Time Management: Trading Time Scarcity for Abundance with Laura Vanderkam

Beyond the To-Do List - Productivity for Work and Life

Erik Fisher

Self-improvement, Business, Entrepreneurship, Education, Careers

4.5 • 878 Ratings

🗓️ 6 July 2026

⏱️ 47 minutes

🔗️ Recording | Apple Podcasts | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Time management and time abundance are at the center of this conversation with Laura Vanderkam, bestselling author and time-use researcher.

Laura Vanderkam has spent over a decade studying how people actually spend their time — tracking her own hours for 11 years and collecting data from thousands of others along the way. Her new book, Big Time: A Simple Path to Time Abundance, makes the case that time isn't the scarce resource we assume it is, and that shifting how you see it changes how you live it.

In this conversation, we cover:

The lottery ticket reframe — why Laura argues we should treat the time we've been given as an unearned windfall to manage, not a resource we're constantly running out of.
The "not actually more overworked" argument — what a century of time-use data really shows, and why the story you tell yourself about having no time matters more than the data itself.
Complexity isn't the enemy, chaos is — Laura's circus metaphor for running a full, complicated life without it feeling like it's running you.
Dream big, plan small — how reading War and Peace one short chapter a day (the same time it takes to brush your teeth) is the model for tackling anything that feels too big to start.
Active patience — Laura opens up about a brutal year of chronic pain and the hardest lesson in the book: sometimes the answer isn't a better system, it's time itself doing its work.

This one's for anyone who's ever ended a Tuesday feeling like the whole evening just disappeared. Grab Big Time: A Simple Path to Time Abundance wherever books are sold, and find more of Laura's work — including her podcast, Before Breakfast — at lauravanderkam.com.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	One thing I've learned from years of talking about productivity is that focus doesn't happen
0:04.5	automatically, but sometimes it begins with a cue. Sometimes it's something that you use to tell your
0:10.6	brain, okay, we're working now. Brain FM is that for me. Brain FM is functional music designed for
0:16.6	specific states like focus, relaxation, meditation, and sleep and more. And for work, I like to think of
0:24.2	it as a simple focus ritual. I pick the mode. I press play and then I use that at the start of a work
0:30.7	block. You can do it too. Treat it like an experiment. Go to beyond the to do list.com slash brainfm
0:36.8	and you can get 20% off to try BrainFm or go to the link in the show notes.
0:41.8	Again, you can try it and get 20% off by going to my link and supporting the show at Beyond the Todo list.com slash BrainFm.
0:51.2	Music Brain FM.
1:12.7	Hello and welcome back to Beyond the To--List, a podcast about productivity.
1:19.7	I'm your host, Eric Fisher, and today's guest has been on the show so many times, even from the very beginning. And for good reason, it is Laura Vander Cam.
1:23.2	She spent over a decade studying how people actually spend their time, and her new book,
1:28.8	Big Time, A Simple Path to Time Abundance, might be her most important argument yet,
1:34.2	that time isn't the scarce resource you think it is, and the story you tell yourself about
1:39.1	having none of it is the thing actually costing you.
1:42.1	We get into why you're probably not more overworked than you think,
1:46.0	why complexity isn't the enemy, chaos is, and what it looks like to read War and Peace
1:51.6	one chapter a day. So if you think that you don't have enough time for anything, I dare you
1:57.4	to challenge that thought and listen in as you enjoy this conversation with Laura Vandercam.
2:04.8	Well, this week, it is my privilege to welcome back to the show.
2:08.1	Laura Vandercam.
2:09.4	Laura, welcome back.
	...

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