9 Strategies To Better Control Your Time - Laura Vanderkam

... the biggest culprit is this time where you don't even know what you're doing. There's not a good way to describe it. And when I've had people do this, they'll write, "Hours of time, no recollection." Like, what happened? Was I abducted? I don't know. We were doing something. It passed. It was there. But it wasn't memorable, it wasn't particularly enjoyable, it was just time. And I think that's often the biggest culprit for many people. (airplane whoosh)

Why do you think it is that people are so overwhelmed when it comes to time management? What's the problem that they're trying to solve?

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

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

Absolutely. Although I'd argue that, you know, life isn't really that different. (laughs) Um, you know, uh, people have always wasted time. Um, people have always felt busy. I, uh, at various points in my life have collected old magazines, um, you know, from the 1950s and 1960s and as you can imagine, many of the articles are on how people feel very busy and, you know, modern life is just so crazy. And of course, now people go, "But they didn't have sma- smartphones. They didn't have, you know, internet access. They... H- What happ-..." I don't know. Your boss can call you at home. Like if they had phones, that could happen, or people got stuck at the office late, or, you know, f- we have to fill time with something. And so you can feel oppressed by whatever is going on in your life, even if some future version of the world has entirely different distractions. So yeah, I, I... You know, we've always managed to waste time. We've always felt like life can just happen to us. We've always needed to take steps to feel more in charge of our decisions and our time, uh, in order to spend life a little bit better.