417: Managing Infinite Expectations with Laura Vanderkam

Pete Mockaitis
Laura, welcome back to the How to be Awesome at Your Job podcast.

Laura Vanderkam
Thanks for having me back.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, well, I’m excited to discuss your fable, but first I want to hear about the story behind the story. Did you really write it in one month for National Novel Writing Month?

Laura Vanderkam
Well, I did.

Pete Mockaitis
One month. That’s quick and impressive.

Laura Vanderkam
Well, it’s not that long a book. You can read it certainly in about two hours, so it isn’t that lengthy in terms of word count. But the trick is it took a lot longer than that to come up with the idea. I had written stuff for National Novel Writing Month, which is when people try to write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November.

Pete Mockaitis
It’s November.

Laura Vanderkam
It’s a whole social media thing. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Where others are growing mustaches, you’re writing novels.

Laura Vanderkam
Others are growing mustaches, other people are writing novels. Thousands of people try this every year. It’s great because it’s not going to be a good novel at the end of the November, but it’s going to exist. You can definitely take something that exists and turn it into something better. That’s often much easier to sort of work into your normal life than turning nothing into something. That challenge can really get people going.

It’s somewhat like Whole 30. People can do anything for 30 days. It’s just like, well, I only have to go crazy on the writing for 30 days. I’m a big fan of National Novel Writing Month, but yeah. That’s when I cranked it out, November 2017, then spent about a year editing it.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh okay. I was going to say, as I read it, it sure seemed like it took more than a month to create.

Laura Vanderkam
The rough draft existed in a month. Everything else took quite a bit of time.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s cool. You’ve written numerous nonfiction books. We’ve talked about one on a previous occasion, so check that out. It was a fun one. What have you found are some of the key benefits of writing in a fable format?

Laura Vanderkam
What I’ve learned over the years is that people really like stories. When I give speeches people seldom come up to me afterwards and say, “That statistic, that statistic just moved me.” It’s always a story that I’ve been telling about something that people can remember and then recite back to you with a reasonable amount of accuracy, whereas people can never get the statistics right when they come back to you and try to cite them again.

I learned that people like stories. That’s how we remember information. Certainly if you look at some of the most popular business books of all time, they are things like The One Minute Manager or The Go-Giver series, books like that, that tell a story. I thought I’d give it a whirl. My publisher on all my other time management books said that they were looking to commission a few fables, so asked me if I was interested and I was, so Juliet’s School of Possibilities is the result.

Pete Mockaitis
Yes, lovely. I’d love to get your take when you were doing some of the researching and writing, did anything in particular strike and your readers/fans as particularly as a fascinating and surprising discovery?

Laura Vanderkam
Juliet’s School of Possibilities is a fiction story, a novella. The funny thing is though, you can probably work a lot of time management themes into a novella. I think that was sort of surprising for me as I realized, oh, these things do suggest themselves to a story line.

The heroine, Riley’s, life is completely falling apart because of being stretched too thin, trying to respond to everything instantly, having no idea what she should prioritize, so she leaps at whatever is most urgent in front of her. A lot of people have told me that they can really sympathize with that idea, that this is something that they go through themselves. Hopefully, in the course of the fable, as fables need to do, she learns how to live life differently from a mentor figure, Juliet.

But yeah, I think a lot of people suffer from that feeling that there’s just not enough time in the day. It’s not that we’re necessarily wasting time. Certainly there is a lot of wasted time in life, but people aren’t watching 8 hours of TV a day. They’re trying to do the stuff they’re supposed to do, but there’s no way they can do all of it. The question is when you can’t do all of it, what do you do.

Pete Mockaitis
Oh, yeah. We’re going to dig into that, but first I’ve got to address what just made me chuckle the most is so Riley, our heroine, is working for a firm called MB & Company, which is a strategy consulting firm and the top three strategy consulting firms are named McKinsey & Company, Bain & Company and the Boston Consulting Group, and they’re often referred to as MBB as a category.

It’s pretty clear that you were alluding to one of these three and the lifestyle. Tell me a little bit why you chose this as the backdrop here.

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, well, through my own personal life I have a bit more involvement with perhaps one of those consulting firms that people can go look that up if they would like. But it is not any of them in particular, but yes, by being MB it could be any of them.

Certainly these places are known for a certain lifestyle that people travelling a lot, being on call for their clients, certainly a very high-paced, very competitive environment. Very amazing people that these firms hire too. Certainly incredibly smart, driven, who get to solve very interesting problems.

I thought it made sense that Riley would be at a place like this because she’s a smart, ambitious person who wants to solve the world’s problems. This seems to her like a place she can do it while getting paid fairly decently at the same time.

Of course, the issue for her, the challenge is she feels like she’s constantly proving herself. Many of the people who work in the MB-type world, the Ivy Leaguers and such, and, of course, she isn’t. She’s just very, very smart and ambitious, so she feels like she’s constantly proving herself. That’s one reason she feels she has to work harder than everyone else.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, that was fun for me because I worked at Bain.

Laura Vanderkam
Okay, so you’re one of the MBs.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah. I went to the University of Illinois.

Laura Vanderkam
Yes, all right, so you appreciate this.

Pete Mockaitis
It was that, yeah.

Laura Vanderkam
I have to say, Pete, do you think I got it right? Do you think I got this MB Consulting Company, was I accurate?

Pete Mockaitis
I’d say it was close enough to the mark certainly in terms of hey, like the demanding review process and the interesting performance categorization buckets.

Laura Vanderkam
I was going to say, do you have a euphemism for firing people because there were some funny ones out there?

Pete Mockaitis
Well, no, I thought that was funny. It’s like ‘resignation suggested,’ I think what it was in your book. I remember at Bain it was like the top was ‘consistently outperforms,’ and then there was ‘frequently exceeds expectations.’ Almost everybody was in the middle, which was called ‘strong contribution.’ Then below there was one called ‘inconsistent contribution,’ which you didn’t want to be.

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, you don’t want to be inconsistent.

Pete Mockaitis
Then there was one even lower – one time – I don’t think anyone I know has ever seen it, so yeah.

Laura Vanderkam
One of the firms has the euphemism ‘counseled to leave,’ which I just find hilarious, but, yes, ‘resignation suggested’ is the fictional one. Yeah.

Pete Mockaitis
Anyway, it was a fun read. It was quick and it was inspiring. But you tell me, if you would like for readers to take away one thing, what would it be?

Laura Vanderkam
Well, Riley learned that you do have a lot of choice over how you spend your time. It may not appear that way when there’s all this stuff coming at you, but the choice to do anything is the choice not to do something else. In fact you are always choosing, so the question is which choices are you going to make. She is empowered, perhaps, by the end of the fable to make choices that in line with her long-term goals both professionally and personally.

I hope people will think about this that there’s a phrase in the book that “Expectations are in ; time is finite. You are always choosing; choose well.” That pretty much sums it up. We could never do anything that somebody might hope we would do, that we might internally hope we would do.

Get 500 emails a day, you’re not going to be able to answer them all. This is setting yourself up for failure right there. Given that we are always choosing, how we can learn to choose well? I hope the readers will come away with tools to make good choices in their own lives.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah, that phrase is what struck me the most, “Expectations are infinite; time is finite,” because, well, it’s just so true – it’s very liberating for me as I reflect on it in that indeed, expectations are infinite, and so there is – it’s basically just a fool’s errand to try to meet them all. You’re asking for trouble if you do that.

I don’t know remember who had the quote, it might have been a comedian or someone. He said, “I don’t know the secret to happiness, but the key to unhappiness is trying to live up to everyone else’s expectations.” Who said that? It was good.

Laura Vanderkam
I don’t know, but it’s a good quote.

Pete Mockaitis
I like it. I should know it because it’s so good. That was just connecting/resonating. We’ve got two kids under two years old right now in the house. Our home is way less tidy than it’s been historically. Go figure. I was chatting with my wife about in terms of like, “I don’t even know how people can do it all.” She’s like, “I don’t think they actually do.” It’s like they’ve got helpers or they just accept, “All right, this is the squalor we’re going to be in for a little while.”

Laura Vanderkam
It is a squall. Two under two will definitely do that for you. A lot of things get de-prioritized during that time. We have to learn to be okay with that. I think where people get into trouble is when they decide that they’re still going to have the pristine house, that for some reason that should be a priority because if it is going to be a priority, then absolutely nothing else will never happen because you will constantly be picking up after the small children who are destroying it.

You might be happier to decide that it just isn’t a priority for now. When the children are 12 or something, maybe you can have a nice house again, but for now, not so much. That’s great. We have to choose what matters to us in any given moment.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. Can you share what are some of the other top productivity and time management implications from the book?

Laura Vanderkam
Well, I certainly hope that I may steer a few people away from attempting to maintain inbox zero because – it’s funny, a lot of people assume that I must always have an empty inbox because I write about time management in people’s minds, therefore, you must always have an empty inbox. That’s not true at all. I have hundreds of unread messages. I don’t archive anything or delete much, so there’s thousands of things in there. I just don’t really care.

In my mind, email is a tool to do your job. It’s not your actual job itself. If I am answering something, great. If I’m not, I’m not and that’s fine. I generally would prefer to focus on the projects I have chosen to do and then let email fit in around the edges of that.

The issue with attempting to achieve inbox zero constantly is that, you can’t last in that state because whatever you send out to get yourself down to zero, people will then respond to, so you’re right back up.

I’ve seen people on time logs because I’ve had thousands of people track their time for me over the years, like writing down what they’re doing, sending in their log so I can analyze them. I’ve seen people attempt to pursue inbox zero in the course of the time they’re logging for me and it’s just funny. Some people have put like notes like “I’m at 200. Okay. Inbox 185. Inbox 135. Oh wait, back up to inbox 165. All right, down to inbox 120. Oh, we’re back up to 180.” It’s just, you’ll never get down there.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. I love your quote from wise Juliet in the book. She said something like, “I have 24,000 unread emails and I know they’re all unimportant because my assistant has told me that they’re not important.”

Laura Vanderkam
Which is a much more efficient way really. Would it have been a wise use of Juliet’s time to read through those 24,000 emails? Well, probably not, especially since she has someone whose job is to support her professionally.

One of the things that Riley, the woman whose life is falling apart before she meets Juliet, hasn’t seemed to get her head around. I think a lot of us see or have this issue too. I don’t have a dedicated assistant, so it’s not something that’s really an issue for me in this case.

But she has an assistant and yet she doesn’t really use her because in her mind she still needs to do everything, like somebody sends you an email, you must be the one reading it and responding within the first ten seconds, but, of course, if you’re doing that, you can’t do anything else.

Pete Mockaitis
Right on. Well, so you say you tackle email around the edges. Does that mean that nowhere in your calendar is there a dedicated processing buffering email time? It just sort of happens when it happens?

Laura Vanderkam
No, I would say there is, but I try to have it be later in the day.

Pete Mockaitis
Yeah.

Laura Vanderkam
This is the key thing that I try not to go through and process all my email in the morning because that is when I’m most productive, most able to crank out creative stuff.

These few weeks I’ve been focusing on book launches, there’s been a lot more back and forth with people than there would be normally, so some of this has not entirely been happening in the past two weeks. It’s funny, I feel a little cranky about it, actually.

But I try to have most of my email processing and triaging, as I call it, later in the day. Around 3:30 I’m not doing all that much. It’s really hard for me to be cranking something out at 3:30 in the afternoon. That’s a really good time to sort of go through the email, delete the stuff I’m not going to respond.

If I see something that I want to put some thought into, I’ll make a note and put it on the to-do list for the next day or two to go through and have a thoughtful response to that and everything else I either deal with or I don’t, but I try not to spend too much time on it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, so not to make it all about you and your day and your processes, but yeah, let’s go there for a little while. 3:30 is kind of a lower energy time, fine for emails. Then when are you done with the work for the day?

Laura Vanderkam
It depends. I have a couple of children who get off the bus between 4:00 – 4:15. I often am doing car runs to various activities, but I will come back to my work later. Certainly if there’s something I decided to respond to later, I might do that. I might do a project at night while the big kids are reading in their rooms and the little kids are asleep.

Sometimes I do work between 9 and 10 PM, which is a strategy that I found a lot of working parents do. I don’t know if you’ve stumbled upon this one yet with your two under two. The issue a lot of parents face is you’re trying to work sort of normal hours and your kids go to bed relatively early, you then won’t see them very much.

But if you leave the office at a fairly early time, go home, hang out with your kids, and then do those hours that you would have done at the office at night after they go to bed, then you’re trading off work time for TV time as opposed to work time for family time. That’s a choice a lot more people are willing to make.

Pete Mockaitis
I hear you. Well, talking about 9 to 10 PM work and TV, now I’m thinking about blue light. I’m thinking about sleep quality. I’m thinking about melatonin. Any pro tips there?

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah. Well, I definitely think you should end it before too late. Working what I call the split shift, where some of your work is done at night after the kids go to bed, requires being careful about it. You need to make a to-do list for the time that you’re going to work.

People are like, “Oh yeah, I’m going to get through my thousand email backlog after the kids go to bed.” No, you are not. What are the three things that do need to happen before you start work tomorrow? Let’s do those things. Or what would help set you up for a good morning tomorrow and then you can triage again at lunch the next day to figure out what you need to do.

But those things that have to happen are the things that you have identified as being important. Those are the things you should do.

Then you should set an end time. Maybe in past life you would have left the office at 6:30 and now you’re committed to leaving at 5:00, so you should probably only aim to do an hour to an hour and a half in the split shift. Don’t suddenly be the person who’s going to be doing three hours at night because that wasn’t what you were doing before. You don’t need to add hours to it.

But yeah, I try to be off at least 30 – 40 minutes before I’d like to go to bed so I can have some time to relax, to read, to talk with my husband, all that stuff.

Pete Mockaitis
Lovely. I want to talk a little about some of the nice question prompts you’ve got at the end of the book. Tell me, in your experience working with clients, what have you found to be some of the most useful prompts that really get people thinking and prioritizing and coming to insight, clarity, revelation, like, “Aha, yes, I should do this or stop doing that.”

Laura Vanderkam
Well, one of my favorite things to ask group is what they’d like to spend more time doing. It’s funny, I have people make a list on their own and then afterwards I ask, “Okay, who put exercising down?” It’s like every hand in the room goes up, it’s just, oh, I’ve never seen that before. Imagine that. People want to spend more time exercising.

But if you sort of nudge people to make a longer list of the things they want to spend more time doing both personally and professionally, you get some interesting answers. People have good conversations with each other about it.

We can usually think of lots of things on the personal front between exercising and reading or spending more time with family or doing certain hobbies. Those are all things that people want to spend more time doing. Volunteering.

But there actually are professional things that people want to spend more time doing too, even if we don’t necessarily want to spend more time at work. People want to mentor younger colleagues. They want to spend more time doing strategic thinking, maybe doing things that would establish them as a thought leader, giving speeches or writing papers or otherwise doing that.

Reading for work, all those great studies or papers that do come out. It’s hard to stay on top of that when you feel like you’re constantly responding to emails. Those are things people want to spend more time on too. Or actually developing employees. Really nudging people to think through those things too.

One of the prompts in the Juliet’s School of Possibilities book that somewhat gets at this is the idea if you’re going to spend an extra hour this week on – or if you had an extra hour this week to spend on one professional priority, what would it be?

On some level, I think it’s a very silly question. I kind of had an argument with myself about putting it in because the truth is there is nobody who couldn’t find one extra hour per week right now in their lives to do whatever it is they say they don’t have time to do, professionally or personally.

Yet, it’s a good question to prompt people to think about because it immediately gets people to that, “Oh, what is that one thing I know would be impactful and I know that I’m skimping on?” Same thing with your personal life. If you one more hour this week to do something in your personal life, what would it be? Immediately we get to that thing that people love, enjoy, find meaningful, and don’t feel like they’re doing enough of. It’s a way to quickly get at that concept.

Pete Mockaitis
I found that it’s something about making it small and bite-size and approachable with one hour, somehow made it easier to answer because it was-

Laura Vanderkam
I could ask you what you’d do if you went off in a cabin in the woods for three months, but you don’t know. You have no idea what you’d do. Maybe you do, but most people would, “I have no idea. I’d probably watch TV. Does my cabin have cable? I don’t know,” whereas that one hour is much more manageable.

Pete Mockaitis
Certainly. It makes it all the more clear in terms of, “Okay, that’s what I want to go do. That’s what I want to not do.” I’d like to hear what then, once you’ve identified the activity you’d like to do some more of or some less of, tends to be the very next step for people to making that come to life?

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, well then you need to figure out how you can find space for this in the life that you currently have. I really do believe that anyone can find the space. I know people are busy. They have lots of commitments.

I always talk through this story of the lady who kept a time log for me and in the course of her time log week, her water heater broke, which created this massive flood in her basement. Magically enough, she found the time to deal with it. It’s the same thing. If you treated this priority for you as the equivalent of having water all over your basement, you would probably find the time for it.

For most people, mornings are good. It tends to be time that the emergencies have yet to arise, although, I would also challenge people that you create the sense of emergency by plugging into things like your inbox. Maybe you could show up at work and just do whatever the priority is for an hour and then go into your inbox. It might be a weekend morning if it’s something that’s personally important to you.

People say, “Well, I want to work on creative writing. I just want to find one hour in my week to do it.” I’m sure you can. Get up a little bit early on the weekend.

Or even if you have two young kids as you do, hopefully they nap at some point. Maybe you can use nap time not for chores, but for doing some creative adult fulfilling thing. Or after they go to bed at night or maybe trading off with a spouse that each of you gets two hours on Sunday afternoon to do your thing and you trade off. Then you’re each getting a chance to have that extra hour in your life. It doesn’t have to be too complicated.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, Laura, tell me, anything else you want to make sure to mention before we shift gears and hear about some of your favorite things?

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, well, I hope listeners might check out this fable. I know it’s a little bit different. I was worried about this of asking my readers, who I know love just productivity tips, straightforward productivity tips, to give it a chance. But as I said, people really do like stories. It’s so much easier to remember lessons when they come in the form of a story. I’ve certainly found that as I read things. Sometimes it’s things we know, but it’s good to be reminded of them.

Pete Mockaitis
All right. Thank you. Well, now could you share with us a favorite quote, something you find inspiring?

Laura Vanderkam
Well, I wrote this ‘choose well’ quote in my book. I actually got those words ‘choose well’ engraved on a bracelet that I wear. Juliet wears a bracelet that says ‘choose well’ and said well, if it’s good enough for her, maybe it’s good enough for me. I’m walking around with a bracelet saying ‘choose well.’ It’s reminding me in any given moment that I do have a choice of how I spend my time and I should think about it.

Pete Mockaitis
How about a favorite study or experiment or bit of research?

Laura Vanderkam
Writing nonfiction books, I’ve come across all sorts of fascinating studies. My favorites are always the ones where the researchers clearly have a sense of humor. I read about one not long ago, where how people react when they feel rushed and late.

These researchers actually set up seminary students to go deliver a sermon on the Good Samaritan who is in the Bible because he stopped to help a wounded man. They then told some of these seminary students that they were late to deliver their talks. Those seminary students were actually highly likely to rush right past an injured man lying on the ground because they were late to deliver their talks. That’s pretty funny. It doesn’t say good things about human nature, but it’s humorous.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, and I think – call me an optimist, but I’ve reflected on that study at length. My hopeful spin on the matter is that if we are being selfish jerks, it’s not because we are full of malice or spite or selfish or just sheer self-absorption, but rather we just feel kind of busy. If we can solve that problem, well, then we can make the world a better place, Laura. Are you inspired by my vision?

Laura Vanderkam
Well, then we just need to tell ourselves, “I have all the time in the world.”

Pete Mockaitis
There you go.

Laura Vanderkam
“So I can deal with this.” Yeah, that’s the banality of evil. People seldom set out to do horrible things. It just sort of one small choice leads to another.

Pete Mockaitis
That’s right. Chill out and everyone will be better off. How about a favorite book?

Laura Vanderkam
I probably said this last time I was on, but I’m still a big fan of Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse. I reread that once a year. It’s just very evocative prose and packs so much into just 200 pages. Anyone who wants to write a lot in a quick book would do well to read that.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite tool?

Laura Vanderkam
I’ve really been reflecting on the wonders of Uber of late. In years past when I started giving speeches, it was always just a hassle to go anywhere other than your hotel and the airport if you were in a town that wasn’t New York or Chicago. There’s no taxis in most smaller towns. Now you can get everywhere. You can go try a restaurant just because. It’s not this huge horrible thing attempting to get back.

Pete Mockaitis
And a favorite habit?

Laura Vanderkam
Favorite habit. Well, I recently started putting some strength training into my life. I kept saying I wanted to do it. It was probably one of those things I would have said I would have done if I had more time, which, again, I know is a ridiculous question because I do have plenty of time. I just wasn’t doing it. But what I realized is that I needed a good cue in my day that now is the time to do this.

The way my mornings are currently structured, some days I bring my middle schooler to school and then I come back and I have about 10 – 15 minutes before I need to get the middle kids out to the bus stop. That’s my time.

I had been just deleting emails and feeling like, “Oh, well, I can’t use this time. It’s too small. Or maybe I could read, but I feel like I should be working.” Now I just go into my office and throw around a kettlebell and do some resistance bands, do some plank poses and I’ve done it by the time it’s time to get the kids out to the bus.

Pete Mockaitis
Awesome. How about a favorite nugget, something you share that really seems to connect and resonate with folks?

Laura Vanderkam
Yeah, I use that phrase ‘I have all the time in the world’ that we need to be telling ourselves. That’s one that’s in the book that Juliet says several times, “I have all the time in the world.” I’ve been thinking about it. It is such a good mindset to have. It isn’t actually true. Everyone’s time is limited. We have many things that are on our plates that we need to do, various obligations we’ve taken on at various points.

But we’re so much better off believing that we have all the time in the world because whenever you have a thesis, you look for evidence to support it. Somebody who feels like they have all the time in the world isn’t going to race past the injured person. Somebody who has all the time in the world is actually going to have a conversation with an employee who’s come to you to talk about something very important.

Somebody who has all the time in the world is going to sit at the breakfast table for five minutes longer when a kid really wants to talk, whereas somebody who doesn’t have all the time in the world might rush off and they would really miss out. Better to have that phrase in your mind rather than saying, “I’m so busy. I have no time for anything,” because if that’s your story, then you certainly look for evidence to support it.

Pete Mockaitis
Well, I like that a lot. It sure feels better having that in my brain than the opposite. Could you share some of the most compelling evidence that makes that kind of true?

For example, I could think that “I have all the time in the world because the amount of time required to do a given task is highly compressible.” You could do a task in 20 hours or 1 hour and you can outsource/automate, etcetera that thing. In that sense, time can fold and become – I feel like the Matrix right now.

Laura Vanderkam
Time can fold and stretch and climb in and out of it or whatever it is we do with our Matrix. Time is a funny thing. It is all about our impressions of it.

One thing I encourage people to do is to celebrate the time dividends that they have in their lives. There are certain things we do that are much easier for us now than were in the past. Maybe it’s a skill, like writing an article for me is very quick or recording a podcast can be done relatively quickly. I don’t have to spend a ton of time preparing for it.

Or even giving a speech, I have a basic outline, which I then change for different groups, but I know the stuff that might go in there and I cycle through different things depending on who I’m talking to. Writing the speech originally took quite a bit of time and effort, but now I have it and I have it memorized and so you reap the benefits of doing that.

Sometimes if I’m feeling like, “Oh, I don’t know that I did all that much this week,” I’m like, “Well, I didn’t spend 30 hours writing a speech because I didn’t need to.” I should celebrate that fact. I encourage people to recognize those time dividends in their own lives.

Pete Mockaitis
Right. When you talk about it being quicker now than it used to be, that reminds me, Steven Landsburg is an economist. We had him on the show. He had a talk all about how just the insane amount of time it would take to say do laundry in the 1920s. It’s just massive.

Now we can do it pretty darn quick with washers and driers. I have a washer/dryer combo in one tub, so that’s pretty cool. That kind of really does provide some good evidence for having in the world because it’s like well people survived and lived their lives in a pre-laundry machine world.

Laura Vanderkam
They were scrubbing on those washboards. It was tough work.

Pete Mockaitis
And in a pre-internet world and in a pre-smartphone world, they were getting by just fine. Now we have all these time saving devices. What’s intriguing is instead of us just hanging out in leisure for three times as many hours in our weeks, we manage to still do lots of work.

Laura Vanderkam
Although less than in the past. This is a little known fact, but the average work week has in fact declined over the past two generations. People like to think they’re more overworked than ever, but on the whole, society-wide, it’s not true.

Pete Mockaitis
Now is that worldwide and US?

Laura Vanderkam
I know it’s US. But as people move out of hard manual labor, I don’t know that you realize how many hours it takes to run a farm. It’s a lot.

Also, there’s different kinds of people in the workforce now too as more women have gone into the workforce. Women, in general, tend to go into jobs and fields and also in the way they make their choices, tend to log fewer hours working for pay than men do. They log more hours obviously in childcare and housework. The overall work level market and nonmarket is exactly the same. But because there’s more women in the workforce, that lowers the overall time too.

Pete Mockaitis
And Laura, if folks want to learn more or get in touch, where would you point them?

Laura Vanderkam
I would ask them to come visit my website, which is LauraVanderkam.com. I blog most days there. You can read that. You can find out about all my books and hope people will come check it out.

Pete Mockaitis
Do you have a final challenge or call to action for folks seeking to be awesome at their jobs?

Laura Vanderkam
Well, I always challenge people to try tracking their times at least for just a few days to see where the time really goes. Some people do this automatically at work because they’re lawyers or accountants or other people who have to do it. But if you’re not in that camp, just try it because it’s enlightening to see where the time really goes.

Try to do it outside of work as well because sometimes we’ve been telling ourselves, “Oh, I have no time to join that softball team,” or something and you track your time and say, “Well, actually on Thursday nights I’m not doing much of consequence, maybe I could join that softball team and practice with them.” I promise you’ll feel a lot better about life if you do.

Pete Mockaitis
Laura, this has been so much fun. Thank you and good luck with the book and all your adventures.

Laura Vanderkam
Thank you so much.