Time Management: Trading Time Scarcity for Abundance with Laura Vanderkam
About this episode
Laura Vanderkam discusses time management and the concept of time abundance, challenging the perception of time as a scarce resource.
Time management and time abundance are at the center of this conversation with Laura Vanderkam , bestselling author and time-use researcher. Laura Vanderkam has spent over a decade studying how people actually spend their time — tracking her own hours for 11 years and collecting data from thousands of others along the way. Her new book, Big Time: A Simple Path to Time Abundance , makes the case that time isn't the scarce resource we assume it is, and that shifting how you see it changes how you live it. In this conversation, we cover: The lottery ticket reframe — why Laura argues we should treat the time we've been given as an unearned windfall to manage, not a resource we're constantly running out of. The "not actually more overworked" argument — what a century of time-use data really shows, and why the story you tell yourself about having no time matters more than the data itself. Complexity isn't the enemy, chaos is — Laura's circus metaphor for running a full, complicated life without it feeling like it's running you. Dream big, plan small — how reading War and Peace one short chapter a day (the same time it takes to brush your teeth)…
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