About this episode

Laura Vanderkam discusses how our perceptions of time can be misleading and how tracking time can improve satisfaction.

What would you do with four extra hours a day? Probably say you don't have them. But according to Laura Vanderkam, one of the world's leading thinkers on time, they're already there. You're just not seeing them.  Laura has tracked her own time for 11 years. She's run large-scale time-tracking studies with hundreds of participants. And what she keeps finding is the same thing: the stories we tell ourselves about our time are almost always wrong. The tasks we dread feel longer than they are. The free time we insist we don't have keeps showing up in the data.  In this How I Work episode, I sit down with Laura to dig into what 11 years of time diaries actually reveal, why tracking your time for just one week can make you feel dramatically better about your life, and how to reclaim those post-dinner hours that most of us write off as dead time. Laura is a bestselling author of many books on time and productivity, and her latest,  Big Time , is one of the most practical and perspective-shifting reads I've come across in a long time.  If you've ever ended a weekend convinced you had no…

People in this episode

Host: Amantha Imber

Guest: Laura Vanderkam

Topics covered

• time management
• productivity
• self-perception
• time tracking
• work-life balance

Keywords

• time tracking
• productivity
• time management
• self-perception
• work-life balance
• golden hours
• time satisfaction

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Big Time

Explore listener stats, chart rankings, contacts and more on the How I Work podcast page.