Why You're Not As Busy As You Think, with Laura Vanderkam

Afford Anything | Make Smart Money Choices

Paula Pant | Cumulus Podcast Network

Entrepreneurship, Investing, Business

4.7 • 3.6K Ratings

🗓️ 15 August 2016

⏱️ 39 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

#38: There are 168 hours in a week. If you work 40 hours per week and sleep 8 hours per night, you’ve accounted for 96 hours. You have an additional 72 waking hours per week. What are you doing with this time? That’s the question today’s guest, Laura Vanderkam, tried to answer by analyzing more than 1,000 time logs kept by full-time professional workers. Our collective narrative says that Americans are overworked, sleep-deprived and don’t have enough time for family or personal lives. That’s our emotional truth. But statistics paint a different picture. When more than 1,000 professionals track their time in 15-minute increments over the course of a 168-hour week, the data doesn’t point to time deprivation. In today’s episode, Laura describes this surprising fact: we have more time than we think. She also shares tactics on how to reduce chores and errands, stay focused and productive at work, and recognize the difference between efficacy and diminishing returns. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	You're listening to the Affordable Care Podcast. I'm your host, Paula Pant.
0:14.3	If you work 40 hours a week and you sleep 8 hours a night, which is 56 hours a week,
0:20.5	then you've accounted for 96 hours of your week. But a week is 168 hours long. This means
0:27.0	that you have an additional 72 waking hours that are unaccounted for. What are you doing
0:35.2	with this time? Let's pause and explore this for a second and let's use math, real numbers
0:41.4	to walk through this. Let's assume that you work a 50 hour week instead of 40 hours. Let's
0:48.0	also assume that you spend 10 hours a week commuting to and from work. Let's assume that you
0:53.8	spend 5 hours a week showering and getting dressed. And then let's assume that you spend another
0:59.4	10 hours a week doing housework, chores and errands. We'll also assume that you sleep 8 hours
1:05.2	per night, which is 56 hours a week. Do you think that sounds like an incredibly jam-packed schedule?
1:11.9	Well guess what? Even with all of this, you still have an additional 37 waking hours per week.
1:20.1	That's practically the equivalent of another full-time jobs worth of time. And that is assuming
1:26.4	that you work 50 hours a week and commute 2 hours a day, which for most listeners is probably not
1:32.8	going to be the case. It's also assuming that you spend another 2 hours a day, 5 days a week doing
1:38.7	housework, which some listeners may do more, some may do less. The point that I'm trying to make
1:44.8	is that what sounds and feels like a busy schedule is actually more free than we might assume.
1:52.7	Busyness may be an emotional truth, but it's not a new miracle truth when we start adding up the
1:59.6	way that we spend our time. So it's not that no one ever has bad nights, right? We do all of us do.
2:06.2	And those stand out in your mind. And so they become slightly more typical. It's the night that
2:11.5	you are up with the toddler and then catching an early morning flight that you're going to talk about
2:16.5	and remember, whereas another night that week where you slept perfectly fine just doesn't come to mind.
2:23.2	This is something that I learned from Laura Vandercam, the author of the book 168 hours you have
	...

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