What I Learned Speaking With A Time Management Guru

Published in

The Startup

9 min readJul 3, 2018

As entrepreneurs, our time management skills are obviously critical. We’re pulled in so many directions throughout the day, whether that’s by team members, customers, or vendors. This doesn’t even acknowledge the demands on our personal lives—especially so if we have a partner or children.

It can all be overwhelming.

Our calendar often takes on a life of its own, filling up our time with commitments that we may not necessarily enjoy. Any personal time or time for passion projects is often placed at the bottom or our list—or simply brushed aside.

That said, how can we bolster our time management skills and take back our schedules?

One time management expert may have the answer.

In the latest episode of The Power Of Bold, I spoke with Laura Vanderkam, a productivity and time management expert who has written several notable books on time management, including Off The Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done.

You can find my complete interview with Laura on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify or Stitcher.

Laura is also well-known for her 2016 TED Talk on time management, which has garnered millions of views.

All of us try to find more time for the things we love, but often, this task is more aspirational than real.

Laura understands this.

She has studied productivity and time management for years. She knows that many of us feel overwhelmed and that we want to take greater control of our calendars.

In the interview, my goal was to extract Laura’s insights on time management and how we can free up our schedules while creating memories that will last a lifetime.

Considering that, here are some of the top time management insights I gathered from my conversation with Laura.

Track Your Time For One Week

If you’ve ever worked as an attorney, accountant, or consultant, the mere mention of one phrase may send shudders down your spine.

The billable hour.

The idea behind the billable hour is that individual employees track the amount of time spent on each of their projects. After logging their time, their firm or organization can charge clients a certain amount for their work.

Many attorneys, for instance, find tracking their time to be one of the most laborious parts of legal practice. That said, they (and their superiors) gather interesting insights about the attorney’s workday, including whether the attorney is allocating more or less time than necessary toward certain tasks.

As someone who is interested in time management, Laura decided to embark on her own “billable hour” experiment. She spent one year tracking how she spent her time.

Laura shared her reflections with The New York Times, which you can find here.

By taking on this experiment, Laura discovered how she could free up some of her time. As one simple example, she discovered that in one year, she spent 327 hours reading magazines and online articles. With this knowledge in hand, she spent the same 327 hours next year reading books she had always wanted to read.

By completing this experiment, Laura was also able to recall more memories throughout the year.

By tracking her time, she essentially created a journal that told her everything, as opposed to a written journal that discussed the highlights of her day or her feelings about her day.

She would then reflect on the great memories she created throughout the year, which allowed her to essentially relive those moments and revive the happiness associated with those moments.

So what does this mean for us?

By tracking your time, you’ll discover parts of your schedule that you can change. You’re able to tighten up inefficiencies and free time for other tasks. And you’ll be able to recall more memories throughout the period you track.

Now granted, you don’t have to spend an entire year tracking every hour of your life. That’s likely asking for too much. Instead, think about recording your time for one week (possibly two). One week is often enough to give you a holistic view of where your time goes.

You also don’t need to be extremely strict about your tracking. You don’t need to use a time management app or account for every tenth of an hour. Instead, just try looking back and tracking your time at lunch and in the evening. You can record your time in a spreadsheet, in a notebook, or even on your phone.

By doing this, you’ll gather the raw data that will inform future changes to your schedule.

The Danger of “Busy”

We like telling people that we’re “busy.”

Intuitively, it makes us feel important. It shows the world that we’re wanted and that we have responsibilities. It shows that the demand for our time is high.

However, there is a problem with telling others that we’re busy.

That problem is that we start to believe it, even if it isn’t necessarily true.

And when we believe it, we start to believe that we don’t have time for the things that are truly important to us.

We think, “Oh, I would like to go grab drinks with a friend, yet I’m so busy with work.”

It’s easy to default to busy. Having said that, we can change our behavior.

As a starting point, we can change our conversations. We can stop saying “busy” when we’re asked, “How are you?” By placing less emphasis on our “busyness” than what we actually did throughout the day, we also start to realize (1) whether we are actually busy and (2) if so, what we can do to feel less overwhelmed.

Perhaps you’ll be inspired to track your time and find where you can cut out time-sucking tasks. On the flip side, you may be content with your schedule and can celebrate it instead of obsessing over your “busyness.”

Ultimately, be cautious when using the word “busy” to describe your day. Saying it day-after-day may make you feel more stressed about your calendar—even though you may have more time than you think.

Take Ownership

Often, it is too easy to follow our routines.

It makes sense.

Routines provide comfort. They are familiar. They help us get through the day.

However, your routine may not be serving you well in the long-run. If you track your time for one week, you will likely discover parts of your day when you are idly spending your time. Or there may be times where you feel like you’re dragging your feet.

For me, it’s that killer 2:30 pm period, where I feel fatigued and demotivated.

Ultimately, inertia keeps us in the same cycle. We feel like we are always strapped for time, yet we revert to habits like constantly checking our Instagram feeds or hitting “next” on the Netflix queue.

As Laura says in her 2016 TED Talk:

The most successful people build the lives they want, and then the time saves itself.

The bottom line is that we need to take control of our schedules. We can’t be passive about it. We need to be proactive and ensure that we are spending as much time as possible on the things we want to spend it on.

Luckily, we can make significant headway by adopting a proactive attitude, analyzing our schedules, and developing a plan of action.

So how can we do this? Laura has some helpful tips:

Use Friday Afternoons For Planning: Laura finds that Friday afternoons are best for planning her upcoming week. By planning your next week before you leave work, you’ll have less anxiety over the weekend. Also, by taking action on Friday afternoon, you are more likely to reach colleagues if you need to reschedule meetings.
Embrace the Three-Category List: When planning your week, it helps to create a three-category list. Divide a piece of paper into career, relationship, and self priorities. By creating three categories, you subconsciously nudge yourself into scheduling activities for each category. It’s more difficult to ignore time with friends, for instance, or to place self-care to the side.
Pay Yourself First: While this is a common phrase in personal finance, Laura says it is applicable to time management. If you are hoping to work on a passion project, for example, yet you never seem to have enough time to get started, you should think about “paying yourself first” and blocking out, say, one hour on Monday morning. If you have to wake up early, so be it. By setting aside time for your creative tasks on Monday morning, you increase the chances that your passion project won’t be brushed aside.

These are just several tips, but they can go a long way. You just have to look at how you spend your time, create a plan of action, and execute.

Beware of Technology

Technology is a great thing. It connects us with the people we love. It allows us to get out of the office and work remotely. Some apps even help us embrace mindfulness.

That said, technology can be a major time suck. It may seem like a Facebook or Instagram check only takes one or two minutes, but that number becomes large if you add it over the course of a day. The same goes with email checks, especially for founders and those with demanding jobs.

Not only that, technology can make us feel like we have less time. According to a time perception study organized by Laura, respondents with high time perception scores checked their phones about half as frequently as those with the lowest time perception scores. Other studies show that people feel more relaxed when they are told they can check email three times per day versus checking it whenever they want.

Ultimately, according to Laura’s research, looking at a phone will make you feel like you have less leisure time compared to spending time with friends, for instance, or staring at the stars.

If we can spend more time on emotionally satisfying things (like having dinner with a close friend) versus checking Twitter, we will feel like we have more time. We also build happier memories along the way.

But what happens if we have to constantly check our email? Especially as founders, we are always in demand, whether that’s from employees, customers, or investors.

Laura recommends that we’re still better off consciously checking our email for 15 to 20 minutes per hour and spending the rest of the hour on other tasks. Delegation is also a useful skill. Perhaps someone else on your team can deal with certain emails that are sitting in your inbox.

Whatever you decide, there are clear benefits to spending less time on your devices.

Take action. You may be surprised by the results.

The importance of adventure

We all have responsibilities on our calendars.

We all have people depending on us.

Yet the days can fly by.

2018 is already half over. How many distinct memories do you have from the past year?

This is why Laura recommends that we try to build adventure into our lives.

Our brains are more likely to remember firsts or new events as opposed to the normal tasks we complete each day each day.

We’re on autopilot. The world goes by as we are in our own heads, thinking about the workday or what we need to do.

While we can’t make every day a vacation, we can put ourselves in a position where we have more memorable moments in our daily lives.

By doing this, time seems more expansive. You anticipate the adventure, make memories doing something you normally don’t do, and then have a story to tell your friends and family.

For example, if you live in a large city, make it a personal goal to travel to a different neighborhood each weekend. Or you can just plan on doing something unusual on Monday nights, rather than emptying our your inbox.

All you have to do is resist that temptation to stay in the comfort of your own home or apartment. Yes, it is difficult to resist that temptation, but you’ll thank yourself once you’re out the door.

Take Control

When you look at the reality, entrepreneur is essentially a synonym for busy. All of our schedules are full and we have little time to do the things we want.

That said, we cannot make excuses. We cannot be passive.

There is time in our schedules to do the things we want. We just have to be proactive about it.

Whether it’s tracking our own time, putting down the phone, building adventure into our lives (or a combination of all three), we can not only find more time to do the things we want, but can expand our perception of time to include memories that we’ll relish reliving.

Arguably, we cannot afford to pass on this exercise. Better to make the changes now (no matter how painful) than regret time lost.

Thanks for reading! Once again, you can access Laura’s interview on The Power Of Bold by visiting our page on iTunes, Google Play, Spotify, or Stitcher. If you’d like to read a full transcript of the episode, you can access the episode’s show notes here.