Laura Vanderkam is the author of several time management and productivity books, including the new Tranquility by Tuesday: 9 Ways to Calm the Chaos and Make Time for What Matters, along with Juliet’s School of Possibilities, Off the Clock, I Know How She Does It, What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast, and 168 Hours. Her work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and Fortune. Beyond being a successful author, Laura is also the host of the podcast Before Breakfast, as well as the co-host of Best of Both Worlds with Sarah Hart-Unger.
Whether you’re following an overly strict schedule or absolutely no schedule at all, there is one common experience: YEARS go by and you are left with very few (if any) memorable, meaningful moments. In order to “survive” our busy schedules, it seems that we get stuck in a time loop of tasks, interspersed with eating (poorly) and sleeping (not enough). Then we repeat – for decades. But as you’ll learn in my conversation with Laura, there are simple ways we can structure our lives so that we don’t have to choose between reaching our goals and living a present, purposeful life.
If you’re ready to stop letting life pass you by with your head down assessing to-do lists, this conversation is a must-listen. Laura shares simple ways in which we can use time tracking and habit formation not only to “get more done” but to make sure we aren’t missing our lives as we strive to reach our goals. I personally found Laura’s advice game changing and can’t wait for you to hear our conversation.
Laura Vanderkam is the author of several time management and productivity books, including the new Tranquility by Tuesday: 9 Ways to Calm the Chaos and Make Time for What Matters, along with Juliet’s School of Possibilities, Off the Clock, I Know How She Does It, What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast, and 168 Hours. Her work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company, and Fortune. She is the host of the podcast Before Breakfast and the co-host, with Sarah Hart-Unger, of the podcast Best of Both Worlds. She lives outside Philadelphia with her husband and five children, and blogs at LauraVanderkam.com.
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Zack Arnold: I'm here today with Laura Vanderkam, who's the author of Tranquillity by Tuesday: Nine Ways to Calm the Chaos and Make Time for What Matters. You're also the host of the Before Breakfast podcast, you're also the co host of the Best of Both Worlds podcast, which is actually a topic that I want to dive into a lot deeper today, how it is that we can make the most of both work and life. But before we dive in too deeply, I just want to thank you so much, given your time management experts doing the rounds, the fact that you said, you and your audience get 90 minutes of me immensely grateful. So I can't thank you enough for being here today.
Laura Vanderkam: Well, thank you so much for having me on, I really appreciate it.
Zack Arnold: So you and I have not connected before my audience knows all this, but you don't. But I pride myself as somebody that's pretty, pretty good at time management. And I actually know teach time management and anybody that's in the creative world of Hollywood says I kind of need to get my shit together and better manage my time, I've kind of by de facto become the guy. Then I started reading your book. And I read the following sentence. Since April of 2015, I have recorded how I have spent every half hour of my life. And I immediately realized there's a whole nother level to this game that I haven't even been introduced to yet and oh my god, do I have a lot to learn. So rather than talking about your origin story in your life, and how you became an author, how did you become somebody that has recorded every half hour of your life for the last seven and a half years?
Laura Vanderkam: So I had been having lots of other people track their time for me for a week, whenever somebody says, you know, I want to spend my time better and asks, what's the first thing they should do I suggest they do this, that they track their time for a week. For, you know, mostly it's just about gathering data. Like if people want to change how they spend their time, you want to know where the time is going now, because you don't know where the time is going. Now, how do you know if you're changing the right thing, mean maybe something you thought was a problem isn't maybe something you haven't even considered taking FAR more time than you might have imagined. So we want to make sure we are working from good data. Really, the best way to get that data is to track our time for a week because we live our lives in weeks, which I'm sure we'll talk about at some point in the podcast. But a week is kind of the unit of our lives that repeats most often. So I tell people track your time for a week. And I had done this for a few weeks here and there over the years because Fair's fair, right? If I'm having people track their time for me, I should track my time as well. So I can you know, report on the process and see, you know, if there are points that they need troubleshooting on how to do that. But at some point, I'm like, Whoa, you know, I'm curious, what if I kept going with this. And so I decided in April of 2015, I just happened to be, you know, doing another time tracking thing, like, I'll just, I'll just keep recording it. And my original goal had been to do it for a year, because I was pretty sure that I could write about it for somewhere. And I was like what happens when you track your time for a year, and I did wind up writing about it and got some great opportunities coming out of that. But it also just wasn't that hard. It turned out it was not hard at all, the way I do the time tracking, I have a weekly spreadsheet, it's got the days of the week across the top Monday to Sunday, half hour blocks down the left hand side 5am to 4:30am. So 336 cells representing a 168 hour week, I check in usually about three to four times a day, write down what I've done since the last time I checked in, I use broad categories. My philosophy is that it doesn't have to be exact, it's better to be, you know, continue with it than to worry about the exact nature of every individual minute. So I'll just write things like, you know, hang out with kids, or work or sleep or putter around house or so you know, it doesn't have to be exact. But yeah, I just kept going because it wasn't hard. And I find it not so much about the data now. I mean, it's good to check in from time to time roughly how much am I working? How much am I sleeping. And it's it's a wonderful way to preserve memories, and not so much even just like the highlight. So you know, if you have a scrapbook of pictures or something that's the highlights of your life, people write in their diaries about how they're feeling about highlights of their life or lowlights or things like this. This is everything. And so I can pull up a random week from like 2017 and look at it. And the memories are still there. Because I'm seeing how a day went and sequence or anything that was out of the ordinary that happened that we can like, oh, yeah, that and it's got this completeness to the memory. That's pretty surprised. So anyway, that's that's what my story of tracking time for seven and a half years now.
Zack Arnold: That's amazing. And it sounds to me like you already kind of alluded to this as kind of a unique way of just journaling. Yeah, right. It's more a mathematical Google sheet format as opposed to your deepest, darkest secrets in a diary with a lock on it. But you're essentially journaling your life right
Laura Vanderkam: I am journaling my life you know every Half hour of it today. It'll be funny. I mean, at some point, if I want to show this to like my, my two youngest children who were babies during the course of the seven and a half years, I was tracking that, you know, like, this is how often mommy was up with you in the middle of the night, you know, I don't, I've got an actual record of it, I ever want to share that
Zack Arnold: What I don't want to do, because I know this is gonna be a 90 minute episode about all of the cell settings and formula because I could geek out on this literally for hours. But the one question I do have, do you have a coded in such a way that it's quantifiable? Meaning I could say, How many hours did you play with your kids between 2016 and 2019.
Laura Vanderkam: No, I liked that I not to do that, because of the journaling function of it that I wanted to be able to describe things a little bit more free freely than than to code everything into unique categories, like this is my life because you know, there might be time with kids like, time with kids and car versus time with kids reading a story versus time with you noticed, there's all sorts of different categories that might occur in the course of my life, that might be time with kids, for instance. So I elected not to do that. If somebody is just tracking for a week, I can see upsides, having it a bit more in terms of, you know, the coding ability to just, you know, figure out the numbers or, you know, then you might want to choose your categories a bit more carefully, because then you can quickly see, you know, how many hours did I sleep, but I would point out that if you're only doing this for yourself, there are only going to be 336 entries on a 30 minute, you know, spreadsheet for 168 hour weeks, so you can add it up yourself to like, you could also just add, and it's not that that intense? Yeah.
Zack Arnold: Well, even though I don't do this, for my time, this is something that I've been building for the last year for my fitness specifically, because I have very specific fitness goals, because I spent the last five years training for and becoming an American Ninja Warrior from having, you know, award winning DadBod in my late 30s. And two kids like I want to make a dramatic lifestyle change. And I've been building out this entire spreadsheet where if you said, how many hours have you spent working specifically on shoulder and neck mobility, I can tell you down to the minute over the last year. So I understand if I'm still having issues, it's because I'm not putting attention somewhere. So what I found is that that process for me helps me identify patterns. Where am I consistent? Where am I not consistent? Oh, I find that I'm not balancing as well. Well, yeah, that's because you did all upper body the last two weeks, and you skipped a lower body. So I'm curious. Number one, what patterns have emerged from this process that have really taught you more about your behavior and who you are and your identity. And number two, I want to talk about this concept of budgeting your time because this is very similar to if you came to a financial management expert, and said, I don't really know where my money's going and I'm in debt, the first thing they'd say is track your spending. And I think that money and time very, very similar the way that you look at it, and the way that I look at it. But first of all, what patterns have you learned about yourself from having done this for so many years?
Laura Vanderkam: Well, one is that I average 7.4 hours of sleep per day. So that was an interesting revelation. More more interesting for the fact that I clearly don't sleep 7.4 hours every single day, it's that over any longer period of time. That is what it comes out to. And I came across this little statistic pretty early in my tracking. Because I started adding things up early. I was like after the first month or two, I was like, Oh, well, let me just see what I'm averaging on sleep. And then you know, I had the first six months. And as I go, let me see what I'm averaging asleep. It was always right around 7.4 hours. And again, kind of weird, because during that first year of tracking, I had a baby, like I had an infant for much of the year, he was three months old when I started tracking. And so my sleep was very disrupted. And yet somehow one way or another over a couple of weeks, I was averaging 7.4 hours per day. I was like, Okay, that's interesting, um, you know, cool. Then I tracked a second year. And it was also right around 7.4 I think was like 7.3 something, you know, is like very, very close. I'm like, Well, that is interesting, it did get you know, and it just keeps coming out. It turns out, my body has a very strong sleep setpoint. And as I've studied this with many other people, I find that something very similar occurs. For many of us, it doesn't mean that any given week might not be higher or lower. It doesn't mean any two, three weeks might not be higher or lower, but over a longer period of time, say two to three months, you're probably going to average out to some number. And so once I knew that number, it became easier to say well, what would happen if I attempt to get that number every single night right and see if I you know what I could control you know, if I could be in bed at a time that would allow me to get that 7.4 hours pretty much every day. So that was that was kind of a curious thing to discover. I I enjoyed that. Do want to hear another one-er
Zack Arnold: yeah, let's let's dig into one more. I just I love getting into the weeds right away.
Laura Vanderkam: Yeah, yeah, uhm working was an interesting one. And I am on the record of telling many, many people that you're probably not Working as many hours as you think you are, and particularly, the more high of a number people put on the number of hours they work, the more likely it is to be inaccurate. We just We live in a very competitive world. So people are tossing around like, oh, yeah, work 80 hour weeks, do you, I don't know, track your time, let's find out. Often they don't. And I'm not saying it's not high, it might be something like 55 to 60 hours. But that's not 80. Right, like and 80 is a different number. And your life and your choices will look different if you think you're working 80 versus if you're working 55. You know, it's just there's hours there that aren't aren't accounted for. Anyway. So I've said this to many, many people over the years, and I thought I worked about 50 hours a week, because I had tracked my time for various weeks over the years. And I was always working about 50 hours a week. And then I realized, once I started tracking time for an entire year, that I was tracking very specific weeks in the past, like it was never a week where I was like, knew I was going to be off for a day and a half doing whatever it is never a week where I you know was going to something else was going to be happening so that it wasn't a complete work week, I was always tracking complete work weeks. But once you track a whole year, you realize, not every weeks like that, like there are days where you're you're off for some reason, you have a lot of things during the workweek that you need to do that are in your personal life, or you know, you take a day off here and there, the long term average is a lot closer to 40. And 40 is a different number than 50. Like here I am writing about this topic speaking about this topic. And I have 10 hours going, you know, over the long haul to somewhere completely different than than what I'm thinking is doing. So, you know, I found it an interesting and an enlightening experience, because it allowed me to then make some more rational choices of how I'm allocating my hours.
Zack Arnold: So it sounds to me like you're obviously very much all in on the idea of awareness is the first step when it comes to just about changing any major habit or establishing a new identity. I always say that you have to start with awareness. So if somebody says, I want to lose weight, well, let's find out how many calories you're putting into your body. And I'm, by the way, not a calorie counting component. But if you want to find out what are your eating habits, I would suggest take a week, or maybe even take two weeks write down everything, you just see what's going in your body. So it develops awareness. And if you want to know how are you spending and going into debt, you need more awareness of how you're spending your money. It's so much more difficult for people to grasp this concept when it comes to time. Why do we have such a difficult time valuing our time, the way that we do our money?
Laura Vanderkam: Well, I think it's because it keeps passing no matter what you do. You know, no matter what you do, you could lock yourself in a closet, and the next 168 hours will still happen. And eventually you will be on the other side of the next 168 hours and they will have been filled with something whether you made a you know active decision about it or not. And because of that fact, it is a lot harder, sort of get our hands around it on some level for food to go into your mouth, it has to go in, right like you have to you have to put it in there, right. And maybe it's a little lesser degree with money because we have so many things on like automatic pay now or whatever but but still like there's, there's an amount of you know, that it did have to leave your control at some point. And there's no set amount that always has to go out one way or the other. Like, even if you were living in a box on the street, you know, you still have 168 hours in a week, like it doesn't matter like that everything is still happening, you're still having those hours go whether you want them to or not. And it's not quite the same with food or money even though we're still talking resources that might we might wish to optimize or track or whatever else like that. But because of that, I think there's often a lot to be gained by doing it. You know, sometimes, you know, most people aren't like completely unaware of how much money they make. I mean, you you have a rough idea, right? But we can be totally clueless on time. And people don't even know that there are 168 hours in a week. Like we say 24/7 The number of people who have actually multiplied that through is smaller than the number of said 24/7 a, you know, we just we don't know, because it keeps going. So we just don't know.
Zack Arnold: Thanks to modern technology, I would venture to guess some people don't even know how to multiply 24 by seven and that's our calculators. A different topic of conversation.
Laura Vanderkam: Like, no, I'm not gonna have assistants to do this math problem.
Zack Arnold: But yeah, so I think that there's a real lack of awareness even though it seems so obvious to me that yeah, the time is passing. I always talk about time as the universal equalizer. People talk about this everywhere, right? You hear it all the time. Bill Gates has the same 24 hours he clearly has a lot more resources as far as team as far as money everything else, but in some way, shape or form. He has to fit the way he lives his life within the same box that we do. Same with Elon Musk or any of the you know, the most, you know, fortunate or or richer, whatever it is that you want to say, we still all have that great equally equalizer of time. But for some reason, we still assign more value, at least in my mind to money than we do to time. But I find that the older you get, and the more you become really connected with your mortality, then that's where that balance really starts to shift. And you're like, Oh, well, I'm not getting the time back, I can always earn more money, I'm never going to earn more time.
Laura Vanderkam: Ya know, and I think it behooves a lot of us to start thinking about that, perhaps younger, then then we do, I think, you know, there may be certain things you have to do for your professional work or whatever. I'm not saying that, like, you know, if you're assigned to come in for an eight hour shift, you'd be like, but I value my time as well. You know, we have things we do. But but people make choices that are, you know, that do definitely overvalue for instance, money versus time, I really, you know, people take an out of the way plane trip to get to their destination instead of a direct one or, you know, just not thinking about, like running these errands, because you don't want to pay a $5 delivery fee, but it eats up three hours of your Saturday or something. Yeah, there's just all sorts of things. We do like that.
Zack Arnold: Yeah. And it just, it still confounds me. And it's kind of one of the things that I continue to, to workshop and mastermind and try to solve is Why is it so difficult to get people to understand the value of their time and make these choices based on money or other people's needs versus the one thing that I want to protect as my time, right. And that's something that I want to get into a lot deeper. Whenever I have the opportunity to talk to somebody at your level at any subject matter whatsoever. I see this as an opportunity to mastermind life's bigger problems. So what we could do is we could talk the entire session about you have nine rules in your book. Let's go through them one by one bullet point by bullet point. What are your favorites? I'm guessing you've had that conversation a time or two? Have you not attempt a feud? Yes. So here's what I want to try instead. What I would love if in five minutes or less, here are the nine rules. You want to learn more about them and you want to go deeper. You've got a book by the way, I highly recommend it to everybody that is listening or watching. I'm going to sound like a productivity nerd page turner, like this was on the same shelf as Oliver Berkman. Right? So the problem that I have with writers like you, my complaint is that I have more notes and dog years and highlights, then I don't, which means that that defeats the whole purpose of doing it. Because every page, I'm like, This is amazing. This is amazing. Yes, I have to do this makes it so much more difficult, right. But what I don't want to do is summarize your book, because that's the easy conversation. I love to summarize it in a few minutes to give people a sense of what the strategies are, then I want to workshop the bigger problems that come with productivity and time management. So in a few minutes, if somebody just wanted the elevator pitch, what's your book about and what are your rules.
Laura Vanderkam: So Tranquillity by Tuesday is about nine ways to calm the chaos and make time for what matters. I had noticed over the years, I've had 1000s of people track their time for me, as we talked about before, many asked me for time management advice, and I realized I was often saying the same thing, right that I was giving people advice that fell in one of certain categories. So I decided to hone this down to nine rules that I think are broadly applicable, and will help most people make more time for what matters spend less time on what doesn't feel better about their lives in general. So I have these nine rules. But because I write Self Help for busy people, I didn't want to just say, hey, here's nine rules that Laura likes. You know, Terry, do what you want with them. I wanted to try them out. So I recruited 150 Busy people to try out these rules over nine weeks. Each week they would learn a new rule, they would answer questions about how they plan to implement it. They would answer questions a week later about how the rule was, you know, how it played out in their lives. If it worked. If it didn't, the challenges they faced, how they overcame those challenges. I did this for nine weeks, measured people on various dimensions over the course of the nine weeks to see how satisfied they were with a time I am happy to report that after nine weeks, people's overall levels of time satisfaction on my scale I developed I rose 16%. So that's exciting from the beginning to the end a highly statistically significant result with that many people but you know just to give a real quick run through the rules. I'll just go ahead and recite them and we can dive into any that you wish to rule number one, they found a three categories I mean, first, foundational habits are feeling better about our lives. Second category making more time for what matters and the last category is wasting less time on things that don't. Rule number one, give yourself a bedtime. So choosing a time to go to bed most nights unless you have a really good reason not to rule number two, plan on Fridays, which means to have a designated weekly planning time. I choose Friday for reasons I described in the book, you might want to check that out. But some time where you look forward to the next 168 hours and get a grip on what is important to you and what is happening, and how you can make it through those next 668 hours making progress on your goals. Third strategy, move by 3pm Do some sort of physical activity, just 10 minutes or so in the first half of every day, it's kind of a magic reset button on our days to give ourselves more energy, more focus. Rule number four, three times a week is a habit. Things don't have to happen daily, in order to count in our lives, and aiming for doing things a few times a week is often quite doable. And when things are doable, we do them. Rule number five, is to create a backup slot. This is about building more open space into our lives generally, so that we have space for when emergencies happen, or when opportunities arise. Because I think true time management masters don't make a perfect schedule, they make a resilient schedule that allows them to keep making progress on their goals. Rule number six, one big adventure, one little adventure. This is about changing up the rhythms of daily life so we can keep our routines but we do something just a little bit out of the ordinary twice a week in order to make time more memorable and more fun. Rule number seven is to take one night for you. So one night a week, do something that does not work. That is not family responsibilities, but as you enjoyable just for you intrinsically, and it can change the entire experience of time. Rule number eight batch the little things designate a time for all those non urgent, not important matters that can clutter up our calendars. Because by doing that you leave open space and the rest of the time for deeper work or enjoyment of life in general. And finally, rule number nine is effortful before effortless. So when a spot of leisure time opens up, do just a few minutes of something requiring a little bit more active engagement like reading hobbies, connecting with friends, before you switch over to the passive leisure of screentime. If you do this, you will find yourself far more satisfied with your leisure time and start to feel like you even have more of it because it becomes more memorable.
Zack Arnold: For anybody that's listening or watching this is how it works with a professional. Because if I if you stepped away for five minutes, and you'd hit the spacebar and hit a play button, talk about a succinct pitch that I can tell you have given over and over that is so clear, so well designed, but it doesn't feel like it's rote, or verbatim when you are reading off an index card. That was a really impressive summarization of a lot of really big concepts. I can tell you, I've done it a couple of times before, but that was really, really impressive and very useful.
Laura Vanderkam: Oh, thank you. I'm glad. So that was about five minutes to I was kind of I
Zack Arnold: It probably was you're gonna have to check your spreadsheet afterward.
Laura Vanderkam: I have a weird sense for it sometimes.
Zack Arnold: And the reason that I wanted to ask it in that sense is because I knew that you'd be able to knock that out of the park. So we can say, Great. We've talked about the nine things in your book, people can read the book, the book is amazing. As somebody who's taught time management for years, and I'm obsessed with learning everything I can about it. Oftentimes I read books and like, Yeah, I'm kind of already doing most of this stuff. And you're just saying the same thing in different ways. I have a giant list of things that I want to change and improve about the way that I manage my time based on these nine steps. But now what I want to do is I really want to dig into the weeds and talk a bigger picture about time management work life balance and life itself. I recently had a podcast conversation with Ralph maggio, who's the star of one of the shows that I work on and talks a lot about balance. And there's a phrase that he uses that I'm basically going to blatantly steal. He uses it all the time. And I know use it. He says I like to work in the pastels. And here's what that means. Your nine rules, those are the primary colors. Those are the here are the obvious things to start with. What I really loved about your book, is that for a lot of books, that's it. Here are the nine rules, here's step by step, do these things and you'll get improvements. The best part of your book is in the pastels, where you ask the question, what's going to stop you from making this happen? And here are all the different mindsets and the limiting beliefs and the excuses that people use. And it was in how do I solve the problem of not wanting to do this? That, to me is where the magic is of your book. And that's what I absolutely loved. And I I'm hoping that people really appreciate that. And I'm assuming that was conscious. But I'm guessing a lot of people don't realize how much effort goes into being able to write that way and do that so succinctly.
Laura Vanderkam: Yeah, well, what that came out of is because I tried this, these rules on the 150 people, right, and, you know, I had some concern that when I was asking them these questions, they'd give short answers, like, you know, let me get to the end of the survey. I told Laura and I do it and you know, I, I made small donations to nonprofits that people could choose as an incentive to keep them going with the survey, but you know, they could have just filled out one word, but I think a lot of people really took it too. I heard as they were thinking about these things. And you know, I asked them questions like, What challenges do you think you will face as you try this rule? And what do you think you're going to do when you face that challenge? And that that thought process, you know, had people going through and figuring out what life was actually going to look like over the course of the next week, and how this rule practically would play out. And then a week later, when I asked the question, How did it go? What challenges did you face? What effects did you see in your life by doing this rule? Did you overcome those challenges? Did you need to modify the rule? How likely are you continued, you know, to continue using it. And people gave long observations, they told stories from their lives, they gave examples of things they were doing challenges that arose in the course of attempting to do these various rules. And so some of the book felt almost like it was writing itself. Because it wasn't that I needed to track down people who had ever tried this and say, Okay, tell me your story. And I'll try to put that in the book. I was choosing from hundreds of answers for every single rule about what could go wrong, what you could do if something goes wrong, what you might not anticipate going wrong, but could write out all these things. And because of that, I think it gave the book, a practicality to it that's really rooted in daily experience of life, that it's not just out in the abstract. This is how this rule might possibly work. It's like, no, no, this is what happened when real people tried it out. And this is what they saw,
Zack Arnold: ya know, when I'm working with my students, and this goes back to what you said about how somebody that's really good at time management, they don't build a schedule, they build a resilient schedule, I can show someone a screenshot of my 24/7, ideal weekly calendar. This is an exercise I constantly do, where essentially, if I have a budget for my 168 hours, how am I using every hour of it not? How did I use it? It's how in the ideal world, where am I priorities? Can you see my priorities and my values on my calendar, and I can show you here's how to create a calendar event. Here's the right click button to give it a color on it. And everybody will show it to me. And then I'll ask great, what's going to stop you from actually doing this? The floodgates open, right? And they realize, Oh, my God, this is way harder than I thought. It's like, yeah, no, shit, it's hard because you actually have to practice what you preach. So you can build it, but can you actually follow through with it? And that's where I think that so many of your strategies are valuable, because anybody can do it. It's being able to resiliently stick to it, facing all the crap that is thrown at us every single day as we try to manage your time.
Laura Vanderkam: Yeah, and I've heard people say this all the time. It's like, well, I meant to do X and something came up. It's like, okay, well, something always comes up. I mean, I sometimes I wish I lived in other people's worlds where nothing ever would come up, right? It was we're planning our lives, that there won't be traffic, there won't be bad weather, everyone's going to do what they said they would do. Nobody gets sick, like, nothing happens that you didn't expect to have happen. And then that's fine. I mean, if it does great for you, I'm thrilled for you. But my personal experience is that stuff always comes up. Things don't go as planned. That doesn't mean there's a problem with planning. I think planning is essential. But we need to be able to pivot, we need to be able to find space for things. We need to have backup plans absorbed the reality of things not going as you might have initially pictured them going. But when we do that, when we do those things, it becomes quite possible to still make progress on your goals, even when life doesn't go as planned. And there are some pretty amazing examples I've seen over the years of people who who do this just because they build in enough open space to absorb things that go wrong and talking about people who have like, huge deadlines that they meet, despite like being in the hospital. And it's not that anyone would fault them for not meeting it in the hospital. It's just that they got it done ahead of time. So it's not like there was any, you know, if something happened in the last week, it actually wasn't a problem. I mean, it was for them personally. But it didn't slow the project it anyway because they had built in enough space for something to go wrong. You don't know what will go wrong. But you know that something inevitably will. And so by making sure most things happen well ahead of schedule that there are buffers built in, then you can absorb almost anything that goes wrong and still keep the project on track.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, I agree with all of that. And as I'm sure you've heard a million and a half times, well life got in the way, and life can get in the way and derail your afternoon maybe life can get in the way and derail your entire week. If life getting in the way Have derailing a month or a year, that's more a lack of planning than life really getting in the way because you're not developing resilient systems to be able to to manage and triage. And I mean, everybody looks at a calendar and they think, Well, this is exactly what it needs to be. It's you're playing jazz all day, every day, I'll put together like my weekly review, I've shared screenshots of the entire weekly review with all the blocks and the different color codes. And I'm like, wow, how do you stick to that? I'm like, Are you kidding? By Friday, it looks completely different. I still accomplished all the things that I wanted to accomplish. But I'm moving things around and playing calendar Tetris constantly. But like you said, I built in some of the white space, and I made sure that I have backup plans and whatever it might be. But life can get in the way once in a while. But if it's just consistently getting in the way, to me, it's just partially like you said, it's just it's a lack of planning and not having that resilient schedule.
Laura Vanderkam: So and I do want to be clear here that some people's lives are legitimately more difficult than other people's, absolutely stay on track with things and, you know, it's, it's an interesting thing, to me, if people are writing about productivity and such, and have very few obligations to the rest of humanity. You know, it's, I have a little, sometimes a little worried about the things that people put out there. If they have never, for instance, had to deal with a sick child or other relative, right, if they've never dealt with a huge team where things can go wrong with them, you know, the life is there's a little bit more layers of it for some people who have more responsibilities versus others. That said, I think, even if we do have a great many responsibilities, we can take that into account, as we are building our schedules and figuring things out. And when you think about what can go wrong, and you make plans to account for what can go wrong, you often can still have things happen, no matter what comes up.
Zack Arnold: So I'm glad you brought up this idea of their levels of difficulty. Because I think that yes, we want to acknowledge that everybody's circumstances are different. And I've been waiting for the spoiler for a little bit later in the episode for those that didn't know. But listening so far, knowing you're tracking 168 hours a week, you're a successful author with multiple books, you have multiple podcasts. I mean, that's all well and good. And you've got a team. But I mean, clearly, you must not have a family if you're able to accomplish all these things, right. So well, what's the spoiler alert that I'm going after? A real wake up call here?
Laura Vanderkam: I did talk about having babies in the course of the time tracking, but I have five kids.
Zack Arnold: Yeah. So to me, it wasn't that you have kids, it's that you have five children, and you're still managing all this and managing at a high level.
Laura Vanderkam: Yeah, they range in age from, you know, teenager to toddler. So we're really getting all all the experiences at once, you know, the teenage stuff, the toddler stuff, and everything in between. It's great. Yeah, it's a it's a active household, lot of moving parts, juggling a great many things. But you know, you come up with systems, you make sure that people get where they're going most of the time.
Zack Arnold: So the reason that I wanted to bring that up there, there's a multitude of them. But that is one of the excuses or the obstacles that I hear from my industry so often, especially from the women in my industry, it's a really, really big emotional struggle that they have is that I have to choose between a successful career and a family. And in Hollywood, it's a legitimate concern, because like you said, there's a difference between I'm working 40 or 50 hours versus I am at work. And a lot of people in this industry, maybe they're not working all that time, and they can be more effective, but they're at work for 80 hours a week, it's hard to balance both. And the nut that I've really been trying to crack. And this is really kind of the foundation of this entire conversation. This is a continuation of something that I talked about with Mike Vardy recently. And I know that you've talked to Mike as well, if that I don't think that in today's day and age with the way that there is such a blurred line, such a gray line between work and life. I don't think work life balance is the right term for what it is that we're striving for going forwards. And there's one line in your book that really stood out to me that actually is just one of those pieces of feedback from one of your surveys. And I think this to me, so clearly encapsulates one of the biggest struggles that all of us have right now. And the line is very simple. And it's as follows. I'm thinking about kids stuff while at work, and work stuff while with the kids. And I debt to me if you're with your kids, and you're at work from the outside that looks like work life balance, but it's not work life presents. So how do you feel about this idea that everybody wants to achieve work life balance? Do you think that that's actually what we can be working towards? And is it even possible?
Laura Vanderkam: Well, I don't like the phrase work life balance for a lot of reasons. I mean, I use it because that's what people search for.
Zack Arnold: I feel exactly the same way that's what they're looking for, but it isn't what they're looking for.
Laura Vanderkam: And so you know, you kind of have to use the term because otherwise people like, well, I don't know what you're talking about if you use some cutesy other phrase, like, it's just your own personal metaphor for whatever it is. But the key problem with the work life balance metaphor, is a balance, it puts them on opposite sides of the scale. And for one to come up, the other has to go down. Right? And so the only solution there, if people like I need work life balance is you have to work less. I mean, nobody's ever saying that, because they, you know, like, well, actually, I need less time with my family, I need to work more like that's not usually what people are bringing this up from. So it you know, the only solution that implies when they're on opposite sides of the scale is that for life to have more space, work has to have less space. Maybe that's true. I'm sure it's true for some folks. But just to throw out there and a curious statistic over all of the population in terms of time use, there's historical time use data. Nobody argues with the factual reality that women are working more hours for pay now than they did in 1965. Okay, that's, that's a known statistic, right? Curiously enough, women also spend more time interacting with their children now than in 1965. How is that even possible, right? But it turns out that women and people in general, do more than just work and spend time with kids, right? There's many other things we can do. There's housework, for instance, which turned out to be a gigantic change, that women in general spend a lot less time on housework than they did in 1965. And so you know, the time was available for work to go up with kids to, you know, actually rise a little, you know, not, not fall, you know, there's leisure time, in various forms that could that can change, right, if somebody could decide to work more hours and watch less TV. And in fact, when I did a time diary project a couple years ago, for my book, I know how she does it. I had, I tend to read data from 1001 days in the lives of women who had six figure jobs and also had kids at home. So women with big careers, you know, the kind people like, I don't know how she does, or why don't you know, that's big, demanding jobs, kids, track your time, I looked at the data, they were working more than 40 hours a week, because it's probably not surprising, but it wasn't that much more it was it was, you know, like 44 hours a week or something like that, spending quite a bit of time with their kids, what they weren't doing much of as watching television. And far less than the average person less even than the average woman with a full time job less than the average woman with kids and a full time job. And I think what was going on, is that people would work during the day, come home at a reasonable time hanging out with their families, and they'd often do some work at night after their kids went to bed. And that's how they were logging the extra hours. But that time is totally just traded off for television. Right? That that's what people would do at that time. So what have you put the choice that way? It's like, okay, good. I have a huge career and a family, you just can't watch much TV. But that's sort of a different work life balance question than people thinking that it's the harsh trade off, like every hour with work is taken away from your kids, right? Like it just, we don't look at the whole of 168 hours. So we don't see what the actual trade offs often are.
Zack Arnold: So what's the term then, if it's if we know that the search term for if we want to maximize for SEO, its work life balance, but you and I know having done this for a long time, you're doing it at a much higher level than me a much deeper level working with more people, you know that work life balance isn't the answer. What is it that we're actually helping people work towards when they think it's work life balance? How do we define it?
Laura Vanderkam: So at the end of best of both worlds podcast every week, we have a walk offline this you know, we'll be back next week with more on making work and life fit together. Mm hmm. And I think that is probably a better image for it that we've got lots of puzzle pieces, you know, a mosaic if that's what you want to look at it. You talked about a calendar, Tetris and if that's how you want to think of it, but lots of different pieces and they fit in in different places. And so the people who were doing work at night after their young kids went to bed, they had some of their puzzle pieces were up there on there. If you're thinking of the spreadsheet with 168 hours, you know, they were putting in some of the work at a different time. That was not work. Some people would do early morning work. They might do a shift on the weekend. Maybe while their partner was with the kids they might trade off each people got extra time for leisure or for work, whatever it is they wanted to do. But then they would also do personal things during work hours, sometimes I definitely saw on people's logs, you know that flexibility was far more important than actual hours worked. You know, there were people who would come into work at like 10 o'clock Sunday, because they'd gone and done have breakfast at their kids preschool. And you know, they just do an extra hour or two of work at night, or, you know, they do an hour or two of work on the weekend. And so they weren't having to make necessarily the harsh trade offs that people often think that that success would require.
Zack Arnold: I love the idea of it being about making life and work fit together. Because that just for me being such a spatial and visual person, like you said, you you pulled it right out of their calendar, Tetris is like, it's literally the the process that I teach my students is visualize your time as colored blocks, because all the people not all but many of the people in my industry that are highly creative. We're also visual learners and spatial reasoners. And they love the idea of visualizing time. So it's not some esoteric thing that I can't even really feel I know, it's passing, I can't hit the stop button. But I can't really visualize it boom, colored blocks on the calendar they get. Because as an editor, we work all day long with colored blocks, but we use those colored blocks to create emotions, time also creates very specific emotions. So I love this idea of making these two things fit together. Because that just fits so perfectly into it doesn't have to be more of one equals less of the other. That's my biggest problem with it, is that, oh, if I need more time with the family, I must lose time with work. But we're not really focused so much on the presence of it. Right? Is that this idea of well, I'm at work, I'm thinking about the kids. As soon as I'm at home with the kids, I'm thinking about work like, that may be balanced on the spreadsheet. But is it really balanced?
Laura Vanderkam: Yeah, I mean, there's different things with with mental. You know, and I think that's a different matter to that people also have to develop certain strategies and habits that allow them to focus on what they're doing at any given moment. And so I totally get it that, you know, if you've got something big hanging over your head at work, it can be hard to focus at home. And you know, if you've got a big thing going on at home, that can, you know, you're going to start thinking about it during the day at work as well. What you do want to be careful about is controlling what you can control. And that's, that was one of the reasons behind, you know, circle back to Tranquility by Tuesday, rule number eight, of batching. The little things as promised, we can distract ourselves from the deep work we're trying to do. If we're like, Well, I'm going to fill out these three permission forms and like refill the lunch, you know, account for the kid and sign them up for gymnastics and whatever else. And it's not that that work doesn't have to happen, it does. But you don't want to have it taking up the time that you have designated for deeper work. And so I have people glio create a little batching window where they do all those little mental load things. But you can do that at home, too, I would recommend like if you know you're going to have to work after hours, you know, and you've chosen to do that, you're better off batching it rather than being on and off email the entire evening, while you're trying to hang out with your family say okay, no, I'm gonna be off. And let's say 530 to 730 or 538, whatever it is, yeah, this time, I'm going to be off. And then after that, I'm going to batch all the work stuff that I wanted to get to. And so keeping it from just bleeding into each other constantly. So you're constantly test switching.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I always know that it's at the end of any given day, if I feel more rundown or more exhausted and more scattered, or specifically with me more anxious, I can just look at my calendar and realize I didn't stick to my time blocks. And I was checking on the email every five or 10 minutes. And I spent a little bit of time just kind of randomly distracting myself going to social media, as opposed to being present with those things and saying, You know what, it's fine if I want to scroll social media for half an hour, but there's a purpose behind it, as opposed to it being a distraction. So batching is something that I find that when I do it works like magic, when I don't do it, I literally feel it, it becomes an emotional response of anxiety, like my brain just can't handle bouncing back and forth. And it's not because I'm broken. It's because that's the way that we're wired. Exactly. Yeah. So what I want to get into next is a very common theme that you share throughout your book, which is also one of the most fundamental themes that I share. And I want to dig into this a little bit deeper. So a little background on this, when I originally decided that I wanted to call this program, optimize yourself, it's because I'm surrounded by people that are all about technology. And it's always about how do I optimize my harddrive speed and my internet connection and my workflows and efficiency, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera? Then I realized I fell into a trap. And I've had to crawl my way out of that trap. Because oftentimes, the word optimize is a synonym for perfect. How do I get perfect at this thing? How do I find the latest life hacker bio hack to be perfect at this, cross it off the list and move on to the next thing, which which can very much become a trap. So what I always talk about is that self optimization is not the relentless pursuit of perfection. It's the relentless pursuit of progression. And this is a common theme that you have with multiple areas and rules in your book where the solution is all often don't pursue perfect at the expense of good enough. So with any of those given rules, I found that rather than thinking it's all or nothing, you have really approachable ways to break it into smaller pieces. So talk to me more about this idea of how you approach things in a similar way. And where we can use them to build a more resilient schedule and fit all the pieces together.
Laura Vanderkam: Yeah, this probably plays out in a couple of different roles. I mean, one, like move by 3pm. You know, everybody knows exercise is good for you. But I think many people have in their minds that it needs to be like an hour at the gym. And if it's not that it doesn't count. And I think that's kind of ridiculous, because then many people can't go to the gym for an hour every day. And so then it's not, they're not getting the benefits of physical activity at all, if that's what you think it has to be. But, you know, many of us can get up and walk for 10 minutes, somewhere in the course of our day, and most of us would benefit quite a bit from doing it. And so, so you know, the exercise is what it what you want to do full formal workouts, great, but I'm challenging you to every single day, get up and just move your body for a few minutes, and then get back to whatever you're doing. And it encourages people to start thinking strategically about their schedules, and where they can force and breaks. But you know, recognizing that, you know, whatever idealized idea of exercise you have, doesn't doesn't actually need to be what moving your body entails. I would say also, that rule number four of three times a week as a habit, is all about this idea of not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good. Because there's so many things in life that people would like to do, and would like to have be part of their lives. And then they get discouraged. Because they're not doing it every day. If you think of your life in terms of days, and let's say you want to practice the piano, and you get to the end of the day, and you haven't done it. So you're like I'm horrible. I'm a failure. I'm terrible, you know, I I'm never playing the piano. But you know, if you look back over the last week or two, and you have this in your life, like you have a piano, it's something you occasionally do, often people discover that they aren't doing it like once a week, maybe it just feels like never, because if you think of your lives and days, and six out of seven days, you're not doing it. And so it's hard to focus on the one where you are. But I maintain that many things don't actually have to happen daily in order to count in your lives that if you do it three times a week, it is happening regularly, it can be part of your identity. And three is a very achievable number, if you discover that you are doing this thing once or even twice a week, but you Hey, you already have a couple stamps on your card, you just need to get one or two more, it's not about doing a total lifestyle overhaul. It's just about finding maybe one more slot, two more slots in the course of the entire 168 hours to make it happen. And when you do, then you can celebrate your success. So I mean, you know, this is about different things like practicing a musical instrument, or maybe it's some sort of spiritual discipline that people do or creative work like, you know, writing morning pages, or you know, writing for, you know, 500 words in a novel or something or, you know, it could be full formal workouts, like weightlifting, it could be family meals, it could be reading to children, and all these sorts of things that you think I would like to do more, and then you tell yourself, I'm never doing X, Y, or Z. Never. And not as much as I want or very different stories, not as much as I want is something we can work with. And getting to three times a week is a pretty doable way to work with it.
Zack Arnold: I love this idea. I am a recovering perfectionist, and I needed to read this section more than just about anybody else because I am so guilty of pushing myself to the point of exhaustion because I have to cross off all the red x's. And if I haven't, well, I'm a failure for the week. It's not just about I missed it, we assign an identity to it. I'm a failure, or I'm lazy, or I'm a procrastinator, right. So I totally am on board with this idea of three days a week. And I can tell you, it's going to be a challenge for me. But if I took anything away from your entire book of which I showed you 100 different dog years I took a lot out of your book. If there's one if I had to pick one thing, it's probably I need to start being okay with the three days a week. However, right now I want to play the devil's advocate. Okay, I want to play the part of James clear who has a very specific rule that you never skipped twice. It's all about building the habit. And you can skip it once and that's fine, but you never skip twice. How would you respond to that?
Laura Vanderkam: Well, I think it's interesting because that doesn't even allow for like people doing different things on weekends versus weekdays because if you skip if you do something Monday, Wednesday and Friday, I think many people would think that's a habit. People do things Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, and they call it a daily habit. Right? It's not you're not doing it two days a week that are real days. You're doing it five times a week, not daily. But you know, I would think that most people, people who have full time jobs, they think of themselves as you know, going to work regularly. It's a habit, right? And yet they skipped Saturday and Sunday and it's not the end of the world. So I would say you know I understand the thought behind it like you don't want multiple things to stack up in terms of getting away from doing stuff again and again. But I would argue that many people do, in fact have pretty regular habits that they skip twice in a row because they don't do it on weekends.
Zack Arnold: And for anybody that doesn't have enough context, huge believer and follower in James clear, I teach his book, I have entire modules built around teaching his concepts, and I love it. But this is one that I always stick on. Because I feel like this is feeding my perfectionism is allowing me to, to give myself the permission to be human and fail and skip a few things. And you've now kind of given me the permission to be like, I don't have to work out five or even six days a week, which technically I should be doing something all seven, but I know my body needs a rest. I'm a much bigger subscriber, if you know what I'm done. And if I've made it three times a week, so I think that it's a really, it's really important shift for me. And I know that I have a lot of followers that are also members of the recovering perfectionist club as well. So that to me, was a really, really big one. And I wanted to make sure we talk about always pursuing progress as opposed to trying to pursue perfection. So the next area that I want to go into is something that I am fascinated by that I'm still learning a lot about I'm in the infancy of going to this level of understanding time management, but it's our perception of time. And the older you get, the more you realize that the perception of time that we have is not constant. For me, the first 43 years of my life was a hell of a lot faster than I thought they would. And if I think about how long it took to go from zero to 16, that was four lifetimes. Like, before I could drive to when I could drive, it was like I was never going to be 16. And everyday just never ended. And it was so slow. And between 16 and 43. It happened in like six months. And I love this idea of understanding how it is that we perceive time and you go into this not super deep into like the neuroscience of it. But in the day to day how we can plan activities or ideas or rearrange our calendar to bring more novelty and to give us a better perception of how quickly or slowly slowly our time is passing.
Laura Vanderkam: Yeah, so it turns out that a big chunk of our time perception, it's shaped by how many memories we have of a given unit of time. And one of the things about being younger, is that you tend to be making more memories, because you're doing things for the first time. Right that many people I mean, you mentioned 16, I would extend that I think a lot of people have a ton of memories between the ages of like 16 and 24. Like as a young adulthood, right, and you're getting your first jobs your first loves, you're moving to new cities, you're doing new things, you know everything, it has an excitement to it. That kind of disappears at some point in middle age, where we tend to do the same thing over and over again, it's comfortable. We like it, you know, we choose our routines for a reason. And there is nothing wrong with routines. Routines, make good choices, automatic so yay, yay, routines. We just don't want to be so given to the routine that every day completely looks like the other home years just disappear into these memory sinkholes, where all you are seeing to distinguish time is that children get taller, right? So you see somebody Three years later, you haven't seen the kid in three years like my how you've grown like you find yourself saying that old fogy thing, what we're saying is like it didn't fill the temporal space of three years, like since I saw you last.
So we want to, most of us want to slow time down to a certain degree. And partly that is about putting more memories into time having more things that stand out, and that makes time feel thicker, and richer. And that is where rule number six, one big adventure, one little adventure comes to into like every week, do two things that are out of the ordinary, slightly intense, novel, different, interesting. Something you are not going to immediately forget. And doing this does a cup I mean, it won't exhaust or bankrupt anyway, like two things that are differently if you like to get in your jammies, when you get home from work. Like four out of five nights you can get into your jammies, as soon as you get home. And maybe one night you do something a little bit different for an hour, right? Like that's what we're talking it's not crazy to do something for half a weekend day as a big adventure. But it will change the experience of time because first people start planning in their adventures, right? They need to think through the upcoming week and think well, what will I do? That is different. And that gets you in the habit of looking, you know, planning your time with an eye toward what would I genuinely look forward to. And that is not always the mindset people have when they are planning their lives, but I think that's a good one. So you're thinking about advance insures you might have and thinking about when you could have them. And then most likely, you'll enjoy the experience. Or maybe you won't enjoy it. Maybe it's a little too crazy or adventurous, but at least it'll make a good story afterwards. And then afterwards, you've got a memory. That wasn't a week like all other weeks, that was the week we went mini golfing that was the week we tried the new gelato place. That was the week we went on the hike in the state park. That was the week when we went to the beach, even though it's November and you know, we stood on the cold sand and got the wind in our faces. And that was memorable, right. And, and so these are things that make units of time distinguishable from all other units of time, it forms memories, the more memories we have, the more time seems to slow down.
Zack Arnold: So if we're talking about units of time, this is an area where I'm incredibly, increasingly fascinated by this such that even though I find this a lot of impostor syndrome coming out even saying this to you as a very established author, I'm in the very early stages of myself becoming an author. And one of the areas that I want to dig into is the idea of units of time, because as an editor and a storyteller, for my entire adult and most of my child life, I've been focused on editing and telling other people's stories. And it's all about units of time, right? We have hours, minutes, seconds, and in my world frames, right, I define a second as containing 24 frames. Now a lot of people that now have iPhones and cameras and whatnot. They're like, Oh, what does this 24 FPS thing on my phone mean? Now, you know, the world that I've lived in for decade after decade after decade. And memories is a part of that. But there's another unit of time. And it's one that I'm the most interested in the unit of time has moments. Because a moment is different from a memory is different from a minute or a second or anything else. And I believe that in order for us to live, live more fulfilling lives, we have to create as many meaningful moments as possible. So would you agree or disagree with that? And using some of the strategies that we're talking about? How do we create more definable moments that lead to more fulfillment?
Laura Vanderkam: Yeah, I think, you know, moments are a great way to think about it, I would think that moments has a certain aspect of that mindfulness we were talking about before, that one of the things people encounter when they are tracking their time that's difficult is there's big chunks of completely in amorphous time, but they can't necessarily say what they were doing. They weren't, you know, doing anything that was a discrete task, or an activity or experience. They're just, it was just time that just went somewhere, right? And because, and then they can't remember it. And so it's hard to account for afterwards. And I've had people say things when they're trying to track their time, like, whole hours with no memory, like, was I abducted? Like, what happened? What did that you know? And what it is, is there is no mindful movement in their and workdays are slightly easier to track in the sense that, you know, you've got your nine o'clock meeting your 10 o'clock meeting your 11, that and you know, you can look back on your, you know, where you were, or you have an event that was supposed to happen at that time. And so it's a moment was there, whether you enjoyed it or not, it was a distinct event that you have a memory of, usually disappears within 24 hours, because he didn't care about it. But we have less of that in our personal lives. And I think it would behoove us to have more of that to be like, yes, you know, after put the kids to bed like 930 to 1030 was my puzzle time, or it was the time I was reading this book, or is it time that my partner and I went and had a glass of wine on the porch, or whatever it is, but something that was distinct. That happened that was chosen and experienced as a moment, as opposed to a amorphous time that, you know, eventually you're just done with it.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, and for me, going back to the topic that we talked about earlier, where I decided to give or take about five years ago, I'm going to set an audaciously stupid goal, a stupid goal is transformation from DadBod to American Ninja Warrior, people assume, Oh, it's because you want to get in better shape, and you want to get on TV yadda yadda yadda, right. And for me, it had nothing to do with the end result, the end result was more a culmination of having to make all of these lifestyle changes, such that in the process of making those lifestyle changes and having to learn skills, all of which is very novel, I am creating almost an endless amount of meaningful moments. So it wasn't about here's the goal. And if I don't achieve the goal, I failed. Like you don't think yourself well, when you're the goal isn't you're gonna walk across the stage and you culminate a graduation. It's not about that moment. That's just a representation of all the things that you achieved while you were at school. And I want to set a goal such that it's the culmination of something. But I've developed the skills I built the moments I've made new friends, I built a new network. To me, that's really how to be able to set a goal but then I have to break it down and actually build a plan around it. So I know that goal setting isn't necessarily something that you dig into in your book too much. But I'm sure that somebody that's really into time management and productivity and making sure that our time matters. What is your approach to setting goals?
Laura Vanderkam: Well, so when I set goals, I'm I want to be pretty clear that I'm going to achieve them. So I don't necessarily like to set ones that I have no control over, for instance, it needs to be one that I am excited about, and that I can see a path to doing. And when I have those things, you know, done then that it can, you know, I'm pretty good habit of sticking with them, I'm pretty good track record with it. Just as an example, for the past two years, I've been doing yearly reading projects, which is that I choose some big work or collection of works to read through in just a couple of minutes every day. So in 2021, I read through Warren Piece, at the rate of one chapter a day. So there are 361 chapters in Tolstoy's book, which makes no lends itself very well to reading in a year. And in fact, I did finish on December 27, having read one chapter, every single day, for the year, I read other things, too, but that was, you know, my project to really absorb the book and get through all of it and become more familiar with it. And it was very doable, because, you know, it takes less, you know, takes five to 10 minutes a day. They're very short chapters. So I did that. This past year, my reading challenge has been to read through all the works of Shakespeare. And he wrote a lot of plays, wrote a lot of poems. But in my illustrated Shakespeare anthology, there are 1024 pages, which means that over the course of a year, 365 year days, you only have to read about three pages a day. So I got you know, I found a calendar online if somebody else who'd done a Shakespeare writing project, and I've read through about three pages a day, every day getting through this. And, you know, we're recording this toward the end of 2022. And I am very close to having read everything that Shakespeare wrote, and the cars there. And what these goals have in common is that they're big. Like, it's a big goal to read through all the works of Shakespeare. But it can be doable in very, very small steps, and spread out over a long enough timeframe. It doesn't inspire a whole lot of resistance. Like if you told me I have to read all the works of Shakespeare in a week, I'd be like, that's not gonna happen. But in 15 minutes a day. Sure, like that, that can be done. And you just keep going. And you get to the end. So that's, that's the kind of goal I look for.
Zack Arnold: Now, what this sounds like, to me, is the behavior very much of somebody that a friend of yours might call an upholder. I know that you're friends with Gretchen Rubin. I am a gigantic fan of Gretchen's, I've had her on the podcast one of my favorite interviews, I share it ad nauseam people like if I feel listened to one episode, listen to one with Gretchen, your entire life is going to make sense in 60 minutes or less. I saw her speak on stage in 2018, and an event and in about 10 minutes, I went from not only understanding I couldn't understand myself couldn't understand the friction of my marriage, all these other things. I'm like, Oh, my God, my entire life makes sense. It's like That's wonderful. It has such an amazing transformation. I mean, it's like one of the first foundational things that I teach all of my students in my program. But what I keep getting stuck on is all the things that you're mentioning as far as how you do this spreadsheet as far as you're going to do one chapter a day. I am not an upholder. And most of the people that I work with are not upholders. So for you, it's a matter of I know that it has 361 chapters. And I think it's I love the fact that you're like, and I was done on December 27. Because that's the 361st day of the year. In my mind, I'm thinking there's going to be half of those days where I'm like, Yeah, I just, I'm not feeling it. And I'm going to make excuses. So whether you want to pick one specifically or you want to talk more general about all of your rules, how would you approach these knowing that somebody is not an upholder, knowing that they're a questioner, and they're going to go through the logic of all this and break it down into pieces and analyze all the reasons it could be different or better, it needs to be customized, or the obliger that says, well, these are my needs, I can't meet my needs, I must meet the needs of others, or the rebel tells me to do all these habits. I'm gonna do it my own way. So how do we approach some of these using the four tendencies?
Laura Vanderkam: Yeah, well, the good news is, I think that the This book will work for for anyone, no matter what tendency you fall in, like if you are a rebel, or a questioner who doesn't like the idea of rules. That's why I didn't put rules on the cover. And it says nine ways to calm the cast. Very smart. Well, that's ways it's just waste. It's suggestions, their ideas you could try out in the iterative process of life design. And if it works for you, awesome. If it doesn't, your life is different from mine. I just, you know, I'm throwing it out there as a suggestion for any questioners. You might follow the 150 people who tried this out, you know that it's not just an idea Laura thought might be cool. It's, here's what happened when 150 People went through it. Here are the questions they raise to write, these are the challenges that they saw in it. This is what they came up with, here's how we could, you know, get around those challenges. And this is why it worked for people, you know, even with life as it is. So I think, you know, seeing other people's experiences might help people get some, you know, evidence that it's not just based on nothing that it that it does, in fact, work. As for, you know, the obligers, among us. I think one of the reasons people were able to stick with this project, when I did it, the 150 people is you are getting an email from Laura every couple of days asking you if you'd done it, right. I mean, like, you know, tell me at the end of the week, you know, if you've done it, you fill out the survey, and then you know, I make a donation to Red Cross or Nature Conservancy, or whatever else that you chose from a list. And so people are okay, I'll stick with it for that, you know, five minutes do this, and they get a donation. And, you know, Laura's emailing me, so I'll probably do it. And if somebody needs something similar reading through this book, I would suggest reading through it with some friends, that all of you read through it at the same time. And you can do the same thing, like you email each other at the start of the week. Here's what we're both focusing on this week, end of the week, email each other. Did you do it? You know, people are waiting to hear from you at the end of the week. So hopefully, they will get a positive answer from you that you did. And then you know, there are those of us who are the upholders who set a new year's resolution and ended on December 27. With with the last step in it. And you know, I'm sure I am a textbook, upholder, I have, I will throw out as a claim to fame that I've actually been an anonymous upholder anecdote in one of Gretchen's works.
Zack Arnold: But the reread trying to figure out which one I was,
Laura Vanderkam: but but, you know, that said, you know, people who find rules helpful if they are explained well and seem to make sense, we'll probably find something that they enjoy about the rubric of, of this book.
Zack Arnold: Yeah. And one of the things that I really appreciated about the book is the fact that you understand that rubric, and you apply it to it. So I was reading the book, once. Once you learn the four tendencies, it's like The Matrix, you can't unsee it. You just every interaction you have every person, you're just you're always trying to figure out where they fit in, and how can I better interact and ask the right questions. And when I'm hiring team members, I won't say what's your tendency, but I'm trying to suss it out and get a sense of it, right. And when I was reading through it, what I really appreciated about the book is you could have just written it as without saying these words, I'm an upholder, here's what I do just do this thing. But you understand that everybody's wired that way. And I feel like you really approached it knowing the rubric was there. So if I am a rebel, if I am a question, or if I am an obliger, here are the other ways to do it. Although you never actually mentioned the four tendencies themselves. I felt like you were kind of writing to them. Was that conscious or subconscious?
Laura Vanderkam: Well, certainly, I mean, I've been very influenced by Gretchen's work, and I think it's great. And I definitely understand that lots of people need external accountability. And lots of people don't, you know, automatically do things when they see it, they want to convince themselves of it. So yeah, of course, you know, it's always a question of what people are going to need to stick with it. And these various tendencies kind of came out in people's answers, right. And in the 150, people who completed the project, many had one or the other that they were, they were more leaning toward one way or the other.
Zack Arnold: There's one further area that I want to dig into that I'm really, really passionate about that, at least in my industry is a vastly underserved group of people. And that's moms, that's moms or caretakers in general, whether it's, you know, single dads, whatever. But the idea of somebody that's a primary caretaker for others, being vastly underserved and underrepresented. And you talk about this idea of somebody that saying that there's no way that I can do all of this or make these changes, because I'm too busy. And you talk about the idea, or the concept of being addicted to being busy, almost work kind of becomes a martyr complex, which very much fits into the obliger tendency. But how is it that we can allow people and give them the permission and give them the tools to say, well, there's no way I could do this, I have to run out for the kids. And that's not or the other thing, clearly is somebody that's a mother of five, you figured out how to make it happen. But how do we better address this idea that I'm addicted to always being busy and doing things?
Laura Vanderkam: Well I definitely think that you know, it, I do not want to anyway, come across as minimizing the concerns of working mothers and particularly in like creative industries in Hollywood. I know that there are all sorts of things that are set up that are, you know, discriminatory against people with caretaking responsibilities. I can't do anything about that. I mean, I can lobby I can write legislators I can, you know, do what I can but i None of us individually can necessarily change the larger world, what we can do is as we're working for change their focus on what we can do personally, which is where a lot of my work comes in. So not saying that there aren't larger social things that need to change. But given that, what can I do existing within this world to make sure that we are enjoying ourselves that we are making progress on our goals, that we aren't feeling like life is a total slog. And so that's where things like, you know, batching little things come in, you know, we can we can talk about why is it that women in particular have such a mental load of all the household responsibilities and Kid related decisions and things like that it takes time, it takes mental energy, that is true, it's probably not fair, how it's divvied up. But whatever amount of the mental load you are carrying, how can you make sure that you still have time for your deeper work for rejuvenating leisure time, and that's where you try to confine it to chunks of time as you can. Same thing with the rule number seven to take one night for you. I think this was the rule that I got the most resistance, the most pushback to, because many of the people who were responding to my survey were caretakers in one shape or form of other people, whether it was you know, elderly relatives, or children or whatever. And they're like, Well, they do their work because they have to earn an income. And then the other time is consumed with the caregiving responsibilities. And the idea that you might create some time that a separate from both of those people just feel like, Oh, I just can't, I can't say, well, let's explore that.
Why can't you? Like, why?
Why couldn't you take one night? out of seven? To do this? Well, you know, aren't you you know, the easiest thing, obviously, if you are co parenting with someone you can trade off, each of you get one of them, people be like, well, by my partner couldn't put all the kids to bed, I'm like, okay, he or she could learn, right? Like, you know, probably over the course of a couple of weeks, you could have a few tutorials, you know, it's not rocket science, you probably figure it out, you know, or, well, if I take a night for myself, I'll come home and the house will be a mess.
Okay. And, like, and it'll be a mess, great. Like, I'm guessing it's a mess. And other times to write or, you know, I could try to take, if I take a night for myself, like work will be an emergency, like, none of my employees can handle this stuff like I'm, well, I'm sorry, you hired such terrible people. Like, let's explore that, you know, why did you do that? What could you do to change that now, like what you know, can do need to change up your your payroll here somehow do you need to train people in different things like, but what all this comes down to? It's it's one of two things, sometimes it is arrogance, that nobody can do the things I do. Right? Without me, the world is going to stop spinning. And the flip side of that is fear. Which is that if other people can do the things that I'm doing, what's the point of me? You know, what is the point of me? And I say, Well, you know, that's, that's a pretty high bar to clear for all of us. I mean, like, somebody can do anything you're doing for the most part, you know, it's just like, the world is gonna go on spinning in all of our absences. Which once you get your head around that idea, like, hey, actually, there's a whole lot I don't have to do.
Or if I do have to do it, maybe I can find somebody else who can do it once or twice. And, you know, even even some really hard situations. I mean, and I certainly don't want to belittle like, I know, people are, you know, caring for special needs kids. And there's a certain level of expertise that's required. And, you know, if you have somebody with very high medical needs, for instance, that you are, you know, a primary caregiver for like, Absolutely, like, I get that.
But you could get hit by a bus, like, you don't want this person, this other person, this other human beings care to be only dependent on you when something could happen to you. Right? Like there has to be a backup just just for the other person safety. And if you can have a backup, if something were to happen to you, that is terrible. Maybe you can come up with a backup system for two hours on a Tuesday night. Right. You know, and so encouraging people to think that way. It's, you know, it's hard. I got a lot of pushback on it, but But I do think it's important.
Zack Arnold: Yeah, well, if there was one sentence that I highlighted double Asterix for different posted notes, the phrase that you already mentioned, what is the point of me, because that just dig so much deeper, deeper than productivity tricks, and oh, I need to move my calendar blocks here and take a Tuesday night or whatever it might be. It really drills to the heart of where I think a lot of the challenges are especially with those that are obligers, that are really moving themselves to the point of burnout for the sake of others. It's they realize, if I remove myself from the equation, maybe I don't need to be a part of it as much as I thought. So now what's my identity? Boy? Is that a scary conversation?
Laura Vanderkam: Oh, scary. Well, the good news is that all of us have worth just as human beings. So once we get our head around that idea that it becomes a lot less important what you actually do.
Zack Arnold: Hmm, yeah, I love that. And I think it's like I said, there's, there's so many things happening in the pastel, so to speak, in this book, as opposed to just here's, you know, nine ways, not nine rules, because you understand they're rebels out there that just want suggestions. But nine ways to do this here, the bullet points here, the action steps, but there's so much more detail in here than just the action steps that somebody's thinking, I don't need another self help book with, you know, nine steps and 27 action steps and journal entries. And, like, to me, you provide all of that. But there's so much more nuance to help people understand themselves and their challenges and the limiting beliefs. Like there's just so many little nuggets here and there. So I just I wanted to share how much I appreciate that. And again, just tell everybody, you want to dig deeper into this stuff, you get the book. So the last nugget that I just wanted to share very briefly, which really goes to the heart of one of the challenges that I'm trying to solve in this industry, or frankly, just with our 24/7 burnout culture in general, is this idea of wearing your sleep deprivation or your 80 hours a week is a badge of honor. And I just I'm going to start with this quote. And I know your answer could be the quote, but this is just one that needs to be on a you know, four foot by six foot giant poster in front of everybody's desk or on the top of their bed. There are no prizes given for enjoying your life the least. Where did that come from? Because it's such a brilliant line.
Laura Vanderkam: I you know, it's just, like, my kind of surprise that how people attempt to relate to each other like we we complain about stuff, right? Like I do. I mean, you know, I've been in part of this conversation with people like, oh, yeah, my family was doing X, Y, and Z. I'm so busy where I'm like, lifestyle is bad. I guess we shouldn't be friends. I don't know. Is that one? Was that what I'm supposed to take from this? Yeah. Like, life is hard. Your life is always hard. But since there aren't any prizes for enjoying your life, and like the least like nobody wins in the misery Olympics, like you don't want to take part in it. Like you want to get yourself out of this competition. Rather than seeing who has the worst possible life. It was somebody's always got a worse life. Like, you know, anyone listening to this, like your life is probably great, compared to many, many people on the planet. So with that understood, like the the misery Olympics is not one you're ever going to win. So, you know, there's really no no point in taking part. So you know, given that there aren't any prizes for it? I think it gets us in the mindset, like, well, what are we going to do to fix it? Like, if there's something that's a problem that's making us unhappy, we could explore that explore why that is, hopefully we can get, you know, some emotional support for the people who are close to us. But ultimately, we want to think about what is within our power to make it better. And we're not going to make it perfect. Like I'm not promising people, you know, if like, you know, you hate your job, and you have a huge mortgage, like you can get out of it tomorrow, like that's probably not going to happen. But on the other hand, there are a lot of jobs out there in the world, could you find something in another year? Well, probably like if you were putting a concerted effort into work at looking you could find something that had, you know, comparable paycheck, and in the course of a year of looking, you know, maybe it's that life is very, you don't have enough support at home, you've got young kids who are going through a difficult phase or whatever, you've got elderly parents, you're caring for like I get it, I get it. But could you carve out a couple hours a week for doing things that make you laugh, that you are genuinely enjoying and find fun. And it's not all 168 hours of the week, like you don't get out of the fact that you've got the difficult kids and this sick parents or whatever, but you have a couple hours a week where you are doing something else. And having those hours of genuine enjoyment can change your entire perception of the rest of your time.
Zack Arnold: Nobody wins in the misery Olympics. One of the best quotes I think I have ever heard not only about time management, but about designing a more fulfilling life. I absolutely love it. And I feel like that we could probably go on for at least at least I don't know about you. But based on my prep sheet, I'm about 20% through all the things that I wanted to discuss. But given that we're both considering ourselves, somebody that focus on time management and have the skills for time management, I do want to be very precious about your time and getting you out of here before we do run over. But the last thing is for somebody that is inspired to take action, what is the simplest and fastest route for them to find more about either you or your books or both?
Laura Vanderkam: Yeah, just come visit my website which is lauravanderkam.com. It's just my name. You can find information on my books, including Tranquillity by Tuesday, you can find information about my podcasts. I also blog a couple times a week I enjoy it. It's like, you know, it's always 2005 back on my blog. I'm still blogging three or four times a week. So come join that we have a great community of commenters. It's really one of the best lovely places on the internet. So hopefully, I'll see some of your listeners there.
Zack Arnold: I love it. Well, on that note, I want to thank you once again for sharing your most valuable time and I'm honored to know that I'm going to occupy roughly three Google Spreadsheet cells for the last 90 minutes that we have talked it's an honor to be a part of that journey.
Laura Vanderkam: Exactly. Exactly.
This episode was edited by Curtis Fritsch, and the show notes were prepared by Debby Germino and published by Glen McNiel.
The original music in the opening and closing of the show is courtesy of Joe Trapanese (who is quite possibly one of the most talented composers on the face of the planet).
Gretchen Rubin is a NYT bestselling author who has sold over 3.5 million copies of her books, some of those titles which include Outer Order, Inner Calm, Better Than Before, The Happiness Project, Happier at Home, and the book that we discuss in-depth in today’s conversation: The Four Tendencies.
If you have any interest in working "smarter" instead of "harder," you'll need a system to get you there…and that system is GTD.
Learn the difference between being “busy” and being “productive” so you can define your own version of productivity and set goals that allow you to align your time with your values.
This conversation has a refreshingly different agenda: re-defining what it means to be “productive” and exploring the ways in which we can maintain momentum towards – and reach – our personal and professional goals while remaining balanced.
In Farrel’s own words she firmly believes:"You can be proud of the work that you do and also proud of the fact that you’ve had a good life.”
