168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think

According to the author, we all have more time than we think we do. We need to plan our life, our dreams and our goals using hours, not blocks of time like days or weeks. We all get the same 168 hours every week, so we need to cut out the time-wasting activities we care nothing about. Instead, we should be devoting those hours to our core competencies. Just like a business, we need to focus on what we do best and care most about so we can create the life we want.

"168 Hours" shows us how to accomplish this. Rather than dreaming about finding the time to read "War and Peace" or head back to school to get your MBA, here you'll learn how to actually find the time to do it.

This is the kind of book that all of us can learn something from. Everyone has gone through periods when there doesn't seem to be enough time to breathe, let alone to relax on the front porch or play with our kids. Many people go years in this perpetual state of time crunch. Living life this way is not only stressful, but it can be unfulfilling and ultimately unproductive.

"168 Hours" shows us how to find the kind of time most of us only dream of, so we can create a meaningful life and career. This is also a book that divides itself equally between time management and life enhancement. The author spends a great deal of time offering advice on how to discover your perfect role, and identify the goals you truly want to accomplish in life.

The author, Laura Vanderkam, is a journalist whose work has appeared in Reader's Digest, USA Today, Scientific American, and Wired. She's also the author of the best-selling book "Grindhopping."

So, keep listening to find out how spreadsheets can help you get rid of time-wasting activities, how to run shorter, more effective meetings, and a useful technique to identify the work that truly matters for your career.

At the start of the book, the author sets out to convince us that we really do have a lot more time than we think we do.

According to countless time studies conducted all over the world, we claim to spend more time at work, doing housework and running errands than we actually do. And we drastically underestimate how much leisure time we have. For instance, the majority of people in western cultures claim to have only 16 or so hours of leisure time per week. But, we spend more than 16 hours a week just watching television. The majority of people claim to spend around 45-50 hours at work. But by and large, most of us spend around 36 hours at work.

You may be thinking that it's hard to generalize about how much time people spend on things. After all, a lot of people genuinely work 50 hours a week and have very little leisure time. But in this chapter, as well as the rest of the book, the author uses well-sourced research to prove that most of us have more time than we think we do. And, it's hard to argue with the numbers that she presents.

The reason why we think we don't have much time is that we don't stop to analyze what we're really doing with our time. So, we spend more time than we might like on things, like watching TV or surfing the Internet, that don't bring us much pleasure or fulfillment.

Instead of devoting our time to high impact activities that require thought and initiative, like playing with our kids or improving our careers, we waste time on easy activities that do little to improve our lives. This, in turn, makes us feel overworked and under-rested.

The author suggests we start with a blank slate. In your mind, wipe away every commitment and obligation you have. Instead, picture a spreadsheet with 168 hourly slots. How you fill those slots every week is entirely up to you. Even with sleeping 8 hours per night, and working 50 hours per week, we're still left with 62 hours, or slots, for other things.

We thought this was a perceptive concept that makes a wonderful introduction to the book. Looking at our time as a blank slate means, in a sense, we can start over. We can fill up our spreadsheet only with activities and pursuits that deserve to be there. This first chapter offers a lot of useful insights into why we spend so much time on low impact or valueless activities. It will make many readers reexamine why they're choosing to watch TV rather than map out next year's career goals. So, don't miss it.

Now that you're convinced you might have more time available than you thought, why don't you actually find it so you can start using it? Well, this is what the rest of the book covers.

There are many useful tips in the chapters focusing on work. And, one of our favorites was how to save time during meetings.

The author tells the story of an organization called East Meets West, a non-profit organization that provides life-saving medical equipment to developing countries like Vietnam. This equipment helps premature babies breathe safely, saving thousands of lives each year.

The organization is busy, and incredibly effective. And one way they do this is to keep their meetings short, so everyone can get back to what they should be doing, which is saving lives.

John Anner, the organization's founder, has developed a particular system for conducting meetings. Everyone, down to the newest employee, knows the format. Every meeting has an agenda, as well as a time frame next to each item. These times are strictly kept. No one is at the meeting who doesn't need to be there. And at the beginning of the meeting, the leader spells out the goals.

There are plenty more tips in this section, but we thought the most important one was about training. The leadership team trains the staff on how to hold effective meetings. Everyone knows the routine, and they all realize that the organization's real work takes place outside the conference room. Wasting time isn't an option.

Although many managers work to run more productive meetings, few, we think, train their teams to do the same thing. However, training your staff on how to be more effective during meetings means that everyone is working together to be more productive.

At East Meets West, it's estimated teams save 10 hours per week simply by sticking to a meeting agenda, with set time limits for each issue.

If you're in a management position, you could easily adopt this technique with your team. Training them to participate in and run more effective meetings could save you, and them, hours each week.

Another thing we need to do is to identify what is work, and what isn't work.

According to the author, work is anything we do that advances us towards our life or career goals. Any task or activity that doesn't do this simply isn't work.

Now, all of us know we have to check email, schedule conference calls and complete our departmental budgets on time. And while these activities have to be done, we can minimize the time spent doing them.

Then we'll have more time to identify the activities that will move us towards our goals. And, we'll have more time to focus on taking the steps that will get us there.

Sounds pretty obvious, but there's an enlightening story that really helps illustrate this point.

Carol Fassbinder-Orth is a young biologist who's accomplished an incredible amount of success very early in life. In her mid-20s, the mother of two already had her Ph.D, and was working as a professor at a prestigious university. And she did it without working the 80 hours a week that most people say is necessary to build such a career.

She realized early on that scientists aren't judged by the number of hours they spend in the lab. So she wouldn't attain a professorship just by putting in a ton of time. She knew if she wanted to move forward on her career goals, she needed to find out how scientists, and potential professors, are judged. And she needed to focus all her time and efforts on those activities.

This kind of focus landed her a professorship at an incredibly early age. And she did this while raising two young children.

Let's see how she did it. Here she is, trying to earn tenure at her university. So, she identifies the work she needs to focus on to achieve this goal.

If Fassbinder-Orth is going to gain tenure, she knows in the next five years she needs 3-5 publications in major journals, she needs to attract a certain level of prestigious grants, and she needs to do a good job lecturing and directing her undergrad students. She minimizes or entirely eliminates time spent on other activities at work, because they don't ultimately move her towards her goal.

Although many readers won't be able to eliminate every non-essential activity from their schedule, we did think this was a useful way to look at work. Identifying the activities or metrics you'll be judged on is a great idea. This allows you to focus more of your time on the work that will move you forward towards your next goal.

What do you do with the tasks that don't do anything for you? The author suggests you either ignore them, minimize them, or delegate them.

So, what's our last word on "168 Hours"?

We thought it was a useful book that almost everyone will learn something from. Without a doubt, the author offers some great advice and tips to help even the busiest executive find more time in their schedule.

By the end of the first chapter you'll be convinced, by the author's compelling voice and cold, hard statistics, that you truly do have more time than you think. The author makes her case exceptionally well, and you'll be excited to dive into the rest of the book. There's enough advice, worksheets and checklists to help you reinvent how you allot your time. This means you'll spend less of it on activities that bring no value to your life, and more on developing your career, playing with your kids, or following your dreams.

That being said, we do have some criticisms of the book.

One of the underlying messages of the book is that we shouldn't be wasting our time on anything we can't excel at. According to the author, there's little point in this. We think it's not as simple as that. Yes, it's a good idea to focus on our strengths as far as possible. But there will always be times when we have to do things we're not so good at, and when that happens, it's often a chance to learn and grow.

This, in turn, leads to our next criticism. The author says you should spend your time on activities that you like and do best. The rest, like housework and cutting the lawn, should be outsourced to someone else – and she devotes an entire chapter to this topic.

For some people, this will be helpful advice, and just the encouragement they need to clear more time for things that matter to them, whether that's personal development activities or family time. There will be others, though, who would rather not spend their money in this way.

Another criticism is that the book's tone, and much of its content, is largely written for busy parents, especially wealthy working mothers. Now, this doesn't detract from the book's high-quality advice. But it might be wearing for many readers, especially those who don't have children or aren't interested in reading dozens of case studies about how some working parents cleared up their schedules so they could attend their children's weekly soccer match.

So, while there are plenty of practical, time-saving tips in this book, and plenty of advice, there are also many tips and suggestions that some readers simply won't find useful. After all, we can't all afford to hire a personal shopper, like the author does herself, and suggests we do in chapter seven.

All in all, "168 Hours" does have useful advice and practical tips that will help readers reanalyze their lives and schedules. But parts of the book might be irrelevant for some readers, especially those who don't have children.

"168 Hours" by Laura Vanderkam is published by the Penguin Group.

That's the end of this episode of Book Insights. Thanks for listening.