Gain control of your free time

I am so excited to be here today talking about my favorite topic, which is time and how we spend it. I know we have a lot of extremely busy people in this room today, extremely busy people probably, but I do hope to convince you in the time we have today that, however busy you are, you can build the life you want in the time that you’ve got. To do that, though, we’re going to need to rethink some common misperceptions about time, and we’re going to learn seven of my favorite time management strategies that I hope will help you make more of your time both at work and at home and at whatever stage of life you happen to be in.

But first, just a little bit about me. People often ask me how I came to this topic of time management. Unfortunately, it is not because I am always on time. I do try to be, but I was, in fact, once late to my own speech on time management. The truth is, I came to this topic a few years ago when I realized something that is dumbfoundingly obvious in retrospect, but at the time seemed profound, which is that we all have the same amount of time.

We all have 24 hours in a day, 168 hours in a week, and so when you find people who are doing amazing things professionally, like many of your colleagues here, many of the speakers you’ve been hearing from in this conference, and then you talk to them, you realize that they also have really cool personal lives too. They’re raising happy families; they’re involved in their communities, doing some sort of crazy, athletic endeavor on the weekend. They’re not making the harsh trade-offs that people often say success requires.

Well, it turns out that these people don’t have any more time than the rest of us. They may have other things going for them. I’m not saying they’re not smarter, richer or better looking, but they don’t have more time. So I think we can learn how they allocate their hours to get all these things done that they do.

I spent the past 10 years studying the schedules of people who are doing a lot professionally and personally to figure out how they make their lives work. The seven strategies I want to share today come from studying these people’s schedules, and I hope these will help you make more time both at work and at home, as well. And, since we don’t have an infinite amount of time, and I know people have great programming they’ve got to get to later this afternoon, we’re going to go ahead and dive right in.

The first strategy I want to talk about, the first strategy for making the most of our time, is to figure out where the time really goes. People often say to me, “Laura, I want to spend my time better. What is the first thing I should be doing?” And I always say, “Well, let’s figure out where the time is going now because if we don’t know where the time is going now, how do we know if we’re changing the right thing?”

Maybe something we thought was a problem really isn’t. Maybe something we’ve never even considered is taking far more time than we might’ve imagined. We want to make sure we are working from good data, same as any business decision, right? You want to make sure you have good data before you make a big change. So how do we get that data? Well, the best thing we can do is to try tracking our time.

There are lots of ways we can do this. We’re going to hopefully track for a week. A couple of days is good, but a week is better. We can use spreadsheets, which is what I use. I’ve actually been tracking my time continuously for four years now, which nobody else needs to do by the way. But it’s been useful for me. You can use one of dozens of time-tracking apps on the market, or you can walk around with a little notebook if you want to look all artsy.

The tool itself doesn’t actually matter. What matters is that you do it. And when I suggest people try tracking their time for a week, you may be surprised to hear that I get a little bit of resistance, right? “That sounds like an interesting idea. Tracking my time? I’ll consider that for later.” I’ve explored this resistance with people a bit, and it comes down to a couple of things. Sometimes people have been lawyers or accountants, and other people have to bill their time in six-minute increments throughout the day, and they’re like, “No, please, not anymore of my time!” Just for one week, just to see where it goes.

Sometimes people tell me, “I’m too busy to track my time,” which I guess is one special problem. I’ve got it down; it takes me about three minutes a day. I check in three times. It takes me about a minute to write down what I’ve done since the last check-in. So three minutes a day is about the same amount of time I spend brushing my teeth, which is an activity that I have yet to declare myself too busy to do.

But I think the more common reason, when I explore this with people, is the resistance. It’s the same thing if anyone’s ever tried to lose weight. You know that a nutritionist will tell you to keep a food journal, and that is because it works. There’s pretty good evidence — studies and peer-reviewed journals — that people who write down what they eat lose significantly more weight than people who do not. So, you think we’d be all over that, right? But the truth is that we just don’t want to know. We don’t want to know that we grabbed six chocolate chip cookies from the kitchen next to our home office over the course of a day, which is a purely hypothetical example.

It’s the same thing with time. We don’t want to know about that two-hour Instagram bender the other night, right? We don’t want to know how much time we are wasting. So let’s get this out of the way right now. We all waste time, OK? I waste time; you waste time; we all waste time. Figuring out where the time really goes is not about seeing how much time we are wasting. It’s about making sure we are not telling ourselves stories about our lives that aren’t actually true. When it comes to time, we have all sorts of stories we tell ourselves.

I’ve explored these over the years because I find them so fascinating. One of my favorites, one of the most common stories we tell ourselves, is about just how many hours we are working. People who get paid by the hour know how many hours they’re working. Pretty straightforward, right? People who don’t, who are more nebulous, say, “You know, well, we all are working hard; we’re working long hours, especially when we’re talking with other people.”

In a competitive world, we have a tendency to put a high number on just how many hours we are working. Sometimes the number goes up and up and up depending on the situation. You’re at a party, and you go, “I worked 50 hours last week.” “Fifty? I wish I worked 50. I worked 60.” “Oh, 60 is my light season,” so on it goes. I once met a young man at a party who told me he was working 180 hours a week at his startup. Very impressive if you actually multiply 24 times 7, right?

There was once a study comparing people’s workweeks with time diaries. It found that people claiming 75-plus hour weeks were off by about 25 hours. Can you guess in what direction? I laugh about this, but I do it too. I used to say I work about 50 hours a week because I actually tracked my time for various weeks here and there over the years, and I always worked about 50 hours during those weeks. And then, a couple of years ago, I decided to start tracking my time continuously. I soon realized that, in the past, I had chosen very specific weeks to track, namely, the weeks where I was working 50 hours a week because I wanted to see myself as a serious professional who was putting in the hours. Tracking my time continuously, I saw that the long-term average was a lot closer to 40, which is a different number than 50.

So, here I am, writing about this, speaking about this. I have 10 hours going somewhere completely different than I think they do. It’s not about playing “gotcha” or anything like that. It’s that we want to know how many hours we’re working because then we can make good choices within it. We can make good choices in the time we’re not working as well. We want to know so we have a good picture of our lives.

We do this in the opposite direction with free time. People will tell you, “Oh, I have no free time whatsoever.” And then a little bit later in the conversation, you’re talking about if that was really a Starbucks cup in that episode of “Game of Thrones” that was sitting on the table. It’s like maybe just a tiny bit of free time, right? But what it is, is that people don’t have as much free time as they want. And in our minds, the story “not as much as I want” can become “none.” But “not as much as I want” is a very different story than “none.” I mean, “not as much as I want” suggests some good ideas right there. How can I scale this up over time? How can I make good choices within the free time that I do have? Whereas, “none” is just defeatist. What can you do with that?

We want to make sure the stories we’re telling ourselves about our lives are actually true. The best way to make sure they’re true is to actually keep track of where the time really goes, so if you track your time, and I really hope you will, just write down what you’re doing as often as you remember and as many details as you think would be helpful for you. Try to keep going for a week. Then add up the major categories — work, sleep, maybe time in the car or otherwise traveling, housework, errands, time with family, exercise, reading, volunteering, television — whatever it is you do. Add it up, and then ask yourself a few questions about it.

First question: What do I like most about my schedule? It’s your life, so hopefully something is going great, and we should celebrate whatever that is. Second question: What do I want to do more of with my time? And the third question: What do I want to spend less time doing? What do I want to get off my plate? So, the first strategy is to figure out where the time really goes.

The second strategy is to look forward. When it comes to time, I find we spend a lot of time and effort thinking about that last question: What do I want to get off my plate? What do I want to spend less time doing? And if you read a lot of time management literature, which I admit that I do, you find that a lot of it is structured along these lines. We’re going to help our readers, our viewers, our listeners find an extra hour in the day, and the idea is we’re going to shave extra time off everyday activities. We’ll add it up. We’ll finally have time for the good stuff.

I’m always reading these articles hoping I’m going to find some life-changing hacks, find hours in the day I didn’t know existed. And then these big timesaving hacks are always things like clean the shower while you’re in it, soak your pasta before you boil it so it takes less time to boil — in case pasta boiling is consuming a lot of your life — or my personal favorite, said in all seriousness, is if you send a lot of emails where the answer is “OK,” just type “k” instead of “OK.” If you think about it, it’s a little bit ridiculous. You’re not going to all of a sudden build this amazing life by typing “k” instead of “OK” in your emails.

We don’t build the lives we want by saving time. We build the lives we want, and then time saves itself. It is so much more effective to focus on that second question: What do I want to spend more time doing?

When I do workshops with groups, I actually have them make a really long list of anything in life they might want to spend more time doing, such as hobbies, stuff with their family, travel, personal goals and work goals too. There are always things within the category of work that we want to spend more time doing, even if people generally don’t want to spend more time working, per se, but do things like mentoring younger colleagues or doing more research or more outreach, in general, marketing — all these things that we know we should spend more time doing. Make a really long list, try to get 100 things on this list, and maybe on your plane flight home, or later today, you can start thinking about this.

Once you’ve got a really long list, then you can start turning it into something you can actually work with by doing two exercises. The first, on the professional front, is to look forward and consider that you’re giving yourself an end-of-year performance review. I know a lot of organizations do this. Maybe you’re doing this with your employees, or you’ve been working for places over the years where, in November or December, you sit down with your manager. You talk about the past year, talk about your successes, your opportunities for growth, or whatever the euphemism is in the particular organization. It serves its purpose to look back over the past year, but I find it’s actually more effective doing this looking forward.

I want you to pretend it’s December of 2019. You are giving yourself a professional performance review. And let’s say that 2019 has been an absolutely amazing year for you and your business. What three to five things would you have done in the course of the year to make 2019 so amazing? You can look forward to that professional performance review, and you can do this for your personal life too. You can picture yourself maybe as a guest at a holiday party in December of 2019, and you are regaling friends and family with tales of all the amazing things you’ve done in your personal life in the course of the year. And let’s say that 2019 was so amazing for you that you are like that obnoxious holiday party guest whom no one wants to be around. All right, if 2019 were to be so awesome, what three to five things would you have done in the course of the year to make it so amazing?

Now, between the performance review and this prospective holiday party chitchat, we have a list of six to 10 things that are really our top priorities for the rest of the year, professionally and personally. So, I want you to make this list at some point in the next few days and put it somewhere prominently, maybe on a little sticky note on your bathroom mirror or somewhere on your laptop at work. Put it somewhere where you can see because it’s going to start informing your schedule.

That was the second strategy, to look forward. The third strategy is first things first. I’m taking this phrase from one of my favorite time management and productivity books, “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People.” Anyone here read it? It’s a great book if you haven’t read it. It’s by the late Stephen Covey. He talks about how people spend a lot of time on things that are urgent but not important. One of the interesting things about this is that this book came out in 1990, which is before our phones were dinging at us every 10 seconds with breaking news alerts that aren’t actually breaking news. I was pondering what, in 1990, were those things that were urgent but not important? I don’t know. Maybe people were reading their faxes very carefully or something like that. People have always managed to waste time. Anyway, he says, “Put first things first.” What this means in a time management context is that time is highly elastic. We cannot make more time, but time will stretch to accommodate what we need to put into it.

I saw this best from a time log that a lady kept for me. I’ve had thousands of people track their time for me throughout the years, and this one really stood out because of something that happened. She was a very busy woman. She worked in finance, had two young kids. She went out on a Wednesday night for something. She came home to find that her water heater had broken, and there was water all over her basement. If you’ve ever had this happen to you, you know it’s a pretty big mess. Her time log showed her dealing with it — the immediate aftermath that night, the plumbers coming in the next day and a professional cleaning crew coming in the day after that to deal with her ruined carpet. All this was being recorded on her time log. It wound up taking seven hours of her week.

Seven hours is a fair chunk of time. It’s like finding an extra hour in the day. We talked about this later. I said, “We had this conversation at the start of the week and said, “Hey, could you find seven hours? Could you find seven hours to train for that triathlon? Could you find seven hours to set up those coffee dates with the people who keep asking you to mentor them? Would you have been able to find the time?” “Well, no, of course not. Can’t you see how busy I am?” But when she had to find seven hours because there was water all over her basement, she found seven hours.

Time is highly elastic. We cannot make more time, but time will stretch to accommodate what we need or want to put into it. So, the key to time management is treating our priorities as the equivalent of that broken water heater.

We choose to get to them, first things first. And to get at this, I like to use some language from one of the busiest people I ever interviewed. By busy, I mean she was running a successful small business with 12 people on the payroll. She also had six children in her spare time.

And so, I’m talking to her, trying to figure out how she has it all — that phrase people love to torment each other with. And she explained it to me like this. She said, “Listen, Laura, everything I do, every minute I spend, is my choice. And rather than saying I don’t have time to do X, Y or Z, I don’t do X, Y or Z because it’s not a priority. ‘I don’t have time’ really means ‘It’s not a priority.’”

If you think about it, this is more accurate language. People will tell you they don’t have time to floss. That’s not true. They don’t want to floss, right? Using this language reminds us that time is a choice. And now, granted, there may be horrible consequences to making different choices. If you’ve got a meeting with a major client, you should probably show up. But using this language reminds us that time is a choice. And, over the long run, we have the power to fill our lives with the things that deserve to be there.

People say, “OK, that sounds great. Yes, I want to fill my life with the important stuff. First things first. But have you seen my schedule? I’m booked up all day. I have all these professional commitments. My kids are in 10 different activities. I’m involved in all this stuff in my community. Practically, how do I put first things first?”

Well, we live our lives in weeks. We often think of our lives in days, but we actually live our lives in weeks. And so, putting first things first means thinking through our weeks before we are actually in them. I find a really good time to do this is Friday afternoon. I don’t know about you, but Friday afternoon is not usually my peak productivity time. I’m usually kind of sliding into the weekend at that point, so it’s really hard to start anything new, but I might be willing to think about what future me should be doing. And by taking a few minutes on Friday afternoon to plan the week ahead, you can turn what might be wasted time into some of your most productive minutes of the week.

So, Friday afternoon, take a few minutes, look at the upcoming week, and make yourself a short three-category priority list: career, relationships, self. Making a three-category list reminds us that there should be something in all three categories, right?

It’s pretty hard to make a three-category list and then leave one of the categories blank. Our brains just don’t work like that. By making a three-category, priority list, we put something in all three. And right there, that’s going to give you a more balanced life. But it can be just a short list, two to three items in each, informed by our 2019 goals. Remember our list of six to 10 things we were going to say in the end-of-year performance review and the holiday party chitchat.

Let’s say that you want to bring in a certain amount of new business in the course of 2019. That’s a professional goal. You think, Well, what could I do in the next week to bring me there? Well, we’re going to reach out to a certain number of leads. I’m going to do that on Monday.

Maybe, on the relationship front, you’re trying to be a better friend. You have a friend who’s going through a really tough time, so you’d make a note to call her. On the personal front, maybe you’re trying to read a certain number of books in 2019, so you are going to make it through 100 pages in the novel that has been sitting on your bedside stand for the last six months. All right? Those are our goals, our priorities for the next week.

And then, we’re going to look at our calendar and see where they can go. And here’s the real pro tip: We are going to front-load the week. And the reason we’re going to do that is because stuff is going to come up. Could be bad stuff. Could be good stuff. Probably a little bit of both. But by putting as many of our priorities on Monday and Tuesday as possible, we either get to them before the emergencies arise, or, if the emergencies arise Monday and Tuesday, we have time the rest of the week to still get to them.

So, we carve out Monday morning for reaching out to our leads. Maybe make a note to call our friend on our lunch break, set an alarm to go off 45 minutes before we need to be in bed so we can start reading. And if we do these things, are we going to have a good week? Well, how could we not? We’ve accomplished our most important goals, and it’s not even Tuesday yet. This is how we put first things first, and this is how stuff gets done.

That was my third strategy: first things first. No. 1 is to figure out where the time really goes. No. 2 is to look forward. No. 3 is first things first. No. 4 is to move time around.

I’ve done a lot of time diary projects over the years where I have people track their time for a week so I can study where the time really goes. A couple of years ago, I did an interesting project where I had people with big jobs, who were also raising families, track their time for a week. There are lots of ways you can be busy in your personal life, but that’s certainly one of them. And I found some interesting things.

Three-quarters of the people I studied did something personal during their work hours in the course of their diary week. Maybe it was visiting a child’s class or getting a workout in or meeting a friend for lunch — but something personal. So, I was like, “Oh, that’s pretty cool. People have flexibility.”

The flip side of that was also true. Three-quarters did something work-related during what you might consider personal hours — nights, weekends, early mornings. And, of course, the two are totally related. Work/life integration is really the name of the game these days. And some people don’t like that. They want work to be work, home to be home, and never the two should meet.

But I find that being flexible about when things happen and being willing to move time around a little bit and being a little bit more creative about when we do either work or life activities means people are able to work the hours they need to in order to succeed, while also still have a full personal life as well.

One of the most common ways I see people using this mindset is to think 168 hours, not 24. There are 24 hours in a day. There are 168 hours in a week. People always say to me, “Laura, there are not enough hours in the day to get to everything I want to get to.” And it’s true. There aren’t. But we don’t live our lives in days; we live our lives in weeks. And by looking at the whole of the week, we see just how much space we have.

Some of this is just math. There are 168 hours in a week. You work 40 hours, so sort of standard full-time hours. You sleep eight hours a night, so that’s 56 hours per week. That leaves 72 hours for other things. It’s quite a bit of time, right? If you work 50 hours, that leaves 62 hours for other things. If you work 60 hours, that leaves 52 hours for other things. I mean, we’re still talking a reasonable chunk of time, even with pretty long work hours. So, the time is probably there for whatever personal priorities we might have. We may need to be creative about finding it, but it’s probably there.

But it’s not just about the math. It’s about making sure and it’s about realizing that things don’t have to happen daily nor do they have to happen at the same time every day in order to count in our lives.

I see this 24-hour trap of thinking things need to happen at the same time every day, most often with, you probably guessed it, exercise. People say they want to exercise more, and then they talk themselves out of it because there is not a perfect time every single day. You know how these conversations go. “Oh, I’d love to exercise, really, but I’m not the kind of person who could just go work out for an hour every day at lunch.” Or “I’d love to exercise, but I have a family I want to see. I can’t go to the gym for an hour every night after work.” Or “I’d love to exercise, but I get up early enough as it is. I can’t stomach the thought of waking up at 5 a.m. every day.” All right, fine. Don’t wake up at 5 a.m. every day. Stop looking for the perfect time every single day.

Instead, look at the whole of the week. Be flexible about when it happens, and see where you can fit it in. Maybe one morning you get up a little bit early and do something. Another day, if you’re co-parenting with someone, you could trade off. Each of you gets one night off. You go to the gym then. Do something on the two weekend days, and, wow, we just exercised four times a week. It didn’t happen at the same time every day, but it didn’t have to.

You know, we don’t have to find time for it every single day, but when you look at the whole of the week and can be flexible about when it happens, you can probably fit it in.

Think about this: 168 hours, not 24. I mentioned that I track my time on weekly spreadsheets. You don’t have to really think about it too hard, but put the days of the week across the top, Monday through Sunday, and half-hour blocks down the left-hand side, 5 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. The important thing here is that the week begins, for me, on Monday at 5 a.m. That seems like a defensible start time to the week, right?

If the week starts Monday at 5 a.m., guess where the halfway point is? It is 5 p.m. on Thursday. Now, I don’t know about you, but that sort of sounds like the end of the week to me, right? But it’s actually the midpoint. We have just as much time the second half of the week, after Thursday at 5 p.m., as we have before.

So, there are probably plenty of things that can’t fit into your life from the beginning of Monday to the end of day Thursday, but if you look at the whole of the week, say, end of the day Thursday to Monday, you might be able to fit it in then. Think 168 hours, not 24, and we will find space for whatever we want to by being flexible.

One more part about moving time around. I said you didn’t have to wake up at 5 a.m. every day to exercise, but if you do, you’ll probably stick with it. Mornings turn out to be a great time for getting stuff done. This is often time you can have to yourself before everybody else wants a piece of you. It’s a really great time for doing anything that is important but not urgent, both professionally and personally.

Maybe it’s exercising; maybe it’s writing a novel. I don’t know if that’s something you want to do. You can tell yourself you’ll do it at night with the time you have left over, but guess what? You’re not going to have any time left over. Or, if you do, you’re going to only have enough energy for, say, surfing the web or hitting “Next” in the Netflix queue, right? Whereas, if you get up in the morning and use those morning hours, thinking flexibly about moving time around, using your mornings, you might be able to do it.

People often say to me, “You know, Laura, I’m not a morning person.” And that’s fine. There are plenty of people who are night owls. But here’s how to tell: Are you doing your best, most creative work at night? And if you are, awesome. You’re a night owl. But often, when people say, “I’m not a morning person,” what they mean is that they’re tired in the morning. But that is a very different matter. That’s a function of when you went to bed.

If you track your time and find that you’re not really using your time before bed all that well, not really on top of priority stuff, you might want to cut that off a little bit earlier. Go to bed a little bit earlier; wake up a little bit earlier; turn unproductive evening hours into productive morning hours. We can move time around that way. I really do think that going to bed earlier is how grownups sleep in. I’ll let you think about that for a second. All right. So, that’s the fourth strategy, to move time around.

The fifth strategy is to build in space. When I’ve done my time diary projects over the years, I found something interesting, which is that many of the most successful people I study have a surprising amount of white space on their schedules. And I say “surprising” because I think a lot of us are walking around with this kind of unquestioned story that the busier you are, the more important you are. And on some level, it makes sense because if you have a lot of demand for your time, that’s kind of the definition of being important. But it turns out that a lot of very successful people use the power they have over their time in order to build white space into their schedules. And there are a couple of reasons they do this.

One is that it’s just practical. Everything takes longer than you think it will. If you think about that time when you are putting on your shoes in the morning, and that time you were backing your car out of the driveway, the space between these two is not zero. And if you think it’s zero, that explains why you’re five minutes late everywhere, right? Or if you’ve got meetings stacked up all day, every half hour, and one runs over, as one inevitably does for often good reasons, what happens to the rest of the meetings? Well, then they all start late. And they fall over like dominoes. Whereas, if you build in space, you can get caught up, and you’re not late and rushing. It turns out that nobody likes to be late and rushing.

But it’s not just about the practicalities. It’s also about seizing opportunity. If somebody who works with you wants to come talk about these great business ideas that she has, and she’s like, “Yeah, I’ve got an eight-minute window at 4:12 p.m. next Thursday. Do you want to come talk to me then?” No. You want to be able to have these conversations. And if the conversations are going well, you’ll want to stick with the conversations. And the only way you can linger in these good conversations is to have open space in your schedule.

So how do we get open space? Isn’t that the million-dollar question? We’re so busy. How do we get open space? Well, there are a couple of things we can do. First, be very careful with the word “yes.” It is very easy to say yes. It is often hard to say no. And I think what happens is that the further something is in the future, the more we feel like we’re assigning it to a completely different person. “Oh, November Me won’t be busy. November Me is going to have tons of time. Yeah, sure. November Me can totally take this on.”

And it may look that way right now because you look at your November calendar, and it looks pretty open. But that’s a bit of a fallacy because come November, it won’t be. Come November 1, you’re the exact same person you are now. You won’t have magically discovered any more time. You’re going to be just as busy as you are now; only now you will also have this other commitment that you were lukewarm about in June stacked onto the pile.

So, a better question when you were asked to do something in the future would be to ask yourself, Would I do this tomorrow? Now, of course, you protest, “I’m busy tomorrow. I’m booked up solid tomorrow,” which is somewhat the point because you will be in November too. But would you be tempted to move things around or cancel things in order to fit in this new opportunity?

If you would be, awesome. You’ll be just as excited in November, so go ahead and say yes, a wholehearted yes. But if the answer is “Absolutely not! No way would I ever take this on for tomorrow,” then probably that should be your answer for November too because we understand the opportunity cost for tomorrow in a way that’s just very hard to see far in the future. We know exactly how much energy we’ll have. We know how much we have on our plates for tomorrow. We can’t see that far in the future. So be kind to your future self and ask if you would do it tomorrow before you say yes for the future.

Another thing you can do is what I call a “calendar triage.” Friday afternoon, as you are planning your week ahead, making your three-category priority list — career, relationships, self — take a few minutes to look at what is already on your calendar for the next week.

Ask yourself a few questions about it. First, What do I really not want to do? Does it absolutely have to happen? I don’t know. Maybe it does, but maybe it doesn’t. Maybe it’s a meeting that’s been rescheduled six times that’s just limping along. Put it out of its misery now.

You can ask, Can I minimize something? Maybe somebody asked for an hour or an in-person, but you think it really could be handled with a five-minute phone call. Well, Friday afternoon make that phone call. Make sure anything that’s on the calendar for the next week really deserves to be there.

Or maybe you’ve got an internal meeting with the same people on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then you could maybe be disciplined about the agenda and get through both things on Tuesday. But what happens when people get so busy is that they just start tromping from thing to thing, like schoolchildren changing classes. Like, “Here’s my 2 o’clock, my 3 o’clock, my 4 o’clock.” And we don’t pause to think about whether it’s the right thing to be doing.

If you do this ahead of time, on the Friday of the week before, you can often buy yourself hours and minutes. Maybe it’s that you can delegate something. You’ve brought new talent into your organization, and it’s really time to start training people who would view the things you’ve been doing forever as an opportunity. That’s a great way to free up time as well.

You can do these three things on the home front, as well. You can ignore, minimize and outsource at home. People always tell me, “Laura, it costs money to outsource household chores,” which is true, but it does not cost anything to lower your standards. So I would highly recommend looking into that one as well.

Just a little bit more about that because I find that people have all sorts of stories we tell ourselves about what we are doing on the home front, and these things wind up filling huge amounts of time, whether we truly believe them or not. And I see these stories all the time on time logs. I remember one that a very busy lawyer kept for me. She was working extremely late one night in order to bill some extra time so she could have a reasonable life the rest of the week. So, that’s great. Think 168 hours, not 24. Gold star.

She was working really late. The rest of her family was hanging out, having a grand old time, but they hadn’t gotten the memo that she hoped the house would be spotless when she showed up at 10 p.m. So, she came home and found toys all over the floor. What did her time log show her doing? Any guesses? Picking it up. Right.

Now, I asked her about this. I said, “Well, why? Is there going to be an 11 p.m. home inspection? Is somebody coming around to give you demerits for having toys on the floor?” “Well, no.” There is no 11 p.m. home inspection, right? In fact, that mess is just going to come out again the next morning, whereas, you’ll never get that hour back. So, it’s better to sit back, relax, kick up your feet, have a glass of wine and learn to live in a bit of a mess.

That was our fifth strategy, build in space.

The sixth strategy is to take care of ourselves. When I’ve done my time diary projects, I’ve found something very heartening, which is that many successful people do, in fact, sleep. I don’t know why we are just so obsessed with people who don’t. If you read a magazine, like business magazine stories, it’s always about somebody who wakes up at 3:30 a.m. to do whatever — run marathons — before going to work or something. Most people do, in fact, sleep, including very successful people.

There was a time diary study done on CEOs of big public companies. They had their assistants track their time for a week, and they found that they were averaging about seven hours of sleep a day, when you looked at the whole week.

For most people, it’s somewhere between seven and eight hours a day, when you look again at the whole week, which I think is great. Sleep is a wonderful thing. We shouldn’t necessarily be celebrating these stories of people who only get four hours because it tends to be that they got four hours on Monday night, and then they spent the rest of the week trying to catch up. So it’s better to just be a little bit more orderly, get your seven hours every day and feel much better about it.

People generally are exercising too, which I don’t think is a coincidence. Because building a big career, raising a family, doing awesome stuff in your community are all very meaningful, but they take a lot of energy. How do we get energy? Well, for most people, sleep and exercise don’t take time. They make time. Because whatever time you devote to these things, within reason, is going to be paid back to you in terms of better focus. And whenever you skimp on these things, it’s going to be taken away from you in terms of a lack of focus, and I see this all the time on time logs.

People don’t pay attention to their energy levels. They think, Look at me. I’m a machine. That doesn’t even work because machines get downtime too. “But, you know, I can work through lunch. I don’t need to think about my energy levels.” But we do. Because if we don’t think about our energy levels, we won’t be able to get done what we need to. Sleep and exercise add to our energy holistically. But there are even little things we can do during the day to boost our energy levels because some things add to our energy level, and some things take away. And if you track your time, and I really hope you will, you might write down what these things are that add to your energy levels and take away. It doesn’t mean they’re good or bad.

You can also just track how you react to it. If you’re an extremely introverted person and you’ve had a morning of very intense meetings, you may need to sort of retreat and read a book for a little bit to get yourself back to dealing with the world. Whereas, if you’re extremely extroverted and you’ve been focused on writing a research report for something all morning, you probably need to go seek out a colleague and talk and get yourself motivated that way.

But figure out what you can do to add to your energy levels, and then proactively build in breaks doing these things during the day. Because if you don’t, if you’re like, “Hey, look at me. I can work through lunch. I’m going to be all productive,” a funny thing happens around 2:30 or 3 in the afternoon. You start reading the same email over and over again. And then you’re like, “Oh,” and you pull out the phone. “Somebody sent me a little alert. Somebody just posted a photo on Facebook. Let me just go check that out real quick.” The next thing you know, you’re over at Facebook looking at other photos of people you’re not really all that fond of anyway. And 45 minutes can disappear down this internet rabbit hole.

And what happened is that your brain needed a break. And when you don’t give it a real one, it will take a fake one. But it would have been so much better to give it a real one. Go outside, get some fresh air, walk around, come back 15 minutes later, and you’ll actually be able to focus instead of losing that 45 minutes. You’ll actually come out ahead by taking the real breaks.

We can also build in breaks to the week as a whole. I think that weekends are the secret weapon of successful people. And I don’t mean that they work around the clock on the weekends. I also don’t mean that they never work on the weekends because sometimes this happens. But I find that successful people view their weekends with an eye toward adding to their energy levels.

I know that a lot of us view weekends differently. We’re so busy during the week that we get to the weekend and think, I want to do nothing. But it’s impossible to do nothing. You’ll do something, but it might not be nearly as rejuvenating as if you’d put a little bit of thought into it. Or else we get to the weekend and we’re like, “OK, here’s my list of six months of house chores that I haven’t gotten to. I’m going to get through them all by Monday.” No, you’re not. And you’ll just hit Monday exhausted.

So, a better idea is, a couple of days ahead of time, ask yourself, What three things could I do this weekend to add to my energy levels? Not three things you have to do, three things you’d like to do. And it doesn’t have to be elaborate. Maybe it’s going for a walk with a friend, grabbing dinner with your spouse somewhere, volunteering somewhere or going to worship services somewhere. But find three things that would add to your energy levels — figure out when they can happen. Figure out the logistics, and you will hit Monday far more ready to go. So that is the sixth strategy, to take care of ourselves.

Let’s talk through what we had again. The first strategy is to figure out where the time really goes. So we’re going to track our time and see and get good data so we can make good decisions. The second strategy is to look forward and figure out what we want as our 2019 goals, both professionally and personally. The third strategy is first things first. Treat our priorities as the equivalent of that broken water heater, and think through our weeks before we are in them. The fourth strategy is to move time around. We are going to think 168 hours, not 24, and use our mornings in order to get more done. The fifth strategy is to build in space. We can ignore, minimize and outsource in order to fit the things in our lives that we need to. The sixth strategy is to take care of ourselves and monitor our energy so we can get more done.

And, finally, the seventh strategy is to use bits of time. So even with these scheduling ideas, we can wind up with small bits of time that are hard to use well. You know what these are — five minutes while you’re waiting for a phone call to start or five minutes while you’re waiting for a train. What do we all do with this time? We pull out the phone and start deleting emails. It feels so productive, doesn’t it? “Wow, I got all those emails deleted. Who knows if I accomplished my most important business and personal goals for today, but I know for sure that I got down from 150 unread messages to 50 so, yay. Go me!” What gets measured seems to get done. But I’m not sure if it’s really productive in the grand scheme of things and even if it’s good to delete the emails. Eventually, you probably don’t have to check in every five minutes to delete what has come in since the last time.

I think email is best approached in chunks of time throughout the day. They can be frequent chunks, but consciously chosen chunks. And use some of these little bits of time for something else, something else that will add joy and meaning to your life. Lots of people want to read more books. They can be professionally oriented books, like self-development or business books, and novels are great too, you know. You learn a lot about the human condition that way.

A couple of years ago, I put the Kindle app on my phone. It’s an e-reader app, so I could put e-books on my phone. And then I could start using those small bits of time when I would be deleting emails to read books. And it is amazing, or possibly embarrassing, how much literature I’m getting through now that I’m using those little chunks of time to read instead of just deleting emails that have come in since the last check. But there are lots of things you can do.

You can spend that time, those five-minute chunks of time, thinking through things you’re grateful for. You can meditate or pray. You can go talk to a colleague. You can write in a journal. You can think about your business goals. You can think about your personal goals. Or you could stare out the window at the clouds. Imagine that. We used to do that sort of thing before we had phones in our pockets to seize any minute of boredom.

A couple of years ago, I did a time diary project for my book, “Off the Clock,” and I had 900 busy people track their time for a day. Then I asked them questions about how they felt about their time so I could compare the schedules of people who felt time was abundant with people who felt starved for time. And, again, these are all equivalently busy people. But one of the biggest differences, I found, is that the people who felt time was most abundant checked their phones about half as frequently as the people who felt starved for time.

Again, everyone’s checking like at least hourly. This is not some sort of monastic existence here where they swore off social media and swore off their friends. But there’s a big difference between checking hourly and checking every five minutes. So, if you use these little bits of time for something else, I promise you, you will have a lot more joy and meaning in your life.

Laura Vanderkam is the author of several time-management and productivity books, including “Off the Clock,” “I Know How She Does It” and “What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast.” Her work has appeared in publications including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Fast Company and Fortune. She is the co-host of the podcast “Best of Both Worlds.”