Why Does Time Pass More Quickly As You Get Older? - Laura Vanderkam - #079

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
I am telling you, man, today's episode is absolutely fantastic. Welcome back to the Modern Wisdom Podcast. My name is Chris Williamson, and today's guest is Laura Vanderkam. Her recent book, Off the Clock, is one of my favorites of 2019, and talks about a number of phenomenons that you will be very familiar with. Why does time appear to go more quickly when you get older? Why is it that you have so many memories from a holiday, and yet you can't remember anything from the last three months of your journeys to work? As Laura puts it, time keeps passing whether you want it to or not. Whether you make a decision about how you're going to spend today or don't make a decision, eventually we're going to be on the other side of today, which means that the degree of mindfulness with which you choose how to spend your time is key to how your life will be perceived in the future. So yeah, there's some genuine aha mic drop moments throughout this podcast and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. If you did, please share it with a friend. It would make me very happy indeed. The podcast is growing so quickly at the moment, but more plays is always a good thing when we're spreading good vibes. But for now, please welcome Laura Vanderkam.
I'm joined by Laura Vanderkam today, and we are talking all things time. Laura, welcome to the show.

**Laura Vanderkam** (1:42)
Thank you so much for having me.

**Chris Williamson** (1:43)
It's a pleasure to have you on. I've absolutely loved Off the Clock, which is your most recent book, and I've pounded through it over the last couple of weeks. Not just because we're about to do this podcast, but also because it was a genuinely fantastic read. So congratulations on an amazing book.

**Laura Vanderkam** (1:58)
Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate that.

**Chris Williamson** (2:01)
So yeah, we're talking about time and time management. So to begin with, why is time such a difficult task for people to grapple with? Why is it so important for people to grapple with?

**Laura Vanderkam** (2:16)
Yeah, well, there's a couple of things going on there. I mean, one of the reasons time is so challenging for people is that it keeps passing whether you think about how you're spending it or not. So it's so easy to spend mindlessly. Whether you make a decision about how you spend today or don't make a decision, eventually we're going to be on the other side of today. So it requires you to really think about it in a way that a lot of other choices are more automatic to make a conscious choice about. But the hopeful thing about time, in my opinion at least, is that we all have the same amount of it. So a life is lived in hours, and so what we do with our lives is going to be a function of how we spend our hours, and we all have the same number of hours. And we all have 24 hours in a day, 168 hours in a week. And so when you find people who are doing amazing, awesome things in their lives, they may have many other things going for them. I'm not saying that they're not richer, smarter, better looking than the rest of us, but they don't have more time. And so maybe we can look at how they're allocating their hours and at least that's something that we can pick up on, even if we can't copy all the other things that they're doing.

**Chris Williamson** (3:28)
You're totally right. The fact that I have the same number of hours in my day as Elon Musk does is, well, I mean, that's unless you believe that he's actually managed to like clone himself. I've seen some, I've gone down.

**Laura Vanderkam** (3:42)
Well, there's always, you know, people send me mugs sometimes and say like, you have the same number of hours in the day as Beyonce, which is true. You know, I'm not, she has many other things that she can leverage to use those hours, but I'm guessing that she still wants to, you know, do certain things in her professional life that only she can do, and so she has to figure out how to do that. She probably wants to spend time with her family, which is also something that she has to personally do, even if she has support on the home front as well. Nobody can exercise for her, for instance. That's something that's actually impossible to outsource, however rich and famous you are. And so, you know, how does she allocate her hours? I mean, I may not be able to afford all the things Beyonce does, but I could learn something from how she spends her time.