168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think

I hesitated to buy this book because of the negative reviews, especially the one that says all the useful info is in the TED talk. I finally decided to buy it because someone quoted a useful line from it that wasn’t in the talk, and I’m glad I bought it and read it. The thesis: If you work 8 hours a weekday and sleep 8 hours a night, you still have 72 hours a week for all other purposes. Even if you work 12 hours a weekday, that still leaves 52 hours. Yet we all complain about not having enough time for anything we want to do. So, where do those free hours go? Track your time over the course of a week and find out. In this context, it becomes absurd to say you don’t have time for something. It’s more accurate to say it’s not a priority. Your priorities are not what you want to do, but what you actually do. The author gives inspiring examples of people who manage to do it all. One is Theresa Daytner, who manages a business full time and is a mother of six but still finds adequate time to sleep. Even President Obama was shocked. I like these examples; I don’t like to read books by mere speculators. The author also gives tips for finding time to do what we want with out lives. We need to focus on our core competencies—the things no one else can do for us (like time with our children). For every task we would rather not do, we can at least see if we can eliminate it, automate it, or delegate it (check in that order). Examples include shopping, cooking, and cleaning. Before women joined the workforce, they actually spent less time with their children than they do now, despite having more children. The extra free time was taken up by these tasks; cultural rules developed to fill all that time with housework (like—actual examples cited by the author—having to chop up raisins and vacuum the walls and ceiling). Some say delegating these things costs too much money, but money has to be prioritized like time. If you spend x hours a week cleaning, how much would you pay to have that time back? Isn’t that more important than the money you spend on expensive toys? It would be interesting to see a money management book like this. All in all, it is very helpful, and not just for working moms. I am a single man, and I find the ideas a huge game changer. I disagree with a few things, though. I disagree with the idea that finding a job one loves enough to want to do more than full time is so easy; many of us have to take what we can get. I disagree with the idea that parents need to find fulfillment in careers instead of their children, or that the raising of children should be farmed out as the author seems to be implying. I disagree with the idea that we shouldn’t want to work fewer hours; personally, I like the idea of implementing these ideas in tandem with those of The 4-Hour Work Week (which the author believes to be misguided). The author seems to be buying into the “quality time” myth (I would have preferred to have more time with my parents than not, regardless of activity level), but this can be easily ignored by applying the principles to trying to have more time with one’s children. Still, apart from these minor quibbles, the book is great, and I recommend it to everyone.

Seriously. You do. When I was a programmer, I thought I worked so many hours, even up to 100. I have come to realize that while I may have sat at my computer that long, or been in the office that long, I really didn't work that long. And as much as you think that you do work a lot hours, chances are, you really don't. If you don't buy that idea, you really need to read Laura Vanderkam's new book, 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think. If you want to be able to train for a marathon, and don't think you have the time, you need to read this book. If you want to read the latest novel, but don't think you have the time, you need to read this book. We all have 168 hours. The key is how you use them. It's an unquestioned truth of modern life: we are all starved for time. With the rise of two-income families, extreme jobs, and the ability to log on to the world 24/7, life is so frenzied we can barely breathe. But what if we actually have plenty of time? What if we could sleep eight hours a night, exercise five days a week, and learn how to play the piano without sacrificing work, family time, or any other activity that is important to us? According to Laura Vanderkam, we can. If we re-examine our weekly allotment of 168 hours, we'll find that, with a little reorganization and prioritizing, we can dedicate more time to the things we want to do without having to make sacrifices. The book's author is Laura Vanderkam. Laura is also the author of Grindhopping: Building a Rewarding Career Without Paying Your Dues. She is a member of USA Today's Board of Contributors. She is also a freelance writer and her work has appeared in Reader's Digest, Scientific American, Wired, The American, Portfolio and other publications. Knowledge is power, and when it comes to understanding how we use our time, we often lack the knowledge. Laura opens the book with the myth of the time crunch, helping the reader realize that too often we overestimate the hours we spend on a task, whether it is work, or housekeeping or parenting. The real problem is that most of us do not have any idea how we spend our 168 hours. To solve that, she suggests that we begin to keep a time diary. This was a real eye-opener for me. I had no idea how much time I wasted searching the internet, reading social media sites, watching television, etc. You cannot change what you do not know. I was surprised a couple of years ago when I made note of everything I ate. I was shocked at how much I ate just walking through the kitchen as I was heading to the bathroom or to the home office. A handful of chips here, another snack there. When I wrote it all down, it changed the way I thought about food, making me think about what and how I ate. By keeping track of our time, down to the minute, we get to see how much time we waste! Once we see how much time we are wasting, we can begin to reprioritize our time to accomplish what we want to accomplish, whether its playing the piano or writing that next novel. Vanderkam offers some very practical advice for helping you find your core competencies, which are often the things you love to do. And if you love what you do, you will have more energy for the rest of your life as well. If you are trying to build a career while raising a young family, you will have more energy for your children if you work 50 hours a week in a job you love than if you work 30 hours in a job you hate. Therefore, you need to be in the right job. While the book is not a book on career advice, Laura does offer thoughts on finding the perfect job for you, and it is often a job that does not have a traditional job description. In addition Vanderkam offers suggestions for creating a calendar that allows you to accomplish your core competencies, be more productive, and achieve what you want. In a competitive work environment, we think we need to be in the office late. But is it possible to leave at 5 pm and have time with the family and then work later, after the kids have gone to sleep? And still get the eight hours of sleep we need? And the exercise we need? Yes, it is possible, and Laura shows you how. Vanderkam then offers suggestions on managing your time at home. There was a very interesting stat I came across as I read this section of the book: more parenting takes place today than in the 1950's by both mother and father. In the 1950's stay at home mothers spent less time with their children, despite the fact that they were home, than mothers do today. Why? More housework. Today's parents, and mothers in particular, are willing to let the housework go so they can spend more time with their children. That does not mean that your house needs to be dirty and messy. It means that if you prioritize your time toward parenting, then you need to be willing to forego you doing the cleaning. The same with laundry. She suggests that you outsource those tasks by finding people who will do it for you. Often the monetary cost is less than we think and the time savings it provides us allows us to do more of the things at which we are most effective and love. Creating a full life and aligning your time is not an easy task. But if you do, you can have the time to achieve what you want to achieve out of life. I really enjoyed this book. It is extremely practical while being more than just challenging you to count your minutes and hours. The author helps you understand how you are best motivated, employing the ideas from Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, the Hungarian psychology professor and author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience. At the end of each chapter, she challenges you through questions that cause you to consider the possibilities rather than being stuck in the box you create for yourself. At the end of the book, she provides a look into real case studies of how people used their time, how they changed their time usage, and the impact this had on their life. Finally, this is a book of experience. Laura provides interviews of people who have achieved much through their core competencies, time management, and outsourcing. It is not a book of facts, though it includes some potent ones, but a book of experiences. It empowers you to say, "I can do this!" And you can. With a little work and a little change, you can make the best use of your 168 hours.

I definitely have more time than I think. Nice eye opener.

The title of this book intrigued me. I never really thought about my week in terms of having 168 hours of time. Since time management has never been a strong suit for me, I hoped to gain some insight on how to manage the time that I am given. This book did provide some good ideas on how to look at your schedule. The author gives great tips on how to make the most of your time and how to schedule your time based on your family's needs. However, some of the advice is not very realistic if you have a job which requires you to work on someone else's schedule and not your own. Not every working person can structure their time to go in an hour later so that time can be spent with children. Sometimes, the rest of life must fit in around a work schedule, not the other way around. In addition, the author suggests that the best way to make use of your time is to hire out those tasks that you do not enjoy doing. That may be fine for families with plenty of disposable income at their fingertips. Personally, I cannot see paying someone to do my family's laundry just because I don't like to do it. I can easily find five minutes to toss a load of laundry into the washing machine, and I can find another five minutes to move it to the dryer (and I think I am giving myself more time than I need to get those tasks done). As far as folding the laundry, that chore is easily passed on to another member of my family. I don't need to hire someone to take care of the mundane tasks, like cleaning and cooking. Overall, the book was a good read. I thought the author gave good advice on how to track your time and see where you could make changes in your schedule to free up more time for yourself. I also liked the idea of creating a bucket list that could be tackled with the free time you have created for yourself. However, I don't believe this book is intended for anyone other than those people in the higher income brackets. Some of the advice was unrealistic for the average person.

The negative reviews almost put me off, but now I understand why people might react negatively to this book. This book is going to make you question your "busyness" and calls into question what you do or THINK you do. And my gosh I needed this. I downloaded this while on a trip to Maui sitting on a beach wondering why my life is so busy and I am so tired and I was half worrying about a report I needed to do. I wanted to go back home not being so hectic. Also, I wondered why my mom used to stress about having SO much to do when she did like half of what I do today (and she thinks I am nuts). There are some good examples of people who can lead busy full lives and still be happy. I KNOW they exist, I SEE them at my workplace. This one woman keeps getting promoted but she has time to have a baby and take sabbaticals and she is still a VP-- and she is brilliant. This book gave me some insight. This book may not help an hourly employee, I don't know. But it really really really hit home with me-- as working mother with a big time sucking career. Things are going to change with me because I see the people who DO manage (a lot like the people in the book she describes). Why cannot I be like them? I feel like I learned a lot of good lessons from this book. For those of you knocking her suggestion to send out your laundry or hire away some of your chores, look this is just a suggestion. You just have to decide what is important to you.

I just finished 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think by Laura Vanderkam. it is, perhaps, one of the best books I've read on time management. I love Laura's writing style as a journalist and not a self-help guru. There are lots of varied and insightful stories in this book, yet Laura also has a point of view. A point of view I found unique, challenging, and refreshing, Here's what I learned: 1. After sleeping, bathing, dressing, eating, etc... I have at least 100 waking hours in a week. That's more than two work weeks, plenty of time to do the things that matter most in life. The current cultural narrative that there's not enough time today doesn't hold water in light of these 100 hours, especially when you realize that Americans spend 30 hours every week watching television. 2. Exercise is not optional. Not just because of the health benefits, but also because a healthy body makes what happens the rest of the week that much more productive. And all it takes is 3-5 hours. That's just 3-5% of a waking week. 3. Leisure time needs a little planning for it to be refreshing and rejuvenating. That's why we spend 30 hours a week watching television: it's simple, easy, and available. Yet when I think through the things I really want to do with my leisure time--creative, refreshing, enjoyable things--television doesn't even make the list. The things that do need a little advanced planning and preparation. That's all. 4. Operating in the area of our core competence is the key to effective time use. We must make sure that the hours we spend professionally are invested in the things that we do well and love to do. Not only will we become best in class at these things, but our days will also be filled with joy and satisfaction. No one will hand us our perfect job, however, so It will take courage to carve out this space. But the risk is worth it.

It is a time of year that is suitable for reflection with many people slowing down. You undoubtedly want to do achieve something or become something, but doing anything worthwhile has to be done well, and to do that, takes time. “Being busy has become the explanation of choice for all sorts of things,” says the author, Laura Vanderkam. We are too busy to read, spend quality time with our families, attend to our devotions, keep fit, and have a vibrant social life. Is all this only possible if you can find a part-time career paying full-time rates? Or as many work-life balance protagonists tell us, we need to lower our expectations to get it all in. Amazon list 35,000 books on time management, so why bother with reviewing this one? Because I think Vanderkam has insights worth considering. A Harvard Business Review article titled, ‘The Dangerous Allure of the 70-Hour Workweek’ suggests that the 60-hour workweek is no longer the route to the top, it “is now considered practically part-time.” But the Federal Bureau of Labor Statistics study in which work is actually recorded, shows this to be wrong. Americans sleep about 8 hours a night, just as we did 40 years ago, and we work a lot less than we think we do – on average ‘full-time’ logs 35–43 hours per week. Another study of those who really do work over 60-hour workweeks reports finding no more than 1.7 million Americans, just over 1% of the workforce. “I’m more interested in the woman down the street,” writes Vanderkam, “who—without benefit of fame, outsized fortune, or a slew of personal assistants—is running a successful small business, marathons, and a large and happy household.” We all have exactly the same amount of time. When we do meet the “woman down the street” we can only marvel at why and how she is able to fill her time with so many meaningful things, while others just dream of 15 minutes to take a bubble bath. This is the central question that this book answers. The book reports on the lives of many women (and a few men,) who seem to do it all. Vanderkam explains that “the point of these stories is not to make anyone feel bad or lazy. Rather, I view these stories as liberating, particularly as a young(ish) person trying to build my career and family—as well as nurture my personal passions for running, singing, and other things—in a world that continually laments how hard it is to do it all.” Here are some facts. There are 168 hours in a week – (24 hours a day times the 7 days in the week.) Planned well these 168 hours are sufficient to accommodate full-time work, intense involvement with your family, rejuvenating leisure time, adequate sleep, and everything else that you wish to accomplish. Do the math: even if you actually put in 8 hours of real, focused work each day, (see the facts above!) that leaves you 128 hours each week. If you sleep 8 hours a day so you are always fresh and well rested, that leaves you 88 hours each week. Put in an hour of exercise a day and you have 81 hours left. Spend 3 hours a day on housework and you have 60 hours each week… You get the point. We work less than we think we do, and we have more time than we think we have. The hard, but hopeful truth is that you can have all that time to allocate as you choose, but not without effort. Why do we think we are so time-starved? We lie. We are in so many ways, extraordinarily inefficient. One of Vanderkam’s hyper-successful women down the street, Theresa Daytner, put it this way: “Here’s what I think is the difference, I know I’m in charge of me. Everything that I do, every minute I spend is my choice. If I’m not spending my time wisely, I fix it, even if it’s just quiet time.” What if we approached time differently: started with the unfilled 168 hours and viewed every minute, as our own choice? Instead of asserting firmly that we cannot do everything, we tell ourselves that we won’t be doing these things, because they are just not a priority in our life. When you say “I don’t have time,” you are making someone else responsible for your time: a manager, a client, your family. When something is not a priority, it turns those 168 hours back into a blank slate, to be filled as you choose it to be - with the things that you have decided matter to you. Recording how you spend your time as a time-diary study is a valuable tool, because it forces you to face the reality that a day has 24 hours and a week has 168. Everything we do must be accommodated within these limits. It will also force us to face another reality: we overestimate work and housework, and underestimate how much we sleep and how much leisure or discretionary time we actually have. Consider this: The problem may not be that you are overworked or under rested, it may well be that you have absolutely no idea how you spend your 168 hours. Perhaps you can be in better shape than you have ever been, because you’re sleeping enough and exercising enough. Perhaps you don’t have to choose between working to climb the career ladder and building a ladder for your kid’s tree- house, because there is plenty of time for both. To do this you will need to clarify two issues: what are your most important priorities, and how do you really allocate your time. Only then can you take time out to plan how you will use your 168 hours. While 168 hours is a lot of time, time is a non-renewable resource to be used very carefully. Readability Light -+--- Serious Insights High --+-- Low Practical High -+--- Low *Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on leadership and strategy and is the author of Strategy that Works.

I can't believe the negative reviews on this book. They are way off. However to give you a fair warning - this books isn't for everyone. If your not open minded, not looking to improve the use of your most valuable resource (time), you're absolutely in love with how you currently spend your time, looking for a easy done for you shortcut with no work or thinking, or you think that you have no control over your life and would rather have others control your time than this book is NOT for you. It's a book for people that want to "own" time rather than be victimized by the passing of it. School is never out for the "pro" so as a small business owner I find myself always working to improve my time management skills. One of the ways I do this is by reading a time management book every 12 months and have been doing this since 1999. Having read a handful of these books I'd recommend this book near the top of the list. It'll either be a great introduction to time management or it very good refresher. Either way it's worth the time to read. It's a very rewarding and eye opening experience to complete the exercises in this book and to reflect on how I could use the ideas to improve my life. The key to this book is to put the time into the exercises in the book and you'll get a huge value back out.

Vanderkam has real insight into time management and isn’t afraid to deliver the hard truths. This book has the ability to affect positive change in your life if you’ll let it.

This book has been a catalyst to filling my 168 hours with the things that really deserve to be there.

Me encantó, es un libro fácil y entretenido de leer en el que Laura pone sobre la mesa la necesidad de revalorar nuestro tiempo como el activo más valioso que tenemos y, por lo tanto, pensar con cuidado cómo lo aprovecharemos. Los ejemplos de las personas entrevistadas son bastante inspiradores y útiles para replantear el uso del tiempo. Solo una observación: por favor, no usen desechables para ahorrarse tiempo y extiendan un cheque a una asociación pro ambiente como en una de las sugerencias que casualmente da, también el cuidado de nuestro planeta es una core competence...

Ich denke immer wieder daran, dass ich wie alle Menschen diese 168 Stunden in der Woche habe, und ich bin ein Fan der Autorin geworden, die übrigens auch zusammen mit Sarah Hart-Unger einen Podcast betreibt, der sehr empfehlenswert ist. Besonders für Frauen sehr ermutigend, erleichternd, befreiend, interessant, inspirierend! Und dass Laura Vanderkam schreiben kann, weil sie viel als Journalistin unterwegs ist, merkt man!

really like how practical the method is! The book is inspiring me to do things differently and feel better about what I do. I think that really is the key... When you feel like what you do is in line and focused on the big picture of what you value you feel happier!!