I did not mean to take two weeks off from the blog, but life happens. At the beginning of this stretch, the preschooler got a nasty stomach bug, so I was up much of the night with him. Then our nanny got it, so we were sans childcare. Not my most productive week!

And then of course it was Christmas. We hosted my extended family for a party a few days before. On another day, all 7 of us went into NYC to see the Rockettes and go out to dinner. Activities like this remind me that my family is…bigger than average. When we parked the minivan at the garage we’d booked and all climbed out, it had a real clown car feel. It was a fun trip, but it was also 17 degrees that day, and so every time we were outside someone got massively unhappy.

We did the Christmas pageant (this year we had a reader and a sheep) and the service of lessons and carols on Christmas Eve. Christmas itself was low key in the morning but then the afternoon was a flurry of packing because at 5:45 a.m. on December 26th we drove to Newark Airport to fly to Barbados! International travel is another thing that is challenging with 7 people. But we made it. We spent time in the pool, on the beach, with my husband’s brother’s family (they went to the same resort) and just generally relaxing. Also, we celebrated someone’s 5th birthday! Yes, the little guy turned 5. For the first time since 2007, I do not have a child under the age of 5. Crazy.

I will give a shout out to my husband here, because I arranged to fly home from Barbados on 12/29, leaving him to travel solo with five kids the next day. Why? Because I had a dress rehearsal in Philly on 12/30 for a performance of the Bach B-Minor Mass!

Yep, this item has been on my List of 100 Dreams for ages. If you read 168 Hours, it’s in there. In college, I learned the mass, but then I was going abroad to study in Australia, and so I missed the concert. I figured I’d have another chance. Then 25 years passed. I started to realize that a bucket list item like this was going to be challenging because while you can buy a plane ticket somewhere exotic if you wish to go, it is a lot harder to arrange for an orchestra, a chorus, a director, a performance venue, etc. My back pocket idea was to audition for a choir an hour north of here that performs the mass every spring.

But I got a hot tip that Choral Arts Philadelphia would be performing the B-Minor mass on New Year’s Eve, and the director was kind enough to let me join them. I started going to rehearsals on Monday nights downtown, and re-learning the music. Yesterday, I sang in the performance and finally crossed this off my list. It was really cool. The singing sounded amazing and I was just trying to be as present as possible to appreciate it all. I hope it won’t be another 25 years (any other Philly area choirs doing this work, let me know!) but I know now to appreciate the opportunity.

(Also cool: a member of the orchestra introduced herself to me before the concert and said she had read my books! How fun is that?)

Then I drove up to my neighborhood to meet my younger two kids at a New Year’s Eve party (our nanny worked during the day and took them to the start of it). We did a New Year’s countdown at 7:30 p.m. The kids danced and waved glow sticks. Just perfect. Then my husband and I came home to supervise a houseful of teenagers, because some of the older kids decided to have sleepovers. There are 5 extra young people in my house right now but everyone is still asleep and they have all been very good.

So that was how I rang in the new year. This hasn’t been the easiest year, but I love the way it ended — with music, family and friends. Here’s to a great 2025!

by Elisabeth Frost

After wanting to start a blog for well over a decade, I hit publish at 4:25 pm one Saturday afternoon in 2021. Since then, I’ve hit publish 424 more times. Because that’s the way we create habits in life – do something once and then repeat.

So how did I go from wanting to do something – for years! – to actually doing it? Enter Laura and, more specifically, her rules from Tranquility by Tuesday.

Early in 2021, I was part of Laura’s time-study group trialing her nine rules aimed at “calming the chaos.” Because even with the universal limitation of a 24-hour day, we all have additional, unique constraints that bring some form of chaos – kids, pets, a long commute. It’s the stories we tell ourselves about those constraints that can make a big difference in how we structure our lives.

My stories?

I Don’t Have Time to Write. I’ll Never Stick with It, So Why Bother Starting? Or, the runaway bestseller: It’s So Much Easier to Just Scroll On My Phone and Read Other People’s Blogs.

I had lots of stories in my head, and none on paper.

Following Laura’s rules challenged me to rethink this narrative. First, I have a lot more time than I think – turns out, 168 hours each week. Second, now I had permission to claim as a habit anything I did three times a week; with regard to my writing aspirations, this released me from the notion that I had to write every day for it to count. Third? I needed to put down my phone and actually write.

For the duration of the study, I committed to writing something three times a week. I could have copied out the phone book (I didn’t) – what mattered to me was forming the habit of regular writing.

When the time study was completed, the e-mails from Laura stopped. No one was there to ask me if I had remembered to Move by 3 pm; I didn’t get reminders to plan in One big adventure, one little adventure or to write Three times a week.

In lieu of direct oversight, have I stuck with the rules perfectly? Not even close. I often forget to Plan on Fridays. I sometimes pick away at tasks inefficiently throughout the day instead of Batching the little things. During one low point, I ate onion rings and chocolate in response to catastrophizing about how long it had been since I had gone running – instead of getting up off the couch and, you know, actually going for a run (the epitome of Effortless before effortful?).

But…

I now write more than Three times a week. Last summer my family’s big adventure was a 3-week-long road trip. Laura gives equal airtime to little adventures, too. It was with this rule in mind that I invited a friend to go out for ice cream one beautiful evening…without kids. It was delicious and a highlight of my summer. Her Move by 3 pm rule was the subconscious nudge I needed to maintain a daily outdoor walking streak in 2022.

Even without perfect adherence, applying these rules have made me feel better about how I use my time. They’ve made me more mindful of my autonomy to choose well. While it’s tempting to consider a complete life overhaul, what I really needed and wanted was the inspiration to finally launch a little writing space online, say yes to a second Broadway show (a big adventure!)…and commit to a 10:30 pm bedtime (this last one is harder than it sounds).

Early in Tranquility by Tuesday Laura writes: “I believe the big pieces in your life are probably good. I don’t want to change those. I want to change how you spend an average Tuesday.”

Well, yesterday was an average Tuesday. I wrote. I walked the kids to school in the morning. I batched administrative tasks at work. My light was out before 10:30 pm.

And today? I’m guest posting for Laura Vanderkam. I’d say Three times a week is a habit provided some pretty fun results…

Your turn. What goal or habit change – big or little – currently feels overwhelming? How could you break that down into more manageable chunks or, perhaps, reframe entirely? What was your best adventure – big or little – from 2022? What’s your ideal bedtime…and do you stick to it?

Photos: Elisabeth’s usual writing spot; Elisabeth Frost

I have been pondering this concept since the writer reached out to me a few weeks ago, because I find it fascinating to think about the opportunity cost of time in different stages of life…Now that her piece is published, I can write more about it.

My first thought: we are all going to die eventually. We might have Four Thousand Weeks (I hope more) but time is ultimately limited. It’s harder to see that early in life, when time feels expansive, and possibly even endless, but the older you are, the more that reality starts to hit.

This is a particular issue for folks who are retired. At least on the middle-to-upper income side of things, sixty-something people often retire with the goal of doing  activities such as travel, hanging out with family and friends, spending time on community endeavors that were tough to do while working full time, eating out, going to matinees, whatever. The goal is to do this for a good long time, but at some point (for many folks), health concerns make it harder to take a trans-Atlantic cruise or take that woodworking class. So there’s always a question of how many healthy retirement years you have available for these pursuits, and how you should distribute these pursuits over these hopefully-numerous-but-possibly-not years.

For certain folks, the 1-2 years (depending on place) when many activities were limited by Covid and Covid restrictions represented a very high proportion of their healthy retirement time. Obviously dying of Covid would end those healthy retirement years completely, so this is a question of calculating risks, but not doing things like visiting family, acting in the local theater group, or traveling to Europe, involved severe trade-offs, given that there may not be much time left to do those things.

Covid isn’t over, but now that there are vaccines, and boosters, and milder variants, some folks are wondering if you can make up for lost time. That’s why Barron’s — a publication aimed at people with portfolios large enough that money is not the primary limiting factor — ran this story.

The short answer is: no. Once a second is gone, it is gone. All the money in the world can’t buy it back. I know some retirees who made certain choices even during the darkest days of Covid — such as continuing to visit family members — precisely because they weren’t willing to accept the risk of for sure not seeing their loved ones vs. the lower percent chance of contracting Covid in its riskier forms. Others made different choices. That is the tough calculus of a pandemic.

But that doesn’t make for a good article, so I did offer some thoughts on how to think about time now. One is to think about what you would have liked to have done in 2020 and 2021, and accelerate the timeline on doing more of that. So, for instance, if you would have taken 2 big trips a year, try taking 3 or 4 per year. If you’d go visit some old friends who live 3 hours away once or twice a year, do that more often. Accept that life will feel a little more “full” now— even “busy.” It balances out the time when it wasn’t full at all. Life goes in phases, and no one phase ever lasts forever.

(Speaking of which, I am flying three times in two weeks — including making good on two talks booked for June 2020 and rescheduled for June 2022. It seems that phase of my life is back…)

Photo: This photo doesn’t have much to do with retirees, or Covid, but I enjoyed that I could see Canada from my Detroit hotel room, and even cooler, I was looking south to see our “northern” neighbor.

On the plus side, we got our family photos back from Yana and they turned out well! I’m posting some over on Instagram (@lvanderkam). As predicted, wrangling the children was stressful but also as predicted, I’m really happy to have the pictures. Now we need to make the Christmas card!

I started holiday shopping in earnest this week. Some children are easier to shop for than others. I am really struggling with what to get the 12-year-old. He has promised to think about it and help me out. I should note that he has about $60 in birthday gift card money that he has yet to spend. Contentment is good but this does make gift giving challenging! I welcome ideas on what anyone buys pre-teen boys.

Also in financial news: We set the 10-year-old up with a bank account. Our family policy is to get the kids an account at age 10 so they can start learning about saving and investing. This has been fun to watch. The 14-year-old bought Disney stock on the dip of the pandemic when the theme parks were closed. He was bullish on them coming back and has been rewarded for that bet. I should note that in general we are index-fund-oriented investors who don’t try to time the market, but that is a lot less interesting for kids starting out.

I’ve been pondering what to choose as my 2022 year-long read. I have really enjoyed reading through War and Peace at the pace of one chapter a day during 2021. Right now I’m having to restrain myself from just finishing the darn thing (only about 150 pages to go). After some thought, I’m pretty sure that I will spend 2022 reading through all the works of Shakespeare. I found a reading plan that assigns the plays and poems and sonnets to appropriate times of the year (we start with Twelfth Night, of course, for early January!) and I have a copy of the collected works, so I think that should work well. Humorously, the front of the book notes that it was “purchased at Stratford on Avon, England,” by my husband, during the summer of 1988, back when he was bumming around Europe as a student.

And speaking of books — though not quite so classic…the Kindle version of 168 Hours is on sale for $1.99 today over at Amazon. If you haven’t read my first time management book and were thinking about doing so, today would be a good day to get a copy!

Photo: I think of this as the album cover image. There are some with our faces over on Instagram (@lvanderkam). Photo credit Yana Shellman.

One of my favorites? In “O God, Our Help in Ages Past” a later verse contains these two images: “Time, like an ever-rolling stream, bears all its sons away. They fly, forgotten, as a dream dies at the opening day.”

(Note: Some modern hymnals change the “sons” language to “bears all our years away,” which I think gets at the point even better!)

The more I study time, the more apt I find these two comparisons to be. Time is like moving water. Moving water moves you along with it. It keeps moving no matter what you do. Because of that, it is easy to spend time mindlessly, focused only on the particular rock or eddy hurtling you around at the moment. It is hard to even fathom the water behind you, what is now water under the bridge as they say. This brings up the second image — of fleeting memories no longer quite in our grasps. I dreamed some interesting things last night. Those plots and intrigues are now nothing more than shadows. Same with a great many hours and days that are now in the past.

No one can stop time. No one can even slow it down. But being mindful of those hours as the ever-rolling stream moves along can change the experience of daily life. Documenting hours can also make memories more accessible. They are no longer quite so forgotten.

This brings me to the subject of tracking time. I first began suggesting people track their time when I was writing 168 Hours, my first time management book. I tried tracking my time as well. It was an eye-opening experience — partly because, before writing the book, I didn’t even know there were 168 hours in a week. Most people don’t. We live our lives in a repeating cycle of weeks, estimating proportions without even knowing the denominator. Seeing where those 168 hours went gave me a much more holistic perspective on my time. And while, yes, there were some cringe moments (we all waste time…a lot of time), I found the experience fairly comforting. In 168 hours I generally was making time for a great many things that were important to me. Knowing the size and shape of the canvas, I could experiment more, and make something even more satisfying.

I found time-tracking useful enough that I decided to start tracking my time continuously in April 2015. I’m still at it, now, in November 2021. Those 6.5 years were going to pass anyway, on that ever-rolling stream, but they are not quite as forgotten as my dreams anymore. I can look at a random Tuesday. I can look at the context. A few more specific memories can come to mind.

I don’t expect anyone else to track their time continuously for years (though if you want to, I promise it’s not much of a burden! Three minutes a day, more or less. Like brushing my teeth). But I do think anyone can benefit from tracking a week. You can download the spreadsheet I use (30 minute version), or use an app, or a notebook. Just write down what you’re doing, as often as you remember, in as much detail as you think will be helpful for you. As an example, I record some life-maintenance stuff (like showering/getting ready) but do not record every bathroom trip or snack. If I’m mostly supervising children, I’ll just write “kids, etc.” or something along those lines. There needs to be a balance between detail and feasibility. Being a little more vague has allowed me to keep going for years, which creates a more comprehensive picture of life than if I aimed for perfection…and stopped.

If you’re not in the habit, you’ll probably need to create reminders to check in. It’s pretty easy to remember a few hours during the day, so maybe set 4-5 alarms during a day to stop and record the previous few hours. If you keep going after a week you won’t need to do this, as it becomes a habit and you get better at recollection (I can now record 24 hours in pretty good detail if I want, but I still generally check in three times a day). Weekends tend to be harder than weekdays for new time trackers, but they are definitely worth tracking. This is real time that really happens and it is impossible to get an accurate sense of life without the weekend data too.

After a week, take some time to reflect on your log. If you’d like, you can add up the major categories. How much time did you spend sleeping? Working? In the car or in transit? With family? Doing housework or errands? Watching TV or other screen time? Hobbies? Exercise? Reading? Volunteering? I’d note that unless you’re really intent on creating pie charts, all these categories don’t have to be mutually exclusive and comprehensively exhaustive. If you’re listening to audio books while exercising you can just pat yourself on the back and count these hours as both. If you’re into the pie charts, you’d need to create a category of multi-tasked exercise/reading.

The more important question is how you feel about your time. As you reflect on the week, what did you like? What is working in your life? Celebrate this! You can ask what you’d like to spend more time doing. And, of course, you can figure out what you’d like to spend less time doing as well — with the data in hand to make smart choices. In general, if you want to spend time better, you need to know where it is going now, which is exactly what time-tracking ensures.

Becoming more mindful of time makes time feel more rich and full. The years still roll on. They always do. But since life is lived in hours, being more aware of those hours allows us to be wiser stewards of whatever time we’ve been given. That might seem like a big ask for a spreadsheet, but I promise it is possible!

You can start tracking at any point, but if anyone is looking for a good option, I’ll be hosting my annual time-tracking challenge from January 10-16, 2022 (2023 update: I’ll be hosting my annual time-tracking challenge from January 9-15, 2023). I’ll post my time logs here and if you sign up, you can get daily motivational emails from me during that week. Something to mark on the calendar! It’s only a week and I promise it will be useful. So why not give it a whirl?

Photo: A metaphor for time…

By Laura Vanderkam

Hard as it is to believe, Memorial Day was just over 12 weeks ago. There are 168 hours in a week. Now that the kids are going back to school, it’s a good time to ask this question: what did you do with the 2,016 (168 x 12) hours of summer?

Sure, you slept some. Grownups slept about 672 of them. Kids a bit more. You probably worked a lot of them too. But even if you worked 40 hours a week for all 12 weeks — 480 hours — that still left 864 waking, non-working summer hours. If you took a week or two off work, that would put you up over 900.

This is a lot of time. Do you know how you spent those 900 hours?

I’ve been pondering this as the first cool snap here on the East Coast hints at the weather to come. I remember the big events: a week at the beach in early August, a trip to visit family in the Midwest in July. But many of those 900 summer hours came in shorter spurts. They came as a lazy weekend day, or a gorgeous summer evening when it stays light up until bedtime.

This was going to be the summer I seized this time. In my book, 168 Hours, I reference an exercise created by career coach Caroline Ceniza-Levine, called the “List of 100 Dreams.” This is an unedited list of anything you might like to do or have in life. It’s a good way to start thinking about how you’d like to fill your time, because time management isn’t just about saving five minutes here and there. It’s about filling your weeks — even the small spaces — with activities that bring you and your loved ones joy.

And so, in June, I tried to create a List of 100 Summer Dreams. I tried to think through anything my family might like to include in our summer. Perhaps we would try a hike in a nearby state park? A family swimming class? Making crafts together? Picnic breakfasts?

Well, you know how this goes. Work gets busy. With a three-year-old and an 11-month-old you can make plans, but then sometimes they just want to play with cars. Which is fine, until the car-playing devolves into bickering which devolves into whining for Dora the Explorer. We made it to the zoo a few times. I watched fireworks on the beach one lovely summer night and saw my baby eat his first ice cream cone, which involved him throwing his head back in ecstasy as the ice cream dribbled down his double chin. But we never did have picnic breakfasts.

So it goes, I guess. I don’t believe in scheduling our lives (particularly our summers!) down to the minute. But we live in a distracted world. It is easy to lose our summer hours to television, web surfing, chores, errands and puttering. Using our time well is a process. Fortunately, each new week offers another 168 hours to try again — and each summer, another 2016.

What, you may ask, is 168 hours? It’s what you get when you multiply 24 x 7. There are 168 hours in a week.

Unless you are a regular reader of this blog, I am guessing you did not know this. Few people do. But I think “168 hours” is a much better way to think of our time than the 24-hour blocks we often picture.

One big reason: 168 hours is, for lack of a better word, big. Even if you work 50 hours a week (far more than most people actually do) and sleep 8 hours a night (56 per week), this leaves 62 hours for other things. More time than you’re working!

And yet many people who work 50 hours per week feel like they just don’t have time for a personal life. Why is that? Where does the time go?

Those are some of the questions I explore in this book. I also study people who do a lot with their time, who really use their 168 hours to build big careers and big families and nurture their communities and souls. I try to tease out their secrets. I draw on data from the American Time Use Survey (conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics) and other research to make the case that many of the impressions we have of how people spent their time in the past, and how they spend it now, are wrong. And I try to show how we can all use our time better. We can use it to, as Geoff Colvin says in a lovely blurb on the book cover, “make our lives richer, not busier.”

Who is this book for?

• Anyone who feels busy. Anyone who feels like he or she just doesn’t have enough hours in the day. You may not have enough hours in a day but you do in a week!

• It makes a great graduation present for a young person trying to figure out how to build a rewarding career and a fulfilling personal life. Heck, even the rather atrocious Publishers Weekly review of 168 Hours called my career advice “excellent.”

• It’s a smart Father’s Day present for that man in your life who wants to get ahead in his career and support his family, but doesn’t want to miss out on, you know, the actual family part during that quest.

• It’s for people who want to maintain their friendships, exercise, and volunteer.

• And yes, it is for the working moms I imagine much of the coverage will focus on. (Not that I mind. Last time I checked, moms buy a lot of books).

I suppose I will be asked once or twice about my own life as people absorb this book. While 168 Hours is not about me, I can give this testimonial: as I’ve delved into these ideas, writing this book has changed my life for the better. I am more aware of my time. I am more aware of its abundance. I am enjoying my work more, and I’m getting better at it. I am getting better about thinking through the time I’m spending with my boys (even the grown-up one I married). I seem to be in better shape.

For all these reasons, and for the chance to share some potentially subversive and liberating thoughts with a broad audience, I am grateful that I got the chance to write this book. The actual writing was a total joy. Seldom in my life has anything come so easily as the 80,000 words I hope you will spend a few of your 168 hours reading. Of course, as I write in 168 Hours, the stories of career breakthroughs are seldom as smooth as the later narratives imply. The hard work of building up a platform in a new area as a new mom is a subject for some other time. Right now I am just trying to enjoy this launch. I am trying to remember, as I write in the book, that though “things that were once uncertain seem, in retrospect, to be inevitable,” you can choose to hold onto the excitement of a breakthrough if you make a decision to do so.

I hope you will enjoy this journey as well to making the most of our time. I really do believe that we have more time than we think. We can create the lives we want in the 168 hours we’ve got.

ShareThis