168 Hours: You Have More Hours Than You Think - Laura Vanderkam

168 Hours: You Have More Hours Than You Think

There is more than enough time to live as purposefully and as abundantly as we want our professional and personal lives to be

We seem not to have enough hours in the day to do all that we need to do. There's always too much work and too little leisure. We proudly proclaim ourselves as too busy as the 60-70 hour workweek is our new “part-time,” and a 90-120 hour week is normal.

We are too busy to read to ourselves or to our kids, or to attend religious services, or to spend time talking with our spouses or to vote.

But others, like Theresa Daytner, have more than enough time on their hands. Daytner owns Daytner Construction Group and is a mother of six — including eight-year-old twins. As a business owner, she's probably busier than most of us; yet Daytner sleeps 7 hours every night, coaches soccer and spends the weekends cheering at her children's games. She hikes outdoors and goes on trail rides for hours at a time, in the mornings, during the working day, to enjoy the “peace and quiet” and “recharge.” She has time to watch 24 too, which helps her to recharge mentally. Also, she takes days off work to coincide with her kids' days off school so she can take the kids on sightseeing tours.

Daytner views her time different from most people. All of her hours and minutes are precious, none go to waste. For example, she reads Hardy Boys books to her sons in the car and nurtures her relationship with them in the 10 minutes between when her teens' school opens (8:00 a.m.) and her twins' nearby school opens (8:10 a.m.).

Daytner also understands she is in charge of herself ― “Everything that I do, every minute I spend is my choice.” so she spends her time on the things she does best that no one else can do better: nurturing her business, nurturing her family and nurturing herself. According to her, “If I’m not spending my time wisely, I fix it, even if it’s just quiet time.”

Daytner shows us that our claim of being “busy” is a lie, because we all have the same amount of time ― 168 hours every week ― to create the lives we want; which is to be fully engaged in our professional and personal lives.

By choosing how we spend our 168 hours every week, we have more time on our hands than we think.

We can live our professional and personal lives to the fullest if we spend as much of our 168 hours in the week as is possible on our core competencies

Our core competence is what we can do better than almost anyone else, and is the foundation element we need as we try to use our 168 hours to build the lives we want.

Troy Smith and Jan Rivkin of the Harvard Business School once likened life to a job, “a bundle of tasks and activities an individual takes on… Some, like sleeping and eating, are required, but the rest are simply combinations of choices each of us makes, bundles together for one reason or another.” More importantly, they write, “there is no reason to assume… that tasks must continue to be bundled together in the future in the same pattern they have been bundled in the past.”

They are saying, in effect, that we need to leverage our core competencies in order for us to build our full lives.

Our core competencies rise out of our “clarity of strategic intent” ― our need to allocate scarce time resources on the things we do best and outsource or ignore the rest. This is the path to greatness in our lives; becoming focused and lean. We can’t live full lives if we are too scattered to master something or spend much time on activities we cannot excel in.

Our core competencies are abilities we can leverage across multiple spheres. They should be important and meaningful. They should be the things that we do best, and that others cannot do nearly as well.

Ideally, no one should have more than half a dozen core competencies; and those should fit into certain categories too. For example, if you are in the right job, the substance of your paid work will be a core competence. Nurturing of family members and close friends is also a core competence. Also, your leisure activities will center around your core competencies.

Those who get the most out of life figure out and focus on their core competencies. They understand that what makes happy, successful people different from those who just plod along in life is because they spend as many of their 168 hours as possible on their core competencies ― honing their focus to get somewhere and chucking everything else.

The right job for us is the one that matches our core competencies with the right job conditions and work environments to challenge us to the limit of our abilities

A purposeful life, one that is focused and lean, begins with the right choice of a vocation. If we choose our life’s work well, every hour we log on the job will be a source of joy.

Sylvia Earle, 83 years, is a marine biologist and mother of three. She is Explorer-in-Residence for the National Geographic and author of several books, including the award-winning Sea Change. She is absolutely infectious when she talks about her craft, after more than 60 years “at sea” ― studying the oceans, hunting for projects, finding funding, traveling​ under grueling conditions, battling the blatant sexism in the scientific community and building a career while raising three children.

When we are in the right job, we bring a lot of positive energy to bear on our work tasks. That positive energy flows through all of our 168 hours in the week too. We have more energy working 50 hours every week at a job we love than 30 hours a week at a job we hate.

So, what does the right job look like?

Teresa Amabile, a Harvard Business School professor and author of an article, “Motivating Creativity in Organizations,” defines the right job thus: “You should do what you love, and love what you do.”

“Doing what you love” means you should find the work that matches well with your expertise, your creative thinking skills, and your strongest intrinsic motivations. Intrinsic motivation means loving the substance of the work you do for its own sake.

“Loving what you do” means you should find job conditions and work environments that will allow you to retain that intrinsic focus while supporting your expl​oration of new ideas.

So the right job for us is a combination of our core competencies and the right job and work conditions challenging us to the extent of our abilities. It should call out our best work skills and help us develop new ones.

Productive work is the secret to a professional life that’s fulfilling

Productive work is what results when we put the working part of our 168 hours to effective use. Productive work is what enables people like Theresa Daytner and Sylvia Earle have amazing careers and maintain full personal lives.

Productivity is hard to define and there are one thousand and one ideas out there on how to hack it, but we should think of it in this term: “all work not moving us towards our dream professional lives is unproductive work.”

Productive work implies that we clear our work calendars of things that shouldn’t be there so we can focus on our core competencies. There are four ways to do this.

One, we should be very clear on our priorities by seizing control of our schedules by developing the discipline to spend real time on what’s important even if other things ― including, frequently, our own bad habits ― try to intrude and take us off course.

Two, we shouldn’t mix up activities that look like work for actual work. We might have one thousand and one hacks for being productive, but if no actual, important work is getting done, then we are not working at all. Having a great system for organizing our emails or being able to schedule daily conference calls on ongoing projects is not work.

Three, we should get rid of non-competency work by ignoring it, minimizing it or outsourcing it.

Four, we should boost our efficiencies by getting better at what we do. We should strive at being geniuses at our crafts. We should let no one, to the best of our abilities, be as good as we are in our craft. We can achieve this through what Geoff Colvin described in his book, Talent is Overrated, as deliberate practice.

“There is extraordinary power in knowing what you want to be doing with your time. When companies execute with this clarity of strategic intent, they thrive. When people do, they thrive too.”

We can take deliberate steps to reach the summit of our careers

Productive work ought to result in a breakthrough in our careers, or there would be no point to it. There are six steps we can take to a ​breakthrough in our chosen profession or craft.

One, we should be clear about what the next level in our profession or craft looks like. Clarity will push us to aim big and take a few calculated risks that would propel us in that direction.

Two, we should understand what metrics and gatekeepers are important as we try to achieve the next level in our careers or vocations. For example, someone aspiring to a tenured position in a university knows that three-to-five publications in major journals plus a certain volume of grants are the base metrics.

Most of these metrics or standards are widely publicized​ or obvious, and if they aren’t, it’s our duty to figure them out.

Gatekeepers are senior or more-experienced colleagues who genuinely like us and would actively seek to propel us forward in our profession or craft. They like us because we have outlooks to our professional and personal lives that are similar to theirs. We should ponder on and seek these people out work with them if possible. We should figure out what they really want, that is, what, about our track records, they can point to while arguing our cases ― for example, for a promotion or a choice assignment ― with decision-makers​ in the organizations we work with or in others.

Three, we should work to the point of diminishing returns. For most of us, we will need a lot of hard work and long hours to achieve new heights in our chosen careers or vocations.

Four, we should have good, personal narratives. We should brand ourselves in the best ways possible, and make our stories authentic too. We are wired to desire narratives and so are drawn to identities and images that we have formed over a lifetime.

A good personal brand story about why we do what we do will often lead to an increase in our profiling in the organization we work in or in the media and launch us on your paths to the next levels in our careers or vocations.

Five, we should be open to possibilities and plan for opportunities. There’s an element of luck involved in achieving career breakthroughs. Randomness is a fact of the universe, and our job is to use our 168 hours to stack the odds in our favor by placing many bets and leaving nothing we can control to chance.

Leanne Shear and Tracey Toomey wrote The Perfect Manhattan while bartending in Manhattan in 2002, working until 4:00 a.m. most nights and then hauling ass to Starbucks a few hours later to plot and write. A “chance” conversation they had with a literary agent one night while bartending set it all in motion.

Six, we should be ready to ride the wave the breakthrough we achieve creates. We should desire a career that will “slow-burn,” not “flame out.” we can do this by returning to the 168-hour​ framework we have created and redo everything we did right using it.

We are doing less housekeeping so we can spend more time nurturing our spouses and our children

There’s a different kind of economics playing out in our homes.

Housekeeping ― cleaning, cooking, laundry, yardwork, and the like ― is laborious and time consuming. Recent time-diary studies show that mothers and fathers in this generation spend twice as much time interacting with their children when compared to mothers and fathers in the 1960s.

It would seem ironic that a busier generation with at least 75% of women aged 25-34 years in the workforce would have more time to spend with their spouses and offspring.

The reasonable explanation is that we, like corporations, are focusing more on our core competencies and ignoring, minimizing or outsourcing every other thing. We are getting compensated at market rates for “our hours,” meaning that spousal or parental time, which is a subset of those hours, have become valuable. And just like a modern corporation, we have refocused those scarce spousal or parental hours on our core competencies on the homefront ― nurturing our spouses and our children; not cleaning, cooking, doing laundry, yard work, and the likes.

​The implication then is that, we should give some careful thought and plan to the time we spend with our spouses and our kids; because those hours we have to spend with them are scarce and valuable. We shouldn’t, for instance, fall into the nightly routine of dinner, bath time and bed; or an overdose of family time together watching tv. We should shake up the routine every now and then. Choosing two nights in the week to take the kids out to the movies or to a diner; or for just a walk in a public park are ideas we can implement. Or camping out around a fire in the backyard.

So, how do we get the housekeeping done?

We should outsource them.

If we desire that our lives be purposeful, we need to be deliberate with our leisure hours in the same way that we are deliberate with our work hours

A purposeful life is a combination of purposeful work hours and purposeful leisure hours.

Unfortunately, we are largely unfamiliar with the concept of free time. It's the reason why our long weekend hours are consumed doing chores, shuttling kids around and watching TV; then on Sunday night, we feel tense and unrejuvenated.

We need to be deliberate in the use of our leisure time just in the same way that we are deliberate in the use of our work time. Our full lives result from the structure and purpose we give to our work hours, as well as to our leisure hours. Time is too precious for us to be totally leisurely about leisure.

Outlined below are five steps we can take to purposefully structure out our leisure time.

One, we should decide what purposeful leisure activities we will spend our leisure time doing.

Two, we should create a schedule around the leisure activities we have chosen.

Three, we should commit enough time, energy and resources to make our leisure activities meaningful.

Four, we should align, once in a while, our leisure time with the leisure time of family and friends, so we can keep nurturing those important relationships.

Five, we should use bits of time — for example, commute time home from work — for bits of joy — for example, playing over the family's last summer holiday videos.

A full and purposeful life​ is a full and purposeful 168 hours lived over and over again

Having a full life is not easy, but it can be done. Getting the most out of your life is a function of getting the most out of your 168 hours week in, week out; and that, in turn, is a function of evaluating where you are and where you want to be. It involves you doing a "time makeover" — looking at the data from logging your use of your 168 hours for several weeks, determining what stands in the way, and what can be changed.

There are eight steps to take to do this.

One, log your use of time (168 hours) for several weeks on the purpose-built spreadsheet available to download on the author's website — my168hours.com. From your log, tally up the time spent on major categories such as sleep, work, interacting with the kids and so on.

Two, create a "List of 100 Dreams." Think of this list as your "bucket list" — a list of things you want to get done before your time on earth is over. Doing this will help you figure out what matters to you and fit them into your schedule.

Three, identify and list out your core competencies. Decide how many of your 168 hours you want to devote to your core competencies and your non-core competencies.

Four, start out with a blank slate. You have 168 hours to fill in. Begin by filling in sleep and chow time.

Five, block out hours for core competency activities.

Six, ignore, minimize or outsource everything else. You have only one life to live, spend it living your core competencies.

Seven, fill in bits of time with bits of joy; as explained in the last tidbit.

Finally, change your schedule — your 168 hours — as your priorities in life — your “List of 100 Dreams” — change.

Conclusion

The key message in this summary and in the book itself is that we have more than enough time on our hands to live a purposeful professional and personal life.

And if a purposeful life is a purposeful 168 hours in the week lived over and over again, then all we need to do is take control of our 168 hours by being deliberate in our use of those hours.

And we can be deliberate in our use of those hours when we consciously choose to expend them on those activities that are our core competencies, professionally and personally.

Try this:

• Log your use of time for 168 hours in the week, for 4 weeks, using the 168 Hours Log available to download freely on the author’s website. Examine the data. What is it saying to you?
• On the average, what percentage of your 168 hours do you expend on your core competencies and what percentage do you expend on your non-core-competencies?
• What changes do you need to make?
• Are you in the “right job?” What attributes of your current employment make you think you are or you are not in the right job?
• How does the “new home economics” play out in your home? Do you want to try explaining the concept to your spouse?