#honestly the category is so broad that the vast majority of the ones I know fit into the magical girl genre

[sailorstarr-chan4]

DISCLAIMER: I PLACED SERIES LIKE FRUITS BASKET IN A SEPARATE POLL. Reason being? While it IS a fantasy (family cursed with zodiac animal spirits), it is also very..... grounded, more "magical surrealism" than full-blown "fantasy." You can find my "non fantasy" romance poll here (and yes, Fruits Basket won lol)

Because there's a bazillion romance anime out there, especially in the fantasy category, I limited this list to only include ones I'm familiar with (even while cutting several other titles that I love, alas). But I still set some ground rules so I wouldn't make the list too complicated, mainly that romance is central to the characters, theme, and/or story.

Things I deliberately omitted to make this list simpler:

magical girls

anything by Rumiko Takahashi

any standalone movies (Studio Ghibli, Makoto Shinkai, Mamoru Hosoda, etc)

most harems/reverse harems (listen, I couldn't NOT count Fushigi Yuugi)

#(yes I am 1000% aware I'm missing a lot of beloved titles) #honestly the category is so broad that the vast majority of the ones I know fit into the magical girl genre #it's why I squeezed in Vampire Knight because it's basically magic/superpowers right? lol my poll my rules lololol #Starling polls #anime and manga #romance #Kamisama Kiss #Snow White with the Red Hair #The Ancient Magus Bride #Yona of the Dawn #Fushigi Yuugi #Genbu Kaiden #Romeo x Juliet #Ah! My Goddess #The Water Dragon's Bride #Vampire Knight #otaku issues #original post #300+ votes #50 notes

[nyadversary]

asking since your harry potter post was really interesting and made me wonder - are there any magic systems you really like or think are well-constructed and consistent? what are the traits of a good magic system?

oh i definitely don’t feel qualified to make any broad statements about what makes a magic system Good, it depends so heavily on what kind of story you’re trying to tell. i do want to say more about why i think the magic system in HP is ultimately bad though, and i have at least one example of a system i like to compare it with. under cut

very very early on in the HP series — i’m talking about the first few chapters of book 1 — we get the impression that magical ability does symbolize something? like think about how the series opens. the first chapter of the first book follows vernon dursley, a man who lives an extremely mundane life, likes it that way, and is highly perturbed by anything unusual happening or by anyone who seems out of the ordinary. he’s, what, CEO of a drill company or something? some comically boring but well-paying job. petunia is a housewife who passes the time spying on the neighbors. their infant son is already being spoiled and treated more like a prized possession than a human being. and these people hate anything they think is weird, which of course includes anything to do with magic. the dursleys know for a fact magic is real and it pisses them off and they hate it. 

when harry is left at their doorstep, mcgonagall protests and says the dursleys could not possibly have less in common with magical people like them. either she or hagrid says something to the effect that the dursleys are the biggest muggles around, which stuck with me because it implies that magical ability lies on a spectrum and the dursleys, who are outright opposed to anything the slightest bit unusual, are the furthest from magical anybody can be. this implies all sorts of things about what magic could represent for the series going forward — creativity, rejection of social norms, etc. — and, since these people are harry’s only living blood relatives but he winds up finding community for the first time once meeting other witches and wizards, it appears to be setting up a found family theme. which all sounds perfectly good, and people will still cite this as being a theme of the books. the main problem with that is it isn’t the intended theme going forward at all. 

JKR’s weird obsession with blood lineage honestly needs to be unpacked in a whole other post and i don’t think i’m the guy to do it but... obviously as the series goes on, the importance of blood family gets underlined again and again. it turns out harry is being protected by some sort of sacred maternal blood magic (which is never explained) and this is why he has to live with the dursleys, people he hates and has nothing in common with. the fact that they’re his blood relatives trumps anything else. magical ability generally is passed down within families, and in the later books much time is spent going over various magical lineages (voldemort’s family, dumbledore’s family, sirius’ family, the malfoy family, the hogwarts founders and their descendants, etc...). any notions of magic symbolizing creativity is undermined by the lack of actual creativity in how the magic is presented going forward (like i said in the other post, it winds up serving mainly utilitarian functions in the story) and as for rejecting the status quo, the series embraces the status quo. the happy ending the characters work 7 books to achieve just has everything “returning to normal” — voldemort is killed and the remaining death eaters dealt with, the ministry gets a new PM, hogwarts gets a new headmaster, and things continue on as they were before. issues of systemic injustice are left unaddressed, the subplots about magical beings fighting for full personhood status (centaurs, merpeople, house elves, etc) are left unresolved, slytherin house is allowed to continue on as an institution and presumably many wizards are still just as bigoted towards muggle-borns as they always were, and — oh yeah — the idea that muggles are innately inferior somehow? never explained or addressed. the takeway is just that if you can’t do magic, you suck. it’s so disappointing. all the pieces are there for a way better story (hey guys i think there might be some systemic problems with your magic school and your magic government do you wanna try fixing that maybe?) but JKR was never gonna write that story because it’s one she doesn’t believe in.

to summarize how magic works in harry potter just so i can really make it clear how boring it is:

magic ability is innate and the vast majority of people lack it. with relatively few exceptions, the ability runs in families — it’s rare for someone without magical ancestry to have the ability and it’s also rare for someone with magical ancestry to not have the ability

with only a few exceptions, all wizards are able to learn all spells. some wizards are stated to be unusually powerful but how much of this is due to raw magical potential and how much comes down to other factors like education, general intelligence and ability/willingness to learn, desire to cause harm in the case of the unforgivables, etc is unclear. some magical abilities, like being able to speak parseltongue or being a metamorphmagus (or whatever the fuck shapeshifters are called in this series) or being a seer, are innate and can’t be learned by most wizards. like magic itself, whether or not you have any extra ability seems to be genetic (these are all traits we know run in families)

in order to perform magic, devices like wands, cauldrons, etc are used as instruments or vessels to direct the user’s innate powers. there is no summoning, channeling, or ritual use involved and spells typically only go wrong if the wizard in question is inexperienced or something is wrong with their wand. with very few exceptions (the main one i can think of is divination, which is handled very ambiguously and most of what trelawney teaches is implied to be complete crap), magic works in very predictable and straightforward ways

so it all boils down to “you’re either a wizard or you aren’t, and you almost certainly aren’t unless you come from a magic family, but if you are — good news! you have basically the same abilities as any other wizard. don’t worry there’s nothing even vaguely pagan involved.”

which, like. how utterly dull. there are so many other ways one can approach these issues and nearly all of them that i can think of / have seen done are more interesting than this:

you could have a magic system where magical ability is much more specialized. instead of all magic users being all capable of more or less the same stuff, let’s say person A, B, and C are all magic users but each has a unique magical ability (say A can fly, B can talk to animals, C can become invisible) and, while they might be able to develop their individual talents and become stronger, they can’t learn each other’s skills. charlie bone, which is a crap series overall but which i do think has a more interesting magic system, falls into this category, as does a lot of superhero stuff although it’s generally not called “magic” in those stories.

another, similar, approach would be to have more specialized branches of magic that characters train under — say pyromancy, necromancy, etc. — and so, while it might be possible for a water mage to learn a fire spell or two, characters have much more individualized skillsets. RPG magic tends to be this, obviously. harry potter kind of vaguely gestures in the direction of this trope in that the professors obviously specialize in their particular subjects, but it’s not as if snape doesn’t know charms or whatever — it doesn’t amount to much of anything in practice as all the adult characters are capable of performing a diverse range of spells.

how does one wind up with the ability to do magic in the first place? is it innate, and, if so, is it random or does it run in families? is it associated with any other traits? are there drawbacks to being a magic user? can non-magical people acquire the ability to do magic through some other means, and, if so, does this represent an irreversible change? are magic users really “human” or are they something more? are non-magic users lesser? is there any loss of humanity associated with magical ability? do magic users channel their own innate power or are they channeling something else — if so, is it a godlike entity, demonic, or does it defy moral classification? is there “good” magic and “bad” magic, and, if so, is the delineation clear? if these are different branches of magic, are they wholly distinct in how they work or is there overlap? etc, etc, etc.

ultimately i don’t think anyone should be worried about finding the most unique combination of these tropes, because they’ve literally all been done 10 billion times — if i started off listing popular examples of how these tropes are handled in other media pandemic will have ended before i’m done. what’s important is how writers choose to handle these questions when telling their story. like, what does magic mean to the characters? what does their use of magic say about them? what does magic symbolize? etc... these are opportunities for the story to have Themes and Meaning and impart something to its audience! tbh i think it really says something that the magic in harry potter is so ultimately unimportant to the story that people didn’t bother asking the usual questions about what magic itself / the magic system might symbolize... if you look at what rowling might actually be trying to say with any of that, well, it’s not good.

i guess to end off with an example i like. in the bartimaeus trilogy, which is an extremely good YA series and i highly recommend, magic ability isn’t innate at all. magic in this universe is all done via summoning “demons” (energy beings from another plane of existence basically) and binding them to one’s will, which as you might expect is very dangerous if you fuck it up and summoning is on such extreme levels of academic bullshit that you basically have to study your entire life to do it safely (learning dead languages, being able to draw elaborate pentacles with perfect accuracy, etc etc). in practice, this means magic is something only the ruling class does / can afford to do. anyone in any significant position of power is a wizard, while everyone else — the “commoners” — is a second-class citizen under the thumb of what are essentially superpowered politicians. while the fact that magic exists isn’t a secret, the majority of commoners have no idea how it actually works, that it’s really just summoning and anyone can learn it. they’re being encouraged to think of wizards as innately superior/gifted and to defer to them as their betters. yknow, Or Else. there’s much more i could say about this but it’d wind up being its own post and i’d probably have to just break down the entire plot of the trilogy, but i think from what i’ve said you get a sense of the themes / commentary here. 

this has run long but point being, magic systems Can be used to say something about the story and the characters and to make some sort of thematic point or provide social commentary perhaps, and i think it’s cool when they do. harry potter tries its best to avoid having the magic mean anything and when you do try and analyze what it means, you just get a story about how some people are just way better and cooler than others because of. uh. their blood. so rather than further unpacking that suitcase i say you could just throw it away and, as they say, read another book

#LONG poast under cut. sorry except i'm not #anon #inbox #many thoughts on the subject as it turns out i do apologize that it's messy #i have english major disease

[a-stitch-in-time-and-space]

Headcanon: Julian Bashir is autistic and has frequent sensory overload, and the only two people who can help him are Garek and O’ Brien. Me? Projecting? It’s more likely than you think!!!

Ha, moooood. Which on that note I have a somewhat intense fic here in which Julian has a meltdown. It’s not related to sensory issues so much as “oh boy a lot of shit’s happened to him” but if you want more O'Brien helping him out after this – so because we gave that fic to O'Brien, let’s give this one to Garak.

Also can we talk about the fact that it’s canon that Julian and the other augments can hear sounds at decibels that non-augments can’t and that it causes them pain, but Julian just taught himself to not react, like fuck, how did someone write this and not follow through on Julian-Bashir-is-autistic-and-or-otherwise-nd!

sorry for taking so long, a. this got a bit longish so it’s under a cut and b. I got distracted by the fact that I always want to see everyone’s notes on reblogs in case of interesting discussion points and i have just now learnt that that cannot be done easily if a lot of people reblog at once… oh hyper-fixation how you get me time and again

this takes place post-Doctor Bashir I Presume and alludes to the fact that during this time Garak and Bashir’s interactions were gradually stripped away in the show (because it too gay) - Andy Robinson ran with that in A Stitch In Time and had Garak write about how much he regretted the two of them not remaining close/hinted that he was in love with him… so take that background as you will.

—— More Space ——-

Thank goodness, he thought after an indeterminate amount of time. O'Brien was here. He would be able to calm him down, he would know how to come up with some soothing description of exactly which of DS9’s pistons or pipes or programs was currently making that noise and he’d either fix it or stay with him until it sorted itself out. Or maybe the noise was gone and the residual whining was just himself recreating it perfectly in his head, or maybe he was just too far gone by now for it to matter, but O'Brien would help. Since the two of them had become friends and some of Julian’s old ticks had returned after his augmentation had come to light, Miles had been a surprisingly steady presence in his life.

“Doctor?”

No, not Miles.

Garak.

He couldn’t make himself respond. His body felt like it was compressing him into a vice, with all his ability to focus somehow splintered into a million shards, each of them painful to the touch. Oh no, what if Garak touched him? If Garak touched him right now he might shatter or scream or something else entirely outside of his control, but talking was also impossible right now, so he couldn’t ask him not to touch, please don’t touch-

Garak sat down in front of him, far enough away that it didn’t feel like too… much.

“Doctor. You don’t need to say or do anything.”

He could manage that.

“I was wondering why you’d missed our lunch date. Very pleased to find you didn’t simply opt not to come without telling me, although I find the alternative to be distressing.”  He stopped talking for a moment then. “Apologies for breaking into your room. Again.”

While Garak simply sat and occasionally spoke Julian was dimly aware of the fact that he could feel his edges hardening again. The shards were being pulled back together.

He also noticed now that he was freezing. It usually happened like that, having sat sedentary for however long or coming down from some emotional extreme. He shivered.

“This station is cold,” said Garak.“The temperature, the lights, the people… all too cold.”

Julian managed a smile and it was like his mouth was freed from a curse. “It is, isn’t it.”

“Not to mention loud,” Garak added.

“All that machinery,” Julian nodded and spoke slowly. His mouth still needed to unstick. “Every time an alarm goes it’s like a sharp pain… I used to be… much better at this.”

“What do you mean?”

“I used to… I used to get these all the time as a child. Meltdowns, shutdowns, I think. But then my parents told me later that it was a side-effect of the augmentations and I tried to… to will myself to stop them, to bypass my natural instincts in order to not be found out and it worked, in a way, or at least nobody found out. I familiarised myself with and categorised any sights, sounds, smells, feelings I came across on earth during my Starfleet training and ordered them into lists and sublists: What I could handle mostly, what I could handle sometimes, what I needed to avoid at all costs. I managed to… to pretend. And then I came to Deep Space Nine and for awhile it was all too much again, I had to make new lists, but I managed, I really… I really did, I really did, I really-” he was talking himself into hyperventilating again, he knew this, but he couldn’t stop now, “- and then I got captured and it was like everything just stopped. I barely- I don’t even remember most of it, but when I got back it was so much worse -”

“Julian,” said Garak and the sound of his first name coming from Garak’s mouth surprised him back to the now. “Julian,” said Garak again. “You’re here. With me. On a floor that is quite cold, I might add.”

Julian breathed out and mumbled under the exhale. “One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. Seven. Eight. Nine. Ten.”

“What is that,” asked Garak.

“Counting my fingers. It… helps.”

“Noted,” and the easy way in which Garak seemed to have just accepted that he would be helping Julian again in future was another shock to his system, but then why wouldn’t he? Even if they hadn’t met up as often as they used to. Even if he was untrustworthy at heart and Julian could never figure out why Garak wanted his company at all. He found he missed Garak’s simple and complicated nature. It grounded him, somehow.

He got up off the floor, reaching out for Garak when he stumbled. He held him just tight enough to make sure that he wouldn’t fall. Not overcrowding – Julian suddenly remembered that Garak was claustrophobic. He must know how easily sensory inputs could become too much.

At Garak’s questioningly soft hold on his arm, Julian nodded and he helped him to the sofa. “Would you like some water?”

Julian nodded. As Garak went to fetch it, he began to talk again. Somehow… he just needed to get it out now, like an excision. “After the truth came out my mother told me that they’d been lying. I mean, they’ve been lying about so much, but specifically about this. I’ve always been like this. Or. Some of it. The meltdowns. I thought… those memories weren’t real. But now they are? Some of them. I’m having trouble sorting them.”

Garak handed him the water.

“I developed a theory,” said Julian, forgetting to sip.

“Tell me your theory doctor,” said Garak, his tone of voice tender as he sat down beside him, again, close enough if he needed him, but not too close.

“I was wondering why a heightened inability to process inputs was a side-effect of the vast majority of augments, when I had this inability before my augmentation. I started to suspect that it was less to do with the augmentations and was simply… who we were. The augmentations gone wrong could throw that into extremes, but that may have more to do with medical trauma responses than… anyway, I can’t confirm until I have more data. I did research into my own developmental delays, the medical history – it’s fascinating how we repeat cycles actually, first it was considered a form of possession or changelings, then it began to be classed under a broad form of what would be known as schizophrenia, then divided into narrow and still somewhat inaccurate categories of autism, aspergers, adhd, add, high and low functioning etcera, and then was gradually broadened again under general brain-differences known as neuroatypicals or neurodiverse,” he took a breath and continued: “- I’m not too interested in 21st century history honestly, but I know the government upheavals affected medical classifications and concepts of what was known broadly as “disabilities” at the time, and that it fundamentally shifted again once we formed the federation. But then -” and here he started gesticulating widely in excitement or outrage - “it all becomes the same just repackaged, doesn’t? Stigma against augments who are overwhelmingly people like me is stigma against neurodiversity is stigma against the “possessed,” it’s…” he trailed off. “It’s all the same,” he finished lamely.

He’d become very aware suddenly that he’d done that thing that annoyed most of the people he ever conversed with, running his mouth while forgetting the other person. But Garak didn’t seem annoyed. He was listening intently, in fact. At the pause he even nodded and offered: “The history of such matters is different on Cardassia. Or rather, mental and developmental differences don’t get acknowledged on Cardassia.”

“Eugenics?” said Julian with a frown.

“Not as such. We don’t mind in theory, as long as everyone can perform the tasks they’re assigned to. It’s a… class thing. If you belong to a powerful family and are expected to do great things in the army or politics or the sciences, being unable to do so for any reason is usually – what is the term humans use? - “Swept under the rug.” But then someone like you, dear doctor, if you had been Cardassian it might surprisingly have been easier for you.”

Julian shook his head. “My abilities are due to my augmentations. I’d have been… I don’t know. Not me,” he said softly.

At that, Garak gave him a look that he couldn’t pin down. Something… surprised for a moment, almost? Then smoothed out into an enigmatic smile. “Perhaps. From what you tell me you’ve always processed like you do, you’ve just been given better tools to translate and more…” he searched for the word for a second, before landing on: “space.”

At that Julian burst out into an unexpected laugh. “I certainly have enough space out here. More than enough, I’d say.”

Garak’s smile deepened. “But it doesn’t matter. Either you were always going to be able to pursue medicine and the stigmas of your parents and surrounding society were preventing you from discovering that on your own, or your augmentations made you unlock new abilities. But on Cardassia someone with the kind of passion you possess would have done well, with or without them.”

“If I were born into the right class. And if I didn’t get arrested for being fundamentally against the militaristic state.”

“Naturally,” acceded Garak. “And I must say I’m quite relieved to find the incorruptible, perfect federation comes with its own flaws. One wouldn’t have expected it with the way humans constantly go on about it.”

“Oh, we go on about the federation? According to you Cardassia is superior in culture -”

“- oh, definitely -”

“- politics -”

“- without a doubt, my dear -”

“- criminal justice system?”

“- well, we’ve never brought a wrong case before the court-”

“- I know you’re just saying that to rile me up-”

“- my dear doctor, when have I ever been anything but sincere?”

“- when have you ever said anything you meant?”

“- I am offended, truly-” said Garak with a big grin on his face.

Julian found it the easiest thing in the galaxy to return.

“Remember to drink your water,” he was reminded, gently, before they continued their lunch discussion. It was a moment in which they both forgot that they had ever begun to drift apart in the first place.

—— The End ——-

#Julian Bashir #Elim Garak #ds9 #st: ds9 #star trek #fanfic #writing

[jaybug-jabbers]

Top 3 Favorite Betas from Pokemon Gold/Silver Spaceworld Demo

Hey, everyone. Back with more favorites lists. Considering the jaw-droppingly huge list of beta pokemon that were recently discovered for Pokemon Gold/Silver, though, we’re going to cheat a little. We’ll be doing top 3 lists within some broad categories, so we can ramble a bit longer then normal about some of these beauties.

Beta Babies

So, as we’ve seen, Gold/Silver’s beta was absolutely crammed full of baby pokemon, the vast majority of which were scrapped. It raises some interesting questions about the original direction of the game and the concept of baby pokemon in general. What exactly was the purpose of baby pokemon? Were they originally intended to have such low stats and to be so difficult to evolve (via happiness)? Were they really just for the ‘aw’ factor?

If so, it might be easy to see why Gold/Silver cut so many of them; while the game would have certainly been a very cute place, it would have been difficult in terms of actual battle. Still, it’s a genuine shame to see some of these squishy blobs go. Three of my favorites:

Para– because Paras/Parasect is my favorite pokemon line, and I was absolutely thrilled and amazed to see a baby originally planned. The design is damn adorable, although it admittedly makes little sense. The parasitic fungus that slowly takes over the insect portion is what grows inside and consumes paras/parasect, so why should a baby para burst forth from a mushroom?

Chiks– because it is literally a fluffy ball of shouty heads and I love birds. (although, again, the design raises a question; where did that third head go when chiks evolves into duduo?)

Meowsy– I mean c’mon who isn’t going to love this

New Evolutions

Another shocking thing in the list of beta pokes is finding new evolutions to old friends.

Madame– an evolution for Dux. This thing looks fantastic as heck. I’ve always loved Dux and quite honestly it deserves an evolution. I can’t imagine why it would be cut, especially considering how fabulous it is. I’m curious what the ‘cane’ Madame is holding is, and whether it’s still something made of vegetation. Seriously, though, this duck-evolves-to-swan idea is far superior to the later Ducklett/Swanna that came about.

Animon– the evolution we never knew we needed. In all seriousness, it seems utterly pointless for Ditto to evolve (it still only knows the move Transform and nothing else) from a smiley blob to a screamy blob with a spike on its head, but that’s part of what makes it hilarious and charming. It doesn’t make sense for Ditto to even evolve (which is maybe why they scrapped it). It also doesn’t make sense that it evolves with Metal Coat. (were they considering adding a steel typing?) Nothing about Animon makes any sense. But damn, it’s still fantastic.

Twins– At first glance, one could easily assume this is a ghost type, maybe even a nifty beta concept for Ghastly. But this is a Dark/Normal type and a pre-evo for Girafarig. Maybe more then any beta, I feel like this has a backstory behind it I wish we understood. It seems the concept behind Girafarig was much deeper, originally; spirits that were conjoined twins, one dark and evil, one not? It’s quite a twist.

Betas With Major Changes

A lot of pokes in the Spaceworld demo were recognizable but their beta forms often had some pretty significant design differences that were later tweaked. In some cases those tweaks were clear improvements or just adding some polish, but in other cases I honestly prefer the original direction the beta designs were headed.

Girafarig– we’ve known about the beta design of Girafarig for a while now, about its palindrome motif and probably being based on a pushmi-pullyu. It’s only with this beta that we get a really good look at the wonderfully sinister face with Girafarig’s backsprite, though. Ever since I saw Girafarig, I thought its typing ought to be Normal/Dark, and it’s deeply gratifying to see that typing reflected in the beta version. It makes so much more sense and shows the split, dual nature of Girafarig. The entire original design makes so much more sense and it’s strange and confusing that they would ruin that.

Rayleep (beta Mantine)– holy crud you guys, beta Mantine was actually COOL. Playing again on the dual-nature theme, it seems to have an angel-devil motif with the bottomside looking feathery and angelic and sweet and the topside (and backsprite) sporting dark markings and a sinister face. It’s adorable, it’s cool, it’s a fun and neat design, and it’s a thousand times better then the Mantine we ultimately ended up with … which is an incredibly bland, dull ray indeed. What’s more, Mantine’s Flying typing feels far more justified in its beta design, with its cool feathery wings and tail.

Tael (beta Aipom)– I hate Aipom. I always have. Really ugly pokemon and really annoying movepool. Makes me feel itchy and gross just to look at. Tael, on the other hand(s), is a cat with far too many humanlike hands. It’s cute at first and then kinda creepy the more you stare at it, to be honest. But hey, it looks better then that irritating monkey did. That’s all. I don’t have a deeper reason then that, haha. Some people have remarked Gold/Silver’s beta was clearly the Cat generation; cats everywhere, as far as the eye can see. I am OK with this.

Other beta differences I really dig include Murkrow’s more obviously witchy hat, the Hoppip line’s cat theme, and Tangrowth’s very different and snazzy look.

Completely New Betas

Then there are these guys, ones without any ties to any pre-existing pokemon whatsoever.

Wolfman/Warwolf– Excuse me? These fuzzy little things are amazing. It seems to be a small, stout, dark-colored critter wearing yeti pelts, their glowing, beady eyes peering out from the mouth of the pelt. They have a very unique and fascinating desgin and a lot of intrigue to them. I absolutely love them. They’re pure Ice types and seem to have been replaced in Gold/Silver with the Swinub line, which is an even bigger shame, because I don’t like that line’s design one bit. You can keep your pig mammoths, I’ll take the clan of mysterious snow gremlins, please, thanks.

Kurstraw/Pangshi– these two would have been incredible ghost-type additions to the game. A panda voodoo doll and then a panda based off a Jiangshi? Heck yeah. Their sprites both look great and they’re well-designed and obviously a lot of thought went into it. The concept is perfect. So why cut them? Who knows. Some folks have speculated that back then, they may have worried these pokemon were too morbid for a kid’s game, so I suppose that’s possible. They may have also worried about controversey from parents or whatnot. In any case, it’s a huge shame to see them cut from the roster.

Something that’s particularly interesting is that Kurstraw evolves at level 1. It also seems very likely that Curse would have been its signature move.

Rinring/Bellboyant– these two pokes have a clear and appealing design theme behind them. And they’re Dark type. And they’re cats.

How could they throw these two away?!

Other amazing pokemon include a line of Water/Steel types that are based on a shark with an anchor and a gulper eel, a seal that’s a Water/Fire type (!!), Slowbro/Slowking’s shell as a stand-alone pokemon, and a water starter line that looks way cooler then the totodile line.

Anyway, it’s some pretty exciting stuff. This group of beta designs that were dumped on us was so huge that I think we’re all still struggling to mentally process the information. In a way it gives that old pokemon feeling … the thrill of discovering some new neat critter everywhere you look.

This is a repost on a new blog. The original post was on Jun 7, 2018.

#pokemon #top3 #beta pokemon #pokemon gold spaceworld demo #mycontent #pokemon favorites

[scripttorture]

Given the memory problems torture victims seem to be affected by, is it at all common for someone to resist or be suspicious of those trying to rescue them? Would it be realistic for a character to mistake his friends for torturers and understand later that they aren’t or would it be more likely that he recognizes them and feels happy? My character has been force-fed and beaten and left tied in a chair for hours. How can I write a realistic reaction to seeing his friends again?

Nothis wouldn’t be a common scenario because that’s not how thememory problems associated with torture work.

Thememory problems torture causes come in three broad categories: memoryloss, intrusive memories and inaccurate memories.

Intrusivememories are really vivid, near-constant reminders of the abusesurvivors went through. You know that feeling when you’re randomlyreminded of something embarrassing you did in the past for noparticular reason? Imagine that happening regularly with memories ofthe worst thing that’s happened to you.

It’snot a hallucination, it’s the brain going over those memories overand over again.

Inaccuratememories are- well flaws both in older memories and more recent ones.They’re when our memory of events doesn’t match with whatactually happened. This happens to everyone. But the rate at whichthey occur in torture survivors and other trauma survivors is muchmuch higher than the norm for the population.

Thingslike the order of events, the lay out of rooms, descriptions ofabusers and (with multiple abusers) who exactly did what, can all beeffected (as well as more ordinary memories). Inaccurate memories area large part of the reason why torture convictions are not morecommon. Courts put a lot more stock in the reliability of humanmemory then it deserves. Cases with too few survivors can get thrownout on the basis of inconsistencies in their memories.

Memorylossfrom trauma or torture tends to function in a couple of particularways.

Generallyspeaking people don’tlose older memories. The older a memory is the safer it is. Sosurvivors don’t forget their names or their families or peoplethey’ve known for a long time.

Survivorscanforget aspects of their torture but this is actually much less commonthen intrusive memories and it’s more common for memory loss toeffect periods when they were not being tortured.

Sofor example a survivor might forget a lot of things that happened inthe week before they were captured. They might forget a lot of thingsabout how they were held captive (in periods where they weren’tbeing tortured). And they might have a general difficult rememberingthings afterthey’re released that can last for the rest of their lives. Thatusual comes across as a sort of forgetfulness, missed appointments,forgotten keys- things like that.

Thereason I don’t think what you want to do is possible is becauseyou’ve characterised these people as friends. That implies, to me,that they’ve known each other for a significant period of time.Which in turn suggests the type of older memory that torture isunlikely to destroy.

Ifthe rescuing characters were people who the victim had only known fora week (perhaps up to a month if they didn’t interact much) then Icould see this working. But if they know each other well enough to befriends then I don’t think they’d forget each other.

Ifyou feel like this misunderstanding is important to your story therearesome fairly easy ways you could still achieve it.

Achange in uniform, equipment or standard tactics that happened a fewweeks before the victim character is captured couldeasily and realistically be forgotten. If the new uniform/equipmentcovers distinguishing features the survivor might easily panic andexpectthese strange new people to be more torturers. If they can hear orsee parts of the rescue mission but don’t recognise the tacticsthey might expect to be taken by a different group of bad guys ratherthan rescued.

Goingback to your first question for a moment I honestly have no idea howcommon resisting rescue is for the simple reason that most torturevictims are not rescued.

Thevast majority of victims are….not in a position where they couldever expect rescue. They’re civilians who are picked up almost atrandom, convicted criminals who are being held legally or illegally,members of vulnerable groups. Alot of the time the people closest to them don’t know where thevictims are. Theyare not, for the most part, members of armed organised movements thatwould be capable of mounting raids to forcibly bring them back.

Andthose that are members of such groups- well most of the times thosegroups don’trisk attacking strongholds for one person. They quite reasonablyjudge the risk too great.

Formost victims torture ends because ‘the war’ did or because forwhatever reason higher ups order their release. Or they die ofcourse.

Releasecanbe secured through non-violent political pressure and protest. Infact Ethiopia recently released a lotof torture victims from jails due to the political changes that arecurrently happening in the country.(Ethiopia is my current favourite good news story.) I’m also awareof individual cases where victims were released after bad press andpressure from groups like Amnesty International.

Incontrast I can’t think of a single case where a violent raid saveda victim of torture. There have been incidents where armed groupsintervened successfully in cases of genocide but I’m not sure therehave been any in more ‘usual’ torture cases.

Iknow the West is enamoured with these stories of small, brave, armedrebellions fighting bigger, better armed evil empires but- Let’s bereal here for a moment: the ending that gets is from Blake’s 7,everybody dies.

Idon’t think your character would be likely to have forgotten hisfriends, mistake them for torturers or attack/resist them. But Idon’t think he’s likely to be happy to see them either.

Ithink some kind of panic or anxiety attack would be fairly likely.His friends are in danger and he’s in no position to help thembecause depending on the length of time he’s been in that stressposition/how he was beaten he might well be unable to move.

Hemight dissociate.

Hemight also not react in a visibly negative way, but the rescue isstill a highly stressful scenario. It could result in his death, thedeaths of his friends or with all of his friends being captured andtortured as he was. On that basis- I think I’d save ‘happy’reactions for when they’re out safely and the victim has had achance to receive some medical attention.

Ihope that helps. :)

Disclaimer

#tw torture #effects of torture #memory #memory loss #writing victims #rescue #Anonymous

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Transcript of How to Feel Less Busy and Get More Done

Transcript of How to Feel Less Busy and Get More Done

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John Jantsch: 168. Do you know what that number represents? It is the hours that each of us has in a week, that includes 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That’s 168. So how do you use those to feel less busy and get more done? Well tune in to this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. I talk with Laura Vanderkam, and she’s the author of a new book called Off the Clock. You are going to want to check it out to figure out how to manage your life.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s I switched to Gusto. And to help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners and exclusive limited time deal. You sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to Gusto.com/Tape.

Hello, welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This John Jantsch, and my guest today is Laura Vanderkam. She’s the author of several time management and productivity books, including one we’re going to talk about today called Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done.

So, Laura, thanks for joining me.

Laura V.: Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: Now as I understand it, the method you used to compile some of your research was to literally have what, seven, eight, 900 people track their time on one given day and then turn all that in, and you analyzed it. Is that a good summary?

Laura V.: That’s a good summary, yeah. I had 900 people with full-time jobs and who also had families to track their time for a day. It was normal March Monday. So I had them record how they spent their time and then I asked them questions about how they felt about their time so looking at all this I could compare the schedules of people who felt relaxed, and they had enough time for the things they want to do with the people who felt stressed and starved for time, and rushed and all that and see what was the actual difference.

John Jantsch: So you used something you call Time Perception Scores, and I thought that was kind of interesting because I think a lot of people kind of end it like, “I got my checklist done,” instead of necessarily this idea of how they feel about it. I think there is a lot of stress around even getting a lot done, isn’t there?

Laura V.: There really is. I mean, because ultimately time is what it is, but how you feel about it has a big effect on your life. It’s the question of whether … People will be sitting there on a massage table, but thinking about their inbox. Technically, they’re having relaxed leisure time but they don’t feel that way, and that can keep people from enjoying it. So I think our time perception has a lot to do with how effective we are.

I was asking people questions like, “Yesterday I generally felt present rather than distracted,” and people could answer on a one to seven point scale. Then there are many other questions like that so then I could numerically look at the people who felt most relaxed and present and happy about their time and then the people who felt the worst about it, too.

John Jantsch: So I sometimes thing time management books are a little like diet books. It’s like here’s the new one. Eat good, do exercise, get rest. That’s the new diet. So, I’m going to let you defend that. How is your time management book different than the sea of time management books, because everybody’s been trying to figure this out.

Laura V.: Yes, well the truth is we all have the same 24 hours a day so it’s even harder-

John Jantsch: Right, right.

Laura V.: [inaudible 00:03:47] like money books, or people want different amounts of money so you could at least segment that way. But no, we all have the same amount of time. The honest truth is I don’t care if you have some email hack to take 30 seconds less on your inbox, or all these time management strategies like clean the shower while you’re in it to save a little bit of time here and there, or something like that. This is really not what time is about.

It’s about asking questions of what is important to us, what would I like to spend my time on. I think honestly how I feel about my time, too. Do I feel like time is rushing past, like I’m frantic and harried, like I don’t remember where my time has gone, or do I feel like it is full and rich, and I’m truly enjoying it and lingering in positive experiences? I’m really going for the latter, and off the clock it’s about more about the philosophy of how we view time.

John Jantsch: I’m curious on a couple of data points when you compiled all this research and analyzed it. Was there any difference in how people felt about their time purely based on their age?

Laura V.: So I know that there is broadly about this. I didn’t really look at people’s ages in this. I know everyone had children at home under age 18 so that put somewhat of a limit on what ages people were in. Probably the majority were between ages of about 25 and 55 just because of that constraint on it. But, I do know that many people feel that times move faster as they get older. A lot of people thinking back oh the years between let’s say 16 and 19 seem very vast for people versus the last three years often seem a lot quicker in our recounting.

There’re reasons for that, which is that age 16 to 19 was a very memorable time for people. They did a lot of firsts, they were figuring out who they are, new experiences. Those things tend to be memorable, and when we have memorable experiences, we remember them. Whereas adult life is generally not like that, so we don’t remember it. But we can, and people who have a good relationship with time tend to think about making their time memorable so they do remember it.

John Jantsch: I was just going to say that sounds like that’s a really good point, is maybe we ought to do things that are more memorable. All right, so another data point I was curious about is did you find a pattern to what some of the biggest time drains were for people?

Laura V.: Well, I think one interesting one is not thinking about where you’d like your time to go. I think that being intentional about your time is the biggest way to make sure that is actually spent well. If you think about how a lot of people approach, even a workday, we at least think oh well, here are broadly some things I need to do, but we tend to show up and then just march from meeting to meeting, and trying to check emails in between meetings, and you get to the end of the day like wait, where did all that time go?

It’s hard to say that the time was optimized if you’re doing all that. With people who are more intentional about it who say, “Okay, well these are the three things I absolutely have to get done today. Here’s where I have open space that I can deal with them, and by the way, do I actually have to be at all those meetings? Let me push back against some of them, too.” Those people could work … often could get out of work a little bit earlier than the people who left the work until the end of all the meetings and then had to still get done the things that had to get done.

So I found that people with high time perception scores tended to work slightly less than other people, but it wasn’t that the other people with low time perception scores worked a lot. They worked just a little bit more than the average, but it was more that the people who were good about time were intentional about planning their day so they got stuff done when they had the energy to do it, so that they weren’t stuck by themselves on a late night.

John Jantsch: Many days I feel like I kick ass for two hours, and delete email for six hours. I know there are certain times when I am way more productive, and I wonder if that’s a sort of physical or physiological kind of clock thing, or is that something that we just kind of train ourselves to be?

Laura V.: Well I think that your description of a work day is pretty broad in that a lot of people experience this phenomenon, that they have like two good hours and then six hours of yes, email deletion and random meetings and such. The important thing is that you make sure and you use those two hours. If you only have two good hours, you want to make sure that you are executing on whatever is most important to you during those two hours because the email deletion is still going to happen. Like, you can do that with half a brain, but you can’t deal with that [inaudible 00:08:35] focus time.

For most people that focus time tends to happen in the morning, which is an argument for not scheduling sort of status meetings between 8:00 and 10:00 a.m. because again, that’s time that people can really crank on stuff whereas they’ll still tell you how the project is going at 2:00 p.m., but it doesn’t really matter if they’re half asleep during that time. I do think on the other hand though that you can get some of that email deletion time back by proactively planning in breaks, because what’s sort of happening is that you have energy and then you use it.

If you don’t put more energy back in, then you could only do the low energy tasks like deleting emails. So you know, many things you can do. You can get outside for a little bit, go for a quick walk, talk to somebody whose company you really enjoy. That can get you a little bit more time out of that email deletion category.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I was somewhat being fastidious, but I think a lot of people feel that way, and I do know that they are certain times when I have … And I actually schedule my day a little bit around the knowledge that I’m from ten to noon, I really am very effective, and from two to four I’m really very effective. I just know that, and I think that there is some planning that goes into that, or into taking advantage of that.

Laura V.: Definitely. Definitely. That’s smart.

John Jantsch: You talk a lot about 168 hours, and it’s interesting to think that’s the amount of hours in a week, isn’t it?

Laura V.: It is, which is funny because most people don’t know that. But yeah, 168 hours and many people don’t know, which is fascinating because when people say 24/7 all the time, and then they don’t multiply it through. But it’s really the right way … I think weeks are a good unit to think about time partly because that’s the unit of life that we tend to live, is the repeating cycle of life like both Tuesdays and Saturdays happen the same amount. They’re very different, but they happen the same amount.

So the other reason to think of 168 hours is it just shows you how much time you have. I mean, a lot of people who have full time jobs say, “I have no time for anything else,” but if you think about it, work 40 hours a week, sleep eight hours a night so that’s 56 hours a week. That leaves 72 hours for other things, which is quite a bit of time. It’s twice as much time as you’re working, so there is time for other things it’s just we tend not to see it because work tends to take a lot of [inaudible 00:11:02] energy as well.

John Jantsch: And really … and I think you said the book … you stated the book is more philosophical. So in that sense, it’s not really just about getting more done, is it?

Laura V.: No, because there’s no point in getting more done. You know … especially stuff like the deleting email. I know people feel so productive when they’re deleting email because it’s measurable. I don’t know if I made progress on my most important goals, but I know for sure I got down from 150 unread messages to 50, so yay me, right? But it’s about making sure that you’re effective in the various fears of life … well like you are doing the things in life that make life feel worthwhile. If you aren’t, how can you go about reallocating your hours so those things happen?

John Jantsch: I think for me, at least, I know there are … When I come in every single day, I have a myriad of choices of things I could do but there are clearly some higher payoff activities that if I focused on them, or whatever, and made sure all else got put to the side until that was done, I would certainly advance on my goals. It’s not even about time management, it’s just about making choices.

Laura V.: Yeah, I mean we do have a fair amount of choice about how we allocate our time. I have people that’s telling me, “Well I can’t control this, this, and this.” I mean, it’s easy to talk about the times we can’t control, but then there’s time we can, too, even if it’s a small amount of time. Certainly, we could make better choices within those small amounts of time and ask the question of how can we change things more broadly over a longer period of time? I think it’s easy to become mentally stuck, but often there’s something that can be changed. Then it’s about changing that something and then maybe finding that motivational, and not to push the next thing along.

John Jantsch: Well, and I work with a lot of business owners who are very overwhelmed … who feel very overwhelmed. A lot of it, when we really get to studying it, there’s a lot of things that they shouldn’t be doing. In fact, they should be trying to do less instead of trying to do more because the trying to do more gets them so scattered and stressed that the stuff that really is worth them doing doesn’t get done.

Laura V.: Yeah, and that’s just a function, again, of when you’re starting a business you feel like you should do everything, chase every sale, make sure everything’s done perfectly, which means you have to do it yourself. It’s how entrepreneurs get how that drive to get started. But those skills, that temptation to do all that, and be a perfectionist, that just … you can’t grow that way. I mean, because again, we only have 24 hours in day, and even if you worked every single minute that you weren’t sleeping, there’s still a limit on how much you can do.

If you think of a CEO of a big company, we don’t say, “Oh, well he or she is a failure because they’re not doing everything themselves.” Of course not, we expect that. So it’s really about having more of that mindset of what is the absolute best thing I can be doing with my time? How can we set up the business so that I am supported in doing those things, and these other things that either I don’t do as well, or can’t do well at all … Or even that I do great, but are not the best use of my time can be given to somebody else.

John Jantsch: Wouldn’t it be great if in your business all you had to do was the stuff you love? The reason you started the business. Not all that administrative stuff like payroll and benefits. That stuff’s hard, especially when you’re a small business. Now, I’ve been delegating my payroll for years to one of those big corporate companies, and I always felt like a little tiny fish, but now there is a much better way.

I’ve switched over to Gusto, and it is making payroll and benefits and HR easy for the modern small business. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service to take care of your team. To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive limited time deal. If you sign up today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just to Gusto.com/Tape.

Now I’ve developed over the years, and this may just be rationalizing procrastination, but there are time when I have felt procrastination was actually in order, and it’s because I wasn’t … Like the idea hadn’t come to me, or the way to tackle something hadn’t really come to me and if I went out and ran or did something, and forgot about it, then I’d come back and all of a sudden the idea came to me.

I’ve developed a pattern, I think, of recognizing that. Is that an excuse for procrastination, or is that a valuable-

Laura V.: No, I think that’s a valuable observation. The key is making sure you start your project enough ahead of time so that you have space for walking away from it and doing something else, and then coming back to it. So the issue I think a lot of people have is they leave it up to the last minute and then they don’t have time for that sort of incubation period of the idea. Then, you’re really screwed because there’s nothing you can do about it. Either it will be late, or it won’t be very good. Either of which is not a great outcome.

But if you start enough ahead of time, and you sort of put your thoughts in there, and you say, “Okay, well it’s okay. It’s not great though. Let me think about it a little bit more,” go away from a while and when you come back a day or two later, you’ve got lots more ideas, or you thought about more research you need to do that will solve this problem for you. Then it’s much better. So yeah, I think leaving that space in for incubation is a key part of creativity. So why don’t we call it that instead of procrastination?

John Jantsch: Right.

Laura V.: That sounds much better.

John Jantsch: So should everyone track their time?

Laura V.: I think it would be great if everyone could track their time for a week. I have been tracking my time personally for three years now in half hour blocks. That doesn’t mean I check in every half hour. I check in probably three times a day and write down I what I was doing since the last time. I don’t expect anyone else to track their time for three years. I’m a bit of a time management freak. But, by tracking a week, you can see where the time really goes and the key part of this is making sure that whatever stories you are telling yourself about your life are actually true. A lot of times they turn out not to be true. People have various ideas of how many hours they work, which turn out not to be true. They have ideas of how many hours they sleep, which may true one night per week but isn’t true the other nights.

They may say, “I have no free time whatsoever,” and it’s like, “Except for all that time I was watching TV, which maybe is free time. I’m just not remembering it for some reason.” So I think that knowing where the time goes then allows us to make choices based on good data. If something is working great, that’s awesome. We can celebrate it knowing that that is exactly where our time goes. If it is not working, we can say, “Well now I know. Should I scale it up? Should I scale it down? How does it compare to other things in my life.” In a business decision, you want to make those from good data, same thing with your time. Make sure you’re working from what is true as opposed to what you think.

John Jantsch: How much time does multitasking actually cost us?

Laura V.: It depends what kind of multitasking we’re talking about. I mean a lot of people think that they’re being more productive by say, checking email while they’re on the phone, and in general they’re not. Your brain is just going back and forth between them, so you’re not paying attention to what’s being said on the phone, or else you’re not really answering the email well. You know, if that’s the case, it’s usually good to ask, “Why am I even on this phone call? If I can do other things while I’m on the call, probably I shouldn’t be on this call.” It’s not just worthwhile. “I should have sent somebody else, or maybe made it shorter,” or whatever else.

So things like that, yeah, pretty much just wastes time. As for … I mean there’re nice ways to multitask, too. If you think about something like exercising with a friend, is theoretically multitasking. I mean, you’re having a good conversation with somebody you’d like to, and you’re moving your body at the same time. So, that’s great. Like, that’s a double win right there, or you know, commuting with your spouse. If you can share a car ride to work once a week, that’s great because you’re turning what would be wasted time into a date, basically. So you know, think about how you can double up that way.

John Jantsch: You really need to up your expectation what a date is for.

Laura V.: What a date is. Well, you know when life gets busy enough you take what you can get, all right? Many couples, like young kids and long jobs between the two of them finally don’t get a whole lot of time talk, so if you could talk in the car, take it.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I’m swell. My children are all grown and so when I travel now my wife just goes with me. So we are in a different point, I guess.

Laura V.: Yeah, that sounds great. We may get there eventually.

John Jantsch: You will. You talk about something in the book that I think would be a really compelling idea for people, and that’s the idea of designing an ideal day.

Laura V.: Yeah, so and not just an ideal day, though I think that could be fun. But my ideal day, there’d be like flying cars and I would have to wait in traffic behind anyone else. I think more … I think about it as a realistic ideal day. So within the constraints of sort of your normal life, what would a really, really good day look like for you? You know, when people ask this question they start to say, “Oh, well you know I think it would be good if I could maybe take a walk at lunch instead of just sitting at my desk, and I have the capabilities of doing that some days.” So that would be in a good day.

When you’re thinking of things like that, you’re more likely to start figuring out ways you could work them into your life, or like, “Oh, I listened to a really good podcast on the way into work, and I’d listen to an album I was choosing to listen to more in the genre of music say, on the way home.” Well, that nudges you to start thinking, “Okay, well maybe I should make sure I pack my listening materials as I’m getting into the car instead of just getting in there and realizing, “Oh, well I’m stuck listening to the radio because I don’t have time to find a podcast while I’m paying attention to the traffic. So oh well, I guess I didn’t do that.”

John Jantsch: You know, just an example of that, that I totally, totally buy is that I have a lot better day if I pack my lunch because I choose something really good to eat and if I just don’t do it, and I go, “Oh, I’ll go to the place across the street,” that doesn’t really have anything that I should eat-

Laura V.: Yes.

John Jantsch: So that … I think even something like that helps me actually have an ideal day as well.

Laura V.: Yeah, no food could definitely be a dimension for it. You know, think about what I would spend my time at work doing, would I be reading something at night before bed? How would I spend my time? Because that reminds you what’s important to you, but within a context that you can actually do something with. Because again, I’m not going to get my flying car. That’s not going to happen. But I can choose to listen to the top albums of the last year while I’m in my car. That’s something I..

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Transcript of How to Feel Less Busy and Get More Done

Transcript of How to Feel Less Busy and Get More Done written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing

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John Jantsch: 168. Do you know what that number represents? It is the hours that each of us has in a week, that includes 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That’s 168. So how do you use those to feel less busy and get more done? Well tune in to this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. I talk with Laura Vanderkam, and she’s the author of a new book called Off the Clock. You are going to want to check it out to figure out how to manage your life.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s I switched to Gusto. And to help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners and exclusive limited time deal. You sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to Gusto.com/Tape.

Hello, welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This John Jantsch, and my guest today is Laura Vanderkam. She’s the author of several time management and productivity books, including one we’re going to talk about today called Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done.

So, Laura, thanks for joining me.

Laura V.: Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: Now as I understand it, the method you used to compile some of your research was to literally have what, seven, eight, 900 people track their time on one given day and then turn all that in, and you analyzed it. Is that a good summary?

Laura V.: That’s a good summary, yeah. I had 900 people with full-time jobs and who also had families to track their time for a day. It was normal March Monday. So I had them record how they spent their time and then I asked them questions about how they felt about their time so looking at all this I could compare the schedules of people who felt relaxed, and they had enough time for the things they want to do with the people who felt stressed and starved for time, and rushed and all that and see what was the actual difference.

John Jantsch: So you used something you call Time Perception Scores, and I thought that was kind of interesting because I think a lot of people kind of end it like, “I got my checklist done,” instead of necessarily this idea of how they feel about it. I think there is a lot of stress around even getting a lot done, isn’t there?

Laura V.: There really is. I mean, because ultimately time is what it is, but how you feel about it has a big effect on your life. It’s the question of whether … People will be sitting there on a massage table, but thinking about their inbox. Technically, they’re having relaxed leisure time but they don’t feel that way, and that can keep people from enjoying it. So I think our time perception has a lot to do with how effective we are.

I was asking people questions like, “Yesterday I generally felt present rather than distracted,” and people could answer on a one to seven point scale. Then there are many other questions like that so then I could numerically look at the people who felt most relaxed and present and happy about their time and then the people who felt the worst about it, too.

John Jantsch: So I sometimes thing time management books are a little like diet books. It’s like here’s the new one. Eat good, do exercise, get rest. That’s the new diet. So, I’m going to let you defend that. How is your time management book different than the sea of time management books, because everybody’s been trying to figure this out.

Laura V.: Yes, well the truth is we all have the same 24 hours a day so it’s even harder-

John Jantsch: Right, right.

Laura V.: [inaudible 00:03:47] like money books, or people want different amounts of money so you could at least segment that way. But no, we all have the same amount of time. The honest truth is I don’t care if you have some email hack to take 30 seconds less on your inbox, or all these time management strategies like clean the shower while you’re in it to save a little bit of time here and there, or something like that. This is really not what time is about.

It’s about asking questions of what is important to us, what would I like to spend my time on. I think honestly how I feel about my time, too. Do I feel like time is rushing past, like I’m frantic and harried, like I don’t remember where my time has gone, or do I feel like it is full and rich, and I’m truly enjoying it and lingering in positive experiences? I’m really going for the latter, and off the clock it’s about more about the philosophy of how we view time.

John Jantsch: I’m curious on a couple of data points when you compiled all this research and analyzed it. Was there any difference in how people felt about their time purely based on their age?

Laura V.: So I know that there is broadly about this. I didn’t really look at people’s ages in this. I know everyone had children at home under age 18 so that put somewhat of a limit on what ages people were in. Probably the majority were between ages of about 25 and 55 just because of that constraint on it. But, I do know that many people feel that times move faster as they get older. A lot of people thinking back oh the years between let’s say 16 and 19 seem very vast for people versus the last three years often seem a lot quicker in our recounting.

There’re reasons for that, which is that age 16 to 19 was a very memorable time for people. They did a lot of firsts, they were figuring out who they are, new experiences. Those things tend to be memorable, and when we have memorable experiences, we remember them. Whereas adult life is generally not like that, so we don’t remember it. But we can, and people who have a good relationship with time tend to think about making their time memorable so they do remember it.

John Jantsch: I was just going to say that sounds like that’s a really good point, is maybe we ought to do things that are more memorable. All right, so another data point I was curious about is did you find a pattern to what some of the biggest time drains were for people?

Laura V.: Well, I think one interesting one is not thinking about where you’d like your time to go. I think that being intentional about your time is the biggest way to make sure that is actually spent well. If you think about how a lot of people approach, even a workday, we at least think oh well, here are broadly some things I need to do, but we tend to show up and then just march from meeting to meeting, and trying to check emails in between meetings, and you get to the end of the day like wait, where did all that time go?

It’s hard to say that the time was optimized if you’re doing all that. With people who are more intentional about it who say, “Okay, well these are the three things I absolutely have to get done today. Here’s where I have open space that I can deal with them, and by the way, do I actually have to be at all those meetings? Let me push back against some of them, too.” Those people could work … often could get out of work a little bit earlier than the people who left the work until the end of all the meetings and then had to still get done the things that had to get done.

So I found that people with high time perception scores tended to work slightly less than other people, but it wasn’t that the other people with low time perception scores worked a lot. They worked just a little bit more than the average, but it was more that the people who were good about time were intentional about planning their day so they got stuff done when they had the energy to do it, so that they weren’t stuck by themselves on a late night.

John Jantsch: Many days I feel like I kick ass for two hours, and delete email for six hours. I know there are certain times when I am way more productive, and I wonder if that’s a sort of physical or physiological kind of clock thing, or is that something that we just kind of train ourselves to be?

Laura V.: Well I think that your description of a work day is pretty broad in that a lot of people experience this phenomenon, that they have like two good hours and then six hours of yes, email deletion and random meetings and such. The important thing is that you make sure and you use those two hours. If you only have two good hours, you want to make sure that you are executing on whatever is most important to you during those two hours because the email deletion is still going to happen. Like, you can do that with half a brain, but you can’t deal with that [inaudible 00:08:35] focus time.

For most people that focus time tends to happen in the morning, which is an argument for not scheduling sort of status meetings between 8:00 and 10:00 a.m. because again, that’s time that people can really crank on stuff whereas they’ll still tell you how the project is going at 2:00 p.m., but it doesn’t really matter if they’re half asleep during that time. I do think on the other hand though that you can get some of that email deletion time back by proactively planning in breaks, because what’s sort of happening is that you have energy and then you use it.

If you don’t put more energy back in, then you could only do the low energy tasks like deleting emails. So you know, many things you can do. You can get outside for a little bit, go for a quick walk, talk to somebody whose company you really enjoy. That can get you a little bit more time out of that email deletion category.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I was somewhat being fastidious, but I think a lot of people feel that way, and I do know that they are certain times when I have … And I actually schedule my day a little bit around the knowledge that I’m from ten to noon, I really am very effective, and from two to four I’m really very effective. I just know that, and I think that there is some planning that goes into that, or into taking advantage of that.

Laura V.: Definitely. Definitely. That’s smart.

John Jantsch: You talk a lot about 168 hours, and it’s interesting to think that’s the amount of hours in a week, isn’t it?

Laura V.: It is, which is funny because most people don’t know that. But yeah, 168 hours and many people don’t know, which is fascinating because when people say 24/7 all the time, and then they don’t multiply it through. But it’s really the right way … I think weeks are a good unit to think about time partly because that’s the unit of life that we tend to live, is the repeating cycle of life like both Tuesdays and Saturdays happen the same amount. They’re very different, but they happen the same amount.

So the other reason to think of 168 hours is it just shows you how much time you have. I mean, a lot of people who have full time jobs say, “I have no time for anything else,” but if you think about it, work 40 hours a week, sleep eight hours a night so that’s 56 hours a week. That leaves 72 hours for other things, which is quite a bit of time. It’s twice as much time as you’re working, so there is time for other things it’s just we tend not to see it because work tends to take a lot of [inaudible 00:11:02] energy as well.

John Jantsch: And really … and I think you said the book … you stated the book is more philosophical. So in that sense, it’s not really just about getting more done, is it?

Laura V.: No, because there’s no point in getting more done. You know … especially stuff like the deleting email. I know people feel so productive when they’re deleting email because it’s measurable. I don’t know if I made progress on my most important goals, but I know for sure I got down from 150 unread messages to 50, so yay me, right? But it’s about making sure that you’re effective in the various fears of life … well like you are doing the things in life that make life feel worthwhile. If you aren’t, how can you go about reallocating your hours so those things happen?

John Jantsch: I think for me, at least, I know there are … When I come in every single day, I have a myriad of choices of things I could do but there are clearly some higher payoff activities that if I focused on them, or whatever, and made sure all else got put to the side until that was done, I would certainly advance on my goals. It’s not even about time management, it’s just about making choices.

Laura V.: Yeah, I mean we do have a fair amount of choice about how we allocate our time. I have people that’s telling me, “Well I can’t control this, this, and this.” I mean, it’s easy to talk about the times we can’t control, but then there’s time we can, too, even if it’s a small amount of time. Certainly, we could make better choices within those small amounts of time and ask the question of how can we change things more broadly over a longer period of time? I think it’s easy to become mentally stuck, but often there’s something that can be changed. Then it’s about changing that something and then maybe finding that motivational, and not to push the next thing along.

John Jantsch: Well, and I work with a lot of business owners who are very overwhelmed … who feel very overwhelmed. A lot of it, when we really get to studying it, there’s a lot of things that they shouldn’t be doing. In fact, they should be trying to do less instead of trying to do more because the trying to do more gets them so scattered and stressed that the stuff that really is worth them doing doesn’t get done.

Laura V.: Yeah, and that’s just a function, again, of when you’re starting a business you feel like you should do everything, chase every sale, make sure everything’s done perfectly, which means you have to do it yourself. It’s how entrepreneurs get how that drive to get started. But those skills, that temptation to do all that, and be a perfectionist, that just … you can’t grow that way. I mean, because again, we only have 24 hours in day, and even if you worked every single minute that you weren’t sleeping, there’s still a limit on how much you can do.

If you think of a CEO of a big company, we don’t say, “Oh, well he or she is a failure because they’re not doing everything themselves.” Of course not, we expect that. So it’s really about having more of that mindset of what is the absolute best thing I can be doing with my time? How can we set up the business so that I am supported in doing those things, and these other things that either I don’t do as well, or can’t do well at all … Or even that I do great, but are not the best use of my time can be given to somebody else.

John Jantsch: Wouldn’t it be great if in your business all you had to do was the stuff you love? The reason you started the business. Not all that administrative stuff like payroll and benefits. That stuff’s hard, especially when you’re a small business. Now, I’ve been delegating my payroll for years to one of those big corporate companies, and I always felt like a little tiny fish, but now there is a much better way.

I’ve switched over to Gusto, and it is making payroll and benefits and HR easy for the modern small business. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service to take care of your team. To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive limited time deal. If you sign up today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just to Gusto.com/Tape.

Now I’ve developed over the years, and this may just be rationalizing procrastination, but there are time when I have felt procrastination was actually in order, and it’s because I wasn’t … Like the idea hadn’t come to me, or the way to tackle something hadn’t really come to me and if I went out and ran or did something, and forgot about it, then I’d come back and all of a sudden the idea came to me.

I’ve developed a pattern, I think, of recognizing that. Is that an excuse for procrastination, or is that a valuable-

Laura V.: No, I think that’s a valuable observation. The key is making sure you start your project enough ahead of time so that you have space for walking away from it and doing something else, and then coming back to it. So the issue I think a lot of people have is they leave it up to the last minute and then they don’t have time for that sort of incubation period of the idea. Then, you’re really screwed because there’s nothing you can do about it. Either it will be late, or it won’t be very good. Either of which is not a great outcome.

But if you start enough ahead of time, and you sort of put your thoughts in there, and you say, “Okay, well it’s okay. It’s not great though. Let me think about it a little bit more,” go away from a while and when you come back a day or two later, you’ve got lots more ideas, or you thought about more research you need to do that will solve this problem for you. Then it’s much better. So yeah, I think leaving that space in for incubation is a key part of creativity. So why don’t we call it that instead of procrastination?

John Jantsch: Right.

Laura V.: That sounds much better.

John Jantsch: So should everyone track their time?

Laura V.: I think it would be great if everyone could track their time for a week. I have been tracking my time personally for three years now in half hour blocks. That doesn’t mean I check in every half hour. I check in probably three times a day and write down I what I was doing since the last time. I don’t expect anyone else to track their time for three years. I’m a bit of a time management freak. But, by tracking a week, you can see where the time really goes and the key part of this is making sure that whatever stories you are telling yourself about your life are actually true. A lot of times they turn out not to be true. People have various ideas of how many hours they work, which turn out not to be true. They have ideas of how many hours they sleep, which may true one night per week but isn’t true the other nights.

They may say, “I have no free time whatsoever,” and it’s like, “Except for all that time I was watching TV, which maybe is free time. I’m just not remembering it for some reason.” So I think that knowing where the time goes then allows us to make choices based on good data. If something is working great, that’s awesome. We can celebrate it knowing that that is exactly where our time goes. If it is not working, we can say, “Well now I know. Should I scale it up? Should I scale it down? How does it compare to other things in my life.” In a business decision, you want to make those from good data, same thing with your time. Make sure you’re working from what is true as opposed to what you think.

John Jantsch: How much time does multitasking actually cost us?

Laura V.: It depends what kind of multitasking we’re talking about. I mean a lot of people think that they’re being more productive by say, checking email while they’re on the phone, and in general they’re not. Your brain is just going back and forth between them, so you’re not paying attention to what’s being said on the phone, or else you’re not really answering the email well. You know, if that’s the case, it’s usually good to ask, “Why am I even on this phone call? If I can do other things while I’m on the call, probably I shouldn’t be on this call.” It’s not just worthwhile. “I should have sent somebody else, or maybe made it shorter,” or whatever else.

So things like that, yeah, pretty much just wastes time. As for … I mean there’re nice ways to multitask, too. If you think about something like exercising with a friend, is theoretically multitasking. I mean, you’re having a good conversation with somebody you’d like to, and you’re moving your body at the same time. So, that’s great. Like, that’s a double win right there, or you know, commuting with your spouse. If you can share a car ride to work once a week, that’s great because you’re turning what would be wasted time into a date, basically. So you know, think about how you can double up that way.

John Jantsch: You really need to up your expectation what a date is for.

Laura V.: What a date is. Well, you know when life gets busy enough you take what you can get, all right? Many couples, like young kids and long jobs between the two of them finally don’t get a whole lot of time talk, so if you could talk in the car, take it.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I’m swell. My children are all grown and so when I travel now my wife just goes with me. So we are in a different point, I guess.

Laura V.: Yeah, that sounds great. We may get there eventually.

John Jantsch: You will. You talk about something in the book that I think would be a really compelling idea for people, and that’s the idea of designing an ideal day.

Laura V.: Yeah, so and not just an ideal day, though I think that could be fun. But my ideal day, there’d be like flying cars and I would have to wait in traffic behind anyone else. I think more … I think about it as a realistic ideal day. So within the constraints of sort of your normal life, what would a really, really good day look like for you? You know, when people ask this question they start to say, “Oh, well you know I think it would be good if I could maybe take a walk at lunch instead of just sitting at my desk, and I have the capabilities of doing that some days.” So that would be in a good day.

When you’re thinking of things like that, you’re more likely to start figuring out ways you could work them into your life, or like, “Oh, I listened to a really good podcast on the way into work, and I’d listen to an album I was choosing to listen to more in the genre of music say, on the way home.” Well, that nudges you to start thinking, “Okay, well maybe I should make sure I pack my listening materials as I’m getting into the car instead of just getting in there and realizing, “Oh, well I’m stuck listening to the radio because I don’t have time to find a podcast while I’m paying attention to the traffic. So oh well, I guess I didn’t do that.”

John Jantsch: You know, just an example of that, that I totally, totally buy is that I have a lot better day if I pack my lunch because I choose something really good to eat and if I just don’t do it, and I go, “Oh, I’ll go to the place across the street,” that doesn’t really have anything that I should eat-

Laura V.: Yes.

John Jantsch: So that … I think even something like that helps me actually have an ideal day as well.

Laura V.: Yeah, no food could definitely be a dimension for it. You know, think about what I would spend my time at work doing, would I be reading something at night before bed? How would I spend my time? Because that reminds you what’s important to you, but within a context that you can actually do something with. Because again, I’m not going to get my flying car. That’s not going to happen. But I can choose to listen to the top albums of the last year while I’m in my car. That’s something I..

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Transcript of How to Feel Less Busy and Get More Done

Transcript of How to Feel Less Busy and Get More Done

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Transcript

John Jantsch: 168. Do you know what that number represents? It is the hours that each of us has in a week, that includes 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That’s 168. So how do you use those to feel less busy and get more done? Well tune in to this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. I talk with Laura Vanderkam, and she’s the author of a new book called Off the Clock. You are going to want to check it out to figure out how to manage your life.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s I switched to Gusto. And to help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners and exclusive limited time deal. You sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to Gusto.com/Tape.

Hello, welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This John Jantsch, and my guest today is Laura Vanderkam. She’s the author of several time management and productivity books, including one we’re going to talk about today called Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done.

So, Laura, thanks for joining me.

Laura V.: Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: Now as I understand it, the method you used to compile some of your research was to literally have what, seven, eight, 900 people track their time on one given day and then turn all that in, and you analyzed it. Is that a good summary?

Laura V.: That’s a good summary, yeah. I had 900 people with full-time jobs and who also had families to track their time for a day. It was normal March Monday. So I had them record how they spent their time and then I asked them questions about how they felt about their time so looking at all this I could compare the schedules of people who felt relaxed, and they had enough time for the things they want to do with the people who felt stressed and starved for time, and rushed and all that and see what was the actual difference.

John Jantsch: So you used something you call Time Perception Scores, and I thought that was kind of interesting because I think a lot of people kind of end it like, “I got my checklist done,” instead of necessarily this idea of how they feel about it. I think there is a lot of stress around even getting a lot done, isn’t there?

Laura V.: There really is. I mean, because ultimately time is what it is, but how you feel about it has a big effect on your life. It’s the question of whether … People will be sitting there on a massage table, but thinking about their inbox. Technically, they’re having relaxed leisure time but they don’t feel that way, and that can keep people from enjoying it. So I think our time perception has a lot to do with how effective we are.

I was asking people questions like, “Yesterday I generally felt present rather than distracted,” and people could answer on a one to seven point scale. Then there are many other questions like that so then I could numerically look at the people who felt most relaxed and present and happy about their time and then the people who felt the worst about it, too.

John Jantsch: So I sometimes thing time management books are a little like diet books. It’s like here’s the new one. Eat good, do exercise, get rest. That’s the new diet. So, I’m going to let you defend that. How is your time management book different than the sea of time management books, because everybody’s been trying to figure this out.

Laura V.: Yes, well the truth is we all have the same 24 hours a day so it’s even harder-

John Jantsch: Right, right.

Laura V.: [inaudible 00:03:47] like money books, or people want different amounts of money so you could at least segment that way. But no, we all have the same amount of time. The honest truth is I don’t care if you have some email hack to take 30 seconds less on your inbox, or all these time management strategies like clean the shower while you’re in it to save a little bit of time here and there, or something like that. This is really not what time is about.

It’s about asking questions of what is important to us, what would I like to spend my time on. I think honestly how I feel about my time, too. Do I feel like time is rushing past, like I’m frantic and harried, like I don’t remember where my time has gone, or do I feel like it is full and rich, and I’m truly enjoying it and lingering in positive experiences? I’m really going for the latter, and off the clock it’s about more about the philosophy of how we view time.

John Jantsch: I’m curious on a couple of data points when you compiled all this research and analyzed it. Was there any difference in how people felt about their time purely based on their age?

Laura V.: So I know that there is broadly about this. I didn’t really look at people’s ages in this. I know everyone had children at home under age 18 so that put somewhat of a limit on what ages people were in. Probably the majority were between ages of about 25 and 55 just because of that constraint on it. But, I do know that many people feel that times move faster as they get older. A lot of people thinking back oh the years between let’s say 16 and 19 seem very vast for people versus the last three years often seem a lot quicker in our recounting.

There’re reasons for that, which is that age 16 to 19 was a very memorable time for people. They did a lot of firsts, they were figuring out who they are, new experiences. Those things tend to be memorable, and when we have memorable experiences, we remember them. Whereas adult life is generally not like that, so we don’t remember it. But we can, and people who have a good relationship with time tend to think about making their time memorable so they do remember it.

John Jantsch: I was just going to say that sounds like that’s a really good point, is maybe we ought to do things that are more memorable. All right, so another data point I was curious about is did you find a pattern to what some of the biggest time drains were for people?

Laura V.: Well, I think one interesting one is not thinking about where you’d like your time to go. I think that being intentional about your time is the biggest way to make sure that is actually spent well. If you think about how a lot of people approach, even a workday, we at least think oh well, here are broadly some things I need to do, but we tend to show up and then just march from meeting to meeting, and trying to check emails in between meetings, and you get to the end of the day like wait, where did all that time go?

It’s hard to say that the time was optimized if you’re doing all that. With people who are more intentional about it who say, “Okay, well these are the three things I absolutely have to get done today. Here’s where I have open space that I can deal with them, and by the way, do I actually have to be at all those meetings? Let me push back against some of them, too.” Those people could work … often could get out of work a little bit earlier than the people who left the work until the end of all the meetings and then had to still get done the things that had to get done.

So I found that people with high time perception scores tended to work slightly less than other people, but it wasn’t that the other people with low time perception scores worked a lot. They worked just a little bit more than the average, but it was more that the people who were good about time were intentional about planning their day so they got stuff done when they had the energy to do it, so that they weren’t stuck by themselves on a late night.

John Jantsch: Many days I feel like I kick ass for two hours, and delete email for six hours. I know there are certain times when I am way more productive, and I wonder if that’s a sort of physical or physiological kind of clock thing, or is that something that we just kind of train ourselves to be?

Laura V.: Well I think that your description of a work day is pretty broad in that a lot of people experience this phenomenon, that they have like two good hours and then six hours of yes, email deletion and random meetings and such. The important thing is that you make sure and you use those two hours. If you only have two good hours, you want to make sure that you are executing on whatever is most important to you during those two hours because the email deletion is still going to happen. Like, you can do that with half a brain, but you can’t deal with that [inaudible 00:08:35] focus time.

For most people that focus time tends to happen in the morning, which is an argument for not scheduling sort of status meetings between 8:00 and 10:00 a.m. because again, that’s time that people can really crank on stuff whereas they’ll still tell you how the project is going at 2:00 p.m., but it doesn’t really matter if they’re half asleep during that time. I do think on the other hand though that you can get some of that email deletion time back by proactively planning in breaks, because what’s sort of happening is that you have energy and then you use it.

If you don’t put more energy back in, then you could only do the low energy tasks like deleting emails. So you know, many things you can do. You can get outside for a little bit, go for a quick walk, talk to somebody whose company you really enjoy. That can get you a little bit more time out of that email deletion category.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I was somewhat being fastidious, but I think a lot of people feel that way, and I do know that they are certain times when I have … And I actually schedule my day a little bit around the knowledge that I’m from ten to noon, I really am very effective, and from two to four I’m really very effective. I just know that, and I think that there is some planning that goes into that, or into taking advantage of that.

Laura V.: Definitely. Definitely. That’s smart.

John Jantsch: You talk a lot about 168 hours, and it’s interesting to think that’s the amount of hours in a week, isn’t it?

Laura V.: It is, which is funny because most people don’t know that. But yeah, 168 hours and many people don’t know, which is fascinating because when people say 24/7 all the time, and then they don’t multiply it through. But it’s really the right way … I think weeks are a good unit to think about time partly because that’s the unit of life that we tend to live, is the repeating cycle of life like both Tuesdays and Saturdays happen the same amount. They’re very different, but they happen the same amount.

So the other reason to think of 168 hours is it just shows you how much time you have. I mean, a lot of people who have full time jobs say, “I have no time for anything else,” but if you think about it, work 40 hours a week, sleep eight hours a night so that’s 56 hours a week. That leaves 72 hours for other things, which is quite a bit of time. It’s twice as much time as you’re working, so there is time for other things it’s just we tend not to see it because work tends to take a lot of [inaudible 00:11:02] energy as well.

John Jantsch: And really … and I think you said the book … you stated the book is more philosophical. So in that sense, it’s not really just about getting more done, is it?

Laura V.: No, because there’s no point in getting more done. You know … especially stuff like the deleting email. I know people feel so productive when they’re deleting email because it’s measurable. I don’t know if I made progress on my most important goals, but I know for sure I got down from 150 unread messages to 50, so yay me, right? But it’s about making sure that you’re effective in the various fears of life … well like you are doing the things in life that make life feel worthwhile. If you aren’t, how can you go about reallocating your hours so those things happen?

John Jantsch: I think for me, at least, I know there are … When I come in every single day, I have a myriad of choices of things I could do but there are clearly some higher payoff activities that if I focused on them, or whatever, and made sure all else got put to the side until that was done, I would certainly advance on my goals. It’s not even about time management, it’s just about making choices.

Laura V.: Yeah, I mean we do have a fair amount of choice about how we allocate our time. I have people that’s telling me, “Well I can’t control this, this, and this.” I mean, it’s easy to talk about the times we can’t control, but then there’s time we can, too, even if it’s a small amount of time. Certainly, we could make better choices within those small amounts of time and ask the question of how can we change things more broadly over a longer period of time? I think it’s easy to become mentally stuck, but often there’s something that can be changed. Then it’s about changing that something and then maybe finding that motivational, and not to push the next thing along.

John Jantsch: Well, and I work with a lot of business owners who are very overwhelmed … who feel very overwhelmed. A lot of it, when we really get to studying it, there’s a lot of things that they shouldn’t be doing. In fact, they should be trying to do less instead of trying to do more because the trying to do more gets them so scattered and stressed that the stuff that really is worth them doing doesn’t get done.

Laura V.: Yeah, and that’s just a function, again, of when you’re starting a business you feel like you should do everything, chase every sale, make sure everything’s done perfectly, which means you have to do it yourself. It’s how entrepreneurs get how that drive to get started. But those skills, that temptation to do all that, and be a perfectionist, that just … you can’t grow that way. I mean, because again, we only have 24 hours in day, and even if you worked every single minute that you weren’t sleeping, there’s still a limit on how much you can do.

If you think of a CEO of a big company, we don’t say, “Oh, well he or she is a failure because they’re not doing everything themselves.” Of course not, we expect that. So it’s really about having more of that mindset of what is the absolute best thing I can be doing with my time? How can we set up the business so that I am supported in doing those things, and these other things that either I don’t do as well, or can’t do well at all … Or even that I do great, but are not the best use of my time can be given to somebody else.

John Jantsch: Wouldn’t it be great if in your business all you had to do was the stuff you love? The reason you started the business. Not all that administrative stuff like payroll and benefits. That stuff’s hard, especially when you’re a small business. Now, I’ve been delegating my payroll for years to one of those big corporate companies, and I always felt like a little tiny fish, but now there is a much better way.

I’ve switched over to Gusto, and it is making payroll and benefits and HR easy for the modern small business. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service to take care of your team. To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive limited time deal. If you sign up today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just to Gusto.com/Tape.

Now I’ve developed over the years, and this may just be rationalizing procrastination, but there are time when I have felt procrastination was actually in order, and it’s because I wasn’t … Like the idea hadn’t come to me, or the way to tackle something hadn’t really come to me and if I went out and ran or did something, and forgot about it, then I’d come back and all of a sudden the idea came to me.

I’ve developed a pattern, I think, of recognizing that. Is that an excuse for procrastination, or is that a valuable-

Laura V.: No, I think that’s a valuable observation. The key is making sure you start your project enough ahead of time so that you have space for walking away from it and doing something else, and then coming back to it. So the issue I think a lot of people have is they leave it up to the last minute and then they don’t have time for that sort of incubation period of the idea. Then, you’re really screwed because there’s nothing you can do about it. Either it will be late, or it won’t be very good. Either of which is not a great outcome.

But if you start enough ahead of time, and you sort of put your thoughts in there, and you say, “Okay, well it’s okay. It’s not great though. Let me think about it a little bit more,” go away from a while and when you come back a day or two later, you’ve got lots more ideas, or you thought about more research you need to do that will solve this problem for you. Then it’s much better. So yeah, I think leaving that space in for incubation is a key part of creativity. So why don’t we call it that instead of procrastination?

John Jantsch: Right.

Laura V.: That sounds much better.

John Jantsch: So should everyone track their time?

Laura V.: I think it would be great if everyone could track their time for a week. I have been tracking my time personally for three years now in half hour blocks. That doesn’t mean I check in every half hour. I check in probably three times a day and write down I what I was doing since the last time. I don’t expect anyone else to track their time for three years. I’m a bit of a time management freak. But, by tracking a week, you can see where the time really goes and the key part of this is making sure that whatever stories you are telling yourself about your life are actually true. A lot of times they turn out not to be true. People have various ideas of how many hours they work, which turn out not to be true. They have ideas of how many hours they sleep, which may true one night per week but isn’t true the other nights.

They may say, “I have no free time whatsoever,” and it’s like, “Except for all that time I was watching TV, which maybe is free time. I’m just not remembering it for some reason.” So I think that knowing where the time goes then allows us to make choices based on good data. If something is working great, that’s awesome. We can celebrate it knowing that that is exactly where our time goes. If it is not working, we can say, “Well now I know. Should I scale it up? Should I scale it down? How does it compare to other things in my life.” In a business decision, you want to make those from good data, same thing with your time. Make sure you’re working from what is true as opposed to what you think.

John Jantsch: How much time does multitasking actually cost us?

Laura V.: It depends what kind of multitasking we’re talking about. I mean a lot of people think that they’re being more productive by say, checking email while they’re on the phone, and in general they’re not. Your brain is just going back and forth between them, so you’re not paying attention to what’s being said on the phone, or else you’re not really answering the email well. You know, if that’s the case, it’s usually good to ask, “Why am I even on this phone call? If I can do other things while I’m on the call, probably I shouldn’t be on this call.” It’s not just worthwhile. “I should have sent somebody else, or maybe made it shorter,” or whatever else.

So things like that, yeah, pretty much just wastes time. As for … I mean there’re nice ways to multitask, too. If you think about something like exercising with a friend, is theoretically multitasking. I mean, you’re having a good conversation with somebody you’d like to, and you’re moving your body at the same time. So, that’s great. Like, that’s a double win right there, or you know, commuting with your spouse. If you can share a car ride to work once a week, that’s great because you’re turning what would be wasted time into a date, basically. So you know, think about how you can double up that way.

John Jantsch: You really need to up your expectation what a date is for.

Laura V.: What a date is. Well, you know when life gets busy enough you take what you can get, all right? Many couples, like young kids and long jobs between the two of them finally don’t get a whole lot of time talk, so if you could talk in the car, take it.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I’m swell. My children are all grown and so when I travel now my wife just goes with me. So we are in a different point, I guess.

Laura V.: Yeah, that sounds great. We may get there eventually.

John Jantsch: You will. You talk about something in the book that I think would be a really compelling idea for people, and that’s the idea of designing an ideal day.

Laura V.: Yeah, so and not just an ideal day, though I think that could be fun. But my ideal day, there’d be like flying cars and I would have to wait in traffic behind anyone else. I think more … I think about it as a realistic ideal day. So within the constraints of sort of your normal life, what would a really, really good day look like for you? You know, when people ask this question they start to say, “Oh, well you know I think it would be good if I could maybe take a walk at lunch instead of just sitting at my desk, and I have the capabilities of doing that some days.” So that would be in a good day.

When you’re thinking of things like that, you’re more likely to start figuring out ways you could work them into your life, or like, “Oh, I listened to a really good podcast on the way into work, and I’d listen to an album I was choosing to listen to more in the genre of music say, on the way home.” Well, that nudges you to start thinking, “Okay, well maybe I should make sure I pack my listening materials as I’m getting into the car instead of just getting in there and realizing, “Oh, well I’m stuck listening to the radio because I don’t have time to find a podcast while I’m paying attention to the traffic. So oh well, I guess I didn’t do that.”

John Jantsch: You know, just an example of that, that I totally, totally buy is that I have a lot better day if I pack my lunch because I choose something really good to eat and if I just don’t do it, and I go, “Oh, I’ll go to the place across the street,” that doesn’t really have anything that I should eat-

Laura V.: Yes.

John Jantsch: So that … I think even something like that helps me actually have an ideal day as well.

Laura V.: Yeah, no food could definitely be a dimension for it. You know, think about what I would spend my time at work doing, would I be reading something at night before bed? How would I spend my time? Because that reminds you what’s important to you, but within a context that you can actually do something with. Because again, I’m not going to get my flying car. That’s not going to happen. But I can choose to listen to the top albums of the last year while I’m in my car. That’s something I..

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John Jantsch: 168. Do you know what that number represents? It is the hours that each of us has in a week, that includes 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That’s 168. So how do you use those to feel less busy and get more done? Well tune in to this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. I talk with Laura Vanderkam, and she’s the author of a new book called Off the Clock. You are going to want to check it out to figure out how to manage your life.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s I switched to Gusto. And to help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners and exclusive limited time deal. You sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to Gusto.com/Tape.

Hello, welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This John Jantsch, and my guest today is Laura Vanderkam. She’s the author of several time management and productivity books, including one we’re going to talk about today called Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done.

So, Laura, thanks for joining me.

Laura V.: Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: Now as I understand it, the method you used to compile some of your research was to literally have what, seven, eight, 900 people track their time on one given day and then turn all that in, and you analyzed it. Is that a good summary?

Laura V.: That’s a good summary, yeah. I had 900 people with full-time jobs and who also had families to track their time for a day. It was normal March Monday. So I had them record how they spent their time and then I asked them questions about how they felt about their time so looking at all this I could compare the schedules of people who felt relaxed, and they had enough time for the things they want to do with the people who felt stressed and starved for time, and rushed and all that and see what was the actual difference.

John Jantsch: So you used something you call Time Perception Scores, and I thought that was kind of interesting because I think a lot of people kind of end it like, “I got my checklist done,” instead of necessarily this idea of how they feel about it. I think there is a lot of stress around even getting a lot done, isn’t there?

Laura V.: There really is. I mean, because ultimately time is what it is, but how you feel about it has a big effect on your life. It’s the question of whether … People will be sitting there on a massage table, but thinking about their inbox. Technically, they’re having relaxed leisure time but they don’t feel that way, and that can keep people from enjoying it. So I think our time perception has a lot to do with how effective we are.

I was asking people questions like, “Yesterday I generally felt present rather than distracted,” and people could answer on a one to seven point scale. Then there are many other questions like that so then I could numerically look at the people who felt most relaxed and present and happy about their time and then the people who felt the worst about it, too.

John Jantsch: So I sometimes thing time management books are a little like diet books. It’s like here’s the new one. Eat good, do exercise, get rest. That’s the new diet. So, I’m going to let you defend that. How is your time management book different than the sea of time management books, because everybody’s been trying to figure this out.

Laura V.: Yes, well the truth is we all have the same 24 hours a day so it’s even harder-

John Jantsch: Right, right.

Laura V.: [inaudible 00:03:47] like money books, or people want different amounts of money so you could at least segment that way. But no, we all have the same amount of time. The honest truth is I don’t care if you have some email hack to take 30 seconds less on your inbox, or all these time management strategies like clean the shower while you’re in it to save a little bit of time here and there, or something like that. This is really not what time is about.

It’s about asking questions of what is important to us, what would I like to spend my time on. I think honestly how I feel about my time, too. Do I feel like time is rushing past, like I’m frantic and harried, like I don’t remember where my time has gone, or do I feel like it is full and rich, and I’m truly enjoying it and lingering in positive experiences? I’m really going for the latter, and off the clock it’s about more about the philosophy of how we view time.

John Jantsch: I’m curious on a couple of data points when you compiled all this research and analyzed it. Was there any difference in how people felt about their time purely based on their age?

Laura V.: So I know that there is broadly about this. I didn’t really look at people’s ages in this. I know everyone had children at home under age 18 so that put somewhat of a limit on what ages people were in. Probably the majority were between ages of about 25 and 55 just because of that constraint on it. But, I do know that many people feel that times move faster as they get older. A lot of people thinking back oh the years between let’s say 16 and 19 seem very vast for people versus the last three years often seem a lot quicker in our recounting.

There’re reasons for that, which is that age 16 to 19 was a very memorable time for people. They did a lot of firsts, they were figuring out who they are, new experiences. Those things tend to be memorable, and when we have memorable experiences, we remember them. Whereas adult life is generally not like that, so we don’t remember it. But we can, and people who have a good relationship with time tend to think about making their time memorable so they do remember it.

John Jantsch: I was just going to say that sounds like that’s a really good point, is maybe we ought to do things that are more memorable. All right, so another data point I was curious about is did you find a pattern to what some of the biggest time drains were for people?

Laura V.: Well, I think one interesting one is not thinking about where you’d like your time to go. I think that being intentional about your time is the biggest way to make sure that is actually spent well. If you think about how a lot of people approach, even a workday, we at least think oh well, here are broadly some things I need to do, but we tend to show up and then just march from meeting to meeting, and trying to check emails in between meetings, and you get to the end of the day like wait, where did all that time go?

It’s hard to say that the time was optimized if you’re doing all that. With people who are more intentional about it who say, “Okay, well these are the three things I absolutely have to get done today. Here’s where I have open space that I can deal with them, and by the way, do I actually have to be at all those meetings? Let me push back against some of them, too.” Those people could work … often could get out of work a little bit earlier than the people who left the work until the end of all the meetings and then had to still get done the things that had to get done.

So I found that people with high time perception scores tended to work slightly less than other people, but it wasn’t that the other people with low time perception scores worked a lot. They worked just a little bit more than the average, but it was more that the people who were good about time were intentional about planning their day so they got stuff done when they had the energy to do it, so that they weren’t stuck by themselves on a late night.

John Jantsch: Many days I feel like I kick ass for two hours, and delete email for six hours. I know there are certain times when I am way more productive, and I wonder if that’s a sort of physical or physiological kind of clock thing, or is that something that we just kind of train ourselves to be?

Laura V.: Well I think that your description of a work day is pretty broad in that a lot of people experience this phenomenon, that they have like two good hours and then six hours of yes, email deletion and random meetings and such. The important thing is that you make sure and you use those two hours. If you only have two good hours, you want to make sure that you are executing on whatever is most important to you during those two hours because the email deletion is still going to happen. Like, you can do that with half a brain, but you can’t deal with that [inaudible 00:08:35] focus time.

For most people that focus time tends to happen in the morning, which is an argument for not scheduling sort of status meetings between 8:00 and 10:00 a.m. because again, that’s time that people can really crank on stuff whereas they’ll still tell you how the project is going at 2:00 p.m., but it doesn’t really matter if they’re half asleep during that time. I do think on the other hand though that you can get some of that email deletion time back by proactively planning in breaks, because what’s sort of happening is that you have energy and then you use it.

If you don’t put more energy back in, then you could only do the low energy tasks like deleting emails. So you know, many things you can do. You can get outside for a little bit, go for a quick walk, talk to somebody whose company you really enjoy. That can get you a little bit more time out of that email deletion category.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I was somewhat being fastidious, but I think a lot of people feel that way, and I do know that they are certain times when I have … And I actually schedule my day a little bit around the knowledge that I’m from ten to noon, I really am very effective, and from two to four I’m really very effective. I just know that, and I think that there is some planning that goes into that, or into taking advantage of that.

Laura V.: Definitely. Definitely. That’s smart.

John Jantsch: You talk a lot about 168 hours, and it’s interesting to think that’s the amount of hours in a week, isn’t it?

Laura V.: It is, which is funny because most people don’t know that. But yeah, 168 hours and many people don’t know, which is fascinating because when people say 24/7 all the time, and then they don’t multiply it through. But it’s really the right way … I think weeks are a good unit to think about time partly because that’s the unit of life that we tend to live, is the repeating cycle of life like both Tuesdays and Saturdays happen the same amount. They’re very different, but they happen the same amount.

So the other reason to think of 168 hours is it just shows you how much time you have. I mean, a lot of people who have full time jobs say, “I have no time for anything else,” but if you think about it, work 40 hours a week, sleep eight hours a night so that’s 56 hours a week. That leaves 72 hours for other things, which is quite a bit of time. It’s twice as much time as you’re working, so there is time for other things it’s just we tend not to see it because work tends to take a lot of [inaudible 00:11:02] energy as well.

John Jantsch: And really … and I think you said the book … you stated the book is more philosophical. So in that sense, it’s not really just about getting more done, is it?

Laura V.: No, because there’s no point in getting more done. You know … especially stuff like the deleting email. I know people feel so productive when they’re deleting email because it’s measurable. I don’t know if I made progress on my most important goals, but I know for sure I got down from 150 unread messages to 50, so yay me, right? But it’s about making sure that you’re effective in the various fears of life … well like you are doing the things in life that make life feel worthwhile. If you aren’t, how can you go about reallocating your hours so those things happen?

John Jantsch: I think for me, at least, I know there are … When I come in every single day, I have a myriad of choices of things I could do but there are clearly some higher payoff activities that if I focused on them, or whatever, and made sure all else got put to the side until that was done, I would certainly advance on my goals. It’s not even about time management, it’s just about making choices.

Laura V.: Yeah, I mean we do have a fair amount of choice about how we allocate our time. I have people that’s telling me, “Well I can’t control this, this, and this.” I mean, it’s easy to talk about the times we can’t control, but then there’s time we can, too, even if it’s a small amount of time. Certainly, we could make better choices within those small amounts of time and ask the question of how can we change things more broadly over a longer period of time? I think it’s easy to become mentally stuck, but often there’s something that can be changed. Then it’s about changing that something and then maybe finding that motivational, and not to push the next thing along.

John Jantsch: Well, and I work with a lot of business owners who are very overwhelmed … who feel very overwhelmed. A lot of it, when we really get to studying it, there’s a lot of things that they shouldn’t be doing. In fact, they should be trying to do less instead of trying to do more because the trying to do more gets them so scattered and stressed that the stuff that really is worth them doing doesn’t get done.

Laura V.: Yeah, and that’s just a function, again, of when you’re starting a business you feel like you should do everything, chase every sale, make sure everything’s done perfectly, which means you have to do it yourself. It’s how entrepreneurs get how that drive to get started. But those skills, that temptation to do all that, and be a perfectionist, that just … you can’t grow that way. I mean, because again, we only have 24 hours in day, and even if you worked every single minute that you weren’t sleeping, there’s still a limit on how much you can do.

If you think of a CEO of a big company, we don’t say, “Oh, well he or she is a failure because they’re not doing everything themselves.” Of course not, we expect that. So it’s really about having more of that mindset of what is the absolute best thing I can be doing with my time? How can we set up the business so that I am supported in doing those things, and these other things that either I don’t do as well, or can’t do well at all … Or even that I do great, but are not the best use of my time can be given to somebody else.

John Jantsch: Wouldn’t it be great if in your business all you had to do was the stuff you love? The reason you started the business. Not all that administrative stuff like payroll and benefits. That stuff’s hard, especially when you’re a small business. Now, I’ve been delegating my payroll for years to one of those big corporate companies, and I always felt like a little tiny fish, but now there is a much better way.

I’ve switched over to Gusto, and it is making payroll and benefits and HR easy for the modern small business. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service to take care of your team. To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive limited time deal. If you sign up today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just to Gusto.com/Tape.

Now I’ve developed over the years, and this may just be rationalizing procrastination, but there are time when I have felt procrastination was actually in order, and it’s because I wasn’t … Like the idea hadn’t come to me, or the way to tackle something hadn’t really come to me and if I went out and ran or did something, and forgot about it, then I’d come back and all of a sudden the idea came to me.

I’ve developed a pattern, I think, of recognizing that. Is that an excuse for procrastination, or is that a valuable-

Laura V.: No, I think that’s a valuable observation. The key is making sure you start your project enough ahead of time so that you have space for walking away from it and doing something else, and then coming back to it. So the issue I think a lot of people have is they leave it up to the last minute and then they don’t have time for that sort of incubation period of the idea. Then, you’re really screwed because there’s nothing you can do about it. Either it will be late, or it won’t be very good. Either of which is not a great outcome.

But if you start enough ahead of time, and you sort of put your thoughts in there, and you say, “Okay, well it’s okay. It’s not great though. Let me think about it a little bit more,” go away from a while and when you come back a day or two later, you’ve got lots more ideas, or you thought about more research you need to do that will solve this problem for you. Then it’s much better. So yeah, I think leaving that space in for incubation is a key part of creativity. So why don’t we call it that instead of procrastination?

John Jantsch: Right.

Laura V.: That sounds much better.

John Jantsch: So should everyone track their time?

Laura V.: I think it would be great if everyone could track their time for a week. I have been tracking my time personally for three years now in half hour blocks. That doesn’t mean I check in every half hour. I check in probably three times a day and write down I what I was doing since the last time. I don’t expect anyone else to track their time for three years. I’m a bit of a time management freak. But, by tracking a week, you can see where the time really goes and the key part of this is making sure that whatever stories you are telling yourself about your life are actually true. A lot of times they turn out not to be true. People have various ideas of how many hours they work, which turn out not to be true. They have ideas of how many hours they sleep, which may true one night per week but isn’t true the other nights.

They may say, “I have no free time whatsoever,” and it’s like, “Except for all that time I was watching TV, which maybe is free time. I’m just not remembering it for some reason.” So I think that knowing where the time goes then allows us to make choices based on good data. If something is working great, that’s awesome. We can celebrate it knowing that that is exactly where our time goes. If it is not working, we can say, “Well now I know. Should I scale it up? Should I scale it down? How does it compare to other things in my life.” In a business decision, you want to make those from good data, same thing with your time. Make sure you’re working from what is true as opposed to what you think.

John Jantsch: How much time does multitasking actually cost us?

Laura V.: It depends what kind of multitasking we’re talking about. I mean a lot of people think that they’re being more productive by say, checking email while they’re on the phone, and in general they’re not. Your brain is just going back and forth between them, so you’re not paying attention to what’s being said on the phone, or else you’re not really answering the email well. You know, if that’s the case, it’s usually good to ask, “Why am I even on this phone call? If I can do other things while I’m on the call, probably I shouldn’t be on this call.” It’s not just worthwhile. “I should have sent somebody else, or maybe made it shorter,” or whatever else.

So things like that, yeah, pretty much just wastes time. As for … I mean there’re nice ways to multitask, too. If you think about something like exercising with a friend, is theoretically multitasking. I mean, you’re having a good conversation with somebody you’d like to, and you’re moving your body at the same time. So, that’s great. Like, that’s a double win right there, or you know, commuting with your spouse. If you can share a car ride to work once a week, that’s great because you’re turning what would be wasted time into a date, basically. So you know, think about how you can double up that way.

John Jantsch: You really need to up your expectation what a date is for.

Laura V.: What a date is. Well, you know when life gets busy enough you take what you can get, all right? Many couples, like young kids and long jobs between the two of them finally don’t get a whole lot of time talk, so if you could talk in the car, take it.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I’m swell. My children are all grown and so when I travel now my wife just goes with me. So we are in a different point, I guess.

Laura V.: Yeah, that sounds great. We may get there eventually.

John Jantsch: You will. You talk about something in the book that I think would be a really compelling idea for people, and that’s the idea of designing an ideal day.

Laura V.: Yeah, so and not just an ideal day, though I think that could be fun. But my ideal day, there’d be like flying cars and I would have to wait in traffic behind anyone else. I think more … I think about it as a realistic ideal day. So within the constraints of sort of your normal life, what would a really, really good day look like for you? You know, when people ask this question they start to say, “Oh, well you know I think it would be good if I could maybe take a walk at lunch instead of just sitting at my desk, and I have the capabilities of doing that some days.” So that would be in a good day.

When you’re thinking of things like that, you’re more likely to start figuring out ways you could work them into your life, or like, “Oh, I listened to a really good podcast on the way into work, and I’d listen to an album I was choosing to listen to more in the genre of music say, on the way home.” Well, that nudges you to start thinking, “Okay, well maybe I should make sure I pack my listening materials as I’m getting into the car instead of just getting in there and realizing, “Oh, well I’m stuck listening to the radio because I don’t have time to find a podcast while I’m paying attention to the traffic. So oh well, I guess I didn’t do that.”

John Jantsch: You know, just an example of that, that I totally, totally buy is that I have a lot better day if I pack my lunch because I choose something really good to eat and if I just don’t do it, and I go, “Oh, I’ll go to the place across the street,” that doesn’t really have anything that I should eat-

Laura V.: Yes.

John Jantsch: So that … I think even something like that helps me actually have an ideal day as well.

Laura V.: Yeah, no food could definitely be a dimension for it. You know, think about what I would spend my time at work doing, would I be reading something at night before bed? How would I spend my time? Because that reminds you what’s important to you, but within a context that you can actually do something with. Because again, I’m not going to get my flying car. That’s not going to happen. But I can choose to listen to the top albums of the last year while I’m in my car. That’s something I..

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John Jantsch: 168. Do you know what that number represents? It is the hours that each of us has in a week, that includes 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That’s 168. So how do you use those to feel less busy and get more done? Well tune in to this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. I talk with Laura Vanderkam, and she’s the author of a new book called Off the Clock. You are going to want to check it out to figure out how to manage your life.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s I switched to Gusto. And to help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners and exclusive limited time deal. You sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to Gusto.com/Tape.

Hello, welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This John Jantsch, and my guest today is Laura Vanderkam. She’s the author of several time management and productivity books, including one we’re going to talk about today called Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done.

So, Laura, thanks for joining me.

Laura V.: Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: Now as I understand it, the method you used to compile some of your research was to literally have what, seven, eight, 900 people track their time on one given day and then turn all that in, and you analyzed it. Is that a good summary?

Laura V.: That’s a good summary, yeah. I had 900 people with full-time jobs and who also had families to track their time for a day. It was normal March Monday. So I had them record how they spent their time and then I asked them questions about how they felt about their time so looking at all this I could compare the schedules of people who felt relaxed, and they had enough time for the things they want to do with the people who felt stressed and starved for time, and rushed and all that and see what was the actual difference.

John Jantsch: So you used something you call Time Perception Scores, and I thought that was kind of interesting because I think a lot of people kind of end it like, “I got my checklist done,” instead of necessarily this idea of how they feel about it. I think there is a lot of stress around even getting a lot done, isn’t there?

Laura V.: There really is. I mean, because ultimately time is what it is, but how you feel about it has a big effect on your life. It’s the question of whether … People will be sitting there on a massage table, but thinking about their inbox. Technically, they’re having relaxed leisure time but they don’t feel that way, and that can keep people from enjoying it. So I think our time perception has a lot to do with how effective we are.

I was asking people questions like, “Yesterday I generally felt present rather than distracted,” and people could answer on a one to seven point scale. Then there are many other questions like that so then I could numerically look at the people who felt most relaxed and present and happy about their time and then the people who felt the worst about it, too.

John Jantsch: So I sometimes thing time management books are a little like diet books. It’s like here’s the new one. Eat good, do exercise, get rest. That’s the new diet. So, I’m going to let you defend that. How is your time management book different than the sea of time management books, because everybody’s been trying to figure this out.

Laura V.: Yes, well the truth is we all have the same 24 hours a day so it’s even harder-

John Jantsch: Right, right.

Laura V.: [inaudible 00:03:47] like money books, or people want different amounts of money so you could at least segment that way. But no, we all have the same amount of time. The honest truth is I don’t care if you have some email hack to take 30 seconds less on your inbox, or all these time management strategies like clean the shower while you’re in it to save a little bit of time here and there, or something like that. This is really not what time is about.

It’s about asking questions of what is important to us, what would I like to spend my time on. I think honestly how I feel about my time, too. Do I feel like time is rushing past, like I’m frantic and harried, like I don’t remember where my time has gone, or do I feel like it is full and rich, and I’m truly enjoying it and lingering in positive experiences? I’m really going for the latter, and off the clock it’s about more about the philosophy of how we view time.

John Jantsch: I’m curious on a couple of data points when you compiled all this research and analyzed it. Was there any difference in how people felt about their time purely based on their age?

Laura V.: So I know that there is broadly about this. I didn’t really look at people’s ages in this. I know everyone had children at home under age 18 so that put somewhat of a limit on what ages people were in. Probably the majority were between ages of about 25 and 55 just because of that constraint on it. But, I do know that many people feel that times move faster as they get older. A lot of people thinking back oh the years between let’s say 16 and 19 seem very vast for people versus the last three years often seem a lot quicker in our recounting.

There’re reasons for that, which is that age 16 to 19 was a very memorable time for people. They did a lot of firsts, they were figuring out who they are, new experiences. Those things tend to be memorable, and when we have memorable experiences, we remember them. Whereas adult life is generally not like that, so we don’t remember it. But we can, and people who have a good relationship with time tend to think about making their time memorable so they do remember it.

John Jantsch: I was just going to say that sounds like that’s a really good point, is maybe we ought to do things that are more memorable. All right, so another data point I was curious about is did you find a pattern to what some of the biggest time drains were for people?

Laura V.: Well, I think one interesting one is not thinking about where you’d like your time to go. I think that being intentional about your time is the biggest way to make sure that is actually spent well. If you think about how a lot of people approach, even a workday, we at least think oh well, here are broadly some things I need to do, but we tend to show up and then just march from meeting to meeting, and trying to check emails in between meetings, and you get to the end of the day like wait, where did all that time go?

It’s hard to say that the time was optimized if you’re doing all that. With people who are more intentional about it who say, “Okay, well these are the three things I absolutely have to get done today. Here’s where I have open space that I can deal with them, and by the way, do I actually have to be at all those meetings? Let me push back against some of them, too.” Those people could work … often could get out of work a little bit earlier than the people who left the work until the end of all the meetings and then had to still get done the things that had to get done.

So I found that people with high time perception scores tended to work slightly less than other people, but it wasn’t that the other people with low time perception scores worked a lot. They worked just a little bit more than the average, but it was more that the people who were good about time were intentional about planning their day so they got stuff done when they had the energy to do it, so that they weren’t stuck by themselves on a late night.

John Jantsch: Many days I feel like I kick ass for two hours, and delete email for six hours. I know there are certain times when I am way more productive, and I wonder if that’s a sort of physical or physiological kind of clock thing, or is that something that we just kind of train ourselves to be?

Laura V.: Well I think that your description of a work day is pretty broad in that a lot of people experience this phenomenon, that they have like two good hours and then six hours of yes, email deletion and random meetings and such. The important thing is that you make sure and you use those two hours. If you only have two good hours, you want to make sure that you are executing on whatever is most important to you during those two hours because the email deletion is still going to happen. Like, you can do that with half a brain, but you can’t deal with that [inaudible 00:08:35] focus time.

For most people that focus time tends to happen in the morning, which is an argument for not scheduling sort of status meetings between 8:00 and 10:00 a.m. because again, that’s time that people can really crank on stuff whereas they’ll still tell you how the project is going at 2:00 p.m., but it doesn’t really matter if they’re half asleep during that time. I do think on the other hand though that you can get some of that email deletion time back by proactively planning in breaks, because what’s sort of happening is that you have energy and then you use it.

If you don’t put more energy back in, then you could only do the low energy tasks like deleting emails. So you know, many things you can do. You can get outside for a little bit, go for a quick walk, talk to somebody whose company you really enjoy. That can get you a little bit more time out of that email deletion category.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I was somewhat being fastidious, but I think a lot of people feel that way, and I do know that they are certain times when I have … And I actually schedule my day a little bit around the knowledge that I’m from ten to noon, I really am very effective, and from two to four I’m really very effective. I just know that, and I think that there is some planning that goes into that, or into taking advantage of that.

Laura V.: Definitely. Definitely. That’s smart.

John Jantsch: You talk a lot about 168 hours, and it’s interesting to think that’s the amount of hours in a week, isn’t it?

Laura V.: It is, which is funny because most people don’t know that. But yeah, 168 hours and many people don’t know, which is fascinating because when people say 24/7 all the time, and then they don’t multiply it through. But it’s really the right way … I think weeks are a good unit to think about time partly because that’s the unit of life that we tend to live, is the repeating cycle of life like both Tuesdays and Saturdays happen the same amount. They’re very different, but they happen the same amount.

So the other reason to think of 168 hours is it just shows you how much time you have. I mean, a lot of people who have full time jobs say, “I have no time for anything else,” but if you think about it, work 40 hours a week, sleep eight hours a night so that’s 56 hours a week. That leaves 72 hours for other things, which is quite a bit of time. It’s twice as much time as you’re working, so there is time for other things it’s just we tend not to see it because work tends to take a lot of [inaudible 00:11:02] energy as well.

John Jantsch: And really … and I think you said the book … you stated the book is more philosophical. So in that sense, it’s not really just about getting more done, is it?

Laura V.: No, because there’s no point in getting more done. You know … especially stuff like the deleting email. I know people feel so productive when they’re deleting email because it’s measurable. I don’t know if I made progress on my most important goals, but I know for sure I got down from 150 unread messages to 50, so yay me, right? But it’s about making sure that you’re effective in the various fears of life … well like you are doing the things in life that make life feel worthwhile. If you aren’t, how can you go about reallocating your hours so those things happen?

John Jantsch: I think for me, at least, I know there are … When I come in every single day, I have a myriad of choices of things I could do but there are clearly some higher payoff activities that if I focused on them, or whatever, and made sure all else got put to the side until that was done, I would certainly advance on my goals. It’s not even about time management, it’s just about making choices.

Laura V.: Yeah, I mean we do have a fair amount of choice about how we allocate our time. I have people that’s telling me, “Well I can’t control this, this, and this.” I mean, it’s easy to talk about the times we can’t control, but then there’s time we can, too, even if it’s a small amount of time. Certainly, we could make better choices within those small amounts of time and ask the question of how can we change things more broadly over a longer period of time? I think it’s easy to become mentally stuck, but often there’s something that can be changed. Then it’s about changing that something and then maybe finding that motivational, and not to push the next thing along.

John Jantsch: Well, and I work with a lot of business owners who are very overwhelmed … who feel very overwhelmed. A lot of it, when we really get to studying it, there’s a lot of things that they shouldn’t be doing. In fact, they should be trying to do less instead of trying to do more because the trying to do more gets them so scattered and stressed that the stuff that really is worth them doing doesn’t get done.

Laura V.: Yeah, and that’s just a function, again, of when you’re starting a business you feel like you should do everything, chase every sale, make sure everything’s done perfectly, which means you have to do it yourself. It’s how entrepreneurs get how that drive to get started. But those skills, that temptation to do all that, and be a perfectionist, that just … you can’t grow that way. I mean, because again, we only have 24 hours in day, and even if you worked every single minute that you weren’t sleeping, there’s still a limit on how much you can do.

If you think of a CEO of a big company, we don’t say, “Oh, well he or she is a failure because they’re not doing everything themselves.” Of course not, we expect that. So it’s really about having more of that mindset of what is the absolute best thing I can be doing with my time? How can we set up the business so that I am supported in doing those things, and these other things that either I don’t do as well, or can’t do well at all … Or even that I do great, but are not the best use of my time can be given to somebody else.

John Jantsch: Wouldn’t it be great if in your business all you had to do was the stuff you love? The reason you started the business. Not all that administrative stuff like payroll and benefits. That stuff’s hard, especially when you’re a small business. Now, I’ve been delegating my payroll for years to one of those big corporate companies, and I always felt like a little tiny fish, but now there is a much better way.

I’ve switched over to Gusto, and it is making payroll and benefits and HR easy for the modern small business. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service to take care of your team. To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive limited time deal. If you sign up today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just to Gusto.com/Tape.

Now I’ve developed over the years, and this may just be rationalizing procrastination, but there are time when I have felt procrastination was actually in order, and it’s because I wasn’t … Like the idea hadn’t come to me, or the way to tackle something hadn’t really come to me and if I went out and ran or did something, and forgot about it, then I’d come back and all of a sudden the idea came to me.

I’ve developed a pattern, I think, of recognizing that. Is that an excuse for procrastination, or is that a valuable-

Laura V.: No, I think that’s a valuable observation. The key is making sure you start your project enough ahead of time so that you have space for walking away from it and doing something else, and then coming back to it. So the issue I think a lot of people have is they leave it up to the last minute and then they don’t have time for that sort of incubation period of the idea. Then, you’re really screwed because there’s nothing you can do about it. Either it will be late, or it won’t be very good. Either of which is not a great outcome.

But if you start enough ahead of time, and you sort of put your thoughts in there, and you say, “Okay, well it’s okay. It’s not great though. Let me think about it a little bit more,” go away from a while and when you come back a day or two later, you’ve got lots more ideas, or you thought about more research you need to do that will solve this problem for you. Then it’s much better. So yeah, I think leaving that space in for incubation is a key part of creativity. So why don’t we call it that instead of procrastination?

John Jantsch: Right.

Laura V.: That sounds much better.

John Jantsch: So should everyone track their time?

Laura V.: I think it would be great if everyone could track their time for a week. I have been tracking my time personally for three years now in half hour blocks. That doesn’t mean I check in every half hour. I check in probably three times a day and write down I what I was doing since the last time. I don’t expect anyone else to track their time for three years. I’m a bit of a time management freak. But, by tracking a week, you can see where the time really goes and the key part of this is making sure that whatever stories you are telling yourself about your life are actually true. A lot of times they turn out not to be true. People have various ideas of how many hours they work, which turn out not to be true. They have ideas of how many hours they sleep, which may true one night per week but isn’t true the other nights.

They may say, “I have no free time whatsoever,” and it’s like, “Except for all that time I was watching TV, which maybe is free time. I’m just not remembering it for some reason.” So I think that knowing where the time goes then allows us to make choices based on good data. If something is working great, that’s awesome. We can celebrate it knowing that that is exactly where our time goes. If it is not working, we can say, “Well now I know. Should I scale it up? Should I scale it down? How does it compare to other things in my life.” In a business decision, you want to make those from good data, same thing with your time. Make sure you’re working from what is true as opposed to what you think.

John Jantsch: How much time does multitasking actually cost us?

Laura V.: It depends what kind of multitasking we’re talking about. I mean a lot of people think that they’re being more productive by say, checking email while they’re on the phone, and in general they’re not. Your brain is just going back and forth between them, so you’re not paying attention to what’s being said on the phone, or else you’re not really answering the email well. You know, if that’s the case, it’s usually good to ask, “Why am I even on this phone call? If I can do other things while I’m on the call, probably I shouldn’t be on this call.” It’s not just worthwhile. “I should have sent somebody else, or maybe made it shorter,” or whatever else.

So things like that, yeah, pretty much just wastes time. As for … I mean there’re nice ways to multitask, too. If you think about something like exercising with a friend, is theoretically multitasking. I mean, you’re having a good conversation with somebody you’d like to, and you’re moving your body at the same time. So, that’s great. Like, that’s a double win right there, or you know, commuting with your spouse. If you can share a car ride to work once a week, that’s great because you’re turning what would be wasted time into a date, basically. So you know, think about how you can double up that way.

John Jantsch: You really need to up your expectation what a date is for.

Laura V.: What a date is. Well, you know when life gets busy enough you take what you can get, all right? Many couples, like young kids and long jobs between the two of them finally don’t get a whole lot of time talk, so if you could talk in the car, take it.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I’m swell. My children are all grown and so when I travel now my wife just goes with me. So we are in a different point, I guess.

Laura V.: Yeah, that sounds great. We may get there eventually.

John Jantsch: You will. You talk about something in the book that I think would be a really compelling idea for people, and that’s the idea of designing an ideal day.

Laura V.: Yeah, so and not just an ideal day, though I think that could be fun. But my ideal day, there’d be like flying cars and I would have to wait in traffic behind anyone else. I think more … I think about it as a realistic ideal day. So within the constraints of sort of your normal life, what would a really, really good day look like for you? You know, when people ask this question they start to say, “Oh, well you know I think it would be good if I could maybe take a walk at lunch instead of just sitting at my desk, and I have the capabilities of doing that some days.” So that would be in a good day.

When you’re thinking of things like that, you’re more likely to start figuring out ways you could work them into your life, or like, “Oh, I listened to a really good podcast on the way into work, and I’d listen to an album I was choosing to listen to more in the genre of music say, on the way home.” Well, that nudges you to start thinking, “Okay, well maybe I should make sure I pack my listening materials as I’m getting into the car instead of just getting in there and realizing, “Oh, well I’m stuck listening to the radio because I don’t have time to find a podcast while I’m paying attention to the traffic. So oh well, I guess I didn’t do that.”

John Jantsch: You know, just an example of that, that I totally, totally buy is that I have a lot better day if I pack my lunch because I choose something really good to eat and if I just don’t do it, and I go, “Oh, I’ll go to the place across the street,” that doesn’t really have anything that I should eat-

Laura V.: Yes.

John Jantsch: So that … I think even something like that helps me actually have an ideal day as well.

Laura V.: Yeah, no food could definitely be a dimension for it. You know, think about what I would spend my time at work doing, would I be reading something at night before bed? How would I spend my time? Because that reminds you what’s important to you, but within a context that you can actually do something with. Because again, I’m not going to get my flying car. That’s not going to happen. But I can choose to listen to the top albums of the last year while I’m in my car. That’s something I..

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John Jantsch: 168. Do you know what that number represents? It is the hours that each of us has in a week, that includes 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That’s 168. So how do you use those to feel less busy and get more done? Well tune in to this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. I talk with Laura Vanderkam, and she’s the author of a new book called Off the Clock. You are going to want to check it out to figure out how to manage your life.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s I switched to Gusto. And to help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners and exclusive limited time deal. You sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to Gusto.com/Tape.

Hello, welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This John Jantsch, and my guest today is Laura Vanderkam. She’s the author of several time management and productivity books, including one we’re going to talk about today called Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done.

So, Laura, thanks for joining me.

Laura V.: Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: Now as I understand it, the method you used to compile some of your research was to literally have what, seven, eight, 900 people track their time on one given day and then turn all that in, and you analyzed it. Is that a good summary?

Laura V.: That’s a good summary, yeah. I had 900 people with full-time jobs and who also had families to track their time for a day. It was normal March Monday. So I had them record how they spent their time and then I asked them questions about how they felt about their time so looking at all this I could compare the schedules of people who felt relaxed, and they had enough time for the things they want to do with the people who felt stressed and starved for time, and rushed and all that and see what was the actual difference.

John Jantsch: So you used something you call Time Perception Scores, and I thought that was kind of interesting because I think a lot of people kind of end it like, “I got my checklist done,” instead of necessarily this idea of how they feel about it. I think there is a lot of stress around even getting a lot done, isn’t there?

Laura V.: There really is. I mean, because ultimately time is what it is, but how you feel about it has a big effect on your life. It’s the question of whether … People will be sitting there on a massage table, but thinking about their inbox. Technically, they’re having relaxed leisure time but they don’t feel that way, and that can keep people from enjoying it. So I think our time perception has a lot to do with how effective we are.

I was asking people questions like, “Yesterday I generally felt present rather than distracted,” and people could answer on a one to seven point scale. Then there are many other questions like that so then I could numerically look at the people who felt most relaxed and present and happy about their time and then the people who felt the worst about it, too.

John Jantsch: So I sometimes thing time management books are a little like diet books. It’s like here’s the new one. Eat good, do exercise, get rest. That’s the new diet. So, I’m going to let you defend that. How is your time management book different than the sea of time management books, because everybody’s been trying to figure this out.

Laura V.: Yes, well the truth is we all have the same 24 hours a day so it’s even harder-

John Jantsch: Right, right.

Laura V.: [inaudible 00:03:47] like money books, or people want different amounts of money so you could at least segment that way. But no, we all have the same amount of time. The honest truth is I don’t care if you have some email hack to take 30 seconds less on your inbox, or all these time management strategies like clean the shower while you’re in it to save a little bit of time here and there, or something like that. This is really not what time is about.

It’s about asking questions of what is important to us, what would I like to spend my time on. I think honestly how I feel about my time, too. Do I feel like time is rushing past, like I’m frantic and harried, like I don’t remember where my time has gone, or do I feel like it is full and rich, and I’m truly enjoying it and lingering in positive experiences? I’m really going for the latter, and off the clock it’s about more about the philosophy of how we view time.

John Jantsch: I’m curious on a couple of data points when you compiled all this research and analyzed it. Was there any difference in how people felt about their time purely based on their age?

Laura V.: So I know that there is broadly about this. I didn’t really look at people’s ages in this. I know everyone had children at home under age 18 so that put somewhat of a limit on what ages people were in. Probably the majority were between ages of about 25 and 55 just because of that constraint on it. But, I do know that many people feel that times move faster as they get older. A lot of people thinking back oh the years between let’s say 16 and 19 seem very vast for people versus the last three years often seem a lot quicker in our recounting.

There’re reasons for that, which is that age 16 to 19 was a very memorable time for people. They did a lot of firsts, they were figuring out who they are, new experiences. Those things tend to be memorable, and when we have memorable experiences, we remember them. Whereas adult life is generally not like that, so we don’t remember it. But we can, and people who have a good relationship with time tend to think about making their time memorable so they do remember it.

John Jantsch: I was just going to say that sounds like that’s a really good point, is maybe we ought to do things that are more memorable. All right, so another data point I was curious about is did you find a pattern to what some of the biggest time drains were for people?

Laura V.: Well, I think one interesting one is not thinking about where you’d like your time to go. I think that being intentional about your time is the biggest way to make sure that is actually spent well. If you think about how a lot of people approach, even a workday, we at least think oh well, here are broadly some things I need to do, but we tend to show up and then just march from meeting to meeting, and trying to check emails in between meetings, and you get to the end of the day like wait, where did all that time go?

It’s hard to say that the time was optimized if you’re doing all that. With people who are more intentional about it who say, “Okay, well these are the three things I absolutely have to get done today. Here’s where I have open space that I can deal with them, and by the way, do I actually have to be at all those meetings? Let me push back against some of them, too.” Those people could work … often could get out of work a little bit earlier than the people who left the work until the end of all the meetings and then had to still get done the things that had to get done.

So I found that people with high time perception scores tended to work slightly less than other people, but it wasn’t that the other people with low time perception scores worked a lot. They worked just a little bit more than the average, but it was more that the people who were good about time were intentional about planning their day so they got stuff done when they had the energy to do it, so that they weren’t stuck by themselves on a late night.

John Jantsch: Many days I feel like I kick ass for two hours, and delete email for six hours. I know there are certain times when I am way more productive, and I wonder if that’s a sort of physical or physiological kind of clock thing, or is that something that we just kind of train ourselves to be?

Laura V.: Well I think that your description of a work day is pretty broad in that a lot of people experience this phenomenon, that they have like two good hours and then six hours of yes, email deletion and random meetings and such. The important thing is that you make sure and you use those two hours. If you only have two good hours, you want to make sure that you are executing on whatever is most important to you during those two hours because the email deletion is still going to happen. Like, you can do that with half a brain, but you can’t deal with that [inaudible 00:08:35] focus time.

For most people that focus time tends to happen in the morning, which is an argument for not scheduling sort of status meetings between 8:00 and 10:00 a.m. because again, that’s time that people can really crank on stuff whereas they’ll still tell you how the project is going at 2:00 p.m., but it doesn’t really matter if they’re half asleep during that time. I do think on the other hand though that you can get some of that email deletion time back by proactively planning in breaks, because what’s sort of happening is that you have energy and then you use it.

If you don’t put more energy back in, then you could only do the low energy tasks like deleting emails. So you know, many things you can do. You can get outside for a little bit, go for a quick walk, talk to somebody whose company you really enjoy. That can get you a little bit more time out of that email deletion category.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I was somewhat being fastidious, but I think a lot of people feel that way, and I do know that they are certain times when I have … And I actually schedule my day a little bit around the knowledge that I’m from ten to noon, I really am very effective, and from two to four I’m really very effective. I just know that, and I think that there is some planning that goes into that, or into taking advantage of that.

Laura V.: Definitely. Definitely. That’s smart.

John Jantsch: You talk a lot about 168 hours, and it’s interesting to think that’s the amount of hours in a week, isn’t it?

Laura V.: It is, which is funny because most people don’t know that. But yeah, 168 hours and many people don’t know, which is fascinating because when people say 24/7 all the time, and then they don’t multiply it through. But it’s really the right way … I think weeks are a good unit to think about time partly because that’s the unit of life that we tend to live, is the repeating cycle of life like both Tuesdays and Saturdays happen the same amount. They’re very different, but they happen the same amount.

So the other reason to think of 168 hours is it just shows you how much time you have. I mean, a lot of people who have full time jobs say, “I have no time for anything else,” but if you think about it, work 40 hours a week, sleep eight hours a night so that’s 56 hours a week. That leaves 72 hours for other things, which is quite a bit of time. It’s twice as much time as you’re working, so there is time for other things it’s just we tend not to see it because work tends to take a lot of [inaudible 00:11:02] energy as well.

John Jantsch: And really … and I think you said the book … you stated the book is more philosophical. So in that sense, it’s not really just about getting more done, is it?

Laura V.: No, because there’s no point in getting more done. You know … especially stuff like the deleting email. I know people feel so productive when they’re deleting email because it’s measurable. I don’t know if I made progress on my most important goals, but I know for sure I got down from 150 unread messages to 50, so yay me, right? But it’s about making sure that you’re effective in the various fears of life … well like you are doing the things in life that make life feel worthwhile. If you aren’t, how can you go about reallocating your hours so those things happen?

John Jantsch: I think for me, at least, I know there are … When I come in every single day, I have a myriad of choices of things I could do but there are clearly some higher payoff activities that if I focused on them, or whatever, and made sure all else got put to the side until that was done, I would certainly advance on my goals. It’s not even about time management, it’s just about making choices.

Laura V.: Yeah, I mean we do have a fair amount of choice about how we allocate our time. I have people that’s telling me, “Well I can’t control this, this, and this.” I mean, it’s easy to talk about the times we can’t control, but then there’s time we can, too, even if it’s a small amount of time. Certainly, we could make better choices within those small amounts of time and ask the question of how can we change things more broadly over a longer period of time? I think it’s easy to become mentally stuck, but often there’s something that can be changed. Then it’s about changing that something and then maybe finding that motivational, and not to push the next thing along.

John Jantsch: Well, and I work with a lot of business owners who are very overwhelmed … who feel very overwhelmed. A lot of it, when we really get to studying it, there’s a lot of things that they shouldn’t be doing. In fact, they should be trying to do less instead of trying to do more because the trying to do more gets them so scattered and stressed that the stuff that really is worth them doing doesn’t get done.

Laura V.: Yeah, and that’s just a function, again, of when you’re starting a business you feel like you should do everything, chase every sale, make sure everything’s done perfectly, which means you have to do it yourself. It’s how entrepreneurs get how that drive to get started. But those skills, that temptation to do all that, and be a perfectionist, that just … you can’t grow that way. I mean, because again, we only have 24 hours in day, and even if you worked every single minute that you weren’t sleeping, there’s still a limit on how much you can do.

If you think of a CEO of a big company, we don’t say, “Oh, well he or she is a failure because they’re not doing everything themselves.” Of course not, we expect that. So it’s really about having more of that mindset of what is the absolute best thing I can be doing with my time? How can we set up the business so that I am supported in doing those things, and these other things that either I don’t do as well, or can’t do well at all … Or even that I do great, but are not the best use of my time can be given to somebody else.

John Jantsch: Wouldn’t it be great if in your business all you had to do was the stuff you love? The reason you started the business. Not all that administrative stuff like payroll and benefits. That stuff’s hard, especially when you’re a small business. Now, I’ve been delegating my payroll for years to one of those big corporate companies, and I always felt like a little tiny fish, but now there is a much better way.

I’ve switched over to Gusto, and it is making payroll and benefits and HR easy for the modern small business. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service to take care of your team. To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive limited time deal. If you sign up today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just to Gusto.com/Tape.

Now I’ve developed over the years, and this may just be rationalizing procrastination, but there are time when I have felt procrastination was actually in order, and it’s because I wasn’t … Like the idea hadn’t come to me, or the way to tackle something hadn’t really come to me and if I went out and ran or did something, and forgot about it, then I’d come back and all of a sudden the idea came to me.

I’ve developed a pattern, I think, of recognizing that. Is that an excuse for procrastination, or is that a valuable-

Laura V.: No, I think that’s a valuable observation. The key is making sure you start your project enough ahead of time so that you have space for walking away from it and doing something else, and then coming back to it. So the issue I think a lot of people have is they leave it up to the last minute and then they don’t have time for that sort of incubation period of the idea. Then, you’re really screwed because there’s nothing you can do about it. Either it will be late, or it won’t be very good. Either of which is not a great outcome.

But if you start enough ahead of time, and you sort of put your thoughts in there, and you say, “Okay, well it’s okay. It’s not great though. Let me think about it a little bit more,” go away from a while and when you come back a day or two later, you’ve got lots more ideas, or you thought about more research you need to do that will solve this problem for you. Then it’s much better. So yeah, I think leaving that space in for incubation is a key part of creativity. So why don’t we call it that instead of procrastination?

John Jantsch: Right.

Laura V.: That sounds much better.

John Jantsch: So should everyone track their time?

Laura V.: I think it would be great if everyone could track their time for a week. I have been tracking my time personally for three years now in half hour blocks. That doesn’t mean I check in every half hour. I check in probably three times a day and write down I what I was doing since the last time. I don’t expect anyone else to track their time for three years. I’m a bit of a time management freak. But, by tracking a week, you can see where the time really goes and the key part of this is making sure that whatever stories you are telling yourself about your life are actually true. A lot of times they turn out not to be true. People have various ideas of how many hours they work, which turn out not to be true. They have ideas of how many hours they sleep, which may true one night per week but isn’t true the other nights.

They may say, “I have no free time whatsoever,” and it’s like, “Except for all that time I was watching TV, which maybe is free time. I’m just not remembering it for some reason.” So I think that knowing where the time goes then allows us to make choices based on good data. If something is working great, that’s awesome. We can celebrate it knowing that that is exactly where our time goes. If it is not working, we can say, “Well now I know. Should I scale it up? Should I scale it down? How does it compare to other things in my life.” In a business decision, you want to make those from good data, same thing with your time. Make sure you’re working from what is true as opposed to what you think.

John Jantsch: How much time does multitasking actually cost us?

Laura V.: It depends what kind of multitasking we’re talking about. I mean a lot of people think that they’re being more productive by say, checking email while they’re on the phone, and in general they’re not. Your brain is just going back and forth between them, so you’re not paying attention to what’s being said on the phone, or else you’re not really answering the email well. You know, if that’s the case, it’s usually good to ask, “Why am I even on this phone call? If I can do other things while I’m on the call, probably I shouldn’t be on this call.” It’s not just worthwhile. “I should have sent somebody else, or maybe made it shorter,” or whatever else.

So things like that, yeah, pretty much just wastes time. As for … I mean there’re nice ways to multitask, too. If you think about something like exercising with a friend, is theoretically multitasking. I mean, you’re having a good conversation with somebody you’d like to, and you’re moving your body at the same time. So, that’s great. Like, that’s a double win right there, or you know, commuting with your spouse. If you can share a car ride to work once a week, that’s great because you’re turning what would be wasted time into a date, basically. So you know, think about how you can double up that way.

John Jantsch: You really need to up your expectation what a date is for.

Laura V.: What a date is. Well, you know when life gets busy enough you take what you can get, all right? Many couples, like young kids and long jobs between the two of them finally don’t get a whole lot of time talk, so if you could talk in the car, take it.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I’m swell. My children are all grown and so when I travel now my wife just goes with me. So we are in a different point, I guess.

Laura V.: Yeah, that sounds great. We may get there eventually.

John Jantsch: You will. You talk about something in the book that I think would be a really compelling idea for people, and that’s the idea of designing an ideal day.

Laura V.: Yeah, so and not just an ideal day, though I think that could be fun. But my ideal day, there’d be like flying cars and I would have to wait in traffic behind anyone else. I think more … I think about it as a realistic ideal day. So within the constraints of sort of your normal life, what would a really, really good day look like for you? You know, when people ask this question they start to say, “Oh, well you know I think it would be good if I could maybe take a walk at lunch instead of just sitting at my desk, and I have the capabilities of doing that some days.” So that would be in a good day.

When you’re thinking of things like that, you’re more likely to start figuring out ways you could work them into your life, or like, “Oh, I listened to a really good podcast on the way into work, and I’d listen to an album I was choosing to listen to more in the genre of music say, on the way home.” Well, that nudges you to start thinking, “Okay, well maybe I should make sure I pack my listening materials as I’m getting into the car instead of just getting in there and realizing, “Oh, well I’m stuck listening to the radio because I don’t have time to find a podcast while I’m paying attention to the traffic. So oh well, I guess I didn’t do that.”

John Jantsch: You know, just an example of that, that I totally, totally buy is that I have a lot better day if I pack my lunch because I choose something really good to eat and if I just don’t do it, and I go, “Oh, I’ll go to the place across the street,” that doesn’t really have anything that I should eat-

Laura V.: Yes.

John Jantsch: So that … I think even something like that helps me actually have an ideal day as well.

Laura V.: Yeah, no food could definitely be a dimension for it. You know, think about what I would spend my time at work doing, would I be reading something at night before bed? How would I spend my time? Because that reminds you what’s important to you, but within a context that you can actually do something with. Because again, I’m not going to get my flying car. That’s not going to happen. But I can choose to listen to the top albums of the last year while I’m in my car. That’s something I..

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Transcript of How to Feel Less Busy and Get More Done

Transcript of How to Feel Less Busy and Get More Done

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John Jantsch: 168. Do you know what that number represents? It is the hours that each of us has in a week, that includes 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That’s 168. So how do you use those to feel less busy and get more done? Well tune in to this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. I talk with Laura Vanderkam, and she’s the author of a new book called Off the Clock. You are going to want to check it out to figure out how to manage your life.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s I switched to Gusto. And to help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners and exclusive limited time deal. You sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to Gusto.com/Tape.

Hello, welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This John Jantsch, and my guest today is Laura Vanderkam. She’s the author of several time management and productivity books, including one we’re going to talk about today called Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done.

So, Laura, thanks for joining me.

Laura V.: Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: Now as I understand it, the method you used to compile some of your research was to literally have what, seven, eight, 900 people track their time on one given day and then turn all that in, and you analyzed it. Is that a good summary?

Laura V.: That’s a good summary, yeah. I had 900 people with full-time jobs and who also had families to track their time for a day. It was normal March Monday. So I had them record how they spent their time and then I asked them questions about how they felt about their time so looking at all this I could compare the schedules of people who felt relaxed, and they had enough time for the things they want to do with the people who felt stressed and starved for time, and rushed and all that and see what was the actual difference.

John Jantsch: So you used something you call Time Perception Scores, and I thought that was kind of interesting because I think a lot of people kind of end it like, “I got my checklist done,” instead of necessarily this idea of how they feel about it. I think there is a lot of stress around even getting a lot done, isn’t there?

Laura V.: There really is. I mean, because ultimately time is what it is, but how you feel about it has a big effect on your life. It’s the question of whether … People will be sitting there on a massage table, but thinking about their inbox. Technically, they’re having relaxed leisure time but they don’t feel that way, and that can keep people from enjoying it. So I think our time perception has a lot to do with how effective we are.

I was asking people questions like, “Yesterday I generally felt present rather than distracted,” and people could answer on a one to seven point scale. Then there are many other questions like that so then I could numerically look at the people who felt most relaxed and present and happy about their time and then the people who felt the worst about it, too.

John Jantsch: So I sometimes thing time management books are a little like diet books. It’s like here’s the new one. Eat good, do exercise, get rest. That’s the new diet. So, I’m going to let you defend that. How is your time management book different than the sea of time management books, because everybody’s been trying to figure this out.

Laura V.: Yes, well the truth is we all have the same 24 hours a day so it’s even harder-

John Jantsch: Right, right.

Laura V.: [inaudible 00:03:47] like money books, or people want different amounts of money so you could at least segment that way. But no, we all have the same amount of time. The honest truth is I don’t care if you have some email hack to take 30 seconds less on your inbox, or all these time management strategies like clean the shower while you’re in it to save a little bit of time here and there, or something like that. This is really not what time is about.

It’s about asking questions of what is important to us, what would I like to spend my time on. I think honestly how I feel about my time, too. Do I feel like time is rushing past, like I’m frantic and harried, like I don’t remember where my time has gone, or do I feel like it is full and rich, and I’m truly enjoying it and lingering in positive experiences? I’m really going for the latter, and off the clock it’s about more about the philosophy of how we view time.

John Jantsch: I’m curious on a couple of data points when you compiled all this research and analyzed it. Was there any difference in how people felt about their time purely based on their age?

Laura V.: So I know that there is broadly about this. I didn’t really look at people’s ages in this. I know everyone had children at home under age 18 so that put somewhat of a limit on what ages people were in. Probably the majority were between ages of about 25 and 55 just because of that constraint on it. But, I do know that many people feel that times move faster as they get older. A lot of people thinking back oh the years between let’s say 16 and 19 seem very vast for people versus the last three years often seem a lot quicker in our recounting.

There’re reasons for that, which is that age 16 to 19 was a very memorable time for people. They did a lot of firsts, they were figuring out who they are, new experiences. Those things tend to be memorable, and when we have memorable experiences, we remember them. Whereas adult life is generally not like that, so we don’t remember it. But we can, and people who have a good relationship with time tend to think about making their time memorable so they do remember it.

John Jantsch: I was just going to say that sounds like that’s a really good point, is maybe we ought to do things that are more memorable. All right, so another data point I was curious about is did you find a pattern to what some of the biggest time drains were for people?

Laura V.: Well, I think one interesting one is not thinking about where you’d like your time to go. I think that being intentional about your time is the biggest way to make sure that is actually spent well. If you think about how a lot of people approach, even a workday, we at least think oh well, here are broadly some things I need to do, but we tend to show up and then just march from meeting to meeting, and trying to check emails in between meetings, and you get to the end of the day like wait, where did all that time go?

It’s hard to say that the time was optimized if you’re doing all that. With people who are more intentional about it who say, “Okay, well these are the three things I absolutely have to get done today. Here’s where I have open space that I can deal with them, and by the way, do I actually have to be at all those meetings? Let me push back against some of them, too.” Those people could work … often could get out of work a little bit earlier than the people who left the work until the end of all the meetings and then had to still get done the things that had to get done.

So I found that people with high time perception scores tended to work slightly less than other people, but it wasn’t that the other people with low time perception scores worked a lot. They worked just a little bit more than the average, but it was more that the people who were good about time were intentional about planning their day so they got stuff done when they had the energy to do it, so that they weren’t stuck by themselves on a late night.

John Jantsch: Many days I feel like I kick ass for two hours, and delete email for six hours. I know there are certain times when I am way more productive, and I wonder if that’s a sort of physical or physiological kind of clock thing, or is that something that we just kind of train ourselves to be?

Laura V.: Well I think that your description of a work day is pretty broad in that a lot of people experience this phenomenon, that they have like two good hours and then six hours of yes, email deletion and random meetings and such. The important thing is that you make sure and you use those two hours. If you only have two good hours, you want to make sure that you are executing on whatever is most important to you during those two hours because the email deletion is still going to happen. Like, you can do that with half a brain, but you can’t deal with that [inaudible 00:08:35] focus time.

For most people that focus time tends to happen in the morning, which is an argument for not scheduling sort of status meetings between 8:00 and 10:00 a.m. because again, that’s time that people can really crank on stuff whereas they’ll still tell you how the project is going at 2:00 p.m., but it doesn’t really matter if they’re half asleep during that time. I do think on the other hand though that you can get some of that email deletion time back by proactively planning in breaks, because what’s sort of happening is that you have energy and then you use it.

If you don’t put more energy back in, then you could only do the low energy tasks like deleting emails. So you know, many things you can do. You can get outside for a little bit, go for a quick walk, talk to somebody whose company you really enjoy. That can get you a little bit more time out of that email deletion category.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I was somewhat being fastidious, but I think a lot of people feel that way, and I do know that they are certain times when I have … And I actually schedule my day a little bit around the knowledge that I’m from ten to noon, I really am very effective, and from two to four I’m really very effective. I just know that, and I think that there is some planning that goes into that, or into taking advantage of that.

Laura V.: Definitely. Definitely. That’s smart.

John Jantsch: You talk a lot about 168 hours, and it’s interesting to think that’s the amount of hours in a week, isn’t it?

Laura V.: It is, which is funny because most people don’t know that. But yeah, 168 hours and many people don’t know, which is fascinating because when people say 24/7 all the time, and then they don’t multiply it through. But it’s really the right way … I think weeks are a good unit to think about time partly because that’s the unit of life that we tend to live, is the repeating cycle of life like both Tuesdays and Saturdays happen the same amount. They’re very different, but they happen the same amount.

So the other reason to think of 168 hours is it just shows you how much time you have. I mean, a lot of people who have full time jobs say, “I have no time for anything else,” but if you think about it, work 40 hours a week, sleep eight hours a night so that’s 56 hours a week. That leaves 72 hours for other things, which is quite a bit of time. It’s twice as much time as you’re working, so there is time for other things it’s just we tend not to see it because work tends to take a lot of [inaudible 00:11:02] energy as well.

John Jantsch: And really … and I think you said the book … you stated the book is more philosophical. So in that sense, it’s not really just about getting more done, is it?

Laura V.: No, because there’s no point in getting more done. You know … especially stuff like the deleting email. I know people feel so productive when they’re deleting email because it’s measurable. I don’t know if I made progress on my most important goals, but I know for sure I got down from 150 unread messages to 50, so yay me, right? But it’s about making sure that you’re effective in the various fears of life … well like you are doing the things in life that make life feel worthwhile. If you aren’t, how can you go about reallocating your hours so those things happen?

John Jantsch: I think for me, at least, I know there are … When I come in every single day, I have a myriad of choices of things I could do but there are clearly some higher payoff activities that if I focused on them, or whatever, and made sure all else got put to the side until that was done, I would certainly advance on my goals. It’s not even about time management, it’s just about making choices.

Laura V.: Yeah, I mean we do have a fair amount of choice about how we allocate our time. I have people that’s telling me, “Well I can’t control this, this, and this.” I mean, it’s easy to talk about the times we can’t control, but then there’s time we can, too, even if it’s a small amount of time. Certainly, we could make better choices within those small amounts of time and ask the question of how can we change things more broadly over a longer period of time? I think it’s easy to become mentally stuck, but often there’s something that can be changed. Then it’s about changing that something and then maybe finding that motivational, and not to push the next thing along.

John Jantsch: Well, and I work with a lot of business owners who are very overwhelmed … who feel very overwhelmed. A lot of it, when we really get to studying it, there’s a lot of things that they shouldn’t be doing. In fact, they should be trying to do less instead of trying to do more because the trying to do more gets them so scattered and stressed that the stuff that really is worth them doing doesn’t get done.

Laura V.: Yeah, and that’s just a function, again, of when you’re starting a business you feel like you should do everything, chase every sale, make sure everything’s done perfectly, which means you have to do it yourself. It’s how entrepreneurs get how that drive to get started. But those skills, that temptation to do all that, and be a perfectionist, that just … you can’t grow that way. I mean, because again, we only have 24 hours in day, and even if you worked every single minute that you weren’t sleeping, there’s still a limit on how much you can do.

If you think of a CEO of a big company, we don’t say, “Oh, well he or she is a failure because they’re not doing everything themselves.” Of course not, we expect that. So it’s really about having more of that mindset of what is the absolute best thing I can be doing with my time? How can we set up the business so that I am supported in doing those things, and these other things that either I don’t do as well, or can’t do well at all … Or even that I do great, but are not the best use of my time can be given to somebody else.

John Jantsch: Wouldn’t it be great if in your business all you had to do was the stuff you love? The reason you started the business. Not all that administrative stuff like payroll and benefits. That stuff’s hard, especially when you’re a small business. Now, I’ve been delegating my payroll for years to one of those big corporate companies, and I always felt like a little tiny fish, but now there is a much better way.

I’ve switched over to Gusto, and it is making payroll and benefits and HR easy for the modern small business. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service to take care of your team. To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive limited time deal. If you sign up today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just to Gusto.com/Tape.

Now I’ve developed over the years, and this may just be rationalizing procrastination, but there are time when I have felt procrastination was actually in order, and it’s because I wasn’t … Like the idea hadn’t come to me, or the way to tackle something hadn’t really come to me and if I went out and ran or did something, and forgot about it, then I’d come back and all of a sudden the idea came to me.

I’ve developed a pattern, I think, of recognizing that. Is that an excuse for procrastination, or is that a valuable-

Laura V.: No, I think that’s a valuable observation. The key is making sure you start your project enough ahead of time so that you have space for walking away from it and doing something else, and then coming back to it. So the issue I think a lot of people have is they leave it up to the last minute and then they don’t have time for that sort of incubation period of the idea. Then, you’re really screwed because there’s nothing you can do about it. Either it will be late, or it won’t be very good. Either of which is not a great outcome.

But if you start enough ahead of time, and you sort of put your thoughts in there, and you say, “Okay, well it’s okay. It’s not great though. Let me think about it a little bit more,” go away from a while and when you come back a day or two later, you’ve got lots more ideas, or you thought about more research you need to do that will solve this problem for you. Then it’s much better. So yeah, I think leaving that space in for incubation is a key part of creativity. So why don’t we call it that instead of procrastination?

John Jantsch: Right.

Laura V.: That sounds much better.

John Jantsch: So should everyone track their time?

Laura V.: I think it would be great if everyone could track their time for a week. I have been tracking my time personally for three years now in half hour blocks. That doesn’t mean I check in every half hour. I check in probably three times a day and write down I what I was doing since the last time. I don’t expect anyone else to track their time for three years. I’m a bit of a time management freak. But, by tracking a week, you can see where the time really goes and the key part of this is making sure that whatever stories you are telling yourself about your life are actually true. A lot of times they turn out not to be true. People have various ideas of how many hours they work, which turn out not to be true. They have ideas of how many hours they sleep, which may true one night per week but isn’t true the other nights.

They may say, “I have no free time whatsoever,” and it’s like, “Except for all that time I was watching TV, which maybe is free time. I’m just not remembering it for some reason.” So I think that knowing where the time goes then allows us to make choices based on good data. If something is working great, that’s awesome. We can celebrate it knowing that that is exactly where our time goes. If it is not working, we can say, “Well now I know. Should I scale it up? Should I scale it down? How does it compare to other things in my life.” In a business decision, you want to make those from good data, same thing with your time. Make sure you’re working from what is true as opposed to what you think.

John Jantsch: How much time does multitasking actually cost us?

Laura V.: It depends what kind of multitasking we’re talking about. I mean a lot of people think that they’re being more productive by say, checking email while they’re on the phone, and in general they’re not. Your brain is just going back and forth between them, so you’re not paying attention to what’s being said on the phone, or else you’re not really answering the email well. You know, if that’s the case, it’s usually good to ask, “Why am I even on this phone call? If I can do other things while I’m on the call, probably I shouldn’t be on this call.” It’s not just worthwhile. “I should have sent somebody else, or maybe made it shorter,” or whatever else.

So things like that, yeah, pretty much just wastes time. As for … I mean there’re nice ways to multitask, too. If you think about something like exercising with a friend, is theoretically multitasking. I mean, you’re having a good conversation with somebody you’d like to, and you’re moving your body at the same time. So, that’s great. Like, that’s a double win right there, or you know, commuting with your spouse. If you can share a car ride to work once a week, that’s great because you’re turning what would be wasted time into a date, basically. So you know, think about how you can double up that way.

John Jantsch: You really need to up your expectation what a date is for.

Laura V.: What a date is. Well, you know when life gets busy enough you take what you can get, all right? Many couples, like young kids and long jobs between the two of them finally don’t get a whole lot of time talk, so if you could talk in the car, take it.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I’m swell. My children are all grown and so when I travel now my wife just goes with me. So we are in a different point, I guess.

Laura V.: Yeah, that sounds great. We may get there eventually.

John Jantsch: You will. You talk about something in the book that I think would be a really compelling idea for people, and that’s the idea of designing an ideal day.

Laura V.: Yeah, so and not just an ideal day, though I think that could be fun. But my ideal day, there’d be like flying cars and I would have to wait in traffic behind anyone else. I think more … I think about it as a realistic ideal day. So within the constraints of sort of your normal life, what would a really, really good day look like for you? You know, when people ask this question they start to say, “Oh, well you know I think it would be good if I could maybe take a walk at lunch instead of just sitting at my desk, and I have the capabilities of doing that some days.” So that would be in a good day.

When you’re thinking of things like that, you’re more likely to start figuring out ways you could work them into your life, or like, “Oh, I listened to a really good podcast on the way into work, and I’d listen to an album I was choosing to listen to more in the genre of music say, on the way home.” Well, that nudges you to start thinking, “Okay, well maybe I should make sure I pack my listening materials as I’m getting into the car instead of just getting in there and realizing, “Oh, well I’m stuck listening to the radio because I don’t have time to find a podcast while I’m paying attention to the traffic. So oh well, I guess I didn’t do that.”

John Jantsch: You know, just an example of that, that I totally, totally buy is that I have a lot better day if I pack my lunch because I choose something really good to eat and if I just don’t do it, and I go, “Oh, I’ll go to the place across the street,” that doesn’t really have anything that I should eat-

Laura V.: Yes.

John Jantsch: So that … I think even something like that helps me actually have an ideal day as well.

Laura V.: Yeah, no food could definitely be a dimension for it. You know, think about what I would spend my time at work doing, would I be reading something at night before bed? How would I spend my time? Because that reminds you what’s important to you, but within a context that you can actually do something with. Because again, I’m not going to get my flying car. That’s not going to happen. But I can choose to listen to the top albums of the last year while I’m in my car. That’s something I..

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Transcript of How to Feel Less Busy and Get More Done

Transcript of How to Feel Less Busy and Get More Done

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John Jantsch: 168. Do you know what that number represents? It is the hours that each of us has in a week, that includes 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That’s 168. So how do you use those to feel less busy and get more done? Well tune in to this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. I talk with Laura Vanderkam, and she’s the author of a new book called Off the Clock. You are going to want to check it out to figure out how to manage your life.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s I switched to Gusto. And to help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners and exclusive limited time deal. You sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to Gusto.com/Tape.

Hello, welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This John Jantsch, and my guest today is Laura Vanderkam. She’s the author of several time management and productivity books, including one we’re going to talk about today called Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done.

So, Laura, thanks for joining me.

Laura V.: Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: Now as I understand it, the method you used to compile some of your research was to literally have what, seven, eight, 900 people track their time on one given day and then turn all that in, and you analyzed it. Is that a good summary?

Laura V.: That’s a good summary, yeah. I had 900 people with full-time jobs and who also had families to track their time for a day. It was normal March Monday. So I had them record how they spent their time and then I asked them questions about how they felt about their time so looking at all this I could compare the schedules of people who felt relaxed, and they had enough time for the things they want to do with the people who felt stressed and starved for time, and rushed and all that and see what was the actual difference.

John Jantsch: So you used something you call Time Perception Scores, and I thought that was kind of interesting because I think a lot of people kind of end it like, “I got my checklist done,” instead of necessarily this idea of how they feel about it. I think there is a lot of stress around even getting a lot done, isn’t there?

Laura V.: There really is. I mean, because ultimately time is what it is, but how you feel about it has a big effect on your life. It’s the question of whether … People will be sitting there on a massage table, but thinking about their inbox. Technically, they’re having relaxed leisure time but they don’t feel that way, and that can keep people from enjoying it. So I think our time perception has a lot to do with how effective we are.

I was asking people questions like, “Yesterday I generally felt present rather than distracted,” and people could answer on a one to seven point scale. Then there are many other questions like that so then I could numerically look at the people who felt most relaxed and present and happy about their time and then the people who felt the worst about it, too.

John Jantsch: So I sometimes thing time management books are a little like diet books. It’s like here’s the new one. Eat good, do exercise, get rest. That’s the new diet. So, I’m going to let you defend that. How is your time management book different than the sea of time management books, because everybody’s been trying to figure this out.

Laura V.: Yes, well the truth is we all have the same 24 hours a day so it’s even harder-

John Jantsch: Right, right.

Laura V.: [inaudible 00:03:47] like money books, or people want different amounts of money so you could at least segment that way. But no, we all have the same amount of time. The honest truth is I don’t care if you have some email hack to take 30 seconds less on your inbox, or all these time management strategies like clean the shower while you’re in it to save a little bit of time here and there, or something like that. This is really not what time is about.

It’s about asking questions of what is important to us, what would I like to spend my time on. I think honestly how I feel about my time, too. Do I feel like time is rushing past, like I’m frantic and harried, like I don’t remember where my time has gone, or do I feel like it is full and rich, and I’m truly enjoying it and lingering in positive experiences? I’m really going for the latter, and off the clock it’s about more about the philosophy of how we view time.

John Jantsch: I’m curious on a couple of data points when you compiled all this research and analyzed it. Was there any difference in how people felt about their time purely based on their age?

Laura V.: So I know that there is broadly about this. I didn’t really look at people’s ages in this. I know everyone had children at home under age 18 so that put somewhat of a limit on what ages people were in. Probably the majority were between ages of about 25 and 55 just because of that constraint on it. But, I do know that many people feel that times move faster as they get older. A lot of people thinking back oh the years between let’s say 16 and 19 seem very vast for people versus the last three years often seem a lot quicker in our recounting.

There’re reasons for that, which is that age 16 to 19 was a very memorable time for people. They did a lot of firsts, they were figuring out who they are, new experiences. Those things tend to be memorable, and when we have memorable experiences, we remember them. Whereas adult life is generally not like that, so we don’t remember it. But we can, and people who have a good relationship with time tend to think about making their time memorable so they do remember it.

John Jantsch: I was just going to say that sounds like that’s a really good point, is maybe we ought to do things that are more memorable. All right, so another data point I was curious about is did you find a pattern to what some of the biggest time drains were for people?

Laura V.: Well, I think one interesting one is not thinking about where you’d like your time to go. I think that being intentional about your time is the biggest way to make sure that is actually spent well. If you think about how a lot of people approach, even a workday, we at least think oh well, here are broadly some things I need to do, but we tend to show up and then just march from meeting to meeting, and trying to check emails in between meetings, and you get to the end of the day like wait, where did all that time go?

It’s hard to say that the time was optimized if you’re doing all that. With people who are more intentional about it who say, “Okay, well these are the three things I absolutely have to get done today. Here’s where I have open space that I can deal with them, and by the way, do I actually have to be at all those meetings? Let me push back against some of them, too.” Those people could work … often could get out of work a little bit earlier than the people who left the work until the end of all the meetings and then had to still get done the things that had to get done.

So I found that people with high time perception scores tended to work slightly less than other people, but it wasn’t that the other people with low time perception scores worked a lot. They worked just a little bit more than the average, but it was more that the people who were good about time were intentional about planning their day so they got stuff done when they had the energy to do it, so that they weren’t stuck by themselves on a late night.

John Jantsch: Many days I feel like I kick ass for two hours, and delete email for six hours. I know there are certain times when I am way more productive, and I wonder if that’s a sort of physical or physiological kind of clock thing, or is that something that we just kind of train ourselves to be?

Laura V.: Well I think that your description of a work day is pretty broad in that a lot of people experience this phenomenon, that they have like two good hours and then six hours of yes, email deletion and random meetings and such. The important thing is that you make sure and you use those two hours. If you only have two good hours, you want to make sure that you are executing on whatever is most important to you during those two hours because the email deletion is still going to happen. Like, you can do that with half a brain, but you can’t deal with that [inaudible 00:08:35] focus time.

For most people that focus time tends to happen in the morning, which is an argument for not scheduling sort of status meetings between 8:00 and 10:00 a.m. because again, that’s time that people can really crank on stuff whereas they’ll still tell you how the project is going at 2:00 p.m., but it doesn’t really matter if they’re half asleep during that time. I do think on the other hand though that you can get some of that email deletion time back by proactively planning in breaks, because what’s sort of happening is that you have energy and then you use it.

If you don’t put more energy back in, then you could only do the low energy tasks like deleting emails. So you know, many things you can do. You can get outside for a little bit, go for a quick walk, talk to somebody whose company you really enjoy. That can get you a little bit more time out of that email deletion category.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I was somewhat being fastidious, but I think a lot of people feel that way, and I do know that they are certain times when I have … And I actually schedule my day a little bit around the knowledge that I’m from ten to noon, I really am very effective, and from two to four I’m really very effective. I just know that, and I think that there is some planning that goes into that, or into taking advantage of that.

Laura V.: Definitely. Definitely. That’s smart.

John Jantsch: You talk a lot about 168 hours, and it’s interesting to think that’s the amount of hours in a week, isn’t it?

Laura V.: It is, which is funny because most people don’t know that. But yeah, 168 hours and many people don’t know, which is fascinating because when people say 24/7 all the time, and then they don’t multiply it through. But it’s really the right way … I think weeks are a good unit to think about time partly because that’s the unit of life that we tend to live, is the repeating cycle of life like both Tuesdays and Saturdays happen the same amount. They’re very different, but they happen the same amount.

So the other reason to think of 168 hours is it just shows you how much time you have. I mean, a lot of people who have full time jobs say, “I have no time for anything else,” but if you think about it, work 40 hours a week, sleep eight hours a night so that’s 56 hours a week. That leaves 72 hours for other things, which is quite a bit of time. It’s twice as much time as you’re working, so there is time for other things it’s just we tend not to see it because work tends to take a lot of [inaudible 00:11:02] energy as well.

John Jantsch: And really … and I think you said the book … you stated the book is more philosophical. So in that sense, it’s not really just about getting more done, is it?

Laura V.: No, because there’s no point in getting more done. You know … especially stuff like the deleting email. I know people feel so productive when they’re deleting email because it’s measurable. I don’t know if I made progress on my most important goals, but I know for sure I got down from 150 unread messages to 50, so yay me, right? But it’s about making sure that you’re effective in the various fears of life … well like you are doing the things in life that make life feel worthwhile. If you aren’t, how can you go about reallocating your hours so those things happen?

John Jantsch: I think for me, at least, I know there are … When I come in every single day, I have a myriad of choices of things I could do but there are clearly some higher payoff activities that if I focused on them, or whatever, and made sure all else got put to the side until that was done, I would certainly advance on my goals. It’s not even about time management, it’s just about making choices.

Laura V.: Yeah, I mean we do have a fair amount of choice about how we allocate our time. I have people that’s telling me, “Well I can’t control this, this, and this.” I mean, it’s easy to talk about the times we can’t control, but then there’s time we can, too, even if it’s a small amount of time. Certainly, we could make better choices within those small amounts of time and ask the question of how can we change things more broadly over a longer period of time? I think it’s easy to become mentally stuck, but often there’s something that can be changed. Then it’s about changing that something and then maybe finding that motivational, and not to push the next thing along.

John Jantsch: Well, and I work with a lot of business owners who are very overwhelmed … who feel very overwhelmed. A lot of it, when we really get to studying it, there’s a lot of things that they shouldn’t be doing. In fact, they should be trying to do less instead of trying to do more because the trying to do more gets them so scattered and stressed that the stuff that really is worth them doing doesn’t get done.

Laura V.: Yeah, and that’s just a function, again, of when you’re starting a business you feel like you should do everything, chase every sale, make sure everything’s done perfectly, which means you have to do it yourself. It’s how entrepreneurs get how that drive to get started. But those skills, that temptation to do all that, and be a perfectionist, that just … you can’t grow that way. I mean, because again, we only have 24 hours in day, and even if you worked every single minute that you weren’t sleeping, there’s still a limit on how much you can do.

If you think of a CEO of a big company, we don’t say, “Oh, well he or she is a failure because they’re not doing everything themselves.” Of course not, we expect that. So it’s really about having more of that mindset of what is the absolute best thing I can be doing with my time? How can we set up the business so that I am supported in doing those things, and these other things that either I don’t do as well, or can’t do well at all … Or even that I do great, but are not the best use of my time can be given to somebody else.

John Jantsch: Wouldn’t it be great if in your business all you had to do was the stuff you love? The reason you started the business. Not all that administrative stuff like payroll and benefits. That stuff’s hard, especially when you’re a small business. Now, I’ve been delegating my payroll for years to one of those big corporate companies, and I always felt like a little tiny fish, but now there is a much better way.

I’ve switched over to Gusto, and it is making payroll and benefits and HR easy for the modern small business. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service to take care of your team. To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive limited time deal. If you sign up today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just to Gusto.com/Tape.

Now I’ve developed over the years, and this may just be rationalizing procrastination, but there are time when I have felt procrastination was actually in order, and it’s because I wasn’t … Like the idea hadn’t come to me, or the way to tackle something hadn’t really come to me and if I went out and ran or did something, and forgot about it, then I’d come back and all of a sudden the idea came to me.

I’ve developed a pattern, I think, of recognizing that. Is that an excuse for procrastination, or is that a valuable-

Laura V.: No, I think that’s a valuable observation. The key is making sure you start your project enough ahead of time so that you have space for walking away from it and doing something else, and then coming back to it. So the issue I think a lot of people have is they leave it up to the last minute and then they don’t have time for that sort of incubation period of the idea. Then, you’re really screwed because there’s nothing you can do about it. Either it will be late, or it won’t be very good. Either of which is not a great outcome.

But if you start enough ahead of time, and you sort of put your thoughts in there, and you say, “Okay, well it’s okay. It’s not great though. Let me think about it a little bit more,” go away from a while and when you come back a day or two later, you’ve got lots more ideas, or you thought about more research you need to do that will solve this problem for you. Then it’s much better. So yeah, I think leaving that space in for incubation is a key part of creativity. So why don’t we call it that instead of procrastination?

John Jantsch: Right.

Laura V.: That sounds much better.

John Jantsch: So should everyone track their time?

Laura V.: I think it would be great if everyone could track their time for a week. I have been tracking my time personally for three years now in half hour blocks. That doesn’t mean I check in every half hour. I check in probably three times a day and write down I what I was doing since the last time. I don’t expect anyone else to track their time for three years. I’m a bit of a time management freak. But, by tracking a week, you can see where the time really goes and the key part of this is making sure that whatever stories you are telling yourself about your life are actually true. A lot of times they turn out not to be true. People have various ideas of how many hours they work, which turn out not to be true. They have ideas of how many hours they sleep, which may true one night per week but isn’t true the other nights.

They may say, “I have no free time whatsoever,” and it’s like, “Except for all that time I was watching TV, which maybe is free time. I’m just not remembering it for some reason.” So I think that knowing where the time goes then allows us to make choices based on good data. If something is working great, that’s awesome. We can celebrate it knowing that that is exactly where our time goes. If it is not working, we can say, “Well now I know. Should I scale it up? Should I scale it down? How does it compare to other things in my life.” In a business decision, you want to make those from good data, same thing with your time. Make sure you’re working from what is true as opposed to what you think.

John Jantsch: How much time does multitasking actually cost us?

Laura V.: It depends what kind of multitasking we’re talking about. I mean a lot of people think that they’re being more productive by say, checking email while they’re on the phone, and in general they’re not. Your brain is just going back and forth between them, so you’re not paying attention to what’s being said on the phone, or else you’re not really answering the email well. You know, if that’s the case, it’s usually good to ask, “Why am I even on this phone call? If I can do other things while I’m on the call, probably I shouldn’t be on this call.” It’s not just worthwhile. “I should have sent somebody else, or maybe made it shorter,” or whatever else.

So things like that, yeah, pretty much just wastes time. As for … I mean there’re nice ways to multitask, too. If you think about something like exercising with a friend, is theoretically multitasking. I mean, you’re having a good conversation with somebody you’d like to, and you’re moving your body at the same time. So, that’s great. Like, that’s a double win right there, or you know, commuting with your spouse. If you can share a car ride to work once a week, that’s great because you’re turning what would be wasted time into a date, basically. So you know, think about how you can double up that way.

John Jantsch: You really need to up your expectation what a date is for.

Laura V.: What a date is. Well, you know when life gets busy enough you take what you can get, all right? Many couples, like young kids and long jobs between the two of them finally don’t get a whole lot of time talk, so if you could talk in the car, take it.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I’m swell. My children are all grown and so when I travel now my wife just goes with me. So we are in a different point, I guess.

Laura V.: Yeah, that sounds great. We may get there eventually.

John Jantsch: You will. You talk about something in the book that I think would be a really compelling idea for people, and that’s the idea of designing an ideal day.

Laura V.: Yeah, so and not just an ideal day, though I think that could be fun. But my ideal day, there’d be like flying cars and I would have to wait in traffic behind anyone else. I think more … I think about it as a realistic ideal day. So within the constraints of sort of your normal life, what would a really, really good day look like for you? You know, when people ask this question they start to say, “Oh, well you know I think it would be good if I could maybe take a walk at lunch instead of just sitting at my desk, and I have the capabilities of doing that some days.” So that would be in a good day.

When you’re thinking of things like that, you’re more likely to start figuring out ways you could work them into your life, or like, “Oh, I listened to a really good podcast on the way into work, and I’d listen to an album I was choosing to listen to more in the genre of music say, on the way home.” Well, that nudges you to start thinking, “Okay, well maybe I should make sure I pack my listening materials as I’m getting into the car instead of just getting in there and realizing, “Oh, well I’m stuck listening to the radio because I don’t have time to find a podcast while I’m paying attention to the traffic. So oh well, I guess I didn’t do that.”

John Jantsch: You know, just an example of that, that I totally, totally buy is that I have a lot better day if I pack my lunch because I choose something really good to eat and if I just don’t do it, and I go, “Oh, I’ll go to the place across the street,” that doesn’t really have anything that I should eat-

Laura V.: Yes.

John Jantsch: So that … I think even something like that helps me actually have an ideal day as well.

Laura V.: Yeah, no food could definitely be a dimension for it. You know, think about what I would spend my time at work doing, would I be reading something at night before bed? How would I spend my time? Because that reminds you what’s important to you, but within a context that you can actually do something with. Because again, I’m not going to get my flying car. That’s not going to happen. But I can choose to listen to the top albums of the last year while I’m in my car. That’s something I..

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John Jantsch: 168. Do you know what that number represents? It is the hours that each of us has in a week, that includes 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That’s 168. So how do you use those to feel less busy and get more done? Well tune in to this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. I talk with Laura Vanderkam, and she’s the author of a new book called Off the Clock. You are going to want to check it out to figure out how to manage your life.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s I switched to Gusto. And to help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners and exclusive limited time deal. You sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to Gusto.com/Tape.

Hello, welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This John Jantsch, and my guest today is Laura Vanderkam. She’s the author of several time management and productivity books, including one we’re going to talk about today called Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done.

So, Laura, thanks for joining me.

Laura V.: Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: Now as I understand it, the method you used to compile some of your research was to literally have what, seven, eight, 900 people track their time on one given day and then turn all that in, and you analyzed it. Is that a good summary?

Laura V.: That’s a good summary, yeah. I had 900 people with full-time jobs and who also had families to track their time for a day. It was normal March Monday. So I had them record how they spent their time and then I asked them questions about how they felt about their time so looking at all this I could compare the schedules of people who felt relaxed, and they had enough time for the things they want to do with the people who felt stressed and starved for time, and rushed and all that and see what was the actual difference.

John Jantsch: So you used something you call Time Perception Scores, and I thought that was kind of interesting because I think a lot of people kind of end it like, “I got my checklist done,” instead of necessarily this idea of how they feel about it. I think there is a lot of stress around even getting a lot done, isn’t there?

Laura V.: There really is. I mean, because ultimately time is what it is, but how you feel about it has a big effect on your life. It’s the question of whether … People will be sitting there on a massage table, but thinking about their inbox. Technically, they’re having relaxed leisure time but they don’t feel that way, and that can keep people from enjoying it. So I think our time perception has a lot to do with how effective we are.

I was asking people questions like, “Yesterday I generally felt present rather than distracted,” and people could answer on a one to seven point scale. Then there are many other questions like that so then I could numerically look at the people who felt most relaxed and present and happy about their time and then the people who felt the worst about it, too.

John Jantsch: So I sometimes thing time management books are a little like diet books. It’s like here’s the new one. Eat good, do exercise, get rest. That’s the new diet. So, I’m going to let you defend that. How is your time management book different than the sea of time management books, because everybody’s been trying to figure this out.

Laura V.: Yes, well the truth is we all have the same 24 hours a day so it’s even harder-

John Jantsch: Right, right.

Laura V.: [inaudible 00:03:47] like money books, or people want different amounts of money so you could at least segment that way. But no, we all have the same amount of time. The honest truth is I don’t care if you have some email hack to take 30 seconds less on your inbox, or all these time management strategies like clean the shower while you’re in it to save a little bit of time here and there, or something like that. This is really not what time is about.

It’s about asking questions of what is important to us, what would I like to spend my time on. I think honestly how I feel about my time, too. Do I feel like time is rushing past, like I’m frantic and harried, like I don’t remember where my time has gone, or do I feel like it is full and rich, and I’m truly enjoying it and lingering in positive experiences? I’m really going for the latter, and off the clock it’s about more about the philosophy of how we view time.

John Jantsch: I’m curious on a couple of data points when you compiled all this research and analyzed it. Was there any difference in how people felt about their time purely based on their age?

Laura V.: So I know that there is broadly about this. I didn’t really look at people’s ages in this. I know everyone had children at home under age 18 so that put somewhat of a limit on what ages people were in. Probably the majority were between ages of about 25 and 55 just because of that constraint on it. But, I do know that many people feel that times move faster as they get older. A lot of people thinking back oh the years between let’s say 16 and 19 seem very vast for people versus the last three years often seem a lot quicker in our recounting.

There’re reasons for that, which is that age 16 to 19 was a very memorable time for people. They did a lot of firsts, they were figuring out who they are, new experiences. Those things tend to be memorable, and when we have memorable experiences, we remember them. Whereas adult life is generally not like that, so we don’t remember it. But we can, and people who have a good relationship with time tend to think about making their time memorable so they do remember it.

John Jantsch: I was just going to say that sounds like that’s a really good point, is maybe we ought to do things that are more memorable. All right, so another data point I was curious about is did you find a pattern to what some of the biggest time drains were for people?

Laura V.: Well, I think one interesting one is not thinking about where you’d like your time to go. I think that being intentional about your time is the biggest way to make sure that is actually spent well. If you think about how a lot of people approach, even a workday, we at least think oh well, here are broadly some things I need to do, but we tend to show up and then just march from meeting to meeting, and trying to check emails in between meetings, and you get to the end of the day like wait, where did all that time go?

It’s hard to say that the time was optimized if you’re doing all that. With people who are more intentional about it who say, “Okay, well these are the three things I absolutely have to get done today. Here’s where I have open space that I can deal with them, and by the way, do I actually have to be at all those meetings? Let me push back against some of them, too.” Those people could work … often could get out of work a little bit earlier than the people who left the work until the end of all the meetings and then had to still get done the things that had to get done.

So I found that people with high time perception scores tended to work slightly less than other people, but it wasn’t that the other people with low time perception scores worked a lot. They worked just a little bit more than the average, but it was more that the people who were good about time were intentional about planning their day so they got stuff done when they had the energy to do it, so that they weren’t stuck by themselves on a late night.

John Jantsch: Many days I feel like I kick ass for two hours, and delete email for six hours. I know there are certain times when I am way more productive, and I wonder if that’s a sort of physical or physiological kind of clock thing, or is that something that we just kind of train ourselves to be?

Laura V.: Well I think that your description of a work day is pretty broad in that a lot of people experience this phenomenon, that they have like two good hours and then six hours of yes, email deletion and random meetings and such. The important thing is that you make sure and you use those two hours. If you only have two good hours, you want to make sure that you are executing on whatever is most important to you during those two hours because the email deletion is still going to happen. Like, you can do that with half a brain, but you can’t deal with that [inaudible 00:08:35] focus time.

For most people that focus time tends to happen in the morning, which is an argument for not scheduling sort of status meetings between 8:00 and 10:00 a.m. because again, that’s time that people can really crank on stuff whereas they’ll still tell you how the project is going at 2:00 p.m., but it doesn’t really matter if they’re half asleep during that time. I do think on the other hand though that you can get some of that email deletion time back by proactively planning in breaks, because what’s sort of happening is that you have energy and then you use it.

If you don’t put more energy back in, then you could only do the low energy tasks like deleting emails. So you know, many things you can do. You can get outside for a little bit, go for a quick walk, talk to somebody whose company you really enjoy. That can get you a little bit more time out of that email deletion category.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I was somewhat being fastidious, but I think a lot of people feel that way, and I do know that they are certain times when I have … And I actually schedule my day a little bit around the knowledge that I’m from ten to noon, I really am very effective, and from two to four I’m really very effective. I just know that, and I think that there is some planning that goes into that, or into taking advantage of that.

Laura V.: Definitely. Definitely. That’s smart.

John Jantsch: You talk a lot about 168 hours, and it’s interesting to think that’s the amount of hours in a week, isn’t it?

Laura V.: It is, which is funny because most people don’t know that. But yeah, 168 hours and many people don’t know, which is fascinating because when people say 24/7 all the time, and then they don’t multiply it through. But it’s really the right way … I think weeks are a good unit to think about time partly because that’s the unit of life that we tend to live, is the repeating cycle of life like both Tuesdays and Saturdays happen the same amount. They’re very different, but they happen the same amount.

So the other reason to think of 168 hours is it just shows you how much time you have. I mean, a lot of people who have full time jobs say, “I have no time for anything else,” but if you think about it, work 40 hours a week, sleep eight hours a night so that’s 56 hours a week. That leaves 72 hours for other things, which is quite a bit of time. It’s twice as much time as you’re working, so there is time for other things it’s just we tend not to see it because work tends to take a lot of [inaudible 00:11:02] energy as well.

John Jantsch: And really … and I think you said the book … you stated the book is more philosophical. So in that sense, it’s not really just about getting more done, is it?

Laura V.: No, because there’s no point in getting more done. You know … especially stuff like the deleting email. I know people feel so productive when they’re deleting email because it’s measurable. I don’t know if I made progress on my most important goals, but I know for sure I got down from 150 unread messages to 50, so yay me, right? But it’s about making sure that you’re effective in the various fears of life … well like you are doing the things in life that make life feel worthwhile. If you aren’t, how can you go about reallocating your hours so those things happen?

John Jantsch: I think for me, at least, I know there are … When I come in every single day, I have a myriad of choices of things I could do but there are clearly some higher payoff activities that if I focused on them, or whatever, and made sure all else got put to the side until that was done, I would certainly advance on my goals. It’s not even about time management, it’s just about making choices.

Laura V.: Yeah, I mean we do have a fair amount of choice about how we allocate our time. I have people that’s telling me, “Well I can’t control this, this, and this.” I mean, it’s easy to talk about the times we can’t control, but then there’s time we can, too, even if it’s a small amount of time. Certainly, we could make better choices within those small amounts of time and ask the question of how can we change things more broadly over a longer period of time? I think it’s easy to become mentally stuck, but often there’s something that can be changed. Then it’s about changing that something and then maybe finding that motivational, and not to push the next thing along.

John Jantsch: Well, and I work with a lot of business owners who are very overwhelmed … who feel very overwhelmed. A lot of it, when we really get to studying it, there’s a lot of things that they shouldn’t be doing. In fact, they should be trying to do less instead of trying to do more because the trying to do more gets them so scattered and stressed that the stuff that really is worth them doing doesn’t get done.

Laura V.: Yeah, and that’s just a function, again, of when you’re starting a business you feel like you should do everything, chase every sale, make sure everything’s done perfectly, which means you have to do it yourself. It’s how entrepreneurs get how that drive to get started. But those skills, that temptation to do all that, and be a perfectionist, that just … you can’t grow that way. I mean, because again, we only have 24 hours in day, and even if you worked every single minute that you weren’t sleeping, there’s still a limit on how much you can do.

If you think of a CEO of a big company, we don’t say, “Oh, well he or she is a failure because they’re not doing everything themselves.” Of course not, we expect that. So it’s really about having more of that mindset of what is the absolute best thing I can be doing with my time? How can we set up the business so that I am supported in doing those things, and these other things that either I don’t do as well, or can’t do well at all … Or even that I do great, but are not the best use of my time can be given to somebody else.

John Jantsch: Wouldn’t it be great if in your business all you had to do was the stuff you love? The reason you started the business. Not all that administrative stuff like payroll and benefits. That stuff’s hard, especially when you’re a small business. Now, I’ve been delegating my payroll for years to one of those big corporate companies, and I always felt like a little tiny fish, but now there is a much better way.

I’ve switched over to Gusto, and it is making payroll and benefits and HR easy for the modern small business. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service to take care of your team. To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive limited time deal. If you sign up today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just to Gusto.com/Tape.

Now I’ve developed over the years, and this may just be rationalizing procrastination, but there are time when I have felt procrastination was actually in order, and it’s because I wasn’t … Like the idea hadn’t come to me, or the way to tackle something hadn’t really come to me and if I went out and ran or did something, and forgot about it, then I’d come back and all of a sudden the idea came to me.

I’ve developed a pattern, I think, of recognizing that. Is that an excuse for procrastination, or is that a valuable-

Laura V.: No, I think that’s a valuable observation. The key is making sure you start your project enough ahead of time so that you have space for walking away from it and doing something else, and then coming back to it. So the issue I think a lot of people have is they leave it up to the last minute and then they don’t have time for that sort of incubation period of the idea. Then, you’re really screwed because there’s nothing you can do about it. Either it will be late, or it won’t be very good. Either of which is not a great outcome.

But if you start enough ahead of time, and you sort of put your thoughts in there, and you say, “Okay, well it’s okay. It’s not great though. Let me think about it a little bit more,” go away from a while and when you come back a day or two later, you’ve got lots more ideas, or you thought about more research you need to do that will solve this problem for you. Then it’s much better. So yeah, I think leaving that space in for incubation is a key part of creativity. So why don’t we call it that instead of procrastination?

John Jantsch: Right.

Laura V.: That sounds much better.

John Jantsch: So should everyone track their time?

Laura V.: I think it would be great if everyone could track their time for a week. I have been tracking my time personally for three years now in half hour blocks. That doesn’t mean I check in every half hour. I check in probably three times a day and write down I what I was doing since the last time. I don’t expect anyone else to track their time for three years. I’m a bit of a time management freak. But, by tracking a week, you can see where the time really goes and the key part of this is making sure that whatever stories you are telling yourself about your life are actually true. A lot of times they turn out not to be true. People have various ideas of how many hours they work, which turn out not to be true. They have ideas of how many hours they sleep, which may true one night per week but isn’t true the other nights.

They may say, “I have no free time whatsoever,” and it’s like, “Except for all that time I was watching TV, which maybe is free time. I’m just not remembering it for some reason.” So I think that knowing where the time goes then allows us to make choices based on good data. If something is working great, that’s awesome. We can celebrate it knowing that that is exactly where our time goes. If it is not working, we can say, “Well now I know. Should I scale it up? Should I scale it down? How does it compare to other things in my life.” In a business decision, you want to make those from good data, same thing with your time. Make sure you’re working from what is true as opposed to what you think.

John Jantsch: How much time does multitasking actually cost us?

Laura V.: It depends what kind of multitasking we’re talking about. I mean a lot of people think that they’re being more productive by say, checking email while they’re on the phone, and in general they’re not. Your brain is just going back and forth between them, so you’re not paying attention to what’s being said on the phone, or else you’re not really answering the email well. You know, if that’s the case, it’s usually good to ask, “Why am I even on this phone call? If I can do other things while I’m on the call, probably I shouldn’t be on this call.” It’s not just worthwhile. “I should have sent somebody else, or maybe made it shorter,” or whatever else.

So things like that, yeah, pretty much just wastes time. As for … I mean there’re nice ways to multitask, too. If you think about something like exercising with a friend, is theoretically multitasking. I mean, you’re having a good conversation with somebody you’d like to, and you’re moving your body at the same time. So, that’s great. Like, that’s a double win right there, or you know, commuting with your spouse. If you can share a car ride to work once a week, that’s great because you’re turning what would be wasted time into a date, basically. So you know, think about how you can double up that way.

John Jantsch: You really need to up your expectation what a date is for.

Laura V.: What a date is. Well, you know when life gets busy enough you take what you can get, all right? Many couples, like young kids and long jobs between the two of them finally don’t get a whole lot of time talk, so if you could talk in the car, take it.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I’m swell. My children are all grown and so when I travel now my wife just goes with me. So we are in a different point, I guess.

Laura V.: Yeah, that sounds great. We may get there eventually.

John Jantsch: You will. You talk about something in the book that I think would be a really compelling idea for people, and that’s the idea of designing an ideal day.

Laura V.: Yeah, so and not just an ideal day, though I think that could be fun. But my ideal day, there’d be like flying cars and I would have to wait in traffic behind anyone else. I think more … I think about it as a realistic ideal day. So within the constraints of sort of your normal life, what would a really, really good day look like for you? You know, when people ask this question they start to say, “Oh, well you know I think it would be good if I could maybe take a walk at lunch instead of just sitting at my desk, and I have the capabilities of doing that some days.” So that would be in a good day.

When you’re thinking of things like that, you’re more likely to start figuring out ways you could work them into your life, or like, “Oh, I listened to a really good podcast on the way into work, and I’d listen to an album I was choosing to listen to more in the genre of music say, on the way home.” Well, that nudges you to start thinking, “Okay, well maybe I should make sure I pack my listening materials as I’m getting into the car instead of just getting in there and realizing, “Oh, well I’m stuck listening to the radio because I don’t have time to find a podcast while I’m paying attention to the traffic. So oh well, I guess I didn’t do that.”

John Jantsch: You know, just an example of that, that I totally, totally buy is that I have a lot better day if I pack my lunch because I choose something really good to eat and if I just don’t do it, and I go, “Oh, I’ll go to the place across the street,” that doesn’t really have anything that I should eat-

Laura V.: Yes.

John Jantsch: So that … I think even something like that helps me actually have an ideal day as well.

Laura V.: Yeah, no food could definitely be a dimension for it. You know, think about what I would spend my time at work doing, would I be reading something at night before bed? How would I spend my time? Because that reminds you what’s important to you, but within a context that you can actually do something with. Because again, I’m not going to get my flying car. That’s not going to happen. But I can choose to listen to the top albums of the last year while I’m in my car. That’s something I..

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Transcript of How to Feel Less Busy and Get More Done

Transcript of How to Feel Less Busy and Get More Done

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John Jantsch: 168. Do you know what that number represents? It is the hours that each of us has in a week, that includes 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That’s 168. So how do you use those to feel less busy and get more done? Well tune in to this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. I talk with Laura Vanderkam, and she’s the author of a new book called Off the Clock. You are going to want to check it out to figure out how to manage your life.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s I switched to Gusto. And to help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners and exclusive limited time deal. You sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to Gusto.com/Tape.

Hello, welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This John Jantsch, and my guest today is Laura Vanderkam. She’s the author of several time management and productivity books, including one we’re going to talk about today called Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done.

So, Laura, thanks for joining me.

Laura V.: Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: Now as I understand it, the method you used to compile some of your research was to literally have what, seven, eight, 900 people track their time on one given day and then turn all that in, and you analyzed it. Is that a good summary?

Laura V.: That’s a good summary, yeah. I had 900 people with full-time jobs and who also had families to track their time for a day. It was normal March Monday. So I had them record how they spent their time and then I asked them questions about how they felt about their time so looking at all this I could compare the schedules of people who felt relaxed, and they had enough time for the things they want to do with the people who felt stressed and starved for time, and rushed and all that and see what was the actual difference.

John Jantsch: So you used something you call Time Perception Scores, and I thought that was kind of interesting because I think a lot of people kind of end it like, “I got my checklist done,” instead of necessarily this idea of how they feel about it. I think there is a lot of stress around even getting a lot done, isn’t there?

Laura V.: There really is. I mean, because ultimately time is what it is, but how you feel about it has a big effect on your life. It’s the question of whether … People will be sitting there on a massage table, but thinking about their inbox. Technically, they’re having relaxed leisure time but they don’t feel that way, and that can keep people from enjoying it. So I think our time perception has a lot to do with how effective we are.

I was asking people questions like, “Yesterday I generally felt present rather than distracted,” and people could answer on a one to seven point scale. Then there are many other questions like that so then I could numerically look at the people who felt most relaxed and present and happy about their time and then the people who felt the worst about it, too.

John Jantsch: So I sometimes thing time management books are a little like diet books. It’s like here’s the new one. Eat good, do exercise, get rest. That’s the new diet. So, I’m going to let you defend that. How is your time management book different than the sea of time management books, because everybody’s been trying to figure this out.

Laura V.: Yes, well the truth is we all have the same 24 hours a day so it’s even harder-

John Jantsch: Right, right.

Laura V.: [inaudible 00:03:47] like money books, or people want different amounts of money so you could at least segment that way. But no, we all have the same amount of time. The honest truth is I don’t care if you have some email hack to take 30 seconds less on your inbox, or all these time management strategies like clean the shower while you’re in it to save a little bit of time here and there, or something like that. This is really not what time is about.

It’s about asking questions of what is important to us, what would I like to spend my time on. I think honestly how I feel about my time, too. Do I feel like time is rushing past, like I’m frantic and harried, like I don’t remember where my time has gone, or do I feel like it is full and rich, and I’m truly enjoying it and lingering in positive experiences? I’m really going for the latter, and off the clock it’s about more about the philosophy of how we view time.

John Jantsch: I’m curious on a couple of data points when you compiled all this research and analyzed it. Was there any difference in how people felt about their time purely based on their age?

Laura V.: So I know that there is broadly about this. I didn’t really look at people’s ages in this. I know everyone had children at home under age 18 so that put somewhat of a limit on what ages people were in. Probably the majority were between ages of about 25 and 55 just because of that constraint on it. But, I do know that many people feel that times move faster as they get older. A lot of people thinking back oh the years between let’s say 16 and 19 seem very vast for people versus the last three years often seem a lot quicker in our recounting.

There’re reasons for that, which is that age 16 to 19 was a very memorable time for people. They did a lot of firsts, they were figuring out who they are, new experiences. Those things tend to be memorable, and when we have memorable experiences, we remember them. Whereas adult life is generally not like that, so we don’t remember it. But we can, and people who have a good relationship with time tend to think about making their time memorable so they do remember it.

John Jantsch: I was just going to say that sounds like that’s a really good point, is maybe we ought to do things that are more memorable. All right, so another data point I was curious about is did you find a pattern to what some of the biggest time drains were for people?

Laura V.: Well, I think one interesting one is not thinking about where you’d like your time to go. I think that being intentional about your time is the biggest way to make sure that is actually spent well. If you think about how a lot of people approach, even a workday, we at least think oh well, here are broadly some things I need to do, but we tend to show up and then just march from meeting to meeting, and trying to check emails in between meetings, and you get to the end of the day like wait, where did all that time go?

It’s hard to say that the time was optimized if you’re doing all that. With people who are more intentional about it who say, “Okay, well these are the three things I absolutely have to get done today. Here’s where I have open space that I can deal with them, and by the way, do I actually have to be at all those meetings? Let me push back against some of them, too.” Those people could work … often could get out of work a little bit earlier than the people who left the work until the end of all the meetings and then had to still get done the things that had to get done.

So I found that people with high time perception scores tended to work slightly less than other people, but it wasn’t that the other people with low time perception scores worked a lot. They worked just a little bit more than the average, but it was more that the people who were good about time were intentional about planning their day so they got stuff done when they had the energy to do it, so that they weren’t stuck by themselves on a late night.

John Jantsch: Many days I feel like I kick ass for two hours, and delete email for six hours. I know there are certain times when I am way more productive, and I wonder if that’s a sort of physical or physiological kind of clock thing, or is that something that we just kind of train ourselves to be?

Laura V.: Well I think that your description of a work day is pretty broad in that a lot of people experience this phenomenon, that they have like two good hours and then six hours of yes, email deletion and random meetings and such. The important thing is that you make sure and you use those two hours. If you only have two good hours, you want to make sure that you are executing on whatever is most important to you during those two hours because the email deletion is still going to happen. Like, you can do that with half a brain, but you can’t deal with that [inaudible 00:08:35] focus time.

For most people that focus time tends to happen in the morning, which is an argument for not scheduling sort of status meetings between 8:00 and 10:00 a.m. because again, that’s time that people can really crank on stuff whereas they’ll still tell you how the project is going at 2:00 p.m., but it doesn’t really matter if they’re half asleep during that time. I do think on the other hand though that you can get some of that email deletion time back by proactively planning in breaks, because what’s sort of happening is that you have energy and then you use it.

If you don’t put more energy back in, then you could only do the low energy tasks like deleting emails. So you know, many things you can do. You can get outside for a little bit, go for a quick walk, talk to somebody whose company you really enjoy. That can get you a little bit more time out of that email deletion category.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I was somewhat being fastidious, but I think a lot of people feel that way, and I do know that they are certain times when I have … And I actually schedule my day a little bit around the knowledge that I’m from ten to noon, I really am very effective, and from two to four I’m really very effective. I just know that, and I think that there is some planning that goes into that, or into taking advantage of that.

Laura V.: Definitely. Definitely. That’s smart.

John Jantsch: You talk a lot about 168 hours, and it’s interesting to think that’s the amount of hours in a week, isn’t it?

Laura V.: It is, which is funny because most people don’t know that. But yeah, 168 hours and many people don’t know, which is fascinating because when people say 24/7 all the time, and then they don’t multiply it through. But it’s really the right way … I think weeks are a good unit to think about time partly because that’s the unit of life that we tend to live, is the repeating cycle of life like both Tuesdays and Saturdays happen the same amount. They’re very different, but they happen the same amount.

So the other reason to think of 168 hours is it just shows you how much time you have. I mean, a lot of people who have full time jobs say, “I have no time for anything else,” but if you think about it, work 40 hours a week, sleep eight hours a night so that’s 56 hours a week. That leaves 72 hours for other things, which is quite a bit of time. It’s twice as much time as you’re working, so there is time for other things it’s just we tend not to see it because work tends to take a lot of [inaudible 00:11:02] energy as well.

John Jantsch: And really … and I think you said the book … you stated the book is more philosophical. So in that sense, it’s not really just about getting more done, is it?

Laura V.: No, because there’s no point in getting more done. You know … especially stuff like the deleting email. I know people feel so productive when they’re deleting email because it’s measurable. I don’t know if I made progress on my most important goals, but I know for sure I got down from 150 unread messages to 50, so yay me, right? But it’s about making sure that you’re effective in the various fears of life … well like you are doing the things in life that make life feel worthwhile. If you aren’t, how can you go about reallocating your hours so those things happen?

John Jantsch: I think for me, at least, I know there are … When I come in every single day, I have a myriad of choices of things I could do but there are clearly some higher payoff activities that if I focused on them, or whatever, and made sure all else got put to the side until that was done, I would certainly advance on my goals. It’s not even about time management, it’s just about making choices.

Laura V.: Yeah, I mean we do have a fair amount of choice about how we allocate our time. I have people that’s telling me, “Well I can’t control this, this, and this.” I mean, it’s easy to talk about the times we can’t control, but then there’s time we can, too, even if it’s a small amount of time. Certainly, we could make better choices within those small amounts of time and ask the question of how can we change things more broadly over a longer period of time? I think it’s easy to become mentally stuck, but often there’s something that can be changed. Then it’s about changing that something and then maybe finding that motivational, and not to push the next thing along.

John Jantsch: Well, and I work with a lot of business owners who are very overwhelmed … who feel very overwhelmed. A lot of it, when we really get to studying it, there’s a lot of things that they shouldn’t be doing. In fact, they should be trying to do less instead of trying to do more because the trying to do more gets them so scattered and stressed that the stuff that really is worth them doing doesn’t get done.

Laura V.: Yeah, and that’s just a function, again, of when you’re starting a business you feel like you should do everything, chase every sale, make sure everything’s done perfectly, which means you have to do it yourself. It’s how entrepreneurs get how that drive to get started. But those skills, that temptation to do all that, and be a perfectionist, that just … you can’t grow that way. I mean, because again, we only have 24 hours in day, and even if you worked every single minute that you weren’t sleeping, there’s still a limit on how much you can do.

If you think of a CEO of a big company, we don’t say, “Oh, well he or she is a failure because they’re not doing everything themselves.” Of course not, we expect that. So it’s really about having more of that mindset of what is the absolute best thing I can be doing with my time? How can we set up the business so that I am supported in doing those things, and these other things that either I don’t do as well, or can’t do well at all … Or even that I do great, but are not the best use of my time can be given to somebody else.

John Jantsch: Wouldn’t it be great if in your business all you had to do was the stuff you love? The reason you started the business. Not all that administrative stuff like payroll and benefits. That stuff’s hard, especially when you’re a small business. Now, I’ve been delegating my payroll for years to one of those big corporate companies, and I always felt like a little tiny fish, but now there is a much better way.

I’ve switched over to Gusto, and it is making payroll and benefits and HR easy for the modern small business. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service to take care of your team. To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive limited time deal. If you sign up today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just to Gusto.com/Tape.

Now I’ve developed over the years, and this may just be rationalizing procrastination, but there are time when I have felt procrastination was actually in order, and it’s because I wasn’t … Like the idea hadn’t come to me, or the way to tackle something hadn’t really come to me and if I went out and ran or did something, and forgot about it, then I’d come back and all of a sudden the idea came to me.

I’ve developed a pattern, I think, of recognizing that. Is that an excuse for procrastination, or is that a valuable-

Laura V.: No, I think that’s a valuable observation. The key is making sure you start your project enough ahead of time so that you have space for walking away from it and doing something else, and then coming back to it. So the issue I think a lot of people have is they leave it up to the last minute and then they don’t have time for that sort of incubation period of the idea. Then, you’re really screwed because there’s nothing you can do about it. Either it will be late, or it won’t be very good. Either of which is not a great outcome.

But if you start enough ahead of time, and you sort of put your thoughts in there, and you say, “Okay, well it’s okay. It’s not great though. Let me think about it a little bit more,” go away from a while and when you come back a day or two later, you’ve got lots more ideas, or you thought about more research you need to do that will solve this problem for you. Then it’s much better. So yeah, I think leaving that space in for incubation is a key part of creativity. So why don’t we call it that instead of procrastination?

John Jantsch: Right.

Laura V.: That sounds much better.

John Jantsch: So should everyone track their time?

Laura V.: I think it would be great if everyone could track their time for a week. I have been tracking my time personally for three years now in half hour blocks. That doesn’t mean I check in every half hour. I check in probably three times a day and write down I what I was doing since the last time. I don’t expect anyone else to track their time for three years. I’m a bit of a time management freak. But, by tracking a week, you can see where the time really goes and the key part of this is making sure that whatever stories you are telling yourself about your life are actually true. A lot of times they turn out not to be true. People have various ideas of how many hours they work, which turn out not to be true. They have ideas of how many hours they sleep, which may true one night per week but isn’t true the other nights.

They may say, “I have no free time whatsoever,” and it’s like, “Except for all that time I was watching TV, which maybe is free time. I’m just not remembering it for some reason.” So I think that knowing where the time goes then allows us to make choices based on good data. If something is working great, that’s awesome. We can celebrate it knowing that that is exactly where our time goes. If it is not working, we can say, “Well now I know. Should I scale it up? Should I scale it down? How does it compare to other things in my life.” In a business decision, you want to make those from good data, same thing with your time. Make sure you’re working from what is true as opposed to what you think.

John Jantsch: How much time does multitasking actually cost us?

Laura V.: It depends what kind of multitasking we’re talking about. I mean a lot of people think that they’re being more productive by say, checking email while they’re on the phone, and in general they’re not. Your brain is just going back and forth between them, so you’re not paying attention to what’s being said on the phone, or else you’re not really answering the email well. You know, if that’s the case, it’s usually good to ask, “Why am I even on this phone call? If I can do other things while I’m on the call, probably I shouldn’t be on this call.” It’s not just worthwhile. “I should have sent somebody else, or maybe made it shorter,” or whatever else.

So things like that, yeah, pretty much just wastes time. As for … I mean there’re nice ways to multitask, too. If you think about something like exercising with a friend, is theoretically multitasking. I mean, you’re having a good conversation with somebody you’d like to, and you’re moving your body at the same time. So, that’s great. Like, that’s a double win right there, or you know, commuting with your spouse. If you can share a car ride to work once a week, that’s great because you’re turning what would be wasted time into a date, basically. So you know, think about how you can double up that way.

John Jantsch: You really need to up your expectation what a date is for.

Laura V.: What a date is. Well, you know when life gets busy enough you take what you can get, all right? Many couples, like young kids and long jobs between the two of them finally don’t get a whole lot of time talk, so if you could talk in the car, take it.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I’m swell. My children are all grown and so when I travel now my wife just goes with me. So we are in a different point, I guess.

Laura V.: Yeah, that sounds great. We may get there eventually.

John Jantsch: You will. You talk about something in the book that I think would be a really compelling idea for people, and that’s the idea of designing an ideal day.

Laura V.: Yeah, so and not just an ideal day, though I think that could be fun. But my ideal day, there’d be like flying cars and I would have to wait in traffic behind anyone else. I think more … I think about it as a realistic ideal day. So within the constraints of sort of your normal life, what would a really, really good day look like for you? You know, when people ask this question they start to say, “Oh, well you know I think it would be good if I could maybe take a walk at lunch instead of just sitting at my desk, and I have the capabilities of doing that some days.” So that would be in a good day.

When you’re thinking of things like that, you’re more likely to start figuring out ways you could work them into your life, or like, “Oh, I listened to a really good podcast on the way into work, and I’d listen to an album I was choosing to listen to more in the genre of music say, on the way home.” Well, that nudges you to start thinking, “Okay, well maybe I should make sure I pack my listening materials as I’m getting into the car instead of just getting in there and realizing, “Oh, well I’m stuck listening to the radio because I don’t have time to find a podcast while I’m paying attention to the traffic. So oh well, I guess I didn’t do that.”

John Jantsch: You know, just an example of that, that I totally, totally buy is that I have a lot better day if I pack my lunch because I choose something really good to eat and if I just don’t do it, and I go, “Oh, I’ll go to the place across the street,” that doesn’t really have anything that I should eat-

Laura V.: Yes.

John Jantsch: So that … I think even something like that helps me actually have an ideal day as well.

Laura V.: Yeah, no food could definitely be a dimension for it. You know, think about what I would spend my time at work doing, would I be reading something at night before bed? How would I spend my time? Because that reminds you what’s important to you, but within a context that you can actually do something with. Because again, I’m not going to get my flying car. That’s not going to happen. But I can choose to listen to the top albums of the last year while I’m in my car. That’s something I..

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Transcript of How to Feel Less Busy and Get More Done

Transcript of How to Feel Less Busy and Get More Done

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John Jantsch: 168. Do you know what that number represents? It is the hours that each of us has in a week, that includes 24 hours a day, seven days a week. That’s 168. So how do you use those to feel less busy and get more done? Well tune in to this episode of the Duct Tape Marketing podcast. I talk with Laura Vanderkam, and she’s the author of a new book called Off the Clock. You are going to want to check it out to figure out how to manage your life.

Stuff like payroll and benefits are hard. That’s I switched to Gusto. And to help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners and exclusive limited time deal. You sign up for their payroll service today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just go to Gusto.com/Tape.

Hello, welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This John Jantsch, and my guest today is Laura Vanderkam. She’s the author of several time management and productivity books, including one we’re going to talk about today called Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done.

So, Laura, thanks for joining me.

Laura V.: Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch: Now as I understand it, the method you used to compile some of your research was to literally have what, seven, eight, 900 people track their time on one given day and then turn all that in, and you analyzed it. Is that a good summary?

Laura V.: That’s a good summary, yeah. I had 900 people with full-time jobs and who also had families to track their time for a day. It was normal March Monday. So I had them record how they spent their time and then I asked them questions about how they felt about their time so looking at all this I could compare the schedules of people who felt relaxed, and they had enough time for the things they want to do with the people who felt stressed and starved for time, and rushed and all that and see what was the actual difference.

John Jantsch: So you used something you call Time Perception Scores, and I thought that was kind of interesting because I think a lot of people kind of end it like, “I got my checklist done,” instead of necessarily this idea of how they feel about it. I think there is a lot of stress around even getting a lot done, isn’t there?

Laura V.: There really is. I mean, because ultimately time is what it is, but how you feel about it has a big effect on your life. It’s the question of whether … People will be sitting there on a massage table, but thinking about their inbox. Technically, they’re having relaxed leisure time but they don’t feel that way, and that can keep people from enjoying it. So I think our time perception has a lot to do with how effective we are.

I was asking people questions like, “Yesterday I generally felt present rather than distracted,” and people could answer on a one to seven point scale. Then there are many other questions like that so then I could numerically look at the people who felt most relaxed and present and happy about their time and then the people who felt the worst about it, too.

John Jantsch: So I sometimes thing time management books are a little like diet books. It’s like here’s the new one. Eat good, do exercise, get rest. That’s the new diet. So, I’m going to let you defend that. How is your time management book different than the sea of time management books, because everybody’s been trying to figure this out.

Laura V.: Yes, well the truth is we all have the same 24 hours a day so it’s even harder-

John Jantsch: Right, right.

Laura V.: [inaudible 00:03:47] like money books, or people want different amounts of money so you could at least segment that way. But no, we all have the same amount of time. The honest truth is I don’t care if you have some email hack to take 30 seconds less on your inbox, or all these time management strategies like clean the shower while you’re in it to save a little bit of time here and there, or something like that. This is really not what time is about.

It’s about asking questions of what is important to us, what would I like to spend my time on. I think honestly how I feel about my time, too. Do I feel like time is rushing past, like I’m frantic and harried, like I don’t remember where my time has gone, or do I feel like it is full and rich, and I’m truly enjoying it and lingering in positive experiences? I’m really going for the latter, and off the clock it’s about more about the philosophy of how we view time.

John Jantsch: I’m curious on a couple of data points when you compiled all this research and analyzed it. Was there any difference in how people felt about their time purely based on their age?

Laura V.: So I know that there is broadly about this. I didn’t really look at people’s ages in this. I know everyone had children at home under age 18 so that put somewhat of a limit on what ages people were in. Probably the majority were between ages of about 25 and 55 just because of that constraint on it. But, I do know that many people feel that times move faster as they get older. A lot of people thinking back oh the years between let’s say 16 and 19 seem very vast for people versus the last three years often seem a lot quicker in our recounting.

There’re reasons for that, which is that age 16 to 19 was a very memorable time for people. They did a lot of firsts, they were figuring out who they are, new experiences. Those things tend to be memorable, and when we have memorable experiences, we remember them. Whereas adult life is generally not like that, so we don’t remember it. But we can, and people who have a good relationship with time tend to think about making their time memorable so they do remember it.

John Jantsch: I was just going to say that sounds like that’s a really good point, is maybe we ought to do things that are more memorable. All right, so another data point I was curious about is did you find a pattern to what some of the biggest time drains were for people?

Laura V.: Well, I think one interesting one is not thinking about where you’d like your time to go. I think that being intentional about your time is the biggest way to make sure that is actually spent well. If you think about how a lot of people approach, even a workday, we at least think oh well, here are broadly some things I need to do, but we tend to show up and then just march from meeting to meeting, and trying to check emails in between meetings, and you get to the end of the day like wait, where did all that time go?

It’s hard to say that the time was optimized if you’re doing all that. With people who are more intentional about it who say, “Okay, well these are the three things I absolutely have to get done today. Here’s where I have open space that I can deal with them, and by the way, do I actually have to be at all those meetings? Let me push back against some of them, too.” Those people could work … often could get out of work a little bit earlier than the people who left the work until the end of all the meetings and then had to still get done the things that had to get done.

So I found that people with high time perception scores tended to work slightly less than other people, but it wasn’t that the other people with low time perception scores worked a lot. They worked just a little bit more than the average, but it was more that the people who were good about time were intentional about planning their day so they got stuff done when they had the energy to do it, so that they weren’t stuck by themselves on a late night.

John Jantsch: Many days I feel like I kick ass for two hours, and delete email for six hours. I know there are certain times when I am way more productive, and I wonder if that’s a sort of physical or physiological kind of clock thing, or is that something that we just kind of train ourselves to be?

Laura V.: Well I think that your description of a work day is pretty broad in that a lot of people experience this phenomenon, that they have like two good hours and then six hours of yes, email deletion and random meetings and such. The important thing is that you make sure and you use those two hours. If you only have two good hours, you want to make sure that you are executing on whatever is most important to you during those two hours because the email deletion is still going to happen. Like, you can do that with half a brain, but you can’t deal with that [inaudible 00:08:35] focus time.

For most people that focus time tends to happen in the morning, which is an argument for not scheduling sort of status meetings between 8:00 and 10:00 a.m. because again, that’s time that people can really crank on stuff whereas they’ll still tell you how the project is going at 2:00 p.m., but it doesn’t really matter if they’re half asleep during that time. I do think on the other hand though that you can get some of that email deletion time back by proactively planning in breaks, because what’s sort of happening is that you have energy and then you use it.

If you don’t put more energy back in, then you could only do the low energy tasks like deleting emails. So you know, many things you can do. You can get outside for a little bit, go for a quick walk, talk to somebody whose company you really enjoy. That can get you a little bit more time out of that email deletion category.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I was somewhat being fastidious, but I think a lot of people feel that way, and I do know that they are certain times when I have … And I actually schedule my day a little bit around the knowledge that I’m from ten to noon, I really am very effective, and from two to four I’m really very effective. I just know that, and I think that there is some planning that goes into that, or into taking advantage of that.

Laura V.: Definitely. Definitely. That’s smart.

John Jantsch: You talk a lot about 168 hours, and it’s interesting to think that’s the amount of hours in a week, isn’t it?

Laura V.: It is, which is funny because most people don’t know that. But yeah, 168 hours and many people don’t know, which is fascinating because when people say 24/7 all the time, and then they don’t multiply it through. But it’s really the right way … I think weeks are a good unit to think about time partly because that’s the unit of life that we tend to live, is the repeating cycle of life like both Tuesdays and Saturdays happen the same amount. They’re very different, but they happen the same amount.

So the other reason to think of 168 hours is it just shows you how much time you have. I mean, a lot of people who have full time jobs say, “I have no time for anything else,” but if you think about it, work 40 hours a week, sleep eight hours a night so that’s 56 hours a week. That leaves 72 hours for other things, which is quite a bit of time. It’s twice as much time as you’re working, so there is time for other things it’s just we tend not to see it because work tends to take a lot of [inaudible 00:11:02] energy as well.

John Jantsch: And really … and I think you said the book … you stated the book is more philosophical. So in that sense, it’s not really just about getting more done, is it?

Laura V.: No, because there’s no point in getting more done. You know … especially stuff like the deleting email. I know people feel so productive when they’re deleting email because it’s measurable. I don’t know if I made progress on my most important goals, but I know for sure I got down from 150 unread messages to 50, so yay me, right? But it’s about making sure that you’re effective in the various fears of life … well like you are doing the things in life that make life feel worthwhile. If you aren’t, how can you go about reallocating your hours so those things happen?

John Jantsch: I think for me, at least, I know there are … When I come in every single day, I have a myriad of choices of things I could do but there are clearly some higher payoff activities that if I focused on them, or whatever, and made sure all else got put to the side until that was done, I would certainly advance on my goals. It’s not even about time management, it’s just about making choices.

Laura V.: Yeah, I mean we do have a fair amount of choice about how we allocate our time. I have people that’s telling me, “Well I can’t control this, this, and this.” I mean, it’s easy to talk about the times we can’t control, but then there’s time we can, too, even if it’s a small amount of time. Certainly, we could make better choices within those small amounts of time and ask the question of how can we change things more broadly over a longer period of time? I think it’s easy to become mentally stuck, but often there’s something that can be changed. Then it’s about changing that something and then maybe finding that motivational, and not to push the next thing along.

John Jantsch: Well, and I work with a lot of business owners who are very overwhelmed … who feel very overwhelmed. A lot of it, when we really get to studying it, there’s a lot of things that they shouldn’t be doing. In fact, they should be trying to do less instead of trying to do more because the trying to do more gets them so scattered and stressed that the stuff that really is worth them doing doesn’t get done.

Laura V.: Yeah, and that’s just a function, again, of when you’re starting a business you feel like you should do everything, chase every sale, make sure everything’s done perfectly, which means you have to do it yourself. It’s how entrepreneurs get how that drive to get started. But those skills, that temptation to do all that, and be a perfectionist, that just … you can’t grow that way. I mean, because again, we only have 24 hours in day, and even if you worked every single minute that you weren’t sleeping, there’s still a limit on how much you can do.

If you think of a CEO of a big company, we don’t say, “Oh, well he or she is a failure because they’re not doing everything themselves.” Of course not, we expect that. So it’s really about having more of that mindset of what is the absolute best thing I can be doing with my time? How can we set up the business so that I am supported in doing those things, and these other things that either I don’t do as well, or can’t do well at all … Or even that I do great, but are not the best use of my time can be given to somebody else.

John Jantsch: Wouldn’t it be great if in your business all you had to do was the stuff you love? The reason you started the business. Not all that administrative stuff like payroll and benefits. That stuff’s hard, especially when you’re a small business. Now, I’ve been delegating my payroll for years to one of those big corporate companies, and I always felt like a little tiny fish, but now there is a much better way.

I’ve switched over to Gusto, and it is making payroll and benefits and HR easy for the modern small business. You no longer have to be a big company to get great technology, great benefits, and great service to take care of your team. To help support the show, Gusto is offering our listeners an exclusive limited time deal. If you sign up today, you’ll get three months free once you run your first payroll. Just to Gusto.com/Tape.

Now I’ve developed over the years, and this may just be rationalizing procrastination, but there are time when I have felt procrastination was actually in order, and it’s because I wasn’t … Like the idea hadn’t come to me, or the way to tackle something hadn’t really come to me and if I went out and ran or did something, and forgot about it, then I’d come back and all of a sudden the idea came to me.

I’ve developed a pattern, I think, of recognizing that. Is that an excuse for procrastination, or is that a valuable-

Laura V.: No, I think that’s a valuable observation. The key is making sure you start your project enough ahead of time so that you have space for walking away from it and doing something else, and then coming back to it. So the issue I think a lot of people have is they leave it up to the last minute and then they don’t have time for that sort of incubation period of the idea. Then, you’re really screwed because there’s nothing you can do about it. Either it will be late, or it won’t be very good. Either of which is not a great outcome.

But if you start enough ahead of time, and you sort of put your thoughts in there, and you say, “Okay, well it’s okay. It’s not great though. Let me think about it a little bit more,” go away from a while and when you come back a day or two later, you’ve got lots more ideas, or you thought about more research you need to do that will solve this problem for you. Then it’s much better. So yeah, I think leaving that space in for incubation is a key part of creativity. So why don’t we call it that instead of procrastination?

John Jantsch: Right.

Laura V.: That sounds much better.

John Jantsch: So should everyone track their time?

Laura V.: I think it would be great if everyone could track their time for a week. I have been tracking my time personally for three years now in half hour blocks. That doesn’t mean I check in every half hour. I check in probably three times a day and write down I what I was doing since the last time. I don’t expect anyone else to track their time for three years. I’m a bit of a time management freak. But, by tracking a week, you can see where the time really goes and the key part of this is making sure that whatever stories you are telling yourself about your life are actually true. A lot of times they turn out not to be true. People have various ideas of how many hours they work, which turn out not to be true. They have ideas of how many hours they sleep, which may true one night per week but isn’t true the other nights.

They may say, “I have no free time whatsoever,” and it’s like, “Except for all that time I was watching TV, which maybe is free time. I’m just not remembering it for some reason.” So I think that knowing where the time goes then allows us to make choices based on good data. If something is working great, that’s awesome. We can celebrate it knowing that that is exactly where our time goes. If it is not working, we can say, “Well now I know. Should I scale it up? Should I scale it down? How does it compare to other things in my life.” In a business decision, you want to make those from good data, same thing with your time. Make sure you’re working from what is true as opposed to what you think.

John Jantsch: How much time does multitasking actually cost us?

Laura V.: It depends what kind of multitasking we’re talking about. I mean a lot of people think that they’re being more productive by say, checking email while they��re on the phone, and in general they’re not. Your brain is just going back and forth between them, so you’re not paying attention to what’s being said on the phone, or else you’re not really answering the email well. You know, if that’s the case, it’s usually good to ask, “Why am I even on this phone call? If I can do other things while I’m on the call, probably I shouldn’t be on this call.” It’s not just worthwhile. “I should have sent somebody else, or maybe made it shorter,” or whatever else.

So things like that, yeah, pretty much just wastes time. As for … I mean there’re nice ways to multitask, too. If you think about something like exercising with a friend, is theoretically multitasking. I mean, you’re having a good conversation with somebody you’d like to, and you’re moving your body at the same time. So, that’s great. Like, that’s a double win right there, or you know, commuting with your spouse. If you can share a car ride to work once a week, that’s great because you’re turning what would be wasted time into a date, basically. So you know, think about how you can double up that way.

John Jantsch: You really need to up your expectation what a date is for.

Laura V.: What a date is. Well, you know when life gets busy enough you take what you can get, all right? Many couples, like young kids and long jobs between the two of them finally don’t get a whole lot of time talk, so if you could talk in the car, take it.

John Jantsch: Yeah. I’m swell. My children are all grown and so when I travel now my wife just goes with me. So we are in a different point, I guess.

Laura V.: Yeah, that sounds great. We may get there eventually.

John Jantsch: You will. You talk about something in the book that I think would be a really compelling idea for people, and that’s the idea of designing an ideal day.

Laura V.: Yeah, so and not just an ideal day, though I think that could be fun. But my ideal day, there’d be like flying cars and I would have to wait in traffic behind anyone else. I think more … I think about it as a realistic ideal day. So within the constraints of sort of your normal life, what would a really, really good day look like for you? You know, when people ask this question they start to say, “Oh, well you know I think it would be good if I could maybe take a walk at lunch instead of just sitting at my desk, and I have the capabilities of doing that some days.” So that would be in a good day.

When you’re thinking of things like that, you’re more likely to start figuring out ways you could work them into your life, or like, “Oh, I listened to a really good podcast on the way into work, and I’d listen to an album I was choosing to listen to more in the genre of music say, on the way home.” Well, that nudges you to start thinking, “Okay, well maybe I should make sure I pack my listening materials as I’m getting into the car instead of just getting in there and realizing, “Oh, well I’m stuck listening to the radio because I don’t have time to find a podcast while I’m paying attention to the traffic. So oh well, I guess I didn’t do that.”

John Jantsch: You know, just an example of that, that I totally, totally buy is that I have a lot better day if I pack my lunch because I choose something really good to eat and if I just don’t do it, and I go, “Oh, I’ll go to the place across the street,” that doesn’t really have anything that I should eat-

Laura V.: Yes.

John Jantsch: So that … I think even something like that helps me actually have an ideal day as well.

Laura V.: Yeah, no food could definitely be a dimension for it. You know, think about what I would spend my time at work doing, would I be reading something at night before bed? How would I spend my time? Because that reminds you what’s important to you, but within a context that you can actually do something with. Because again, I’m not going to get my flying car. That’s not going to happen. But I can choose to listen to the top albums of the last year while I’m in my car. That’s something I..

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