151: Calm Time Chaos with Laura Vanderkam

We've got gifting all wrapped up at Sephora. Gift more and spend less with our value sets packed with the best makeup, skincare, fragrances and hair care they'll love. This year's Showstopper gift sets are bursting with beauty products from Rare Beauty, Summer Fridays, Glossier Amika, and so much more. Shop holiday gifts@sephora.com and give something beautiful.

I hear all the time from people that they get very frustrated about things like, oh, I meant to do this and then something came up. It's like, well, yeah, something came up, right? That's life. Stuff comes up. We can never know entirely what the future is going to look like, but we can expect the unexpected. And by building in space for the unexpected, it doesn't throw us off track.

This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host, Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Hello, hello Free Timers. I am so excited to be here today with Laura Vanderkam. Laura is the author of many time management and productivity books including off the Clock, I Know How She does it, what the Most Successful People do before breakfast, 168 hours, and many related viral articles on Fast Company and elsewhere. And her newest book is the topic of today's conversation, Tranquility by nine Ways to Calm the Chaos and Make Time for what Matters. She's the co host with her co host Sarah of the podcast Best of Both Worlds. And then she has another podcast with quick little tips that I love called Before Breakfast. She also has a TED Talk that I'll put in the show, notes how to Gain Control of youf Free Time. So you can see why she's the perfect guest for this show. It's been viewed more than 5 million times. Laura, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. I'm excited to be here.

I just have to ask, with a TED Talk viewed more than 5 million times, has that generated a lot of communications for you? Like, do you find that people are reaching out and finding you because of it?

Yeah. Fun thing is that that bio must be old because I think on the TED website it's now like up to 12 million views, which is just so exciting every time I think about it. But it totally has. You know, when I hear from people about potential speaking engagements. Often what they will say is like, well, we watched your TED Talk, and you know, it's like a commercial that's out in the world, so it's really exciting. Have that. It's been very good for drumming up business.

Can you give us the crux of the talk of how to gain control of your free time?

It only takes 12 minutes to watch, so that's the good thing about it. Yeah. Well, basically, we want to treat the things that matter to us as urgent, right. Like I make the argument that when we have to deal with things, the particular story in the speech is about somebody's water heater breaking and, you know, her having to deal with the water all over her basement. You find time to deal with it. Right. But then many of us feel like we don't have time for whatever else is important, important to us. So I say, well, let's treat those things that we do truly want to do as the equivalent of a broken water heater. You know, picture that they're making a mess all over your basement and you got to deal with it right now and really bring that sense of urgency to what matters to you.

In the new book, you talk about time chaos. The More I've been thinking about time with my new book and everything, and of course, influenced by so much of your work, it seems that some amount of time chaos is real, some is unavoidable, some is about needing to do more diligent calendar design, and then some of it is in the mind. Just the same way that financial scarcity could be actual, true scarcity, like you're not earning enough to pay the bills. And then there's also a scarcity mindset of just thinking I don't have enough, even mega millionaires who think that way. So I'd love to hear your take, especially after the most recent time study that you did of how much of time chaos just comes from an inner blueprint that we need to rewrite our stories about time. And then how much is it do you think is other constraints or unskillful use of time?

I really think it's both. I'm glad you brought that up because, yes, there are definitely things we can do to control our calendars. There are good habits we can build in, in terms of thoughtful planning of our lives, building in space for things to go wrong. You know, you can't jam pack every single minute and then expect, like, nothing to run over like that. Just life doesn't work that way. Right. So there are definitely things we can do to control some of the calendar chaos that many people experience. But time really is all about the stories we tell ourselves. Because time keeps passing by no matter what you do. It's incredibly easy to spend time mindlessly. And so many of the perceptions we have about time are influenced more by how we are feeling at any given moment than the actual truth. In terms of data, just as one example, you know, most people don't know that there are 168 hours in a week, right? So 24 times 7 is 168 hours. That is not a number you hear banding about all the time. So most people don't know that there are 168 hours in a week. But then there's various things that we talk about doing how many hours per week we do X, Y or Z. And we don't know what proportion that even is, right? So like work hours people throw out, you know, well, normal full time job might be 40 hours a week, but people like throw some huge number on it, like, oh, yeah, I'm working 90 hours a week or something. Are you, I don't know. Like, do you know what proportion that actually is of the time you have? Like, you know, have you thought this through? And often when people do track their time, the stories they are telling themselves just have to change. Like, in general, people tend to work fewer hours than they think they do. They tend to sleep more hours than they think they do. They tend to have more discretionary time than they think they do. The problem is it's just always hard to use this time for things that we need to think about ahead of time. And so because time is passing mindlessly, we don't notice these things and then we can't make good choices with it. So, you know, I'm always encouraging people to work from good data and then make sure that your stories are informed by that data. Actually keep track of your time for a while, see where it goes. I'm not trying to play gotcha or anything like, oh, you thought you had no free time, but look, I found you watching Netflix like nobody cares. It's more that we want to make sure that whatever perspective we have on our lives, whatever our perception is, is true and accurate because then we can actually work with it.

I know you've been tracking your time for many years. And we should also add for listeners, if you're not familiar with Laura's work, that Laura, you have five children and this is your sixth printed book probably in as many years. You know.

Yeah, I like to Crank them out, books, babies, you know. Yes.

So it's not like you're living alone and in a monastery of your own making. You're in it, you're really in the thick of it. I love the metaphor you use of the circus performer.

Yes.

They're spinning all these plates, but if you look closely, there is a sense of tranquility and maybe even fun that they're having. But it's because there's so much structure that they've put around their practice.

Absolutely. I really like the metaphor of a circus for life. And normally when people say life is a circus, they mean it's chaotic and out of control and all that. But that's wrong. Like, if you've ever been to a circus, it is the most orderly thing that you can imagine. Yes, there are many, many moving parts, especially if you got a three ring circus. But everybody gets where they are going at the time they are supposed to get there. Like nobody gets shot out of a cannon at the wrong time in a circus. Right. Like it is all set up to go absolutely smoothly. And when things go wrong, there are systems for dealing with that. It is just a miracle of precision. And that is developed through good systems, through good planning, for figuring out what you will do when something goes wrong, for asking what it should look like and, you know, building the steps to getting there. So actually, I think that's a great metaphor for life. Like I like my life to be a circus. It's something really cool that is created when we have thought about all the moving parts, thought about how they should go, made space for them to do their fabulous work and, you know, sit back and watch the thing happen.

I sense an article title like Nobody gets shot out of a candidate. That's too good.

It's true, it's true. They've got it well set up.

You say that having space in a schedule is the psychological equivalent of sitting on a large emergency fund. And I have to report that having time buffer by not scheduling any meetings on Friday meant that when your publicist reached out and she said Laura's available on this day only, let us know if you want an interview.

It makes me sound like really like a prima donna. And I'm sorry about that because I would have talked to you at any point.

No, it sounds like good batching on her part, like Laura's available this day. I was happy for you. I thought, good on you that the publicist knows to just try at least to batch. And then you could always make exceptions for one offs.

Yes, exactly.

It's interesting that some of your time study participants reported the psychological challenges of that emergency fund of having space in the schedule. And I found this too, like that was actually something I needed to overcome. I laughed out loud at the one respondent who called it a horror vacui. Right. A fear of leaving empty space. And then others describe. You talk about two other traps, avoidance and guilt. That people might just be afraid of the empty space or they might avoid it or feel guilty because of it. And that's just so interesting because it speaks to the psychological challenges that are getting in the way of us leaving something open. Oh yeah, the horror.

The horror vacui. Or however you say it. Yes. This phrase from art, that there was a period of time where the highest ideal was seen as filling every inch of the canvas. And so, you know, you wanted to do that and if you hadn't, you were expressing like this fear of empty space. It's kind of an interesting art term because, of course, much beautiful art is created by leaving open space as well. So it's just a mindset shift here of which you prefer. But I certainly know, you know, in the entrepreneurial community, there's definitely a desire in many cases to book yourself solid. Right. You want to make sure that you are not leaving time on the table, that you could have been meeting with someone, you could have been networking you and try and get new sales. And I totally admire that hustle. That's great, great. But the problem is when you have every single minute booked solid, you don't have any space for stuff to go wrong. And maybe you live a charmed life where nothing can go wrong. I don't live that life. I'm sure most people don't live that life. Things happen, you know, you have could be a kid who has an emergency. It could be that one client is running late and all of a sudden they're right on top of when you're meeting with the next person. It could be that the venue you're going to is suddenly shut, that there's some, you know, police activity in front of it, like knows it can be anything, right? But when you expect life to go perfectly, when it doesn't, everything can fall apart. And that's what we're talking about, creating this schedule chaos. Whereas if you build an open space, if you're falling behind, you can get caught up. You're not late in rushing. If an emergency bumps another priority, you can reschedule the priority for the time that you left open. You stay on track, you keep making progress. Even when life doesn't go as planned, or when something wonderful happens, some brand new opportunity comes up that you really want to seize, you've got space for it. And I actually find that having that open space seems to kind of invite those opportunities. I think it's just that you're more open to it, right? Like, if you're walking around with zero space in your schedule, you kind of give off this vibe of like, don't even try, right?

That's true.

Whereas if you have open space, you're more open to things that come to you. And so, you know, that sense of openness often invites people to, you know, lingering conversations or to reach out or things like that.

That's a great point about the serendipity of leaving open space. And you're right, it's almost a leap of faith that I don't know what's going to fill this, but I know it's important that I leave it there. So whether it is a last minute emergency, I remember one day I had plumbers come and they were carving giant holes in the ceiling. Now, riders barking. That's a good example of the chaos, a normal day of chaos even coming up on Tuesday, someone invited me at the last minute to a media luncheon and in New York. And it sounded so exciting and like the kind of thing that I really missed from years of pandemicing. And because my schedule only had three calls, like I max out at four, I was at least able to shuffle them around the same way I was able to say yes to this. And so I just love that idea. And you also say that the most skilled time managers or time management masters make resilient schedules. So I just love that idea. And let me know if we've covered it already. But what is a resilient schedule?

A resilient schedule is one that can deal with life as it happens. So anyone can make a perfect schedule. Like, you know, like, this is exactly when I'll do X, Y and C. But if something goes wrong, can you pivot and keep going? And if you can, then you have created a schedule that is actually workable. And I think over the long run, having this resilient schedule is just far better because it allows you to make progress on your goals even when life goes as planned. I mean, I hear all the time from people that they get very frustrated about things like, oh, I meant to do this. And then something came up. It's like, well, yeah, something came up, right? That's life. Stuff comes up. We can never know entirely what the future is going to look like. But we can expect the unexpected. And by building in space for the unexpected, it doesn't throw us off track.

We'll be right back just after this with Venmo Stash.

A tag on one hand and ordering a ride in the other means you're stacking cash back with Venmo Stash. Get up to 5% cash back when you pick a bundle of your favorite brands. Earn more cash when you do more with Stash. Venmo Stash terms and exclusions apply. Max $100 cash back per month. See terms at venmo me stashterms.

This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast Smart move Being financially savvy Smart move. Another smart move having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto bundling just another way to save with a personal price plan like a good neighbor State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer, availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by.

One of your nine ways to calm the chaos is take one night for you or one day or one half day. And I'm just curious, what's your favorite way to do this?

So I sing in a choir and we meet every Thursday night. It's actually my church choir, so we sing on Sunday mornings too. But having this one night, Thursday night where I know, like after dinner I'm off to choir, like the evening is not my responsibility. I mean, it's such a nice break in the week. And I really encourage, you know, anyone who's got a lot going on in their lives to think about doing this. To building in one night a week where you do something that is not work, it is not caring for family members, it is something that you find uniquely fun. And ideally, you should make a commitment to this. So something like singing in a choir or playing on a softball team or being a regular volunteer somewhere where your attendance is expected and people will notice if you are not there. And the reason is because when you make a commitment to it, you will actually do it, right? Like, you will go. Even if life is busy, you will go. Even if you are tired, you know you will go. Even if somebody else would possibly prefer that you do something else, right? You have a reason to say, like, no, no, I can't do this on Tuesday night. We'll talk on Wednesday night. I'm sorry, I've got something on Tuesday night. And you protect this time off because it is a commitment. Whereas if you just have this idea like, oh, I'm going to take more bubble baths or I'll do more reading, that'll be my night for me. Like, you know, when something else comes up, you won't do it and then you'll never do it, right? Like, you know, your kid wants you to drive them to the mall, you're like, okay, my bathtub isn't going anywhere, right? You know, so you, you do what other people want you to do during this time. Whereas if it is a commitment, you protect it and that gives you this active form of self care and you will feel better afterwards.

I love it. So another type of commitment is to the big creative projects. A lot of free timers are working on something or another. Not everyone's aspiring to write a book. This is now your sixth printed book about time management, among others. Still, you've been writing about it for 15 years. I'm curious, has your process changed? And the other part that I'm wondering is I love asking authors, do you feel that it gets easier? Like on book number six, has your process evolved to where it feels any easier? Or do you feel that each book is uniquely challenging?

I think every book has its own challenges. I do think the process becomes easier. Like I certainly know that I can create a book others on my shelf that seem to provide evidence that this has been done in the past. And so probably I can do it this time around as well. This one was actually particularly straightforward to write because so much of it was based on this time study that I did. You know that I have my nine favorite time management rules and I recruited 150 people to try them out. And so I ran this big project in the spring of 2021 where I collected various information on people, measured them on various dimensions, how they felt about their time. Each week they would lear a rule. So I sent them a write up of the rule. I had them answer questions about how they planned to use the rule in their life. I would follow up a week later, they would answer questions about how it went. I kept going for nine weeks, measured them on various dimensions through the whole project. And so I could find at the end that, you know, their time satisfaction had rose quite significantly. But also I had all these answers to my questions, you know, like, how did you use this rule in your life? What challenges did you face? How did you overcome these challenges? Did you modify this rule in any way? What effects did you see in your life? And so the answers to those questions form the core of the book. And so this one felt so straightforward to write because I had all these quotes from the participants that I could just turn into the raw material, into the rough draft of the book. So with anything, I set myself a schedule. Over the summer of 2021, I created a schedule where each week I was writing a chapter with a couple buffer weeks because I leave open space, right, as we discussed. So I would say write the intro one week, chapter one, one week, and chapter two, Then leave an open week. Then do chapter three and four, leave an open week, five, and so on like this within each chapter writing week. On Monday and Tuesday, I would create the draft, right? I would just, you know, use those quotes, sort of figure out what the outline was, write it down. Wednesday and Thursday, I would edit it. I leave Friday open. Cause Friday I'm trying to build an open space in case something came up during the week to kind of brush off my schedule. But, you know, that's the pace I did. And, you know, I got my draft done in time and then spent the time editing it after that. And, yeah, that's how it works.

What's the duration of a writing chunk?

Well, you know, I would write for most of the mornings on those days. So usually it's from about nine to, I would say probably 12:30 or one is when I get too hungry. I have to stop. I do my best writing work in the morning. I think for many people, morning tends to be a time when you have more energy and discipline and focus. Not everybody. Certainly there are some night owls, but, you know, a lot of people do their most focused work in the morning. So I tried my best to keep the mornings available for the writing. And then I would do my other projects and meetings in the afternoon.

And that morning idea certainly went viral with your book, what the Most Successful People do before breakfast. I feel like, I don't know if that's your bestselling book, but that one really had legs. Because people are just like, what do they do?

I know. It's such a catchy title, isn't it?

And it does feel so good to get something big and important done early in the day.

It really does. And that's what I was getting at. I mean, for many busy people, mornings are a great time for getting things done. And this is time you can have for yourself before everybody else needs something from you. Right. You know, if you're managing a small business, like, your employees need stuff from you, your clients need stuff from you. That's, you know, what you spend your day doing. And if you have a family, you spend your time dealing with their needs too. And so you can be like, well, you know, when do I make progress on these things that I want to do? Well, you can carve out time at other points too. But for many people, mornings are the sort of the time that's least likely to have these emergencies arise. Like, there turn out to be far fewer business emergencies at 5:30am versus 5:30pm so, you know, if you want to do something creative, you have some sort of exercise, you want to do some sort of spiritual pursuit, for many people, that is the best time to get it done.

Here's another behind the book question. You've been writing about time management again for over 15 years. Do you ever get bored of the topic? And what I mean by that is I feel that sometimes, like, you know, my first book, Life After College there reached a point pretty soon after it came out where I go, I'm done here. You know, I'm really happy that this book is created. It's a great resource for 20 somethings about adulting. I'm still proud of it, even, albeit a little embarrassed because it's a much younger Jenny writing it. But I just became so clear at a certain point, like, I cannot do another interview on this. Do you hit that around this topic, or do you feel that you're consistently finding inspiration in new places for it?

Well, one of the reasons I did the research for this book and did that whole Tranquility By Tuesday project is I wanted to have something new to write about. Right. You know, I think if I was just saying, well, let me go back to the 24 hours we have each day, what should I do with that? I think I would get bored. But if I can create something new that I can create something that hasn't been out there before and write about that, then I can keep myself interested in it and hopefully keep my listeners and readers interested in it too. It's not just whether I'm bored with it. On some level, I'm competing with all my other books. Every time I have a new book come out, it's like, well, if I've read your other books, why should I bother reading this one? And so that's always the challenge for me is like, can I say something new? And if I can't, I won't write the book. I mean, there's no point, right? Like, why would I spend two years of my life, plus the time afterwards where I'm doing interviews just talking about something that is the exact same that I've been talking about before. So it's always has to go through that rubric of is it new? Would I actually feel good about asking someone to buy this book, given that they may have read my other ones? And, yeah, so that's what I always asking.

And then the logistical question, because I know many of your books involve some kind of study which gives you really rich data to pull from. Are you hiring a data analyst or a data scientist to help craft the survey and pick a sample of people? Like, how are you creating the data set behind the scenes?

Absolutely. I've hired people to help me with all of my original, especially the quantitative research, because I have a pretty good grasp of it. But I would not put myself out there as a professional statistician or anything like that. For Tranquility, by Tuesday, this most recent book, I hired somebody who actually has a PhD in survey design, that she helped me craft this survey and helped me compile the data and look through the data and see what would be of interest and how could we structure questions so that it was most likely that we would get data that was of interest? You know, one of the things we did is we did a pilot project first. So I did the whole huge project with 150 people in the spring of 2021. I actually did a smaller version of it in the fall of 2020. And the reason was to see if it would work right. Like, to see, like, would people's lives change on any sort of dimension I could measure if they follow these rules? And so before I tried to do this broadly, knowing I was trying to write the book, I was like, well, let me just make sure. So we did a pilot project with about three dozen people, saw that we got statistically significant results. That also allowed me to change a few questions slightly. Like, if it was pretty clear that no one had any clue what I was getting at, then that was my signal that that should be a different question. And so we changed some things. You know, a lot of it worked pretty well. It was pretty exciting, so we didn't have to change much. But it was also good to know that when I was gonna roll it out to a much bigger group, that I was highly likely to get results.

It's amazing that it did work. And thank you for sharing your process because I love hearing about this pilot version first. It makes so much sense. Of course, you're gonna test it in beta or micro before you rolling out the big one. So that's really helpful for all of us. To what extent do you think people, it's like with food and healthy eating, we know what's good for us when it comes to time design, and yet we don't do it.

Well, that is always the thing. I mean, and many of the rules are quite simple, like giving yourself a bedtime moving by 3pm These are not rocket science and they're not something that anyone would be like. I never would have imagined that that would make my life better if I did. But of course we might know it and not do it. So one of the things of having this be a project, I mean, certainly the people who tried out the rules, they had some incentive in that I was emailing them and checking in, like, have you done it? And it was only for a couple weeks. You know, if you're looking for something to jumpstart a life transformation process, you might say, well, okay, it's nine weeks. I will learn a new rule each week. I will try to build it in as a habit, see if it works. If it doesn't, then I don't have to keep doing it. But if it does, if I do see results that I'm happy with, I might keep going. You know, some people don't like the idea of rules that was definitely came up. So we just said, you know, call them suggestions, ideas Laura had that you might wish to try and just see if it works. And if you're happy with the results, great, keep going. If you're not, you can stop. But just the accountability of having other people sometimes is helpful. And, you know, everyone who participated in the study was part of something, so they had this accountability. But you could read Tranquility by Tuesday with a friend, with people who work with you, with colleagues, with neighbors, any sort of thing. And you check in with each other each week and say, well, did you do the rule this week? And what do you think you'll do next week with this upcoming rule? Then check back a week later. How did it go? And sometimes having that layer of accountability is helpful too.

I was thinking about that while reading that just being in the time study would give them a certain sense of permission, like plan on Fridays or create a backup slot. Ooh, I gotta ask you about backup slots, because I know we talked a little bit about it, but just exactly what that means. But just the fact that they're participating kind of holds them accountable to try some things, give themselves permission to do things differently.

Absolutely, yeah. And I'm sure that, you know, my emails, my sort of incessant emails to people were one of the things that kept them on track, right? Like they may have, you know, not planned to move by 3pm on some particular day. But you get another email from Laura and you're like, well, I guess I'll get up and take a walk and then you feel better afterwards. And so you're like, thank you, Laura. I'm glad I did that.

We'll be right back just after this.

Hi, this is Deechen Lackman and I am here to tell you toyotathon is on. So stop by your local Toyota dealer for incredible year end deals on the cars, trucks and SUVs known for their legendary reliability like the stylish and efficient Camry, the Ready for anything RAV4 or check out a rough and rugged Tacoma or Tundra, all with great financing and lease options available to qualified customers. Visit buyatoyota.com to find out more. Toyota let's go places.

When the holidays.

Start to feel a bit repetitive, reach for a Sprite Winter Spiced Cranberry and put your twist on tradition. A bold cranberry and winter Spice flavor Fusion Sprite Winter Spice Cranberry is a refreshing way to shake things up. This sip and season, and only for a limited time time Sprite obey your thirst.

Creating a backup slot what things do we create backup slots for? And then what do we not need to worry about creating them?

Yeah, so this is getting at the idea of having more open space in our lives and in our schedules and as part of creating resilient schedules. And this is rule number five. And one way to think about this, if you've been invited to say an outdoor event in the summer, and often what they have on the invitation is something called a rain date. And I really think this is just such a brilliant scheduling concept. The organizers are acknowledging that much can go predictably wrong with an outdoor event. Right? It's like right there in the rain date name. But there's no question of whether the event will be rescheduled or for when it will be for the rain date. And so people know not to put anything unmovable in that second spot. And by having a second spot, you vastly increase the chances of the event happening, even if maybe not at the time originally planned. And so I think we need a lot more rain dates in life. If something is important to you, don't just create one time for it, create a backup time for it. Right? So if you are wanting to meet with an employee, like you see this happening all the time, you know, you're managing somebody, you want to give them like celebratory Feedback, talk about all the great things that are going on, you know, your employees dealing with some tough stuff. And so we're going to meet at 10am on Tuesday and talk through this. It's going to be great. And then of course you have some huge client emergency at 9:30am on Tuesday and the meeting gets bumped. And this is just incredibly frustrating for everyone because you knew it was important to do and yet you didn't do it because life intervened and say, well, okay, so just give yourself a rain day, right? Create a backup slot. If it can't happen on Tuesday, when is the second time? And you know, you talked about leaving Fridays open. I think that's a really good idea. That can be kind of your rain date for lots of stuff. So you might just say, okay, well this meeting is incredibly important. If it can't happen at 10am on Tuesday, we're automatically going to reschedule for 10am on Friday. And that just increases the chances that it does happen. It may not happen when you both originally planned, but it will happen. And if it was important to you, then it should happen. The idea of creating an actual second spot, you probably want to reserve that for, you know, the things that you have identified as truly your top priorities of the week. Like, you probably aren't going to do this for everything, but if it is one of your top priorities, then you probably need to think about, well, if time A doesn't work, what is time B? And designate what is time B? And leaving open space like Fridays open allows you to create a lot of time Bs because, you know, most of those things could in fact be moved to Friday if they needed to be.

So of all nine ways to calm the chaos, is there one that jumps out as the big game changer, the big lever?

Well, there's lots, but one I think that just winds up affecting a lot of people's day to day lives is rule number nine is to do effortful fun before effortless fun. And what I'm getting at here is that even busy people wind up with some amount of leisure time in their lives. But the problem is that it is often short in duration or it is unexpected, or it comes at low energy times, like at night after you put your kids to bed or after you're done with work, you've done your chores. Like you don't have a whole lot of energy, right? And so screen time fits all these constraints incredibly well. You could spend two minutes on Twitter, you could spend 20 minutes on Twitter, you could spend two hours on Twitter, right? Like, it's all the same. You don't have to plan ahead or hire a babysitter to turn on Netflix. And so these things, these effortless forms of fun, wind up consuming the bulk of our leisure time. And they do that even though in the abstract, people say that they would prefer to spend their leisure time on things like reading or hobbies, connecting with friends. And so with this rule, what I'm saying is, challenge yourself when a spot of leisure time appears, do just a few minutes of those more effortful forms of fun before you switch over to the effortless. So, you know, you got a couple minutes, you're picking up your phone, read an ebook for two minutes before switching over to Twitter. At night, after you put the kids in bed, do a puzzle for 10 minutes before turning on Netflix, one of two things will happen. Either you will get so into your effortful fun that you will just keep going with it, and that would probably be fine. But even if you don't, even if you switch over, like, you still get both. Like, you get both kinds of fun. And when you change the balance of your leisure time, it winds up feeling far more rejuvenating in the course of tranquility. By Tuesday, I kept asking people how much they agreed with various statements on scales of 1 to 7. So 1 is strongly disagree, 7 is strongly agree. One of the statements was, yesterday, I didn't waste time on things that weren't important to me. And after people learned this rule, their scores, their agreement scores for that question, that statement rose 32%. Right? So they felt like they were wasting so much less time by just doing a little bit of more effortful fun instead of all of the effortless variety. And I promise, you know, people, try this out, you will see something similar. Your perspective on your leisure time will change entirely.

I'm glad you mentioned the notion of wasting time, because in this section you say daydreaming counts. What's the difference between daydreaming and kind of happily, serenely drifting during a slot of effortful fun versus how you define wasting time?

Well, I think wasting time is spending time mindlessly on something that didn't matter to you. Right? And when you have consciously chosen to spend your time on something, then that is probably not wasted time. Like, even if somebody might not recognize as being particularly highbrow. So I'm not saying either that everyone needs to get off social media or stop watching tv. I mean, there's great shows on. Like, I certainly think that watching a well scripted drama can be you Know, an incredibly great experience. And, you know, I love looking at pretty pictures on Instagram like anyone else. So, you know, there's nothing wrong with it per se. It's just about making sure that you are spending your time in a way that you intend to. And I think with a lot of passive screen time, we wind up spending more time on it than we mean to because, you know, much of it is designed to be addictive. It's designed to be hard to get out of. So, you know, it's just a question of making sure that the balance is where we wish it to be. And daydreaming is a wonderful form of active leisure. It's actually harder to do in our world where we have our phones with us all the time. It's something far more, I think, fruitful and allows your brain to do some interesting things, to kind of just stare up at the clouds, like, lie on. There's that great poem that John Kate's poem of lying cool bedded in the flowery grass. It says, ode on indolence that I always quote, he's staring up at the clouds. And personally, I think that's a great way to spend your time. You know, if you've got 15 minutes open, you'll probably get more interesting things going on in your brain if you stare up at the clouds versus reading people arguing on Twitter. You don't know either of them, but somehow you feel like you got to get to the bottom of this drama.

Totally. The wasted time. It reminds me of junk food. You don't feel any better after you eat it. Honestly, even alcohol, so much of the time now, it's like, okay, the first few sips of champagne were great. And then it messed up my sleep, which messed up the next morning, which stole my time.

Yep, yep. Few sips. So that's the idea. We want to figure out a way to build stuff in our lives. So we stop after a few sips.

Okay, last question. If you could give business owners permission to do something differently or drop something altogether, what would it be?

Well, I think this idea that you need to book yourself solid. I think a lot of us are walking around with this idea that the busier you are, the more important you are. And, you know, on some level it makes sense because having a high demand for your time is kind of the definition of being important. But I have found that many people who are important in quotes, however you want to define that, use some of the power they have over their schedules to build in this open space. You know, that they do not in fact, book themselves solid for every single minute. And the reason is that they need time to allow for things to come up. Right? They want to be able to seize opportunities. They want to be able to think about stuff in between events. And yes, that requires being a little bit more judicious about what you take on. But. But again, because they are important, they have the ability to not do certain things. And, you know, maybe that's what we should all aspire to, not packing every minute, but having that level of control over our time where we able to say, well, is this the best use of my time right now? And if it is, great. And if it isn't, probably it'd be better to leave that space open for something that could come up that might be better than this thing that I am putting in.

I heard this great tip that a guy does. I'll put the guy who it is in the show notes. It was just one morning. I was listening to a podcast and he says at the end of every day, he retroactively colors the meeting red, orange, or green based on how it affected his energy. So red is that it drained him, orange is that it's neutral, and green is that it energized him. So actually, when he looks back on his calendar, similar to your time studies, he can see on the whole, he can see patterns. He can see how much of the calendar looks green of the previous week or the previous month. And. And I just think that's such an interesting awareness practice too.

That would be great. And yeah, maybe over time you could have fewer of those red meetings.

Exactly.

Like, oh, those people. It never goes well. Maybe over time I can kind of steer things away from needing to meet with those people frequently.

Yeah, exactly. Well, thank you so much, Laura. It's such a blast to catch up and learn about the new book listeners. You can check out Train tranquility by Tuesday. 9 Ways to Calm the Chaos and Make Time for what Matters. I'll put that in the show notes. Laura, is there anywhere else you want to send people to keep in touch?

Yeah, just come Visit my website, lauravandercam.com you can learn about my books, you can learn about my podcasts, and I still blog a couple times a week. So if you're looking for more about time management in general, you can come read those posts.

Awesome. Thank you so much, Laura. And big thanks everybody for listening.

Thanks for having me.

If you've listened this far, you get a gold star. Thank you. Word of mouth is the most joyful way we can grow this show and it helps us land interviews with the luminaries and insightful guests that you would most love to hear from. Please send this episode to a friend who might find it helpful, and for show notes and related links from this episode, visit it's free time. While you're there, make sure you're subscribed to the Time well Spent newsletter. You'll get instant access to my Tech Toolkit, a continually updated list of all the software I use, along with the total monthly spend to run my business where no one works full time even me. Visit itsfreetime.com join remember, you are running the show. It's time for radical reimagining and everything is up for grabs. Let it be easy, let it be fun and build with love.

Hey Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. You know one of the perks about having four kids that you know about is actually getting a direct line to the big man up north. And this year he wants you to know the best gift that you can give someone is the gift of Mint Mobile's unlimited watch wireless for 15amonth. Now you don't even need to wrap it. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment.

Of $45 for three month plan equivalent to 15 per month required new customer offer for first three months only. Speed slow after 35 gigabytes if network's busy. Taxes and fees extra. See mintmobile.com.