If you feel like you never have enough time, like there just aren’t enough hours in the day, this episode is for you. Because when we intentionally prioritize and plan, even the busiest people can find more time for the things they actually want to do.
I’ve been really struggling to get a handle on my own time lately. Between everything I need to do, want to do and feel like I should do, it feels impossible to keep up. So if we all have the same 24 hours in a day, why do some people manage demanding careers, families, relationships and personal goals, while others feel like they’re perpetually running out of time?
Time management expert Laura Vanderkam joins me to unpack why so many of us feel constantly busy, overwhelmed and behind… and how to reclaim our time, prioritize the life we want to be living, and build a greater sense of time abundance without trying to optimize every minute with “bro productivity hacks”.
Laura Vanderkam has spent over 15 years studying how people actually spend their time, drawing on large-scale research and her own time-tracking experiments to understand the relationship between time, productivity and our perception of busyness. She’s written multiple books including her latest, Big Time: A Simple Path to Time Abundance, in which she explores how we can shift away from a mindset of time scarcity and make more room for the things that matter. Laura also hosts two podcasts, and her work has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Today Show, in her viral TED Talk, and on shows like The Mel Robbins Podcast.
Tune in to learn about:
- Time scarcity vs. time abundance: Why we feel like we never have enough time, what the research reveals about how we actually spend our hours, and how to change our relationship with time.
- Rethink your hours: Why we should plan our lives in week-long cycles rather than in 24-hour increments.
- The biggest time-management mistakes we make: Why we misjudge where our time goes, overestimate the things we don’t want to do, and underestimate the things we want to make time for.
- The habits of high performers: How to manage a full, demanding life, with sustainable routines and minimal decision fatigue
- The “golden hours” you might be missing: Making better use of the most overlooked pockets of time in your schedule.
- Revenge bedtime procrastination: Why we stay up late to reclaim our personal time.
- Phone use and wasted time: The digital hobby that wastes our time, robbing us of our attention, real hobbies, and leisure.
- Creating a resilient schedule: Why we should pre-schedule “rain dates” and plan for things to go wrong.
- To-do lists and ruthless prioritization: How to decide what deserves your time when everything feels important, and Laura’s rule for to-do lists.
- Choosing intentionally: Why the stories we tell ourselves about our time and priorities matter.
- Complexity isn’t chaos: Why having a full life isn’t the problem… chaotic planning is.
- Why you don’t need to choose: Laura’s philosophy on why we shouldn’t have to “give up” time with friends or time at the gym when you’re busy with work or parenting.
This conversation goes way deeper than productivity. It’s about intentionally choosing the way you want to live. Because the goal isn’t simply to simplify or to get more done… it’s to spend more time living a fulfilling life. You may not be able to create more hours in the day, but you can rethink how you use them.
Follow Laura:
https://lauravanderkam.com/
https://lauravanderkam.com/before-breakfast-podcast/
Buy Laura's latest book here
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