This week on the Where Parents Talk, host Lianne Castelino interviews Laura Vanderkam, an author, podcaster, and speaker renowned for her expertise in time management and productivity. Vanderkam, who has written six books on the subject, including 'Tranquility by Tuesday,' shares her insights on how to effectively manage time, especially for busy parents. She discusses common misconceptions about time management, the importance of tracking time, and offers practical strategies to balance work, family, and personal time. Vanderkam emphasizes the significance of prioritizing activities, saying no to less important commitments, and incorporating weekly planning. She provides valuable tips for parents to manage their time more efficiently and find space for the things that truly matter.

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Welcome to Where Parents Talk. My name is Lianne Castelino. Our guest today is an author, podcaster, and speaker. Laura Vanderkam is a thought leader in time management and productivity, having written six books on the topics. Her last book is called Tranquility by Tuesday, Nine Ways to Calm the Chaos and Make Time for What Matters.

Laura is also a mother of five, and she joins us today from just outside. Philadelphia. Thank you so much for making the time in your case. Well, thank you so much for having me. I appreciate it. You've studied time management extensively. What key principles would you say, Laura, that universally apply? And how do they shift then for parents?

Yeah, well, the really cool thing about time is that we all have the same amount of it. So people have wildly varying amounts of money and various other resources, but the mightiest person on the planet still has 24 hours in a day, 168 hours in a week. And so whatever we are going to accomplish in life, we are going to have to do that within this, universal constraints.

So I, I find that a fascinating thing about time. Now, obviously, when you are a parent, you tend to have a few more, constraints on the time than, than many other people do. Many people wind up with a bit of a story of time scarcity, particularly both in, you know, the early years when they have babies and toddlers and then to a degree when they have kids who are doing all sorts of activities or other things that can consume a lot of time.

But, you know, we still all have the same amount of time. And even if we're trying to do a lot with our time, I think many people are surprised to discover When they look into it that they may have more space than they thought. And that when we make good choices with our time and really ask ourselves what we wish to do with it, we often can make space for all the things that matter to us, even amid some pretty heavy responsibilities.

So, before we get into some of those tricks and tips in terms of how to make space as you describe it, what are some of the biggest misconceptions from your experience about how parents should manage their time? Well, I think there's a really unfortunate story, that If you are working for pay that that consumes all of your time on even in the words we have around this, like so a full time job.

We use the word full to mean, you know, I guess it consumes the full amount of my time, right? And yet when you look at how time actually goes, I mean, there's 168 hours in a week. A full time job for many people is about 40 hours a week. So 40 is not 168. Even if you subtract, uh, seven, you know, eight hours a night for sleep.

So 56 hours in a week, we're still talking 72 hours for other things, for the different roles in our lives. And so, you know, one of the big misconceptions is that if you are working full time, you won't have a lot of space available to interact with other people. Enjoy your family to, you know, make the most of that responsibility as well, or even to have time to do your own things.

And I say, for most people, that's actually not the case that there are space, there's space for all these things. If you're careful about how you allocate your hours. So, yeah, I think that's a pretty common misperception, that people pit work and parenthood against each other in a way that's often not quite as harsh a trade off as people tend to think.

You are a big proponent of people tracking time as a potential first step in terms of how to address this issue in their lives. For busy parents, is there a manageable way to track time to really start themselves on sort of solid footing? It's not that hard, I promise. I have been tracking my time on weekly spreadsheets, just Excel for nine and a half years now.

And Granted, I write about time management, so maybe I find this more interesting than other people would, but I wouldn't have stuck with it for nine and a half years if it was onerous at all. So, I have these weekly spreadsheets that have the days of the week across the top, Monday to Sunday, half hour blocks down the left hand side going 5 a.

m. to 4 30 a. m. You know, I check in three times a day, write down what I've done since the last time I checked in, in fairly broad strokes, so things like work, sleep, drive. Hang out, read, you know, the names of my kids if I'm spending time with them or whatever. And I check in three times a day. Each check in takes me about a minute.

So it's been three minutes in a day, about the same amount of time I spend brushing my teeth. It really doesn't take that much time. So, but, you know, the idea is not to do it forever, but I think anyone can benefit. From tracking time for at least one week for 168 hours, because a week tends to be the cycle of life as we actually live it, and that means that we are able to, just get a good picture of our lives, When people think of their lives, they often think of a busy Tuesday, but there are also Saturdays, Sundays, there are holidays, there are, days you left work early for some reason.

There's all sorts of time, and we want to make sure we have a complete picture of it. So what, Laura, are, would you suggest are some effective strategies for parents who feel like, for example, they're constantly torn between, their work life and their family responsibilities, and presumably might not even have time to track their time in order to address their time issue?

Well, I think, one of the key things is for people to get A grip on what they would like to do with their time because many of us have a story of like, I have no time, but the problem is if you have the story that I have no time, then you don't think about what you'd like to do with your time because why would you, you have no time, right?

Like there's, there's no point in even having that conversation with yourself. But then the issue is that when you do have some discretionary time, which everybody does to some degree, even if it's not as much as I want, if you haven't thought about what you're going to do, you're going to do whatever is right in front of you.

Right. And for many people these days, that tends to be electronic distractions, right? Where, you know, reading headlines, scrolling around online, social media, things like that. But it could be other things. I mean, it could be puttering around the house. You know, I don't know, sorting the mail pile on extra time, something like that.

But we do these things because they're right in front of us. But if we thought about it a little bit more, we might have been able to substitute something a little bit more interesting for that time. So I encourage people to go ahead and make a list, you know, pretend you had all the time in the world.

What would you like to spend more time doing? And there are some things that may not be particularly easy at this stage of life, but then there's other things that probably are. I mean, maybe there are books you want to read and you're kind of telling yourself the story, well, I have no time to read. And then we look at our.

You know, iPhones and they're telling us you're spending three hours a day on your phone. It's like, well, where's that time going? But the problem is it's often in these little chunks. You're like checking your email, checking your text, and then you go on and start scrolling around on headlines because you're right there.

It's like if you just repurpose a couple of those minutes for reading an e book or something because you have your phone with you. Well, all of a sudden you're spending more time on reading than you are on reading. doing these other things. Or maybe it's that you want to spend more time with friends and it's hard to kind of get together for say a Saturday night dinner with friends at this particular stage of your life.

But maybe it's that, you know, you've got a little bit of space. Maybe some days you work from home and there's a space between dropping the kids off in the morning. And when your first call is, maybe you have a friend in the neighborhood who might meet you for a walk. And, you know, you start to see that there are ways to get a little bit of whatever you feel you are missing into your life, even when things are particularly busy.

You know what I find particularly interesting about this topic at this time is we've never lived in the history of the world in a time where we've had more ways to communicate, more ways to schedule ourselves, more ways to manage productivity and time management than right now. What strikes you, Laura, about what kind of, Trends you've observed in the time that you've been, on this topic and at it from a frontline perspective about, busyness today.

Is it a crutch? Is it actually valid? So I have somewhat of a different perspective on this because people always seem to think that we live at the busiest time in human history. Right. People say, well, the speed of everything is faster now than it used to be. I mean, maybe to some degree, but we still have.

24 hours in a day. We still have 168 hours in a week, same as people have had at any other point. Honestly, people have always believed that they lived at kind of the busiest time in history. I like to collect old magazines, because they show you what people were thinking at the time. Like what was the current, Mindset of this.

But then, of course, when more women started working for pay, and substituting paid labor for some of that unpaid labor, we didn't get more hours in the day, but people decided that maybe you didn't have to wax your floors as frequently as people were doing in the past. So, how we spend our time does tend to change over time, but people kind of always believe that they are fairly busy.

But the good news about that is, As you can often change your mindset fairly quickly, and this was certainly the case in the early days of the pandemic, which, everyone was sort of trying to figure out what was going on, and all of a sudden there wasn't all this other stuff, that was an option.

And so people were like, Oh, you know, now I finally have time to build those Lego sets. I have time for this hobby I was doing. But most of these hobbies. don't actually take that much time, right? Like somebody's like, well, I finally built that Lego set that had been sitting on my shelf for 10 years.

And it's like, you finally build it. It takes you 12 hours. It's like, can you tell me that you didn't have 12 hours in the course of the past 10 years? Well, no, it's just that when anything is an option, you feel like you should be doing something else. And it makes you feel more tense about your time, but you don't have to think that.

So I always encourage people to. Put the good stuff in first, let the chips fall where they may around it. But if you tell yourself a story that you have the time for the things that are important to you, you probably will make space for the things that are important to you. Whereas if you're telling yourself a story that I'm just so busy, there's no time for anything, then, you start to look for evidence to support that.

It's, it's certainly very true. Um, the other thing that's so interesting about your background is sort of the books that you've written. And one in particular where you looked at super incredibly busy, executives and looked at life and time management through their perspective. I'm https: otter.

ai Well, I think it's, always fascinating to me how people who do have a lot of demand for their time organize their time and, you know, I've, I have not interviewed Beyonce, let me say, but when I say that everyone has the same amount of time, people would be like, well, what about somebody like Beyonce?

I mean, she may have the same amount of time, but she has all these other people doing stuff around her, which means that she can do more. It's like, well, maybe that's true, but. Beyonce can't pay somebody to sleep for her. She can't pay somebody to exercise for her. If she wants a relationship with her kids, she still has to be there doing it some amount of the time.

So in that case, the opportunity cost for people like that is even higher than the rest of us. So I, I have just been fascinated to see what people who do have a lot of demand for their time, um, do. But one thing that I will pass along is that I am surprised at how much open space some incredibly in demand people build into their schedules.

And I say it's surprising because, you know, I think a lot of us have the story that the busier you are, the more important you are, which does kind of make sense. It's having a lot of demand for your time is the definition of being important. But I find that many of these people are a bit careful about making more space in their lives just for practical reasons.

I mean, if meetings run over. You don't want to be rushing the whole day. You want to make sure you're getting where you're going, but also just to seize opportunity because the upside of being in charge of a lot of things is people often will come to you with good ideas and some are terrible.

And some are good and you want to be able to sort of seize the ones that are good, but you aren't going to know all of those at the beginning. So they want to leave this space for opportunity so they can execute on these things that come to them. So I find that's maybe a lesson for the rest of us.

Maybe people aren't coming to us with amazing ideas. But on the other hand, maybe a friend is going to call and suggest you guys get together for a weekend sometime. And if every weekend is booked from now until eternity, It's going to be hard to pull off, but if you have a little bit more open space, you can seize these opportunities when they arise.

Laura, do you have any suggestions about routines or habits that parents can look to adopt to help them stay on track and on time? So I always recommend that people institute a weekly planning time, and I do mine toward the end of the week, Thursday or Friday, looking forward to the next week. Some people do this Sunday night, some people might do it Monday morning, like it doesn't really matter what time it is so much as that you do it.

But what you want is a time every single week where you check in and ask yourself What is most important for you to do over the next week? What is important to you professionally if you are working for pay? What is important to you in terms of your relationships like, with the family and friends and what is important to you personally?

That you want to accomplish over the next week. And so you figure out what those priorities are and you make sure that there is adequate space for them and the logistics are taken care of. So you know that they'll be happening. And then you also look at what you've already committed to, what is on the schedule for the next week?

Does that all make sense that you are doing? Are there any logistics that need to be sorted out in order for you to meet those commitments over the next week? Are there any logistics Challenging spots that now that you're looking at this ahead of time, you will be able to solve. You wouldn't be able to solve in the moment.

So it's good that you're planning ahead. And finally, what are you looking forward to over the next week? Because, you know, we often plan whatever we have to do. We've made sure everyone's getting to their soccer games. Everyone's, going to the dress rehearsal for the play and, you're bringing in the snacks for the class or whatever it is that you have to do.

But we don't think about it. Well, what am I actually looking forward to? Like, what do I see on my calendar for the next week that makes me go, whoa, I'm excited to do that. And if there isn't anything, then this is your opportunity to put it in so that, the future becomes a slightly more exciting prospect than just making sure everything, you know, all the trains move on time.

It strikes me that one of the pain points for many people in terms of managing their time, addressing time management, addressing productivity, is the ability to say no. In other words, the ability to prioritize within their priorities or just prioritize in general. Any tips you can share on that as it relates to parents in particular?

So It can be very hard to say no to things. One little mental trick that many people find helpful is that whenever you're thinking about doing something, or you're thinking of committing to something, and it's in the future, ask yourself if you would do it tomorrow. Because we tend to overestimate.

Our future capacity for doing things. Um, you know, you're, you're asked to do something in April and you're like, Oh, yeah, April me won't be busy. April me is going to have tons of time. And on some level, it makes sense because you're looking at your calendar now for April. It does look pretty open,

come April, it won't be like you're going to be the exact same person you are now. You're going to have just as much going on. Only you will now also have this other commitment that you were lukewarm about in the fall stacked onto the pile. So you always just want to ask yourself, would I do this tomorrow?

And of course you're busy tomorrow. You're booked up solid tomorrow, but would you be willing to move things around? Would you be willing to cancel things in order to take on this new opportunity? And if you would awesome. Like, say yes, because you're going to be just as excited in the future, but if you're like, yeah, no, I'd say no for tomorrow.

Like, I wouldn't even think about it. Then clearly you're not that excited, right? Like, I mean, you know, we're, we're thinking of doing stuff. It's always on a one to 10 point scale. It's like, we're comparing a story. But it's not nothing you have the ability to engineer probably an eight, nine or 10 into your life if you wanted to, if the space was available.

So, you know, compare it to that instead of instead of that. So, um, I think that's one thing you can do. But I think it's also, what I was just getting at there that you could have an eight, nine or 10 instead of the six that's on offer is a That, you might be able to put in some really cool stuff into your life, and you also want to leave some space for serendipity, too, because you don't know everything over the course of the next week or month or year that's going to come up that you might want to do, and it could be that some new friend comes into your life that you're going to want the space to meet with.

It could be that some cool travel opportunity comes into your life. It could be some new professional opportunity. So you know, we, we want to say yes to things and being able to say yes to cool stuff is about saying know to stuff that isn't quite as exciting. So along those lines, are there any common time wasters or low value activities that parents can find themselves involved in and then just get into this cycle of, you know, poor productivity and, not optimal time management?

So I think the biggest time waster is being unintentional about our time. It's you know, I wish it were one thing. I wish it were like meetings, email, social media, house cleaning, whatever driving around. I mean, there's lots of things that people spend more time on than they would like to spend time on.

But those things might waste a few hours here and there. Not thinking about how you want to spend your time can just waste incredible amounts of it. And one example of this is if you don't think about how you want to spend your weekend. Until you get to like Saturday morning. Well, nobody wants to do anything.

So the only thing you do is what you absolutely, you've already committed to do. Like somebody has a soccer practice or whatever it is. And then there's all this time that you'll spend kind of puttering around or like sort of hurting small children if you've got little ones, or, resorting the mail pile or something.

Whereas if you'd thought about it and said, you know, Hey, I'm just gonna, Call up my friend and during this soccer practice, she lives nearby. I wonder if she'd be willing to go for a run with me or meet me for coffee. And then it'd be on your calendar. And if it's something you're really looking forward to, and instead of that time being kind of nebulous, it would be spent doing something that you might really, really enjoy.

And it's hard to sort of see that in the abstract of like, Oh, well, you know, I just had this weekend of doing X, Y, or Z as opposed to putting a little bit of time thinking about what you would like to do and then enjoying time far more than the stuff that you don't want to do takes less time and you got more time for the stuff you do want to do.

Absolutely. You talked about the Excel spreadsheet as something very basic in terms of tools that we could look at in terms of tracking time. Are there any other tools or resources that you think, you know, are of value in particular to parents, with respect to this subject? Yeah, I don't really have a whole lot of time saving or productivity apps to recommend, and partly that's because, apps make us spend more time on our phones, and it would have to be a very, very helpful app to justify the extra time that you'd then wind up spending on your phone because it's there, and that makes your phone more interesting.

So I generally try to stay off of it as much as possible. Um, you know, but I think it doesn't have to be. Technologically advanced. Um, you can track your time with a notebook and pen. You can use the Excel spreadsheets like I do. Planning for your upcoming week can be as simple as having a paper calendar, or maybe you've got an elaborate outlook calendar.

It could be either, it can be a paper calendar. A pCastelinor can be a fancy one. It can be a page in a notebook. What matters is more that you have the systems for making this all work. And if you have systems for being organized about your life, then the tools themselves don't really matter. What matters is that you use them.

When we talk about systems, I'm curious, Laura, as a mother of five, ranging from age 17, down to four, clearly you've mastered this or you're on your way to mastering the subject matter on some level, you know, what brought you down this journey and how did time manage and productivity change?

The more children you had, well, the good news is it doesn't completely change. I mean, I think that, going from zero to one is the big lifestyle change and everything else is just more junk. I am always keeping track of where five people are at different places. The older ones are kind of. In many cases responsible for themselves, but I still generally like to know what their schedules are.

So I have a rough sense of where they are going. You kind of picture a circus with different acts going at the same time, but, the image I like to use is being the ringmaster of this circus with many things going on with the kids. My work, various other things that I'm involved in, that I want to do for myself as well.

And a good ringmaster can calmly be in charge of it all. I set down this journey, probably when I did become a parent for the first time. And partly that's because so much that is written about women in particular and work and life is very negative. You know, the thing you keep seeing the headlines of no one can have it all or something like that.

And I have this really cool kid and I still enjoy my work a great deal. I don't feel this huge, conflict between the two that's ripping me apart. I feel like I want to do both. So maybe I'll just study people who are, enjoying their careers, who are enjoying their families, who seem to have enough time for sleep.

And it turns out there are a fair number of people who have all those things. And so, rather than the disasters and the hard moments. There's, some hard moments for everyone, but for most people, life also has good moments. So we can look at those too. And so I decided to write about how people's were spending their time.

And that's been what I've written out ever since. So any secrets in terms of how you make this all work as the ring master, you know, of over all of these years as. There's more demands and more activities and the kids get older, and then there's all these communications tools, et cetera. Like what has allowed you to keep your head above water and thrive?

I think it's somewhat, I mean, I'm an optimistic person, but I'm also a pessimist or I guess a realist in that I expect things will go wrong. And so I am always coming up with backup layers. There's not one layer of childcare. There's two. If something important needs to happen, like if I need to be taking off to the airport, I'm not relying on somebody who's highly likely to get lost in, you know, not lost, I mean, but late in traffic on the way there.

It's like, Ooh, you know, I won't have somebody coming right the minute before I need to be out the door. If my husband's already gone, like I would be arranging it. Quite a bit before, and then knowing what I do if something went wrong with them. Like, there's always multiple layers. And yeah, that takes more effort and takes more money.

I will put that out there too. But it overall allows you to be a lot more calm. Like, I'm not as worried about, will I be able to do this? Like, what if something goes wrong? Well, I've already thought about what if something goes wrong, and this is what I've worked out I will do. And by having that backup, you know, for that or anything else.

I mean, it's not just the childcare. It's also, you know, if, if like put into my contracts, if I'm not there for this speech, is it, you know, is there a different flight? Can I get into that one? Can I do a virtual event? Can I do, you know, it just always thinking about what can go wrong allows you to then be happy when things go right.

And also calm. When things don't go as pCastelinod, because you've already made a plan for what will happen when things don't go as pCastelinod. Well, and it sounds like, you know, if I'm interpreting what you're saying here, it's very much a proactive approach to time management and productivity, right? It doesn't just happen by accident when you talk about sitting there and, you know, tracking your time and then, you know, Planning out your week and all these things.

Um, is there been a mindset shift in particular that you've seen with your work with parents, let's say, um, that has really been useful that, uh, that you can share with us? So one of the things that people often discover when they track their time is that they do have some time that is not spoken for and that they could use.

Sometimes people have been telling themselves the story that because I'm working full time, I never see my family. And then they track their time and realize that they're seeing a ton of their family. It just didn't happen at 10 a. m. on Tuesday. And I guess in their mind, 10 a. m.

on Tuesday is the only time that actually counts. And that's obviously not true. There's many hours beyond 10 a. m. on Tuesday that we can spend with our families. So then people will be like, well, I guess I was, working 40 hours a week. And then I'm also with my family 40 hours a week.

I, they both seem to fit. And so then there's still some time left over where I could maybe do something fun. I've seen people's lives transformed by doing what I call taking one night for you, which is One evening a week, making a commitment to something that you truly enjoy. I sing in a choir. Other people might, have a particular class at the gym that they always want to get to, or they play an instrument in a musical group, or they volunteer somewhere regularly, or they have a friend group that always does something on Tuesday nights or whatever it is, but one night for something that does not work and is not caring for family members, and that is, Fun for you can transform your entire existence because all of a sudden there's something you're constantly looking forward to and you don't have to make arrangements every week like it's automatically happening.

It can be complicated to do that. But if you have little kids, you can trade off with your partner or hire a babysitter or swap with another friend who wants to have, her own night off too. I promise the vast majority of people can make it work and it can make life feel a lot more fun.

One of the things we all talk about when it comes to parenting, especially, you know, any expert modeling, right? So when we talk about modeling behavior, role modeling, when it comes to time management and productivity from parent to child. First of all, why is that important? And in your house, you've got a whole range of kids that you're modeling this behavior to, what are some of the things that you've observed in the course of you managing your time and you being productive in how your kids are interpreting that?

Absolutely. Nobody wants time management lessons from mom. Other people can pay mom for lessons on time management. You still don't want time management lessons from mom. But it's, you know, I generally, my philosophy with parenting is I'm hoping to help my kids develop their own skills and their own self discipline and their own desire to work toward bigger projects, on their own.

My eldest child is applying to college right now. Obviously for many people that can be a stressful process, but I've really been just trying to support him as he figures out, well, these are the things that I need to get done on these dates. Here's how I work backwards to do all the things that I need to get there, with enough time that I'm not crashing into the deadline where something could go wrong, um, you know, that I also have a big test the night before, you know, the deadline for something, uh, and, and so, you know, I'm not trying to impose the calendar on this or anything, but just talk about it.

Like, Oh, you know, when do you have this coming up? Oh yeah. When are you going to work on that? Have you thought about this? And just having the conversation going and, um, you know, yeah. I've been really proud of what he's managed to do in terms of these huge projects of applying to multiple schools and getting everything on time and been cool to see.

Any final golden nugget that you'd like to share with us and certainly with parents about how to better manage time and be more productive? I think you want to make sure that you don't spend more time than necessary on things that aren't particularly important to you or aren't, a top value. I mean, I love eating, but in my family, we have fairly simple meals just because nobody wants to spend hours At a stove making meals.

Nobody wants to spend time planning it either. So Monday is almost always pasta night in my house and everyone likes pasta and nobody has to think about it. And so, you know, there's Monday, Monday dinner is solved. And I think the more things you can automate that way for a solution that everyone's happy with, even if it's not new every week, if it's not elaborate, you know, the simple solution is often a good solution.

So, uh, if you want to make sure that you're putting in your, your time into the things that are important to you and not spending too much time on things that don't quite matter as much to you. Lots of great tips and advice. Laura Vanderkam, author, podcaster, speaker, time management and productivity expert.

We thank you so much for your insight, your perspective, and mostly your time today. Thank you for having me.