9 Strategies To Better Control Your Time - Laura Vanderkam - #554

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Hello everybody, welcome back to the show. My guest today is Laura Vanderkam. She's a time management expert and an author. Time is non-renewable. It's the single most important asset that we have, and yet almost everyone wishes that they spent their time differently. Thankfully, Laura has distilled nine of her best strategies from years of coaching people on how to control their time more effectively. Expect to learn what everyone is getting wrong when it comes to writing to-do lists, why intentionality is such a crucial skill to develop, how having a bedtime can fix your daytime schedule issues, how to make boring routine tasks suck less, a simple solution to ensure that you do hard things, and much more. Don't forget that you might be listening but not subscribed, and I'm not kidding when I say that the next month is probably the biggest that I've ever had in terms of guests. I'm going to be announcing them very soon on my Instagram and on YouTube community, so make sure that you've pressed subscribe or you're going to miss them and you will be very sad indeed. But now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Laura Vanderkam.
Why do you think it is that people are so overwhelmed when it comes to time management? What's the problem that they're trying to solve?

**Laura Vanderkam** (1:35)
Well, I think the biggest problem for most of us is that time keeps passing no matter what you do. And so it is incredibly hard to spend time mindfully. No matter what you do, a week from now, a week will have passed. And so getting ourselves in the place where we can step back and direct that time as much as possible is challenging, especially as life keeps swirling around us. So, you know, I'm always on the lookout for ways that can help people kind of calm this chaos around us and make sure that we have something of a say in where our time is going.

**Chris Williamson** (2:11)
One of the common threads that I've found between a bunch of different conversations that I've had recently, whether it's been to do with time management or dating, how you're supposed to find your partner, or productivity and focus and attention and stuff like that, is intentionality. That seems to be one of the most common ways. You could call it whatever you want, right? Like effort, directionality, focus, like being intentional with how you do the thing. It seems like there are a lot of ways, more than ever, ways, a sensorium of opportunities that we have to be distracted by tons of things.
I think we lay a lot of problems at the feet of the modern 21st century. The biology hasn't changed, just the options have, but intentionality seems to be like the thing that can cut through it all.

**Laura Vanderkam** (2:56)
Absolutely, although I'd argue that life isn't really that different. People have always wasted time. People have always felt busy. I, at various points in my life, have collected old magazines from the 1950s and 1960s. As you can imagine, many of the articles are on how people feel very busy and modern life is just so crazy. Of course, now people look, but they didn't have smart phones. They didn't have internet access. What happened? Your boss can call you at home. If they had phones, that could happen, or people got stuck at the office late. We have to fill time with something, and so you can feel oppressed by whatever is going on in your life, even if some future version of the world has entirely different distractions.
We've always managed to waste time. We've always felt like life can just happen to us. We've always needed to take steps to feel more in charge of our decisions and our time in order to spend life a little bit better.

**Chris Williamson** (4:03)
There's a story that I heard about ancient Greece and the ancient Greek word for work. The ancient Greek word for work was translated as not at leisure. And I thought that was very interesting that the Greeks saw work as an aberration. They saw that as the thing that was the outlier and that leisure time was the thing that was the set point for humanity. And now that's kind of been a little bit inverted. But yeah, you're right. I mean, you know, you can go back. I was learning about when bicycles were first invented, and it meant that women could go out of the house without a chaperone. And the fact that women could go out of the house without a chaperone was going to cause havoc and this lady cycled in trousers and everybody was up in arms.