Time can be a tricky thing. Some days fly by while others linger, seemingly with no end in sight. How often—and how well—we track our time can be vital in creating more space on our calendar to do the things we enjoy the most.
To better understand how our minds perceive and relate to time, we spoke with writer, author and speaker Laura Vanderkam. As an expert on productivity, career development and time management, Vanderkam understands the challenges of attaining a work-life balance better than most.
Vanderkam’s interest in time management first piqued when she learned that there’s often a disconnect between how a person perceives time and how time is actually playing out. “I think in many cases, people feel like the two are pitted against each other. But I think again, that’s a very limited perspective,” she says.
Vanderkam is a firm believer that even the worst time manager is capable of carving out more time in their week for the things that fuel and fulfill them.
The science of time management
As it turns out, the way in which we relate to time has a lot to do with human nature. Vanderkam explains that it’s in our nature to overestimate the time we spend on things we don’t want to do and underestimate the time we spend on things we do want to do. She shares that people might report having no free time whatsoever, but what they really mean is that they don’t have as much free time as they would like. “Everyone has some discretionary time [but] I totally believe that people do not have as much free time as they want,” she adds.
Household chores, such as washing the dishes or doing laundry, are prime examples of activities people report spending a significant amount of time doing. “People feel like other people in their household should be emptying the dishwasher, which may be true, but that’s an entirely different story than ‘[I’m] spending all my time emptying the dishwasher.’” If you were to track how many minutes or hours you spend washing dishes in a week, it usually is far less then you estimate, for instance.
How novel or intense a memory is also influences how much weight it bears in our minds. Vanderkam explains how, as humans, we remember time as having been longer if we have more memories from it, and that memories are formed by things that are novel or intense. “People remember the four years of high school, for instance, as quite long … but four years is always the same four years,” she says.
Building on this, Vanderkam adds that people have a tendency to remember bad experiences more vividly. “When things are bad or stressful, we tend to remember them as more typical than they may be,” she says. A night in the emergency room might feel like days because it’s so stressful, while everyday mundane tasks feel faster.
Comparison also comes into play, and it can alter how we view our own time. Not only do people underestimate how long they spend on activities they enjoy doing, they also compare how their leisure time stacks up to the leisure time of those within their communities or inner circles. “By comparison, it can seem like none [no leisure time], because somebody else has significantly more,” she adds.
Expanding on this, Vanderkam describes how, despite narratives of Americans being overworked and sleep deprived, there are gaps between how much leisure time people have. “So parents of children under age 6, for instance, have more than an hour less per day than people who do not have children at home,” she explains. Similarly, people between ages 35 and 44 have less leisure time than people in other age demographics—usually due to being at a certain point in their career and/or raising young children, she says.
Time management mistakes you might be making
Time might be finite, but a person’s perception of time is more wavering. In Vanderkam’s experience, people tend to mentally separate their working days from their non-working days, when in reality, all seven days hold equal weight in any given week. Some days are jam-packed and others allow for more flexibility. Dividing the week in this way gives an inaccurate overview of the entire time period.
“When you say ‘daily,’ you mean it happens frequently, but that could be some lesser amount of times per week,” she says. Vanderkam reiterates that you don’t have to do something Monday through Friday for it to count because sometimes things don’t happen Monday through Friday. She asserts that weekends should hold just as much weight as weekdays.
Another common mistake people make with time management is remembering their worst nights as typical. In a seven-day week, it’s common for people to remember the nights when they got the least amount of sleep because those are the nights that stand out the most in their memory.
The same is true for measuring your working hours, assuming you don’t clock in and out. Vanderkam explains how a person is more likely to identify their longest workweek as typical rather than as an outlier. They might have worked a 60-hour workweek once, but remember it as if it’s the norm.
Finally, expectations can either help or hinder how we relate to our time management and the time management of those around us. “Everyone has their own expectations, but maybe they’re not communicating it to other people, and like, just assuming that the other person has the same expectations as they do,” she says. Arriving 10 minutes late to a coffee meeting might be perceived as rude to one person but reasonably on time to the other.
How to improve your relationship to time
From tracking your time to creating short, manageable to-do lists, here are five practical tips to reimagine how you relate to time.
1. Track your time
As a starting point, Vanderkam suggests tracking your time during a one-week period as accurately as you can. “If you want to spend your time better, you need to know where your time is going,” she says. In her work, she has seen that through this process, people realize that what they thought was taking up too much time in their week—household chores, for example—isn’t. If you don’t have a clear breakdown of where your time is going, it’s harder to make meaningful changes to your habits and routines.
2. Think 168 hours, not 24
Vanderkam is a strong advocate for viewing time as 168 hours in a week rather than 24 hours in a day. She asserts that we don’t need to do the same thing every day in order for it to count in our lives. “Maybe, we exercise three times a week, and you do a French lesson three times a week. There’s space for all of it.” Trying to squeeze everything into a five-day period can also be exhausting and leave us more tired on the weekends than if we had spread things out throughout the full week.
3. Opt for short to-do lists
According to Vanderkam, to-do lists are great as long as they’re kept short. “There’s no virtue in putting something on a to-do list and not doing it. It’s just as not done as if you never put it on the list.” She suggests listing only the things you intend to do that particular day, because unexpected things pop up and we need to adapt.
4. Build open space into your calendar
Vanderkam stresses that it’s important to be able to continue making progress on your priorities, even when things come up. Building open space into your calendar allows for flexibility in your week. For example, perhaps you planned on doing something important on Monday but you have a work crisis that takes priority. “Whatever you’re supposed to do Monday could go to Friday, so then you’re not borrowing time from the next week.”
5. Have something to look forward to, ideally every day
In Vankerkam’s experience, the idiom “time flies when you’re having fun” proves true for most people. “Life seems more exciting when we have this kind of happy anticipation,” Vanderkam notes, adding that the more little things you can put in your calendar that you’re genuinely looking forward to, the better you will feel about time in general. Having something to look forward to, however small, also does wonders for motivation, and motivation is a driver of productivity.
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