168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think by Laura Vanderkam (PDF)

Description

It’s an unquestioned truth of modern life: we are starved for time. We tell ourselves we’d like to read more, get to the gym regularly, try new hobbies, and accomplish all kinds of goals. But then we give up because there just aren’t enough hours to do it all. Or if we don’t make excuses, we make sacrifices- taking time out from other things in order to fit it all in. There has to be a better way…and Laura Vanderkam has found one. After interviewing dozens of successful, happy people, she realized that they allocate their time differently than most of us. Instead of letting the daily grind crowd out the important stuff, they start by making sure there’s time for the important stuff. When plans go wrong and they run out of time, only their lesser priorities suffer. Vanderkam shows that with a little examination and prioritizing, you’ll find it is possible to sleep eight hours a night, exercise five days a week, take piano lessons, and write a novel without giving up quality time for work, family, and other things that really matter.

User’s Reviews

Editorial Reviews: Review “Within a few pages, Laura Vanderkam’s crisp, entertaining book convinced me I had time to read it. Then it convinced me I had time to reread War and Peace. In the original Russian. Thank you, Laura, for freeing up my schedule.” -Martha Beck, bestselling author of Steering by Starlight “We so often live our lives day by day. Laura wants us to think about doing it hour by hour. Living this mantra by example, she gets more done in a day than most of us do in a week.” -Seth Godin, author of Linchpin “168 Hours is filled with tips and tricks on how you can be more efficient every day. By being more productive at work and home, you’ll create more free time to focus on the truly fulfilling activities in your life, rather than the simply mundane.” -Laura Stack, author of Find More Time “In 168 Hours, Vanderkam packs mounds of real-world case studies and experience to substantiate her system-and I fully agree. You can improve your mastery of time with this invaluable book.” -Dave Crenshaw, author of Invaluable and founder of Invaluable, Inc. “168 Hours should be an eye-opener for every one of us who leads a busy, hectic life. Reading it made me appreciate how much ‘true’ amount of time I really have and how to use it wisely and optimally to boost productivity, efficiency, and joy.” -Sonja Lyubomirsky, author of The How of Happiness “Laura Vanderkam shows us how to use our only real wealth-our 168 hours a week- to make our lives richer, not busier. That’s a wonderful gift, because it’s what genuine success is all about.” -Geoff Colvin, author of Talent Is Overrated “Laura Vanderkam’s fluid style and perceptive eye are just the right tools to help create the life of your intentions. 168 Hours is the antidote to ‘living for the weekend.'” -Marc and Amy Vachon, authors of Equally Shared Parenting “This book is a reality check that leads any reader to say, ‘I do have time for what is important to me.’ Full of real life examples, Laura Vanderkam teaches how to pack what matters most into both your work and home life. A must read if you are looking for life-changing strategies to make your next minute, hour or 168 Hours more meaningful.” -Jones Loflin and Todd Musig, Co-authors of Juggling Elephants “We predict that 168 Hours will fly off the shelves and into the hands of anyone who has ever uttered the words: ‘I’m SO busy!’ or ‘If only I had more time!’ Vanderkam’s approach is incredibly powerful and resonant given the average American watches 4 hours of television. A day!” -Cali Ressler and Jody Thompson, Co-Creators of Results-Only Work Environment (ROWE) and Co-Authors of Why Work Sucks and How to Fix It About the Author Laura Vanderkam is the author of Grindhopping: Build a Rewarding Career Without Paying Your Dues.

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐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.

⭐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 -+— SeriousInsights High –+– LowPractical High -+— Low*Ian Mann of Gateways consults internationally on leadership and strategy and is the author of Strategy that Works.

⭐I’m a fan of Vanderkam’s work and I do enjoy her philosophy that instead of thinking we don’t have time to do the things we want, we should instead just prioritise our time better. However, I think the specific guidance she offers in this book (which makes up the bulk) is aimed at a particular audience: professional two-parent households with money. A lot of her advice is on prioritising spending time with children over less important tasks, which I have no problem with as this is an issue I imagine many family’s face. I was, however, surprised by the entire chapter dedicated to saving time on common household tasks (like cooking and cleaning) by outsourcing them and having someone else do it for you. This is not a reality for many people, family or not, and is not a good recommendation for saving time. Anyone can just say “I’ll pay for someone else to do it” without taking the time to read this book. To Vanderkam’s credit, she does say that family’s will be the primary focus of the book, but this chapter took me by surprise and I was really disappointed by such a reductionist suggestion.Overall, I did like that this was more than just a book on how to save time and instead offered some suggestions on WHY you might want to. I do think it’s not worth the purchase if you’re single or a one-person household as there aren’t many good tips here. If you want to see the main points of Vanderkam’s philosophy, just watch her TED Talk instead.

⭐Some good advice but a lot of the book is based on numbers that don’t always add up.For example, she rarely mentions the time spent commuting to work. Yet, for most people in large cities, it takes up at least 2 hours a day and this can hardly be thought of as “personal time” (yes, you can read a book but doing any kind of thinking is difficult + you won’t be able to read 100% of the time, due to transfers, being packed like sardines on a train, unbearable heat on a train or platform, unbearable cold waiting for a bus outside etc).In a similar manner, she rarely mentions the half hour or hour lunch break. In most companies, workers have few options and find themselves eating at their desk or queueing at a packed sandwich shop. Again, this isn’t personal time.Therefore, the reality for most people who work 8 hours a day in the office is that it takes up 11 hours of their time, leaving them with far less time for them to use freely than the author reckons someone working 40 hours a week has. She regularly dismisses those who claim we need more work/life balance and accuses them of misleading people, and while I completely agree that a lot of time spent at “work” is wasted and not really work, I feel that she misunderstands the situation for most office workers in large cities (the environment I know). Yes, they have free time, probably more than they think they have (her argument), but not quite as much time for them to shape that she says they have.Another example of dubious maths is the example of Berkeley Tandem. The author says that the owner increased her working hours from 20 to 30 hours a week, meaning a 50% increase, and the business revenue jumped by 30%. This in the chapter about working up to the point of diminishing returns. Now, if the original revenue wasn’t enough for the business owner to live on then it makes sense to work 50% more to boost it by 30%, but if it was a revenue she could live on, then it doesn’t seem very efficient to me to work 50% more to earn only 30% more (seems like the point of diminishing returns has indeed been reached!).

⭐This is one of those books about one single concept. It’s an interesting concept, but without more research or more ideas to back it up, it should have been an article or blog post instead of several hundred pages. I cringed a bit when the author used ADD as a joke for teenagers who have different hobbies (really, do you think that’s ADD, or funny at all?) And also, how many times could you put in the same tip to get more time for prayer and church? Seriously, who are your readers that they need 20 different examples of that? Can’t remember a single example that’s about someone who isn’t a parent with young kids (except the author’s own brother), so maybe it should have been clear on the cover that unless you are a church-goer with toddlers and a hefty television habit, this book isn’t going to be for you.

⭐Great breakdown, reassurance and actionable ideas around why you feel “busy” and how to properly leverage the time you have. Some great takeaways and an easy reading style that led me to finish it in a couple of days. Would recommend.

⭐This book has lots of encouragement and good ideas to help you get a grip on your life. I read a lot of books and i can see that this is going to be one which I keep and return to often. it is well written, not shallow, and not too American! Recommended.

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