New year, new habits: Fixing time management mistakes in 2025

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0:45In this episode, I talked to time management expert Laura Vanderkam. She is a force. She was on the show this past year talking about how to carve out time for what is important. And she has a lot of thoughts on why we mismanage our time and how we can do better. If you are already a Plus supporter, thank you so much. Please tune in throughout December and January as we bring you more Plus episodes from TED speakers specifically on how to start your new year right. If you're not yet a Plus supporter, we hope you will consider joining us. Your support makes our work possible and you get access to ad-free episodes and our bonus episodes.

1:28Go to plus.npr.org to find out more. OK, here's some of my conversation with time management expert Laura Vanderkam. Yeah, there are so many ridiculous time-saving hacks out there. And as you might imagine, I am somewhat of a student of this genre of literature because I'm always reading these, hoping I'm going to find hours in the day that I didn't know existed. The hacks are always things like clean the shower while you're in it. Which I don't know about you. I don't think that's going to change my life and open up hours that I didn't know existed. or something like, you know, if you send a lot of emails where the answer is OK, just type K instead of OK.

2:14Because again, we're not going to build these fabulous lives by typing K instead of OK in our emails, no matter how many emails you send. Right. You need to start with figuring out what you want to spend more time doing in your life. And then you tend to naturally spend less time in your inbox. So let's talk about that. What is the mistake you think that people have? Is it about, well, if I pack the lunches at night, then in the morning I won't feel so rushed? Or where do you find that people think they can sort of hack this whole time problem, but that they're actually not being as effective as they might think.

3:01Yeah, I mean, packing lunches the night before is always a bit of a bugaboo for me. I mean, because it doesn't save time. It just moves the task around. And it moves it from time that you were probably going to be in the kitchen anyway to time that you could have been relaxing or sleeping or something else. A lot of people's time-saving hacks amount to moving things around. They're just rescheduling work rather than removing work. You know, I think for many parents who are packing lunches the night before, that is leisure time that they could have had to, you know, feel more rejuvenated for the rest of life.

3:36But that's just one example of how people kind of don't necessarily think about how to open up space in their lives and how to make sure that they are spending more time on what is meaningful or enjoyable to themselves, to the people they care about, and maybe a little bit less time on things that are not so important to them. This message comes from the Michael J. Fox Foundation. Did you know that every six minutes someone in the U.S. is diagnosed with Parkinson's? It's the fastest growing brain disease in the world. Chances are you or someone you know is impacted by Parkinson's. The Michael J.

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5:47It's not easy to stand out from the crowd. Simplify how you stock up to get ahead. Go to AmazonBusiness.com for support. One of the things you have people do is track their time over a week. And can you just explain what exactly you ask them to do and why you think that might be helpful to other people? Whenever somebody says they want to spend their time better, I suggest they figure out where the time is going now. Like it may be that something you thought was taking a lot of your time really isn't. And it might be that something that you, you know, hadn't considered is taking more time than you imagined, right?

6:26You want to make sure you are working from good data. So I always suggest people try tracking their time for a week. A week is the cycle of life as we live it. it's somewhat useful to know how you spend Tuesday, but it's even more useful to know how you spend a unit of time that encompasses both Tuesdays and Saturdays, because then you get a complete picture of your life. I've had thousands of people do this now. I've tracked my time continuously for almost nine years now. Whoa. I know. That makes me sound like a lot of fun, doesn't it? But what have you learned by that? Do you feel like it's become something that keeps you on track in a way?

7:06Or are you watching, are there trends happening in your life where you're seeing changes? I think that it just makes me mindful of my hours. And at this point, it has become as much of a journaling function as anything else. Because I can call up a time log from six years ago. So it'd be Monday, December 11, 2017 and Monday, December 11, 2023. Anyway, when I look at the weeks, I can almost universally recall those weeks once I see the log. And so the time isn't completely gone. Like the memory is still there. Oh, that's really nice. Yeah. But that's not why I'm encouraging people to track 168 hours one week.

7:50It's more because most people have not had the experience of truly seeing where their time goes. And often it just reveals things to people. I mean, one thing that most people see is how much time they have, right? Because if you have a full-time job, you often think, well, a full-time job is the full amount of my time. And yet you very quickly will see on 168 hours that even 50 or 60 hours leaves some time for other things. And so what are you doing with that time? And people are often surprised to see where it might go. So many people find things that are more pleasant than they might have imagined.

8:32A lot of people who do work long hours are walking around with a story of like, well, I never see my family, right? Like I work full time, ergo, I never see my family. A time log will often reveal that you do see your family. Now, again, it may not be as much time as you want, but it's probably not none. So what's the purpose in that? Is it to say, like, rewrite your narrative and appreciate the time that you are spending with your family? Make the most of it. Like, what's the takeaway then? So I always tell people, look at what is going right in your life first and celebrate whatever that is.

9:09I mean, most of us have our lives and our schedules for a reason. It is the result of choices we have made. And so hopefully something is working really well. Maybe you managed to exercise three times during an incredibly busy week. Maybe you got a reasonable amount of sleep, even though, again, it was busy. Maybe you made time to read to your kids four nights during the week. Or, you know, maybe you made time to mentor a younger colleague. There's just all sorts of things that might have been awesome that could have happened in a, you know, otherwise busy or unremarkable week. And so you should celebrate that.

9:49And then you can start asking, what do you want to spend more time doing? Because maybe there's something that you're doing a little bit of, but you'd like to do a lot of, and you can identify that. Just off the top of your head, can you kind of list the things that people decide to prioritize once they've taken a hard look at how they spend their time? So one of the first things that people decide to prioritize is their health. And that's often precipitated by some sort of crisis, right? that they've gotten sick. And all of a sudden, it's like, okay, I can't just keep going, neglecting my health.

10:25I need to make sure that I have time to sleep each night. I need to make space to exercise. Maybe people are in some sort of chronic pain and their physician is telling them, well, you need to do these exercises to help with it. And you're like, I don't have the time for that. It's like, okay, well, now you're writhing on the floor in pain with your back spasm, maybe we could start making the time, right? So, you know, things like that. Sometimes it's that people feel they haven't, you know, they spend a lot of time with their kids, but maybe not entering their kids' worlds and kind of having those relaxed conversations with them.

11:00Because there's always something else you could be doing, you know, you have to run off and do the laundry or, you know, do whatever else. And then all of a sudden, you've got a kid who's 16, 17 years old, and they're going to be leaving in a year or two. That's me. You start saying, oh, well, maybe I would want to prioritize that trip to Starbucks over doing another load of laundry. We're all figuring out how to use our 168 hours of the week. Some people are playing probably a slightly more difficult level of the game at different points in their lives. But if you're not intentional about your time, it will be spent on something.

11:36But whether it's spent on something that you would have actively chosen, well, that may not happen. So let's say someone is saying, like, you know, this is the year I am going to find time to read more fiction. Like, how should we approach this? I think there are a couple ways that someone might approach it. first is when you have something that you truly want to read you wind up finding time for it even if you didn't think you had that time in your schedule um i'm sure many people had this experience when they were kids with reading harry potter like all of a sudden there were hours in the day to read that they wouldn't have identified as reading hours but they wanted to find out what happens next so if anyone thinks they don't have time to read that might actually be a way to figure out where you do have time to read is, you know, pick up some sort of book that you absolutely can't put down.

12:29And then you can also look for other bits of time during the day that you might be able to open up to the possibility of reading. A lot of this is about how we use small bits of leisure time. I mean, many of us, if we don't have something we are doing in the next five minutes, what do we do? We pull out our phones. Perhaps we look at email first, you know, telling ourselves that we're being productive. But next thing we know, we're reading headlines, we're over at social media, we're doing something else. And that could have been reading time too. And so I'm always encouraging people to put books on your phone.

13:02And when you pick up your phone in those little bits of time, you might be able to get five to 10 minutes of reading done if you do that first before you go do things like read headlines or check social media. How do you suggest people prioritize as they look at the upcoming year and get into this mindset of looking at time as something that they do have and that they can use to make these priorities come true. So anything you want to do is going to involve spending time on it, right? We live our lives in hours. And so any of these big ideas are actually going to be manifested in how we spend our hours.

13:45And so I think it's often helpful to look at what a big goal will entail in terms of how you might spend your time on an average day. So the idea of I want to eat more healthfully, well, what does that actually mean? Well, maybe we drill down to I am going to actually achieve that five servings of fruits and veggies that the nutritionists tell us to do. Okay, well, what does that look like in terms of breakfast, lunch, and dinner and snacks? Well, what kind of veggies am I going to be eating? Well, I don't know. Like now we're getting, what does this mean for when I go to the grocery store on Tuesday?

14:20And I think the reason people often fail at their resolutions is because they haven't drilled all the way down to when I'm in the grocery store on Tuesday, I will be grabbing a bag of baby spinach so I can add a handful to these various other meals that I am making, right? But when you have that as a very specific thing that you plan to do, then the bigger goal has a fighting chance of happening right because now you have made these tweaks that actually affect your day-to-day life and that have a space in your life and that you have thought through what it's going to entail in terms of how you are spending your time do you see a difference in the people who have good time hygiene i guess is the way i'm thinking of it like Are they calmer?

15:06Are they more relaxed? Or maybe not because they have to get somewhere that's next on their schedule. Yeah, I think people can have various different temperaments. So you could be the kind of person who is on time everywhere but anxious about it. Or you could be, you know, late and not anxious about it. But you could also be late and anxious about it. What I will say is that a lot of people whose lives were a bit more happy-go-lucky have something happen in their life where this just no longer works. So for some people, it's that they have a kid or then they have multiple kids. And what worked when it was just you as an adult no longer works when you have four other people in your family who all want to go various places and need to have things happening.

15:56and all of a sudden you're living in absolute chaos, right? Or, you know, maybe it's something that happens at work. Like it was fine when it was just you go to work and you do whatever your manager tells you to, but now all of a sudden you're managing a team of 10 people. Well, if you don't think it through, they're not getting anything done, right? And so it behooves you to be a little bit more intentional about what you are doing so you can make sure that your team is executing on what they need to be doing. And so I think for many people, it's just this, as life becomes more complex, you realize that it requires a lot more intentionality.

16:33You also learn, though, that complexity isn't the enemy. Chaos is the enemy. You can have a very complex life, but if you know where all the pieces need to go, then it can feel very orderly and in control. To me, that is the secret of being calm about life. That was time management expert Laura Vanderkam. You can hear more of my conversation with her in the TED Radio Hour episode called Flipping the Script from earlier this year. Plus, supporters, we have got all kinds of bonus episodes to get you out of 2024 and into 2025 with new ideas, fresh outlooks. Meanwhile, though, our regular episode of TED Radio Hour will be out on Friday.

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