This is an I-Heart podcast. Good morning. This is Laura. Welcome to the Before Breakfast

podcast. Today's tip is about how to make more time for friends. Most of us see our colleagues

when we go to work. We see our families when we go home. But getting together with

friends can be challenging. We're so busy with everything else that they tend to fall to the

bottom of the list. And that's too bad because friends are a good use of time. Indeed, good friends

can make us feel like we have more time. A few years ago for my book Off the Clock,

I asked 900 busy people to track their time for a day. Then I asked them questions about how they

felt about their time. I found that the people who felt time was most abundant spent a far

higher proportion of their time interacting with friends than people who felt time was scarce.

And no, it's not because the people who saw friends had less going on. People who felt

starved for time had just as much leisure time as everyone else. They simply spent more of it

watching TV or on social media. The correlation was so strong that I formed this theory. Being

social makes time. Social media kills time. So let's spend more time with friends and less time

on social media, right? I'm sure we could agree that this would be great, but of course there

are reasons we drift toward the screens.

When you're building our career and raising a family, a lot of your leisure time appears late at night when it's hard to seize.

Or it requires planning ahead or hiring a sitter or trading off child care duties with your spouse.

Your friends are just as busy.

They face the same challenges, but Twitter is ready anytime you are. That said, I do think that even busy people can make time for friends.

One option is that you can build what I call relationship planning into your life. In an earlier

episode of Before Breakfast, we talked about planning your upcoming weeks

on Friday afternoons. I suggested listing priorities in three categories, career, relationships, self.

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