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By Heidi Stevens
RISMEDIA, October 14, 2010–(MCT)–In the time it took you to log on to Facebook and discover that your high school friend forgot to put on deodorant that morning, you could have strengthened your core, dashed off a long-overdue thank-you note and read the first few pages of that new time management book.
We, as a nation, are clearly conflicted about time. We work longer hours than any other industrialized country, but we also watch more TV — a lot more. We over-schedule our kids, but they still average more than seven hours of screen time a day.
So are we pressed for time or drowning in it? Maybe both.
In her intriguing new book, “168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think” (Portfolio, $25.95), Laura Vanderkam argues for keeping a time log for 168 consecutive hours (the number of hours in a week). If you work 50 hours and sleep 56 (eight hours a night), you’re still left with 62 hours, she points out. Sure, some of those are taken up by housework and other drudgery, but it’s hard to argue that you can’t find a couple of hours to hit the gym.
“We live in a very distracted world,” Vanderkam says. “If you don’t think through how you want to spend your time, you lose it to things that aren’t very meaningful.” (See: Keeping abreast of high school friend’s hygiene foibles.)
We chatted with Vanderkam and other experts about time management. In the interest of saving some of yours, we offer this five-step approach.
Check your supply. Not unlike budgeting your money, taking control of your time requires first taking stock of it. Vanderkam provides a spreadsheet in her book (and at my168hours.com) to log your hours for a week. If you’re really ambitious, she recommends logging your minutes. (“Every minute is a choice,” she says.)
“We spend massive amounts of time on things — television, Web surfing, housework, errands — that give a slight amount of pleasure or feeling of accomplishment,” Vanderkam writes, “but do little for our careers, our families or our personal lives.”
Set goals. Chris Guillebeau, author of “The Art of Non-Conformity: Set Your Own Rules, Live the Life You Want and Change the World” (Perigee, $14.95), spends a week each year laying out and updating his one-year, five-year and lifetime goals.
“I want to be living intentionally,” Guillebeau says. “Not efficiently, necessarily, but most of my time should be spent doing things I find enjoyable or meaningful.”
Vanderkam recommends a “List of 100 Dreams,” which can contain everything from “Do a wine tour in Argentina” to “Maintain a stash of Trader Joe’s dark-chocolate-covered caramels,” both of which are on hers.
The important thing is determining your priorities so you know how to spend your newfound time.
Decide what goes. “We do, in fact, have limited time,” Guillebeau points out. Which means some things have to go.
“When I think about time management, I think, ‘Am I happy?'” says Kristin van Ogtrop, editor of Real Simple magazine. “If I’m not happy, I think about the give and take to get happiness. If I need more time to go running, I think about what I need to give up to do that.”
Maybe it’s housework, says Vanderkam, who recommends outsourcing as many chores as possible. “Many people still believe that ‘caring for a family’ means cooking, scrubbing, vacuuming, lunch packing, weeding and laundry, in addition to the emotional work of nurturing children’s brains and souls,” she writes. “Is that really what kids need?”
Hiring a maid service would likely leave more time for reading to your kids, but that, too, comes at a cost. Can you give something up to find the extra money?
The average cable bill in the U.S. is $71 a month, Vanderkam points out. The average tax refund is more than $2,000.
“Money is a choice just like time is a choice,” she says. “We can examine how we’re spending both and see if it matches up with our priorities, rather than just saying, ‘I don’t have time for this’ or ‘I don’t have money for that.'”
Own your downtime. “If you’re only working 10 productive hours a week but technically have to be on a job site for another 30 hours,” Guillebeau suggests, “why not spend five to 10 hours doing something useful instead of just surfing the Internet? Learn a language, write a novel, plan your retirement.”
Turn to your goals and identify ways to work toward them.
Vanderkam recommends creating two lists: “In 30 minutes, I can …” and “In 10 minutes or less, I can …”
Bob Harper, host of NBC’s “The Biggest Loser,” suggests adding exercise to those lists. “You don’t have to have an hour to work out,” he says. “Just get your body moving — for 30 minutes, 20 minutes.”
For windows of 10 minutes or less, he recommends finding four go-to yoga poses for flexibility, or holding a plank position to strengthen your core. “Plank is fabulous,” he says.
Reject busyness. Our culture lionizes busyness, but that can lead us to believe we’re more time-starved than we really are.
“The more I studied time use and talked to people who do amazing things with their lives, the more I came to see that this bleak notion of mutual exclusivity between work and family is based on misleading ideas of how people spend their family time now, and how they spent it in the past,” Vanderkam writes. “We assume we’re all overworked, just as we assume everyone used to live like Ozzie and Harriet. In reality, neither of these perceptions is true.”
Nor do we need to fill each moment. Time management, in fact, may mean doing less.
“One of the things I got out of interviewing successful people for the book is that I really try to do less with my time,” Vanderkam says. “Choose a few things that really matter to you and get rid of as much else as you can.”
(c) 2010, Chicago Tribune.
Distributed by McClatchy-Tribune Information Services.
Troy Gregory
First Team Real Estate
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