Last week I started posting three times a week over at BNET. On Monday, I wrote about “3 Times It’s OK To Skimp On Sleep.” I am a big fan of getting 7-8 hours a night, and almost always do. But last week I made a few strategic choices not to do so. Sunday, for instance, I was following the news of Osama bin Laden’s death. Saturday, my husband and I decided to sit out on our balcony and talk until 1:30AM, using that time to catch up. This week, I’ve also been trying to do the last round of revisions on All The Money In The World, and I find it compelling enough to work late. I know this is a limited few weeks of craziness, though, and so I’m not about to use anecdotes of my own short nights to draw some conclusion about Americans being sleep deprived. We’re not.

I also posted an interview with Xerox CMO Christa Carone about a desktop app that promises to answer “Hey, Where Did My Day Go?” The app tracks your Outlook inbox to see hours spent in meetings and with who, which drama queen sends the most quick reply-all emails and so forth. I don’t have Outlook, so I’m kind of viewing this corporate curse from afar, but Carone mentioned one team member of hers who was sending updates 3-4 times an hour. Yikes! There was some opportunity for consolidation there.

I urged people to push their work housekeeping (returning old emails, taking nice-but-not-urgent phone calls) to one particular day or morning. The piece, called “Swamped? Try The Friday Morning Shuffle” recommends pushing everything to Friday so you can open up other days of the week.

On Thursday, I did a short video interview with BNET in which I debated Penelope Trunk on whether it was good or bad career advice to “do what you love.” I maintain this is still good advice, knowing that there isn’t necessarily one thing we love. You can watch the video here. There were a few technical difficulties, and we lost Penelope for a bit, but mostly it’s still watchable.

Over at City Journal, I reviewed former Paris Review editor Ben Ryder Howe’s memoir, My Korean Deli (the review is called “Family Business“). My long-form piece on the decline of NYC’s Korean greengrocers is the article that refuses to die, and I’m actually leading a discussion over at the Korea Society on Thursday night this week on Howe’s book. If you’re in New York, check it out.

Also, check out this fabulous photo of 168 Hours on photographer Esther JuLee’s bookshelf! And then here’s a copy on Holly Root’s desk (as spotted by novelist Jael McHenry in a Twitter pic). I love that Holly thought her desk was messy in this photo. She should see mine! Where has your copy of 168 Hours been? Send me photos and I’ll post them.

As I note in the post, the best work-life program isn’t a program at all. It’s a corporate culture that tries to be as flexible as possible about letting people work wherever, whenever, as long as the work gets done. I keep citing the BYU study of IBM workers which found that when people could set their own hours and work from home when they wanted, people could work 57 hours a week before a significant number experienced work-life stress. If people had to be in an office during set hours, they could only work 38.

This is a huge difference — with implications both for managers and parents (or others) seeking balance. For those who think having a balanced life requires part-time work, I’d say it’s more about having control of your hours rather than their number. And for those on the management side who think they’ve done their duty by creating a mommy track, I’d say that’s really only a pseudo-solution. Try something more radical and see what happens.

As it is now, because people perceive “work life balance” as being about moms wanting to work less, go-getters tend to express the exact same thought by talking about “time management” and “productivity.” Of course, the only reason you worry about your time management and productivity given competing work priorities is that you don’t want your work to take all 168 hours a week. You want a personal life — maybe even a balanced one! But you avoid that phrase at all costs.

Elsewhere at BNET, I posted a list of 7 Things You Don’t Have To Do Before Having Kids — my answer to the various lists I’ve read recently of things you should do before reproducing.

Thanks also to The Wandering Scientist for mentioning 168 Hours this week in the context of buying time, and if you happen to be a reader of Country Guide magazine in Canada, there is a feature on 168 Hours in there that deals with managing your farm business. Time management is universal!

This week I had two pieces over at BNET as usual. I’ll be bumping this up to 3x a week in May, so please send your ideas! Seriously. I need ideas. What would you like to read about? The blog broadly covers time management, career, productivity, workplace and social trends. This week we had pieces on two books.

On Tuesday, I told readers that “Yes, You Have Time To Write That Novel.” Jael McHenry’s debut novel, The Kitchen Daughter, is out from Simon & Schuster this week. She wrote the book while holding down a full time marketing job that required her in-office presence for 40-50 hours a week. So where did she find the time? Where you’d imagine: nights, weekends, holidays. She seized weekends when she could work in a concentrated fashion, cranking out 10,000 words at a time. Six such weekends gives you a draft, if a crappy first draft (Anne Lamott uses stronger language). Editing can be done in spurts of 15 minutes after that. I thought it was good advice for tackling any big extracurricular project.

Then today, I wrote about “5 Skills You Can Learn From a Low-Wage Job.” After journalist Caitlin Kelly lost her job at the New York Daily News, she wanted both steady income and an escape from the solitude of freelance life. So she took a part-time job at The North Face in a suburban mall. She had a mixed experience with it (as her book, Malled: My Unintentional Career in Retail, out today, recounts). There are some upsides to a job like this — solving people’s problems, for instance. Many white-collar jobs involve vague work and being removed from anything that actually does anything, whereas when someone needs hiking boots and you help them buy the right hiking boots, you have changed something in the world for the better. On the other hand, it’s tough work, as I can attest from my stints working at a mall drug store years ago. You’re on your feet for a long, long time.

I think there are several lessons one can learn from such a job, that I worry many people don’t learn. The competition to get into top colleges is really stiff these days, as, frankly, is the competition for low-wage but steady jobs. If I’m a store manager, I’d rather hire a 25-year-old who might stick around than a 17-year-old, who I know won’t, and probably lacks a lot of common sense anyway. So many well-to-do teens don’t wind up working in malls over the summer and on weekends. They do other things, like volunteer in Africa to learn about the world for their college essays. Well, some part of the world — and it will probably make for good stories in Davos later on. It may not have much to do with the employees in the companies they’ll eventually be running, though.

Of course, that said, one topic I cover in Laughing at the Joneses is whether I’d ever make Jasper and Sam work in those kinds of jobs. Probably not. It’s not that I don’t think they should work. But even as a teenager, one can develop marketable skills to do something more clearly applicable to a long-term career. At age 19, I started freelancing professionally. My little brother did even better, learning computer skills to build websites and the like. He never had to work in a drug store. And he’s continued doing software engineering professionally. So that was clearly good preparation.

What do you think? Do you think your children should work burger-flipping or shirt-folding jobs as teenagers? Why or why not?

Here’s another question: if you are a creative worker, operating a “Brand You” type business where what you are selling is yourself, how can you scale up? I still like my Rembrandt analogy (click on the link in the last sentence to read the post), though this was a low-traffic post for some reason. Apparently, I need to write more about the gender wars or Glenn Beck to get the comments flying

I was quoted as an expert source in USA Today, for Kim Painter’s column “Don’t Spend All Your Time At The Office.” Especially as more people are brown bagging it these days, it is very tempting to eat breakfast and lunch at your desk. I actually do that most days — not because I’m trying to show someone how hard I’m working (see telecommuting, above) but just for efficiency’s sake. But I do try to step away at other times, to get a work out in, for instance.

And remember the List of 100 Dreams? Over at the Inspired! blog, Jen P revisits her list of 100 dreams that she created a while ago, and reports on how they’re coming. Some better than others, but life changes, we change, and that’s how these things go.

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But, given that these old idea files are buried in other stuff, it doesn’t seem like they’re working that well. And frankly, when I looked through one from October-November 2006 yesterday, I didn’t come up with much beyond the names of a few plants I’d like to use in my someday garden. Nice personally, but not-so-helpful professionally, which was the point of the idea file in the first place.

But I know some people put idea files to great use. Has anyone here used one? What did you put in it? What did you manage to get out of it? Do you have any tips for making idea files more than a yellowing collection of useless clips?

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You know what?  I agree. Just in case anyone wonders, I have not been keeping a running tally of the last 2 years. I’ve recorded roughly 5 actual weeks. (You can see two of them here, in June and September). I don’t particularly find it enjoyable to turn such a close  eye on how I’m spending my hours. But I do think it’s a useful exercise to try once or maybe twice. Here’s why:

1. Many of us have absolutely no idea how we’re spending our time. We think we work 50 hours a week (maybe?), and maybe sleep 7-8 hours a night (49-56 hours) but what are we doing in the other 62-69? In the review, Johnston mentioned she hadn’t tracked her weekend, which I understand, but this is also the biggest black hole for most people. You know your weekday schedule, roughly. The weekend can slip away before you even notice. Tracking weekend time (and “relaxing” is a perfectly great entry) helps us figure out how we’d like to be spending those precious hours.

2. Paradoxically, we think we’re starved for time. It’s funny, we have no idea where the time goes, yet we think we have no time. I’ve had tons of very, very busy people keep time logs and they always find that they have space somewhere. The truth is rough, but it also sets us free. Fortunately, you usually only have to track one week to figure this out.

3. The act of observing something changes the thing being observed. If you have to write down “Worked 5 minutes on main project then took 45 minute Facebook and web surfing break” you may be a bit less inclined to do it again, you know?

This constant analysis gets old quickly, unless you have a certain personality type (and you also track your spending, your calories, your exercise, etc.) But one week will give you enough information to make any changes in your life that you really want to make. If the idea still makes you want to poke your eyes out, try blatant bribery. Ice cream after dinner for every day you’ve successfully logged!

A personal note: Many of you read my BNET “168 Hours” blog as well. Thank you for doing that! I’m quite close to meeting a personal traffic goal for the month of March, so if you haven’t visited recently, I’d appreciate your stopping by. Here are a few recent posts:

• 5 Ways To Stop Procrastinating By Friday
• When Is It Smart To Work Weekends?
• What’s Your Minimum Wage?
• How Daydreams Improve Productivity
• Why You Should Make a Bucket List

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Next up: Over at The Simple Dollar, Trent posts a review of 168 Hours. The review is one of the reasons I love the internet. In a print (on dead tree) review, you’d never be able to post chapter abstracts due to limited space, but this is actually quite helpful to readers figuring out if they want to read a book. Instead of just telling the overall theme, you see if there are specific issues that chapters will address that you find pertinent. I wish more people did this. Anyway, Trent was very kind, summing up the book as such:

The idea that we’re under a “time crunch” is a myth. The real crisis all of us are under is more along the lines of misuse of time. We spend our time doing things that aren’t very high on our real personal priority list. It’s not just the time we waste doing unimportant stuff. It’s also the time we spend being productive towards ends that really don’t mean very much in our life.

Trent has grasped the key distinction. Frankly, I don’t think the real time suck in life is the fact that you played Angry Birds for an hour last night. The real time suck is if you’re in the wrong job, or if you’re telling yourself that parents just can’t do things like play the piano or write novels or actually have fun with their kids because it’s more important that they clean the house or pack lunches. So please tweet and FB share that link around!

As usual, I have two BNET posts up this week. It is actually possible I might cross 100,000 visits at that blog this month, so I’d appreciate your comments and FB “likes” on these posts as well. On Tuesday, I asked “What’s Your Minimum Wage?” Drawing on the Money Saving Mom’s post last fall on “Why I Don’t Make Homemade Tortillas,” I discussed the idea that time has an opportunity cost. When you do things yourself in order to save money, it’s important to look at how much time it takes you. If you’re saving $2/hour, this is way below the federal minimum wage. Which is fine if you love doing whatever it is. But if you’re trying to save money, you should actually save money. (A more provocative question: why do people who bill $100/hour wait in a 30-minute line on Ben & Jerry’s free cone day?)

Anyway, as usual, I heard from people who seem to think I misunderstand opportunity cost. They insist that people are only willing to pay them $40/hour between 8AM and 5PM, and hence their time outside the workday has no value. This reminds me that I need to be sure to explain the concept well in Plenty. It is intuitive to me since I work for myself and work by the project, so any given hour can be pretty clearly translated into extra cash if I wanted. I understand how people who have salaries and set hours might not see this as clearly. But, in short, if you could moonlight or freelance, if you could work overtime or a second job, if you could spend an hour figuring out how you’d ask for a raise, or a few evenings pondering how you’d score your next promotion, or even if you just value your leisure time because you work hard then yes, your time outside 8AM to 5PM has an opportunity cost as well. Saving $2/hour by making your own tortillas is not its highest value use.

Then on Thursday, I asked “What Makes A Company A Cool Place To Work?” Yet another survey has found that Google is the most awesome place ever. A full 25% of young professionals said it was their ideal employer. But this makes no sense. No where close to 25% of us are software engineers, and yes there are support and sales and management roles at Google, but not all of us do that either. If you’re a musician, architect, botanist, writer, or any of a host of other lines of work, Google is not going to be your ideal employer. What surveys like this one (which listed Google, Apple and Walt Disney as the top three employers) really constitute is a popularity contest. I’ve used products from all three companies this morning, as have many people. But name recognition does not, by itself, make some place the right employer for you.

Finally, a little creative writing:

Tantrum

Outside, winter sits like a cough that’s stayed too long.

Slush lingers past the ides of March and everywhere people grip their coats.

Inside, the boy snatches at drugstore Easter eggs.

At eye level, there and not for taking, she says to his screaming,

not for taking,

not yet.

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Between the sleep and the singing, I didn’t do much weekend work. That’s a good thing, but here’s a more intriguing question: When is smart to work weekends?

That’s what I asked over at BNET last Tuesday. Checking email randomly is a recipe for having work stress take over your whole week. But I think there are four circumstances when working on your off days has some merits. First is if you’re starting a sideline — particularly a creative one. If you sell ads during the week, I see nothing wrong with making pottery to sell on Etsy on Saturdays. If anything, this creative outlet will spark some more interesting thinking for your regular job. Second, we all need strategic thinking time to plan our weeks. If you can’t get quiet time alone at your office, seize it on the weekends. Third, sometimes we’re aiming for something big. A career making project might be worth a sacrifice of some free time. And finally, occasionally we have to scale back our work-week hours for family reasons. That’s fine, but if you don’t want to scale back your career progression at the same time, then weekends are a good time to make the hours up.

I also posted on How Daydreams Improve Productivity. It’s always wise to think through what can go wrong with our projects. Indeed, I’m sure we can all identify a few product launches or military campaigns which would have benefited from such strategic pessimism. The problem is when we fail to spend an equal number of our 168 hours pondering what can go right. I offered a few questions for glass half empty types to ask themselves to get the daydreams going. One: If the CEO of your company called you into her office and said she was so impressed with your work that she wanted to put you in charge of your dream project, what would you ask for?

No, this scenario will probably never happen. But it’s still a productive question to ask, because it helps clarify in which direction you’d like to send your career. That sounds like time well spent to me.

When are you willing to work weekends? And what is your most “productive” daydream?

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Over at BNET, I discuss the 4 Words You Should Never Say. Longtime readers know exactly what they are: “I don’t have time.” Whenever you feel yourself tempted to say these four words, try using the phrase “It’s not a priority” and see how you feel. Often that is a perfectly adequate explanation. And sometimes it’s true even if it’s not politically correct (sometimes, reading yet another bed time story is not as much a priority as sitting down and finally reading the paper). Other times, though, it turns out we’re just lying to ourselves. We have time for what matters.

I also post on Why You Should Make a Bucket List. If you haven’t already made your List of 100 Dreams, I encourage you to do so! Time management isn’t just about saving a few minutes here and there — it’s about filling your life with things that deserve to be in it. What do you want to do with your time? A bucket list is a good way to answer that question.

Wired’s website ran a nice review of 168 Hours from GeekDad (though they take issue with my exercise nagging… yes, yes). As Jonathan Liu writes:

I found Vanderkam’s approach to time-management quite attractive in terms of how to think about time. Also, 168 Hours is not your typical time-management book, because it’s not just about suggestions for improving your workflow or helping you keep your inbox at zero. It’s more about the big picture, about figuring out how to focus on your “core competencies” and minimizing the rest. The reason Vanderkam uses the 168 hours figure is that twenty-four hours seems like such a short amount of time to cram everything in, but our lives are often lived out a week at a time. Our natural rhythm and our schedules are often made up of weeks more than individual days, and 168 hours seems like a lot more to play with and is a bit more flexible than a single day. …

Making good use of your time isn’t always easy, and the book doesn’t pretend that it is. There are tough choices to make, and sometimes it means cutting out things you like to make room for things you love. …

If you frequently find yourself feeling like you simply don’t have enough time for everything in your life, take a look at 168 Hours. Yes, it will take time to read the book and put it into practice, but maybe it’s worth giving up a couple hours of your life in order to get back so many more.

And, of course, if anyone hasn’t yet read Lisa Belkin’s Motherlode post on the Marginal Cost of Children, check it out. I was fascinated by the 156 comments — some very enlightening, and some surprising (why do people who don’t like children read and comment on a parenting blog?) Thanks to that post, I pretty much have my research done for that chapter of the money book!

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So how have you gotten your best ideas? Was it a eureka moment or did things build up over time? Did you devote specific “strategic thinking time” to coming up with your breakthrough? Have you managed to replicate the methodology next time you needed to be creative?

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