Blog Post #119: Making the Most of Time
We recently talked to time awareness and management guru Laura Vanderkam on Instagram. She shared advice and strategies for how to be intentional with time, make time for ourselves, and ultimately make our time more meaningful. Here are some highlights from the conversation:
Contrary to what a lot of people believe, we do have the time we need to use professionally and personally, and we can learn how to use it better for our own benefit.
Most people don’t track time and don’t know where time goes. Knowing where the time goes can help us make tweaks to where we allocate it. We can make choices that allow us to spend time on restorative, rejuvenating activities.
We’re not going to change our lives overnight. But, we could scale certain things up, like finding 30 minutes to work on something we want to work on. We might not be able to do this every day, but at least somewhat regularly.
Type C people say we don’t have the time for self care, or we are anxious or uncomfortable when we’re not productive. However, if we are taken out of the equation, other people would figure things out. We want to feel important and needed - but it isn’t always true. Once we realize this, we can slowly start to make a few changes.
If we experience strong reactions to change, this is important to explore. Type C can get really focused on what I “have to” do versus what is meaningful for me.
One of Laura’s rules is taking one night a week for ourselves - not work, not caring for family members, and ideally getting out of the house.
To get started, track your time for a week. There is probably some discretionary time somewhere. Also have a weekly designated planning time - plan for career, relationships, self in the week ahead. Consider - what is most important to you for this coming week? At the end of the week, review and figure out what happened if we weren’t able to meet the plan, and what we could do differently.
Spend time on effortful fun before effortless fun. Effortless fun is TV, scrolling on social media, any activity that is passive and requires no effort. Effortful requires some effort - calling a friend, playing a sport, reading a book. If you spend at least a few minutes on effortful fun, you might stick with it.
The 10 minute conversation is a great tool - tell your friend you only have 10 minutes to chat, it’s less daunting, and you can cover a lot more ground than you think.
Weekly spreadsheets are a great way to track time. Laura fills hers in three times a day in 30-minute blocks using broad categories. You could also try a time-tracking app or write it down in sentence form.
Novelty and intensity make memories. We can make normal life more interesting by planning a big and little adventure each week. A big adventure is 3-4 hours, while a little adventure is less than one hour. Life feels more fun and small talk is more interesting, you feel like life is not passing you by. Examples of a little adventure are to walk or run a different route, or to have lunch in a pretty spot in nature.