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072: Laura Vanderkam on calming the chaos
1.4k Plays1 year ago
In this episode, we interview author and time-tracking expert Laura Vanderkam.
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.
We loved chatting with Laura Vanderkam in this episode about time tracking. The topics we covered included:
- thinking about time management as a strategy to make life more memorable and fun
- outsourcing – how to make the decision on what to outsource and let go of the guilt – particularly for traditionally female tasks
- getting your kids to think about time management and to establish good mindsets about time from an early age
- the nine time management rules from Laura’s latest book Tranquility by Tuesday
- the benefits of a weekly planning session and why Laura likes to plan on Fridays
- creating a backup slot in your calendar to make your schedule more resilient
- the benefit of having two things in your week worth remembering – one big adventure and one little adventure
- the importance of sleep – and to give yourself a bedtime – that if you get the amount of sleep you need every single night and you’ll have far more energy and life will feel more in control.
LIFE ADMIN RESOURCES
- Laura Vanderkam’s website
- Tranquility by Tuesday – Laura’s latest book
- The 9 rules from Tranquility by Tuesday
- Best of Both Worlds Podcast
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Transcript
Introduction and Guest Announcement
00:00:00
Speaker
This is Life Admin Life Hacks, a podcast that gives you techniques, tips, and tools to tackle your life admin more efficiently, to save your time, your money, and improve your household harmony. I'm Dinah Rae Roberts, an operations manager who is super excited about this ep, interviewing someone who has inspired so much of my thinking about time management. I'm Mia Northrop, a researcher and writer.
00:00:24
Speaker
I'm intrigued by the idea of a time tracking challenge and think this might be the year where I succumb to my curiosity. In this episode, we interview time management and productivity expert Laura VanderKam. Hello and welcome to Life Admin Life Hacks. Time management is a topic that we need to revisit each and every year to update our thinking and reinforce good habits.
Why Plan on Fridays?
00:00:48
Speaker
And in this episode, we talk to Laura VanderKam who reveals why planning on Friday makes the biggest difference for her life. About making memories is what stops time from slipping away and that setting a bedtime is a must for adults. If you're looking for some inspiration and fresh ideas on managing your time, listen on.
00:01:09
Speaker
Laura VanderKam is the author of several time management and productivity books, including The New Tranquility by Tuesday, Nine Ways to Calm the Chaos and Make Time for What Matters, along with Juliette'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,
00:01:35
Speaker
Fast Company and Fortune. She's the host of the podcast Before Breakfast and the co-host with Sarah Hart Unger on the podcast Best of Both Worlds. She lives outside Philadelphia with her husband and five children. Laura, thanks so much for coming on the show today. Thank you so much for having me. I'm excited to be
Peace of Mind in Life Admin
00:01:53
Speaker
here. Let's get started with thinking about your life admin and when it comes to life admin for you, what's most important? Is it peace of mind, saving money, saving time or household harmony?
00:02:04
Speaker
Well, I certainly think that peace of mind and saving time are both up there in terms of the ones you kind of try to optimize the most for. It's always a work in progress. You know, can't always guarantee smooth sailing in any given week.
00:02:21
Speaker
For the most part, people get where they need to go. For the most part, the papers get in at the time they're supposed to be getting in. And, you know, we only occasionally run out of things like ketchup. So, you know, that's that's always a victory. So in your work, you've done so much time tracking research on yourself and with others and you've looked at a lot of other people's schedules.
00:02:43
Speaker
Is it predictable where people lose time? It is. And not so much that there's like one thing that everybody does wrong, because if there were, like, great, then we could all just not do whatever that thing was and magically stop wasting time. But what tends to be the biggest problem is that people approach time mindlessly.
00:03:04
Speaker
And it's so easy to do because time keeps passing. I mean, no matter what you do, you wake up Saturday morning, it's gonna be the end of Saturday eventually. No matter if you lock yourself in a closet, it's still gonna be the end of Saturday. But if you don't think about it, the odds that the time is spent in some way that is rejuvenating or meaningful or enjoyable, I mean, there's always the chance, but the odds aren't very good. Whereas if you think about it,
00:03:32
Speaker
a little bit more and say, well, what are my intentions for my time? Then you can structure that time in ways that do wind up being more meaningful and enjoyable for yourself and the people you care about. So yeah, I see on time logs just that the days pass by and you do what is scheduled or what has to get done, but people tend not to make as much space for the things that they would like to do or that would make life more interesting. So that's what I'm always encouraging people to think about.
00:04:01
Speaker
Yeah. And has anything changed since you started your research in terms of where people, either their intentions of how they'd like to be spending their time or where they're actually wasting time?
Impact of Social Media and Smartphones on Time
00:04:15
Speaker
So people sometimes ask that when I started writing about this, social media wasn't quite as big a thing as it is now. When I first started writing about time, most people didn't have smartphones in the way that we have them now. It was more you have the Blackberry, but you weren't really necessarily surfing the web on your old school Blackberry all that much. You could email people, but you couldn't do that.
00:04:39
Speaker
And so there are definitely changes in what people have spent their time doing. But it's not like time before 2006 was spent well. We were still the same human beings. We still had 24 hours a day. Time will be spent on something. The question is just what?
00:05:06
Speaker
And it's funny when thinking about this, because I occasionally reread Stephen Covey's Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, that sort of classic self-help book. And he talks about people wasting a lot of time, particularly in a work context, on things that are urgent but not important. And his book came out in 1990, which was before people even had email, right?
00:05:29
Speaker
log onto their computers and check email in 1990. What on earth were they doing? What were those things that were urgent but not important that were landing on your desk all the time? I really have no idea. I don't know, faxes. We're looking at our faxes very carefully or something.
00:05:46
Speaker
But we've always wasted time. We've always wasted time. We waste time now more on a social media context. People probably wasted more time on television or other such things in previous iterations of that. But it's the human tendency to not necessarily be intentional about our discretionary time.
00:06:08
Speaker
That's definitely true. I mean, it's interesting to think about, you know, you used to waste time watching TV, and at least now, even when you're wasting time streaming, you're hopefully watching something you like watching rather than watching, you know, back in the old days when you had to watch what was ever was in front of you without any choice really, or very limited choice. Certainly here in Melbourne, we've got three or four channels as we were growing up. So I was often watching as a young person,
00:06:33
Speaker
things that I didn't even enjoy and still managed to waste time. Yes, exactly. Yeah, hopefully the caliber has at least risen. I mean, people are like scrolling around on their phones at the same time. I don't know, like tweeting about whatever they're watching. Yes, this is true.
Outsourcing Tasks: Breaking Gender Norms?
00:06:48
Speaker
Laura, you've got five kids and you and your husband both have busy careers. So we know from your work that you're a huge fan of outsourcing. But one of the challenges is making that decision of deciding what to outsource. So I'd love to hear how you make that decision.
00:07:03
Speaker
Yeah, well, it's an ongoing process, but I'm always trying to figure out, is there something I am spending my time on that is not necessarily advancing me toward my goals, that I don't enjoy, that I don't think that there's a broader purpose to it as well?
00:07:20
Speaker
You know, and there's always going to be some things that we need to wind up doing. But if it's just like running to the grocery store for milk because we ran out before the bigger shop, like, well, maybe somebody else can do that. You know, if you have somebody who's, you know, helping with the kids in the afternoon, like maybe that person could stop by and get it, everything else are getting them. So just sort of thinking about that, what would buy you back time that you know you would spend on something else?
00:07:49
Speaker
You know, you can be creative about this too. I mean, one of the things about having five children is they are kind of spread out in age. And my youngest is a toddler, so he's obviously very demanding. That's what they are. And you know, if he's around, inevitably you wind up spending time with him. You know, he's the one who would
00:08:09
Speaker
throw things and fall and put a fork in his eye or something like that. So you have to be on hand, which means that you wind up not spending as much time with older children. And so one thing we've done sometimes is get a sitter for him for a few hours on, say, a Saturday so that we can actually do cool things with the older kids that would be totally spoiled by having a three-year-old attempting to be part of it.
00:08:35
Speaker
And how do you, when we talk about outsourcing in our community, often it's, there's a lot of hang ups around it. People feel guilty, essentially. They feel like they should be able to do everything. And we, we talk about, you know, suggesting that people stop shudding all over themselves.
00:08:51
Speaker
Have you wrestled with that kind of dilemma in terms of thinking what I should be able to do or should be able to accommodate? Do you come across that with the people you work with that sort of feel guilt about outsourcing? So I don't so much because I think my highest value work, I mean, on the personal front, it's investing in the growth and development of my children and in the
00:09:15
Speaker
continuation, I would hope, of my marriage. And then, you know, in my personal health and things like staying in good shape and eating healthfully and doing the hobbies that I enjoy. And then professionally, you know, the things that are coming up with the ideas and writing and, you know, producing the big projects.
00:09:31
Speaker
So, you know, as long as I'm focused on those things and know that I'm spending adequate time on those things, which is what I track with my time logs, then I don't think guilt needs to really enter into it. I mean, you know, why should I be running to the grocery store for milk instead of, you know, writing something? That doesn't necessarily make sense.
00:09:53
Speaker
But I think, you know, from a broader sort of you asked about your community and the community of generally working mothers, there's always people get a little bit worked up about stuff.
00:10:06
Speaker
I think there's very much a tendency to get worked up about the outsourcing of women's traditional roles as opposed to other things. I just had a guy here working on my HVAC system. I'm sure that with enough time, we could figure out our HVAC system. We're not, we brought in somebody to do it because they have the skills and the amount of time it would take away from doing other things is just not worth it.
00:10:35
Speaker
And I don't think anyone feels guilty about that. Like, oh, my gosh, I'm a terrible person for bringing in someone to work on my HVAC system. You know, so it's again, it's it's about women's traditional roles versus other kinds of things. I mean, you know, we don't and it's evolved over time, too. I mean, I know very few people who churn their own butter.
00:10:54
Speaker
Like we all outsource that these days and that's no longer a source of guilt. You're not hand delivering all your letters. Most of us okay with outsourcing that to your postal service. So yeah, it's just a question of we all outsource something. It's just a question of what?
00:11:12
Speaker
And I think a lot of people fail to make that understanding that when you choose to do one thing, you're choosing not to do something else. So I think framing it, thinking about what else could I do with that time is really helpful to really help you decide that making that decision. But your point about how gender.
00:11:29
Speaker
this area is. We wrote about that in the book actually because we found the same thing that people would happily get someone in to clean the gutters or someone to do the lawn or look after the pool maintenance, which are traditionally male kind of roles. But if you wanted to outsource getting the birthday cake done or someone sorting out your digital photos, people would raise an eyebrow.
00:11:53
Speaker
So it's interesting to think about the societal kind of norms weighing into that decision making and deciding to step away from that and do what makes sense for you and your family. Exactly. Yeah.
Teaching Kids Time Management
00:12:05
Speaker
So, I mean, thinking of your family, what are your approaches for getting your kids to think about time management and to establish good mindsets about time from an early age?
00:12:16
Speaker
Well, that's always a work in progress, too. But we do have conversations. I think when, you know, with very little kids, time is a very amorphous thing. It helps to sort of think about the order in which we do things. You know, at night we
00:12:31
Speaker
get into pajamas, brush teeth, read stories, then bed. What is the order of things in our lives? As kids get a little bit older, they might start being able to understand things that are coming up in a couple days at least and be able to talk about, you know, three sleeps until this happens to sort of establish the units of time.
00:12:51
Speaker
But as kids get into school age, then they can start to think more about, well, what day is it? Where are we in the calendar? What's coming up that is going on in my life that I would like to think about or invest some time in preparing for? Certainly one of the things we've found helpful to talk about is when kids start having, say, weekly assignments. So it's not just that they have to turn it in the next day, but
00:13:20
Speaker
it will be done by the end of the week. And so then they have an element of choice over when it gets done. And maybe the natural tendency is if it's due Friday to do it the last minute on Thursday or something like that. I would say, well, oh, that's interesting, because what else is going on on Thursday? Oh, and oh, those things. You know, you'll probably want to do those things. And if you have to do this, will you be able to do those things? Maybe not as much time as you want. Well, what would happen if you chose a different day? What day do you think would be good? What do you have got? You know, these are good conversations to have.
00:13:49
Speaker
And then as kids get toward high school and start to have cumulative tests at the end of semesters, that it really behooves you to start thinking about that early as opposed to the last few days, to build in time for planning and reviewing and all that. And so it's really an evolution. And obviously, many adults never kind of figure that out. We're still doing stuff on the last minute, too. But as much as you can kind of put in the thought that there are many things in life that cannot be done right at the moment, you have to
00:14:18
Speaker
See them coming, allocate time to them, put that time into your life at scheduled moments, ideally building a buffer. So when stuff goes wrong, you can deal with it. Those are all ways to start discussing time with young people.
Creating Tranquility in a Busy Week
00:14:34
Speaker
Well, your latest book, Laura, is called Tranquility by Tuesday, and it's interesting because I never really think about my Tuesdays as being very tranquil. It's actually the busiest day in our household, so it's kind of ironic, but we do love it. So can you tell us about how you came up with the title and what tranquility by Tuesday means for you?
00:14:52
Speaker
Well, there is that element that Tuesday is the most normal day of the week, right? So Mondays has its own start of the week kind of stuff. Fridays, everyone's like, oh, thank goodness it's Friday, and weekends have a different vibe entirely. But Tuesday is like the normal day. And so if you can feel tranquil about your life on a Tuesday, you're doing pretty good, right? That your normal life
00:15:17
Speaker
feels good. You have structures built into your life to make it feel sustainable and joyful on an average Tuesday. You are not waiting for weekends. You are not waiting for vacations. You're not waiting for some time in the future when your children are less likely to cause havoc in your life or whatever it is.
00:15:33
Speaker
It's today. It's Tuesday. And so that is what this book is about, about how we can develop habits that allow us to use time well in ways that are meaningful and enjoyable for ourselves and the people we care about on an absolutely average day.
00:15:50
Speaker
I was just laughing about that, the idea of Tuesday being the most normal day. But, you know, it's obviously Tuesday here and I was thinking about my routine and how it's all just sort of set up smoothly. It's probably the day of the week that I know is probably going to be the smoothest and the less sort of rough.
00:16:08
Speaker
Okay, so in this book, you've got nine practical rules that you believe have the biggest impact in life. And probably don't have time to talk about all of them, but we wanted to pinpoint on
Weekly Planning with Family
00:16:19
Speaker
a few. One was planning on Fridays. Tell us about this rule and how you go about your Friday planning sessions, because this is something where you get your kids and your husband involved, yeah?
00:16:29
Speaker
Yeah, so plan on Fridays, this rule really encompasses two aspects. One is to plan, and specifically to plan your life in weeks. I think every busy person needs a designated weekly planning time. When you look forward to the next week coming up,
00:16:48
Speaker
and plan your life holistically. So think about your work priorities. Think about your relationship priorities. Think about your personal priorities. Think about where those things can go. Look at what you are already committed to. Figure out how you're going to tackle that stuff. Iron out any logistical challenges. Make sure you've got something you're looking forward to. Get rid of anything that doesn't belong on your schedule. That's a good planning session.
00:17:11
Speaker
And we've done all those things. And if you do that once a week, then the sort of in between can be a lot less intense. Any given day, just say, oh, what am I doing tomorrow? Quick look over it, go from there. As for Fridays, because this is the part where people are like, well, why Friday? And there are lots of other times that people plan. People plan like Sunday nights. Some people plan Monday mornings. I mean, those are both very popular times that I see a lot.
00:17:36
Speaker
Fridays have a couple things going for them. First, if you work a Monday through Friday work week, many people are sliding into the weekends by Friday afternoon. It is very hard to start anything new. So if that would just be wasted time, you may as well repurpose it for planning. We are often willing to assign our future selves things to do that we just can't tackle on Friday afternoon, because we're too tired, we're done. So, you know, we do that planning work instead of the actual execution work.
00:18:04
Speaker
Second, it's business hours. So if you need to set up a meeting with someone, if you need to get an appointment somewhere, if you need to do any of those things as you determine through your weekly planning, you can do it. Whereas if you are planning on the weekend, that's a lot less possible. I mean, maybe your colleagues will respond. Like if you're managing people, they'll respond to your meeting requests on weekends. But do you really want to do that? You don't want to be that boss.
00:18:25
Speaker
right? You can't call your dentist office necessarily on Sunday night and expect them to be open to make your appointment, right? So then you have to push that to working hours anyway. So you may as well, like, you know, take care of it. It allows you to use your weekends better. Like if you're planning on, you know, Friday, I plan the upcoming Monday to Sunday week, I realize not everybody wants to think about the weekend that's eight to nine days ahead of time.
00:18:50
Speaker
But by doing this, I can actually plan it twice. I can do broad outlines what will happen eight to nine days from now. And then on Friday, I revisit it. You know, what's happening over the next two days? Do I need to tune anything up? And that allows you to, you know, actually use your weekends well when you're thinking about it. But the biggest thing for me is it also calms the Sunday scary. It's like even people who love their jobs.
00:19:11
Speaker
often feel some trepidation on Sunday night when they don't know what's happening during the week. Like they know all this stuff is about to hit, but they don't have a plan to deal with it. They don't know what's all there, how they're going to cope.
00:19:24
Speaker
And so you feel just anxious. Whereas if you end Friday with a plan for Monday, you can relax. That's what came to mind for me is that idea of you're going to have peace of mind because you've, you can slide into the weekend knowing that, you know, the loose ends are tied up or you've got a plan for how the week is going to go and you can actually enjoy your weekend and just get into it.
00:19:45
Speaker
I'm just really interested to know, particularly for your family, there's a lot of logistics to make work. And so how, in particular, you involve your husband, but maybe also your older kids in your planning. If it's not in your Friday planning session, how do you manage the logistics of who needs to be where and who's driving who and all of those things which really take a couple of people to figure out?
00:20:08
Speaker
Yeah, well, there's a couple ways that I approach this. I mean, my older children in particular, I collect things like during the week that they've mentioned to me of like, oh, I wanted to do this. Like, you know, I need to go shopping for new pants or I want to get my hair cut. Or could I have a play date with so and so? You know, those are all things that kind of I just jot down real quick or send an email to myself that I will then collect during the Friday planning as I'm sort of setting out when these things can happen.
00:20:35
Speaker
A lot of stuff is the same week to week. A child might ask to take rock climbing classes, but then it's going to be at the same time for the next 12 weeks. You don't have to revisit that every week. It's built into the schedule. We tend to do the same drivers week to week unless something has really gone different in terms of who handles what.
00:20:56
Speaker
But yeah, I know I create a schedule on Friday for the week of roughly what's happening, which can then be updated as stuff comes up. But yeah, I learned to ask the older kids, you need to send me your rehearsal schedule for the next week on Thursday so I can have it for Friday. And I know it can change. The director of the musical is not beholden to my planning schedule.
00:21:20
Speaker
Unfortunately, unfortunately. But at least knowing that, then we can revisit when something comes up. My husband and I, we're doing this less now because both of us have started sort of traveling less post pandemic than we used to have more intense logistical meetings. Because if you are in California and I am in Florida, we need to make this work.
00:21:47
Speaker
Right. And so there's more logistics to be ironed out when that is the case. But if we are both working from home, you know, it's it's it's a little bit easier. But we talk about things we want to do broadly coming up, you know, things we'd like our kids to do, things we'd like to do together. And then I create a schedule again, you know, this is the the the mistress of planning in the household bit of something of cruise director role. But you know, so far, it's gone pretty well.
00:22:14
Speaker
And Laura, where are you doing your scheduling? Are you using paper? Are you in a digital tool? What's your preference? So I use paper. And I know that makes me sound incredibly old fashioned. And I know a lot of people have to use digital calendars just for work. You know, your, your boss is not going to be cool with just dealing with your paper planner. Like I sent you a meeting request, you need to respond to it. It's in my planner. I thought, just me. You can use whatever works for you. But I make my lists in paper planners for the most part.
00:22:44
Speaker
I often just type the weekly schedule in a Word document so that I can just email it to people who need it. The various folks who, you know, my husband, people who might be helping us with driving, older kids can look at it, that sort of thing. Yeah. Okay. So one of the other rules you have in your book is about creating a backup slot.
Handling Life's Unpredictability
00:23:02
Speaker
And at the start of this chapter, it reads, anyone can make a perfect schedule. Time management masters make resilient schedules. So tell us about creating a resilient schedule.
00:23:13
Speaker
Yeah, people get very frustrated when they plan in time for their priorities and then life happens. You know, you've carved out a couple hours to work on this big speculative work project and then an existing project kind of blows up or maybe you plan to take one of your kids somewhere special and then it rains or the child is sick or you're sick or whatever else. It just happens, you know, and people get very frustrated because they carved out the time and then couldn't make it work.
00:23:40
Speaker
But there are ways to deal with that. And one of the best ways to think about this, when people are invited to outdoor events, if you're in a climate where rain happens, there's often a rain date scheduled. And what's going on is that the organizers are acknowledging that much can go predictably wrong outside. It's right there in the rain date name.
00:24:01
Speaker
But there's no question of whether the event is going to be rescheduled or not and when, like it will be for the rain date. And so if you want to do this thing, you know not to put anything unmovable in the second slot. And by creating a backup slot, you vastly increase the chances that the original event happens, even if not when originally planned.
00:24:22
Speaker
And so for anything important in our lives, we need the equivalent of a rain date. So if you can't work on this big speculative project on Tuesday morning, when's the backup slot? When else could you get to it? If you and your kid plan to go to the amusement park on Saturday and Saturday there's tornadoes coming through, when else could you go?
00:24:42
Speaker
And if you know the answer to that, you are highly likely to make this thing work. If you don't know the answer to it, then you are at the mercy of life intervening. And I know that sounds really hard. Like it's hard enough to carve out one time for these things you want to do. Like I'm saying carve out more than one. Like what are you talking about, Laura?
00:24:59
Speaker
But you can sort of get at this by just creating more open space in general in your life. I try not to schedule too much on Fridays because then it can be the backup slot for anything that goes wrong during the week, right? So it's not that every event needs its own specific backup slot. But if I trust that only say 20% of things have life blow up on them, well, then that 20% can all move to Friday.
00:25:24
Speaker
It's usually not 90%, it's some 20% and the question is what? So that moves to Friday. So you might think about that. Like how could you create more open space in your life generally? If it's not a completely open day, maybe it's an hour and a half every afternoon, right? That's open, that's not scheduled. So when stuff runs late, something comes up, you've got a spot to put it.
00:25:44
Speaker
Yeah I think where I put this into practice most often is like in the lead up to Christmas when I know I've got to get Christmas shopping done and I'll like I'll have a date where I'm like all right this is the day where I'm going hard I'm going to hit these shops but I'll always have a backup slot because invariably you get there the thing you were looking for without a stock or you can't find it or you've changed your mind and you need you need to have that built in from the start. I love that idea of resilient schedules.
00:26:11
Speaker
And I think for me, for work, my mic calendar gets so filled up with meetings that I, and I used to just put, you know, I used to put in my diary focus time and then people just book over focus time because they can see it. So now I just, I create private meetings that no one can see what they are that are called focus time. And I hope no one that I work with is listening to this because that's what I do to get around it. Cause people won't book over private meetings, but they will book over focus time or anything else. Like, you know, who book a project meeting.
00:26:40
Speaker
Anyway, so that's my resilient chit-chilling. Well, this is the problem with digital calendars and one where I like having a paper one. But another sort of trick with this, if you have colleagues you work with very closely, you create meetings with them and then you don't do them. Those are...
00:26:58
Speaker
open time, right? Or if you do need to meet with the person, you schedule it for an hour, two hours, and it's, you know, it's a 15 minute meeting, like, both of you are aware of that. And then that's the time that you have that has been unschedulable, unless, you know, it's a total emergency. So yeah, eyebrows, even people can
00:27:21
Speaker
So one of the other rules in the book, probably the one I love the most is probably the one that's inspired me the most from reading your blogs, your weekly email over the last few years is one big adventure and one little adventure.
Incorporating Adventures into Routine
00:27:34
Speaker
So can you tell our listeners about this rule and the benefits that it has? Yeah, so we won.
00:27:40
Speaker
Tuesdays they feel tranquil, but we also want them to feel memorable. Like, we don't want life to just kind of keep passing by. And much of adult life is very routine. Like, you do the same things day in, day out. And there's nothing wrong with that. I mean, routines make good choices automatic. But when too much sameness stacks up,
00:27:59
Speaker
You wind up with whole years just disappearing into memory sinkholes. Every day is exactly like, what was that Tuesday versus any other Tuesday? Well, who even knows? So we want to put in a couple things that create memories because we don't say where did the time go when you actually remember where the time went because you did something memorable
00:28:23
Speaker
with it. And so this rule to do one big adventure and one little adventure each week gets at that. It creates a nice balance between having good routines, but also doing things that maybe bust the routine a little bit. A big adventure can be three to four hours, so like half a weekend day. A little adventure can be less than an hour, doable on your lunch break, doable on a weekday evening, as long as it's something out of the ordinary. And challenge yourself to do one big adventure, one little adventure each week.
00:28:53
Speaker
You'll start planning in things that you are looking forward to. You will start creating more memories. You'll start thinking of yourself as an adventurous person. And I think life will start to feel very, very different. And I think it's probably the thing that I love most about your sort of time management and productivity work is a lot of other time management experts are talking about how to pack more work in or how to be more efficient. And it really feels to me like your work is like
00:29:18
Speaker
how to make more fun in your life. So really, I guess it really attracts me to the idea of thinking about what is there in my week and in my schedule to look forward to. Well, it's just a very practical rule, too. I mean, it gives you an idea of like, OK, you want to have more fun in life. People are like, OK, I manage my time well so I can have more fun. Well, what do I do with this fun? And here's an idea for how you can start thinking about actively planning more fun into your life.
00:29:42
Speaker
So all of those tranquility by Tuesday rules, which one is the rule that you think makes the most difference to achieving tranquility fit for you and your family? Well, you know, I think the planning on Fridays is on a practical level, how things move around here, that the trains arrive mostly on time.
Setting a Bedtime for Structure
00:30:00
Speaker
I mean, any the first rule, rule number one is just to give yourself a bedtime. And so people living in any sort of chaos
00:30:08
Speaker
You should start with this rule. Like, you wake up at a certain time in the morning. If you are an adult, my guess is you set an alarm because you have to get up for work or family responsibilities. That is the time you wake up. That is set. You also need a certain amount of sleep. So, ideally...
00:30:23
Speaker
That amount of sleep you count back from the time your alarm is set and that is the time you go to bed. This is not difficult. This is just a simple math problem. It has nothing to do with what kind of person you are or how important you are or anything else. It is just math if you need to wake up at six.
00:30:40
Speaker
and you need eight hours of sleep, your bedtime should be 10 p.m. If you wake up at 6.30 and you need seven hours of sleep, your bedtime can be 11.30. These are just mathematical questions. Figure it out. But you commit to getting in bed at that time any night that you don't have a really, really good reason not to. And if you do this over and over again, your life transforms.
00:31:02
Speaker
Like not only are you getting enough sleep, like you are waking up rested in the morning, but your life feels more structured and orderly in general. Like again, all of us know the day has a beginning. Like you wake up, the day has a beginning. The day also has an end. And when you set what time that end is, you know exactly how much time you are working with.
00:31:23
Speaker
you know what you could allocate with different things make things fit, you know, it's like a game of Tetris, how can I make all the pieces fit here in this 16 and a half waking hours I have, but you can't think it's bigger than that. Right? Like, you know what the space is, you feel that well, and then you go on to the next day. And this just just makes life feel more sustainable and doable.
00:31:44
Speaker
Yeah, that's really interesting. It takes discipline to go to bed at a reasonable time. And for some people, it takes a real mindset shift to know that it's a false economy, to push the hours, try and cram more into one day, thinking, oh, that's not going to affect me for the rest of the week. The fact that I'm robbing myself of sleep and I'm probably grumpy and irritable and making worse
00:32:07
Speaker
food choices and not doing exercise, like it has this real domino effect. You know, there's so much research too coming out now about the health impact of not getting enough sleep. Well, and the crazy thing is, I mean, people think that they're saving time. Like they think like, oh, well, if I stay up later, I get more time. But you don't get more time. Like the vast majority of people who are not chronic insomniacs
00:32:29
Speaker
have a set amount of sleep that their body needs. And if you skimp on it one night, you will crash and make it up at some other point. And the question is, is that other point time that you would wish to devote to sleep? Your body's gonna force you to substitute sleep for other activities at some point. The question is just when?
00:32:50
Speaker
And so, you know, I see this all the time on time logs that Monday and Tuesday, people get short amounts of sleep. And then later in the week, they're falling asleep on the couch watching television. They are sleeping through alarms. They are, you know, they're crashing on weekends. And so they can't use this time that might be discretionary time on the weekend because their their bodies are forcing them to substitute sleep for those other activities. Then, of course, they've slept late on Sunday mornings and then they can't go to sleep on Monday on a Sunday night for Monday. And the cycle starts all over again. So it's just like, choose the time.
00:33:19
Speaker
Get the amount of sleep you need every single night and you'll have far more energy. Life will feel more in control. Yeah, there's a whole bunch of apps. I fell down a rabbit hole over the holidays and we're looking at this. There's sleep debt apps will calculate your sleep, calculate your sleep debt. And you know, it's plugged into, if you have like a smartwatch or something that's tracking your sleep and your sleep cycles, it can calculate your sleep debt and helps you plan, where are you going to catch up on this sleep? So you can regulate it.
00:33:48
Speaker
Laura, this has been, we could go on for hours. There's so many different directions you can
Where to Find Laura VanderKam's Work
00:33:52
Speaker
take on this. But thank you so much for your time today. Thanks for sharing these ideas and your experience. It's been such a pleasure. Yeah, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. So where can our listeners find you if they want to hear more?
00:34:04
Speaker
Yeah, well, you can come visit me at my website, which is lauravandercam.com. That's just my name. And you can learn there about my various books, including Tranquility by Tuesday and about my podcasts, Before Breakfast, which is a short, every weekday morning tip designed to take your day from great to awesome. And then Best of Both Worlds, which I co-host with Sarah Hart Unger, where we talk issues of work and family from the perspective of people who truly love both.
00:34:31
Speaker
Thanks for listening. Show notes for this episode are available at lifeagminlifehacks.com. And if you're a fan, please subscribe and share the love and tell a friend or review us in your podcasting app. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.