How busy are we, exactly?
The author and time management expert Laura Vanderkam decided to answer that question for herself. She tracked her time for an entire year (8,784 hours in a leap year), and in doing so learned her life was a bit less hectic than she thought. Ms. Vanderkam, a working mother of four young children, recently wrote in The Times about her experience.
The article, “The Busy Person’s Lies,” was widely viewed and shared and generated hundreds of comments. But it also left some of us with questions for Ms. Vanderkam, whose latest book is “I Know How She Does It: How Successful Women Make the Most of their Time.” I recently spoke with Ms. Vanderkam to find out exactly how she did it, the best apps for tracking time and why some people have been critical of her time-tracking advice. Here’s an edited version of our conversation.
How did you do this? Break it down for us — did you use a datebook, or an app?
I used a spreadsheet. It’s just an Excel worksheet, with the days of the week across the top and then blocks for the time, from 5 a.m. to 5 a.m. in half-hour increments. It’s on my laptop, and it was pretty much open all the time.
How often did you update it?
Most weekdays I probably updated it between three and six times. If I wasn’t at my laptop during the day, I kept a sort of a mental tally all day and filled it in in the evening. As long as you’re looking at half-hour blocks and paying attention, not estimating, you’re not likely to make big mistakes, the way you do if someone asks you, how much to you sleep, or how much do you work, and you just guess without any data. If you’re tracking, you’re going to be off by minutes, not hours, and you’ll still get the information you want.
What’s the first step to tracking your time? How long a period should you track?
Just choose a tool to use. The tool itself doesn’t matter. You can use a spreadsheet, or one of a million time tracking apps, or a Moleskine notebook if you want to look all artsy. The key is to do it consistently. And a week is great, or even a few days. The longer you do, the more insights you get, but a week is enough to see patterns.
Any apps you recommend?
Toggl is free for the basic version. If you want to use an app, I suggest using that for a while, and see if you feel like you need any extra bells and whistles. Once you know what you like, you look for a paid app.
What kinds of categories did you use?
I didn’t categorize until I was finished. I just wrote a brief description of what I did during that half hour — feed baby/email, speech, church, shop Target, work on train, things like that. I categorized later. I looked at work, sleep, exercise, housework and errands, TV, reading and time in the car, because those were the things I was interested in. Different people will have different categories. I could have pulled out different things, like child care, but as a mother of four who often works at home, so much of that is nebulous. I’m pretty aware of it. But if I were concerned with whether I spent enough time with my kids, or wondering what those numbers looked like, I would have tallied that.
Did you expect to be able to account for every hour out of your 24?
No. Some people get hung up on this. I’m not a perfectionist. If I ran on the treadmill for 27 minutes and spent three going upstairs and getting water, I’m calling that 30 minutes of exercise. And the time that’s sort of unclassifiable is fine with me — hanging out watching kids play, or flipping through a magazine. The big categories won’t go wrong.
Is there an issue with being honest with yourself? People always say, “I never watch TV,” but they seem to know everything that happens on “Game of Thrones.” Do you have to make a commitment to not lie to yourself to make this work?
When I do this, it’s just for me. Which means that I don’t think there is any reason to lie on it. If you’re not happy with the amount of TV you watch, or whatever, time tracking is a good way to notice that. Just because you know where the time goes doesn’t mean that you need to punish yourself for wasting it or feel bad about spending it the way you do. Are you happy, or not? If you’re happy, celebrate that. There’s nothing wrong with sitting on the porch drinking a glass of wine and staring at the trees.
But if you have open time and you don’t ask yourself, what would make me happy — if you just spend that time mindlessly on Twitter because your phone is in your hand — then maybe this is your chance to ask what you want to do with that time that is meaningful. Life is what it is. It’s just a matter of asking, now I know this. Do I want to keep it, or do I want to change it?
One of the concerns in the comments on your “The Busy Person’s Lies” piece is that time tracking is a luxury of the upper class. Is time tracking useful for people who don’t have white-collar, flexible jobs?
I think it’s still very useful. With some jobs, you know exactly how many hours you work — it’s right there on your check. But it’s still easy to have the rest of life go by mindlessly. Some of us need a reality check on work. Others want to check other things in their lives. We have only so many hours and a life is lived in hours. I think we all share an interest in figuring out where they go and if we are spending them in ways that are meaningful and enjoyable.
I did see the comments that sort of relegated this to first-world problems. I could understand that better if I were complaining, but I’m not. My point is that I see life as a working person in a prosperous country as very doable, and I think that is a good story to tell ourselves.
What’s one of the most important things we can learn from tracking our time?
Sometimes we don’t want to own up to how much of time is a choice. But for many of us, there is a reasonable amount of choice in how we spend our days. Using the language of being “busy” lets us avoid responsibility for those choices.
I always use the example of a woman whose water heater broke during the week when she was tracking her time, and it took her seven hours to deal with it. Any of us would say we don’t have seven hours, but when we have water all over the basement floor, we find seven hours.
How do we figure out what really matters to us, and how we can treat it like a broken water heater? That’s the big question.
If you choose to track your time, and the results push you toward changes in how you spend time or how you think about it, let us know. Email us at wellfamily@nytimes.com, and we might use your story in a later post.
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