable. You remember your time. And so it doesn't feel as much like it's slipping through your fingers.

Seems like a lot in this sphere that does get talked about and then sometimes doesn't get talked about is hiring help. And I did a whole eight week course called Delegation Ninja. I talked about how when I first hired a VA in 2013 for $200 a month, it was like saved my life during one of the toughest periods of my life. What about people who feel like they don't want to or can't for financial reasons, hire help? How do they find a sense of time freedom? Is it all the same things apply? Or is there, did you find kind of a special or different circumstance if they're not going to hire?

Yeah, I would push back on that a little because nobody does absolutely everything themselves. Like very few people are say, churning their own butter. Like most people are not sewing their own clothes. Like, you didn't build your own house, you are not taking your own mail and driving it to Wisconsin yourself. Like, everybody uses help for some things, paid help for things like that. It's just a question of what we consider within the norm or not. And for many people, I find that by pushing a little bit further into, you know, what you're willing to pay. Again, it's just a little bit farther than, you know, you have the post office drive your letter to Wisconsin rather than you bringing it yourself. You go to the grocery store and get your chicken, your eggs there, rather than having the chickens in your backyard. Like, you're okay with that. So why are you not okay with like, you know, hiring a VA for $200 a month if you have a business that is going to require that to grow? Or having enough childcare to have enough time to focus on your business? Or maybe it's getting a grocery delivery service, like paying a little bit extra to get the groceries delivered to you like that. People have weird hangups about strange, strange things that if you change your mindset, it's just going a little bit farther than what you're already doing. So that's something I would suggest people do. Obviously life is easier if you have more money than if you don't. I'm not going to argue with that reality. And one of the things money can buy is time. There are plenty of people with lots of money who don't seem to buy themselves time.

I don't know how much you've driven around the Washington D.C. area south of Washington D.C. we've been driving through there because we had a couple of car trips to North Carolina recently. And they have this whole variable toll system. And.

If the toll is high, it means the traffic is terrible and you're going to save a ton of time by paying the toll. So we're like, okay, well, I guess we'll pay the toll, we'll go through it, save ourselves an hour stuck in traffic. You're looking over at the lane, that is the traffic, and there's plenty of people in very nice luxury cars sitting over there. It's interesting to me that.

We don't feel the same way about spending money to buy time as we somehow do about spending money to buy things. But that said, I would say figure out what the biggest pain points are for you and then figure out what you can do about them. You can outsource them. That's always an option. It could be that you could minimize them. It could also be that you can ignore them. There are sometimes things that just don't have to be done. Like it's entirely possible to not do most things in life. And you know, somehow life will continue. Maybe there will be repercussions, maybe there won't. But that can be a way of buying time freedom. You know, if, like don't organize your closet, like what happens? You know, just.

You know what's funny? I feel time extra when I organize things. It's like it's my way of procrastinating and I feel like, ah, I could just organize all day, but probably I'm glad that I'm not. Actually. I dabbled when I was working at Google and I wanted some extra income. I put three Craigslist posts up because it was Craigslist at the time. One for HTML, css, tutor for small business owners, one that I would be a personal home organizer. I'd come organize a room. And then the third was babysitting and I actually didn't get any takers for babysitting, so I did the first two. So I guess my sliding doors career, I could have been a personal home organizer. Yeah, well, as a random aside, you.

Know, it sort of depends. I Mean, there's definitely something to be said for giving objects a home so you know where they are.

But I know what you're saying, which is like, see, but you don't have.

To decant all your spices into matching jars and then make sure they're, like, alphabetized and you're spice. Right?

Unless you love it.

Yeah, unless you love it. Like, so, you know, be telling yourself the story that, oh, I would have time, freedom, if only my spice rack were organized. Like, no, no, no, no, no. And you don't have to pay somebody to do it, nor do you have to do it yourself. Just go about your life. Leave the spice rack to itself. Just ignore it. You're fine. You'll find the cumin if you need to.

That's what I really loved from Tiffany Dufu's book, Drop the Ball. It was such a good reminder of Drop the ball. What can you drop? And that's always been helpful for me, too. And it's something I share in the delegation ninja course, which is what are your assumptions about what has to get done? And I think on this level, it can be scary to drop things. Or for some people, for me, three days would be a miracle if I could respond to emails in that time. I like more like a month or three. But for some people, not responding within the hour would be really scary to them. And it's just push the boundaries, like, be willing to just experiment and see what happens. That I think sometimes with this stuff, especially around time, we almost have to overcorrect a little bit and give ourselves permission to go too far and then pull it back. But if we're always hesitant to even try at all, let alone go too far, kind of nothing happens and we stay stuck.

Yeah, I agree. I mean, it's your life. You should just be bold and do what you need to do, you know, and see what happens. See what happens, right. And, you know, in many cases, you're better off asking for forgiveness than permission. Not everything, but, you know, if you're the sort of responsible, upright citizen who's listening to this podcast, like, my guess is you could probably push a little farther to see what. What you can do. And if it doesn't work, fine. But now, you know, but instead of just, you know, artificially setting your limits in a way that keeps you from living the life you want.

Well, I love, love the question. I always like to leave people with a piece of homework or something they can try. So one, figure out what the biggest pain points are. And then you also share four Great reflection questions that someone could ask at the end of a day, you call it tending to your garden. Can you share what those questions are and if there's anything else that you would want to leave listeners with?

Yeah. So, I mean, one of the reasons I track my time is so I can see what I like and what I don't like and what I want to do differently. And I know not everyone is going to track their time for any significant quantity of hours. I mean, even a day, let alone, you know, weeks or months or years. But one of the ways you can sort of back into spending your time better is just reflect at the end of the day. I mean, reflecting in general is a good idea because if you don't reflect on your life, you start to feel like time is getting away from you. It's that pausing to reflect that makes you feel like you have more time. But in that end of the day, look back on the day and ask yourself, like, what did I like about my day? What worked? What was good? Celebrate, whatever that is. Second question, what do I want to do more of with my time?

What would you like to scale up to spend more of your hours on? Third question, what do I want to spend less time doing? And the fourth question is, what can I change to make those things happen? And just by constantly asking yourself these questions, it's like weeding your garden or pruning your plants, you make it look a little better day by day and then keep coming back to it because the work is never done. Like, the weeds are never 100% gone from the garden. You keep having to come back and get them out again. But in between the weedings, you start to have a really pretty space. And it's the same thing with your schedule. If you keep asking these questions, keep pruning, keep tending, you wind up building the life you want.

I also love what you said about aiming for memories as well. And we know that the research supports this, that money, of course, does not buy happiness, but it's that it's actually experiences that we remember, we cherish. And you talk about with people as well. And so it seems like these tending your garden questions and the pruning is so vital, and I love the encouragement that of course weeds are going to pop back up. This is the nature of just time and responsibilities. And then also it seems like, and I know Tim Ferriss does this, he plans a family vacation every six months so that they all collectively have something to look forward to. And it seems like sort of being intentional about memory Making experiences and being able to look forward to that would also be a good exercise.

Oh, yeah. In general, with time, when we say, I have a quote in this book from somebody that when we say, where did the time go? What we often mean is, I don't remember where the time went. And that's because you haven't done anything memorable with your time. There are upsides to routines, but the downside is that you do the same thing over and over again every day. Nothing stands out. Like you don't remember the day. There's no reason to. So you want to ask yourself, well, why is today different from other days? Why will tomorrow be different from other days? And some days it's just going to be like maybe, well, I went for a cool walk at lunch, or I spoke with this new colleague who's really cool and I learned something new about her life. Or I found this new project at work, I could start working on it. I got really into it. Or I read this fascinating article that opened up a whole new way of thinking. Maybe it's that you went somewhere with your family at night. That was the big band concert. You want to throw that in. But then it can be bigger stuff too. Planning in vacations, interesting trips, even just like day trips. People could use their weekends doing chores and errands and watching tv. Or you could say, well, what's within two hours of me that I could go explore and then take at least one weekend day to go do that. But if you think about these things and think about planning in memories, your life will just be more memorable. And the way the brain works is you will feel like you will have more time.

I love it. Laura, thank you so much for being here. Where can people find you if they want to reach out?

Yeah. Well, please come visit my website, which is lauravanderkam.com and you can learn about my various books there, including off the Clock. I'm also blogging. I'm very 2006 that way. I still blog like four times a week.

That's amazing. And you have a podcast and I have a podcast.

So if you are listen, you listen to all of Jenny's. You're looking for something else to listen to, you can come listen to Best of Both Worlds. My co host, Sarah Hart Unger and I talk work and family issues.

That's a great plug. I've never had anyone say, oh yeah, once you're done listening to the podcast.

Well, you know, I'm on your podcast.

Oh yeah.

I think it's awesome. I love that you're doing that podcast. I can't believe you're still blogging. And four times a week.

Well, it's good practice as a writer, right?

Yeah, that's so true. And as a thinker.

As a thinker, I try out stuff. It's like where you beta test ideas and if people respond to it, you know that it's probably worth pursuing. If nobody cares, then maybe you shouldn't spend a whole lot of time on that one.

So true. I know. Seth Goed says we don't have. We don't have thinker's block, we don't have talker's block. Writer's block doesn't have to be a thing if you just make a habit of it, which you have so clearly done. Laura, thank you again and everybody who's listening, go grab a copy of off the Clock. Feel less busy while getting more done. It's been such a pleasure to chat with you and just be on parallel career paths.

Thanks so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

Thanks so much for listening to this episode of the Pivot podcast. Make sure you don't miss an episode or my insider tips and templates by signing up for Pivot List, a curated twice monthly newsletter where I share the inside scoop on what I'm reading, watching, listening to, and the latest tools I'm geeking out on. Sign up@pivotmethod.com pivotless get show notes from this episode@pivotmethod.com podcast and connect with me on Twitter ennyblake.

Remember, build first, then your courage will follow. Hasn't it always.