#079 - Laura Vanderkam - Why Does Time Pass More Quickly As You Get Older?
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I'm telling you, man. Today's episode is absolutely fantastic. Welcome back to the Modern Wisdom Podcast. My name is Chris Williamson, and today's guest is Laura Vanderkam. Her recent book, Off the Clock, is one of my favorites of 2019 and talks about a number of phenomenons that you will be very familiar with.

Why does time appear to go more quickly when you get older? Why is it that you have so many memories from a holiday and yet you can't remember anything from the last three months of your journeys to work? As Laura puts it, time keeps passing whether you want it to or not. Whether you make a decision about how you're going to spend today or don't make a decision, eventually we're going to be on the other side of today.

Which means that the degree of mindfulness with which you choose how to spend your time is...

key to how your life will be perceived in the future. So yeah, there's some genuine aha mic drop moments throughout this podcast and I hope you enjoy it as much as I did. If you did, please share it with a friend. It would make me very happy indeed. The podcast is growing so quickly at the moment, but more plays is always a good thing when we're spreading good vibes. This episode is brought to you by Mint Mobile.

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But for now, please welcome Laura Vanderkam. ♪

I'm joined by Laura Vanderkam today and we are talking all things time.

Laura, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. It's a pleasure to have you on. I've absolutely loved Off the Clock, which is your most recent book, and I've pounded through it over the last couple of weeks, not just because we're about to do this podcast, but also because it was a genuinely fantastic read. So congratulations on an amazing book. Well, thank you so much. I really appreciate that. So yeah, we're talking about time and time management. So what's

To begin with, why is time such a difficult task for people to grapple with? Why is it so important for people to grapple with?

Yeah, well, there's a couple of things going on there. I mean, one of the reasons time is so challenging for people is that it keeps passing, whether you think about how you're spending it or not. So it's so easy to spend mindlessly. You know, whether you make a decision about how you spend today or don't make a decision, eventually we are going to be on the other side of today. So it requires you to really think about it in a way that a lot of other choices are more automatic to make a conscious choice about.

But the hopeful thing about time, in my opinion at least, is that we all have the same amount of it. So a life is lived in hours. And so what we do with our lives is going to be a function of how we spend our hours. And we all have the same number of hours. And we all have 24 hours in a day, 168 hours in a week.

And so when you find people who are doing amazing, awesome things in their lives, they may have many other things going for them. I'm not saying that they're not richer, smarter, better looking than the rest of us, but they don't have more time. And so maybe we can look at how they're allocating their hours. And at least that's something that we can pick up on, even if we can't copy all the other things that they're doing. Yeah.

You're totally right. The fact that I have the same number of hours in my day as Elon Musk does is... Well, I mean, that's unless you believe that he's actually managed to clone himself. I've seen some... People send me mugs sometimes and say, like, you have the same number of hours in the day as Beyonce, which is true. She has many other things that she can leverage to use those hours, but I'm guessing that she still wants to...

you know, do certain things in her professional life that only she can do. And so she has to figure out how to do that. She probably wants to spend time with her family, which is also something that she has to personally do, even if she has support on the home front as well. You know, nobody can exercise for her, for instance. That's something that's actually impossible to outsource, however rich and famous you are.

And so, you know, how does she allocate her hours? I mean, I may not be able to afford all the things Beyonce does, but I could learn something from how she spends her time. One of the things that you've touched on there that I always talk to my friends about is Conor McGregor. So Conor McGregor, unbelievable talent, right, in mixed martial arts. And now he's a businessman and he's doing all this other stuff. But he's just recently had a kid.

And like, there is going to have been a time at three in the morning when Conor McGregor's had to change a dirty nappy. Like that's, that's happened 100%. And there's a quote from Erasmus. It's actually in the School of Life Confidence book, which is like 70 pages big. And it says, from the king in his castle to the peasant in the street, everybody shits.

It's true.

to talk about systems and improving your processes and outsourcing things is great, but you're totally right. There's a lot of things that only you can do. So where do we start? We're looking at 168 hours in a week or 24 hours in a day. How do we begin to get a better grasp on just what's happening?

Well, one of the best things you can do is actually figure out where your time is going. So I am one of these crazy people who tracks my time. I've actually been doing this for four years now, which nobody else needs to do. But I do recommend trying to track your time for a week because a week tends to be the cycle of life as we actually live it. You know, if you track a week, you will see this is pretty much what my life looks like.

And, you know, everyone who does this, um,

get something from it. Very few people are completely and totally aware of where all 168 hours of their week go. We have various stories we tell ourselves, but many of those stories are based on how we feel about our time. You know, if we're tired, if somebody is stressing us out, if a particular week has had a lot of one thing or another, you know, these are all things that influence our perception of where the time goes.

But when we actually keep track of it, we may get very different impressions. And so I think it's important to work from good data. Same thing if you were trying to make a business decision, you'd want reliable data so that you knew you were changing the right thing. And exactly the same with time. I mean, maybe something you thought was a problem really isn't. Maybe something you never even considered is taking far more time than you might have imagined. So you track your time in half hour increments, right? From like, is it five in the morning till...

4.30 in the morning? Yep, you're good. You read the book. I definitely did read the book. Yeah. No, I have these fun spreadsheets, if I'm allowed to use those two words together, that have the days of the week across the top, so Monday through Sunday, and half hour blocks down the left-hand side from 5 a.m. to 4.30 a.m. If any of your listeners want to go to my website, you can get a copy, but you can also just make it yourself.

because I promise it is very low key Excel type stuff. You could whip this out in like 50 seconds if you wanted.

But I just write down what I'm doing a couple times a day. I tend to check in like three to four times a day based on sort of how full the day is. Usually it takes me about a minute each time. So this really only takes me three minutes or so per day, same amount of time I spend brushing my teeth or something, which is, it's just not that big a chunk of time. And it's so useful because I truly know where my time goes. Like I can't tell myself I'm

I'm working 80 hours a week or something like that because I'm clearly not like I can see that. I have learned that I sleep on average. It's somewhere between 7.3 and 7.4 hours per day when you average it over, you know, usually a period of about three or four weeks. That's where it will come out to. I spend about an hour a day in my car, which is not something I would have thought because I don't.

I don't tend to drive long distances. Like I don't have a daily commute. So I, in my mind, I was spending zero time in my car, but of course that's not true. When I added up, it was, it was far more significant than I might've thought. So, you know, you just want to see where the time goes and then you can decide, do I like it? Which if, if so, awesome. If you are unhappy about anything, if you'd like to do more of something, or if you'd like to do less of something, well then now you know what the numbers are. And so then you can start working from there.

Yeah, I think time is this kind of ephemeral, nebulous, difficult-to-define experience that we all go through. And...

Without the hard data to actually look at where you're spending your time, you're totally right. It's open to interpretation. A lot like when someone looks in the mirror, they may have lost four pounds, but if they're having a bit of a bad day and they're in a bit of a mood, they might wake up and look at themselves in the mirror and think, I look terrible today. And you're like, well, by every quantifiable metric, you're better.

but you're allowing your own subjective interpretations to kind of get away with themselves. So you studied a number of people who were tracking their time and some were good and some were bad. Can you explain some of the characteristics of people who had good, was it time mindfulness? What was the term that you used? Sure. Time mindfulness is certainly something you could say. Um,

I've done a number of different time diary projects over the years. There was the one for off the clock. I did a different one for a book I wrote called I Know How She Does It. But one of the things that's key for people who are visibly using time well is that they are intentional about their time. And so you can see things like if somebody gets up in the morning and exercises. Well, that didn't happen

randomly. Like, you don't just like, you know, magically wake up at like 545 and think I'd like to go for a run. Like that, you know, this is somebody who has thought about like, this is the best time of my day to do exercise. So this is what I'm going to make it happen. Or somebody who starts Monday morning with a focused work project, like they had to think about that.

They had to look at their week ahead of time and say, well, this is something I would like to get done this week. I'm going to start Monday with it because that's probably when I have the most energy. Like most people don't show up at work Monday morning and be like, oh, yeah, now I should do this project. Like people who don't think about it spend the first part of Monday like, you know, answering emails and then walking around the office, see what's going on and start working.

then whatever their first meeting's 10:30 or something and then the morning's kind of gone. But if they thought about it, maybe they use 8:30 to 10:30 for that project before they go to that 10:30 meeting. So you can really see things like this. And off the clock, one of the most interesting things I discovered about people who were spending time well is that they were highly likely to spend, I had people track a March Monday, so a very ordinary day, like nothing special about this day whatsoever.

But the people who had the most abundant perspective on time, who really felt like time was sort of most working in their favor and felt relaxed about it, were highly likely to have done something very interesting during their leisure hours on that March Monday. So, I mean, there was somebody in my study who went like to salsa dancing lessons on a Monday night. Somebody went to a big band concert. Like somebody went to a movie with their family on a Monday night or just little

It could be little things like a trip to the playground with the family on a Monday night, but just something that wasn't like get home from work, eat dinner, watch TV, all go to bed. Like they'd actually thought about it.

it and what might be fun. And they did it. And that made them feel like they had more time. When it comes to planning in advance and structuring your days, I can't help but think about Cal Newport's deep work and James Clear's Atomic Habits. The fact that segmenting off time to do...

To go deep, as Cal calls it, on one particular task is a lot easier than being bounced around between multiple different tasks and kind of getting ragged about by whatever the next thing that appears in consciousness is. And then...

As James says, you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems. And having those systems in advance definitely appears to give people more liberation with their time. So one of the best, chapter two for me was my favorite chapter in the whole book. And the main question that I had going into that was, why does time appear to go faster as we get older? Would you be able to tell the listeners why that is?

Yeah. So, I mean, time passes at the same rate regardless, but most people have this impression that time has sped up. That if they think back to when they were a kid, like, oh, you know, summer lasts forever. You know, they have all these memories of their youth. But like last year seems to have gone quite quickly. Or what often happens is you see like a child that you haven't seen in a while and you're like, wow, look at how much you've grown. And it's because

The time since you last saw this kid did not fill the cognitive space of two years in your mind, and so you're like, "Whoa." But what's happening is that our perception of how much time we have had is shaped by how many memories we have of any given unit of time. When we say, "Where did the time go?" What we're actually saying is that I don't remember where the time went.

And that's because we haven't done anything memorable with it. So much of adult life tends to get into these sort of routines and routines are great. They help make good choices automatic. But if it's not a routine to necessarily make something good happen, it's just routine because that's what your life looks like and you never think about it. You do it over and over again.

then no day stands out in your mind. Like there's no reason for you to remember any given day. If no day is different from another, then you won't remember it. And when you have no memories of time, it disappears. So the way to counter this is,

is to ask yourself the question of why is today different from other days? And it's a version of the Passover question. You ask on the night of Passover, why is tonight different from all other nights? And of course, with Passover, there's a very specific reason. It's a holiday. It's a major holiday. You're celebrating that. But it's a good question to ask in a secular context, too, which is that why should I remember today? What did I do today that will stand out in my memory?

And I'm not saying that you'll be able to answer that for all the days of your life. And that is probably unrealistic. But if you can answer it for more of them, then you will have more memories of time and then time will start to feel more sort of thick and rich. I guess that the image I used in the book is it'll be like this rich tapestry as opposed to a slick linoleum floor.

Yeah, it was a good analogy. The sentence that you put in, which was, the days are forgettable and therefore we forget them, that kind of really struck home to me. I was like, well, yeah, of course.

Like, why would I remember a day where I've done the same thing over and over? Would you be able to explain about the car journey analogy to work? I really enjoyed how that gets condensed down. I thought that was really clever. Well, so, I mean, one of the things people do over and over again is commute to work. And if you have spent, let's say, four years at the same job and you drive the exact same way to work every single morning, like this hour each morning is, you know,

been a thousand hours over four years, but you know, in your mind, it's just one journey. Like there, there's nothing different about each one of them. So a thousand years, I mean, a thousand hours becomes one hour, right? Like that's what it can compress down to. And, you know, it was something like that. I mean, the analogy isn't perfect,

because of course, what are you going to do about that? Like you, you have to commute to work. Like you're not going to drive some incredibly different way. Um, and if you've got an hour long drive, you can't do anything else. Like you're not going to bike that hour. Like, cause then it'd be three times as long, but yeah,

It's just something to think about. If there are certain chunks of your days that have to be the same, then you need to be very cognizant of the times that you can make something different. Can you go talk to someone new at lunch or go somewhere different or seek out new projects at work? Can you do interesting things in your personal life with your family at nights and on the weekends? Can you think about planning weekend adventures into your life or

Or, you know, maybe take that salsa dancing lesson on a Monday night or something. But think about the parts of your life that you can do different things and can switch up the routine a little bit because there's a lot of parts of life that you may not be able to do that as much. Yeah. Is novelty the only way that you can look to expand time?

You can also make it expand by making it sort of deeper and more intense. One of the reasons that we remember, say, high school or college better than like a random three, four years of adult life is that there were so many intense experiences for most people during this time. And maybe it was their first job, first love, like first time driving a car, you know, whatever it is, there's things you're going to remember because they were intense.

And so you can think about how can I do more intense things now? Like how can I do things that maybe seem scary a little bit outside my comfort zone but will definitely be memorable? Whether it's like giving a speech, like maybe that's something that

you know, if you don't do a lot of it, you'll remember it because it's going to be an intense experience or, you know, anything along those lines, much travel. There's the novelty, but there's also the intensity of the experience. And these are the things that make it expand in memory. That's definitely, I'm sure all of the listeners at home will know what we're talking about. When you say that you go away on holiday and you can remember, like I went to Africa in November and I remember the book that

that the guy at reception who booked us into our first hotel stay out of like 20 nights, I remember the book that he had in his hand, this ornithology book about birds. And I remember his name and I remember like the kind of shoes that he had on as we walked to, I'm like, if you asked me anything about my commute to work this morning, I couldn't tell you what time I left. Probably I wouldn't be able to tell you anything at all, but you're totally right. The novelty plus intensity, I guess when you kind of

combine them together, you've got novelty and intensity working in synchronicity that it really steps things up. And yeah, that's why holidays...

feel they strike so many chords, right? Yeah. And what it is, is that your brain has no idea what it's going to need to remember in the future. And so it's remembering all of it. Like you didn't know if this guy booking you into the hotel was going to play a major role in your life. You know, I don't know if you're in a game preserve and maybe the lions will attack. You need to know him, right? Like your brain has no idea. So it's holding on to all of it.

Whereas, you know, most of life, your commute is your commute. Like you don't need to remember it. There was nothing new about it. There was nothing that you're already sure it's safe because you've done it a thousand times. So you don't remember any of it. So it's, yeah, that's that novelty and that intensity combined together can make a

There's also an interesting, I forget where I read this, but that the brain has a natural rate of remembering of something like six to nine events per fortnight, you know? And so the thing is that if you have a bunch of novel experiences, which you would on the first day of vacation, like you can have six new experiences before breakfast. Right. And so that's why it seems like it's,

a hugely long day at the beginning of a vacation is because you're packing so much new stuff in. You're totally right. Again, this sentence, sorry to start keep quoting your own content back to you, but the sentence of people say they want more time. What they really want is more memories.

That, to me, just was such an eye-opener. Gretchen Rubin talks about something similar. I think she says she actually does suggest taking a different route to work every so often, which if you live in a city like myself might be an absolute nightmare because if I go down the wrong street and I get caught by roadworks, I'm late for work. And that will be both novel and intense experience when I rock up late to a meeting. Yeah.

But yeah, I totally get it. Would you be able to talk about the past, present and future self?

Yeah. So this is another part of how we experience time and why we don't necessarily make life memorable. So there's been some interesting work. Daniel Kahneman writes about the remembering self and the present self. And so I threw in another one of like the anticipating self. But anyway, our story, like what your brain thinks about. There's the here and now.

But a lot of your brain is also looking at other points in time. It's remembering stuff you did in the past. So that's the remembering self or it's looking forward to stuff you're going to do in the future. So that's the anticipating self. And what winds up happening is that we give way too much attention to how we feel in the present, even though our life story really depends on both the past and the future as well.

And so what ends up happening is we say, oh, I'd like to do great, awesome things in my life. I'd like to do interesting things. I'd like to go to that salsa dancing lesson on Monday night. Then you get home from work on Monday night.

And you are tired, right? And you feel like, well, you know, I could do salsa some other time. I mean, the TV's right here. You know, I've worked hard. Let me just kick up my feet. Maybe some other time, you know. But what's happening? This one philosopher, Robert Gruden, I quote, is he says, we pamper the present like a spoiled child.

It's sort of given to its whims to do nothing. But when you constantly do nothing, well, then you have nothing memorable. I mean, watching the TV is not a memorable way to spend the night. Going to the salsa dancing lessons probably is. So what we need to do is make sure we are taking into account both the anticipating and the remembering self in addition to the present self. So if you're anticipating self thought it would be really fun to do something, like probably your remembering self will also be glad to have done it. So,

Think about that and not just how you feel right now. If you can tell yourself, you know, this, I'm trying to, you know, I've got one actor trying to be a, give a monologue and what should really be a three actor play. Like sometimes that can nudge you to just plan it in and then do it anyway. Because once you start doing it, you will probably draw energy from the fact that it's fun and enjoyable and meaningful. And then afterwards you're going to be glad you did it. I mean, one way or another, this evening will be over.

Like eventually you will get into bed tonight and it could be getting into bed, having had a really cool time at salsa dancing lessons, or it could be getting into bed, having just watched TV like you did the past seven nights in a row. So, you know, think about it. I think that's a really, really powerful concept. I was talking to a friend about this recently to do with training. We were talking about the fact that if you've got, if we're doing intervals, let's say in the gym and you've got another two or three intervals left, the voice in the back of your head that says, okay,

I'm tired. This is stupid. This sucks. I've already done most of the work. I kind of don't need to do any more. I might injure myself, even though, you know, you don't, you're not going to injure yourself. Like all of the things, the present self is kind of like water cutting through rock. Like it's always going to try and take the easiest route. And yeah, the time is going to pass anyway. The fact that the time is going to pass, no matter what you do,

means that you might as well do it doing something that your remembering self in the future is going to feel good about. Because right now, the present is transient, but the future is forever. And the fact that there's an asymmetry with that means that I think so many choices would be better made if people thought before they were about to do something, tomorrow, how am I going to feel about this decision that I'm about to make?

Yeah.

Yeah. Am I going to eat the cookie or am I going to have a banana or an apple? Am I going to go to salsa dancing or am I just going to sit on the couch and watch Netflix? Am I going to do another round of this particular workout, which is, again, the time is going to pass in any case. The only thing, what are you going to do? You go pick your phone up from your bag, check your phone, do some Instagram or whatever. And then you're like, well, before that, I'm in the car and I could have finished that off and had the extra sense of satisfaction in retrospect. Yeah.

Yeah. No, I mean, that's exciting. If you think that you will have been happy to have done it, then just do your future self a favor and go ahead and do it. I get it. Touching on the holidays thing again as well, I remember a Tim Ferriss article quite a while ago where he said that he books like up to six holidays at once, but he'll book them for like 2022, 2024, and he'll have all of these things. And what he talks about with that is that your equivalent of the anticipating self is

gets pleasure from the holiday that is so much greater than the amount of time that they're at the holiday for. So say you can go away for a week, but if you've booked the holiday two years in advance, you get excited for two years,

Which is pretty cool, right? What a way to stretch the pleasure. And there's been some interesting research into this. People are happiest about a vacation before the actual vacation because it turns out that we're sort of incapable of complete bliss in the moment. Like you can be sitting on a tropical beach, you know, watching a gorgeous sunset, like the love of your life beside you and be thinking like my toe itches. Like, I mean, this is the reality of our physical bodies and just the way our brains work. But

In your anticipation, you're not thinking about your toe itching. I mean, that's just not something that comes up. So in your anticipation, you're thinking about the tropical beach and the drink and the sunset and all that stuff. So, yeah, max out your pleasure by anticipating it as long as possible. I guess as well by committing to making plans in advance. Yeah.

what we're actually going to be able to do is not only satisfy the anticipating self, hopefully make a commitment that bypasses the present self, who can sometimes be a dick, and then the remembering self will be gratified by it. But also in the buildup to that, you have all of this extra pleasure as well. So the experiencing self or the present self also gets that stretched. I think that's...

That whole concept, I really hope that the listeners at home take this to heart because it's something that's kind of been floating around in different pieces. Some of Carl Newport's work and some of James Clear's work and some of Gretchen Rubin's work, but I'd never had it delivered to me kind of in one piece.

one succinct message before. And it was very, very useful. So I really hope that everyone takes that on board. Moving on, what were some of the other tools that people can use to help expand their sensation of time or also help them become more mindful of their time?

Well, one tool that I found fascinating is this idea of learning to savor time, um, which is to know that you are enjoying something and acknowledge that you are enjoying something. And, you know, times when we're not enjoying ourself, when we're unhappy, when we're uncomfortable, they naturally slow down. Um,

you know, we've become very aware of time in these situations, but I mean, wouldn't it be awesome if you could make the good time sort of passes slowly as these bad times. And one of the ways you can is really calling attention to it. Like, you know, pause and be like, Hey, I'm having a really good time right now.

And I mean, that sounds a little crazy, but like, why not? Like, tell the people you're around, like, I'm really enjoying myself right now. Oh, you're enjoying yourself too. This is really cool. Like, what is cool that's going on? Oh, the music is great. Like, the scenery is awesome. These people are so fun. You know, and just anything you can think of to sort of articulate and lock in the memory.

And one of the scenes I quote is a man who did mountain climbing. One of the researchers into this topic of savoring is also a very serious mountain climber. And he'd talk about

When he's summiting a mountain, he'd really try to stretch out the time when he's on the summit. Think about everything you can lock in, anything you can see that you can then describe to yourself and keep that memory. Who's here with you? What does this person look like? What are we saying to each other? Pause and take it all in. How are you feeling? Think back to a time when you didn't have this and now you do so you can really relish that pleasure.

And when you do these things, you manage to stretch it out. I mean, nothing lasts forever. Of course, this is the nature of time. But when you can really make that memory strong, then those, say, 10 minutes of being at the summit of a mountain can become much bigger in your mind than, you know, 10 minutes while you're making breakfast in the morning. Yeah, yeah. I couldn't agree more. How do you...

How do you mediate between the fact that we're often told that we need to be present and we need to focus on what's happening right now with the fact that we need to be kind of metacognizant of things and we almost need to observe the observer a little bit. And then we also need to anticipate and then we need to remember. Like it feels like the common narrative about foresight

Focusing on being present kind of works a little bit a little bit of contradictory nests to that. Would you agree? Yeah, I don't think it's really a paradox I mean, I think that we can be enjoying the moment but part of our enjoying the moment being present in the moment is into it's really thinking about where it stands in relation to our past in our future one of the things that lends Significance to a moment is thinking about yourself in the future looking back on this

You know, if you can picture yourself like, you know, someday I'll be, you know, old and unable to climb mountains and I'll be really glad I had this experience. And if you're thinking about that while you're on the mountain, like it deepens your experience of the moment or the fact that we were, I mean, we were talking about anticipating, like, you know, the, you can be very present in the moment on your vacation and that's awesome, but isn't it awesome to also have thought about it for six months ahead of time and gotten some of the pleasure as well. I really don't think this is a paradox that

all. I mean, I think what we're getting at when we say we need to be in the moment and enjoy the moment is that often our brains do go elsewhere in unproductive ways when we are in something that we are truly enjoying. So for instance, if you are on the mountaintop, you don't really need to be thinking about, did I pay my electric bill? Because there is nothing you can do about that at the moment. So it's not very helpful to think about. So maybe you can just sort of

In terms of being in the moment, put your thoughts on the scenery you're taking in and the experience and think about the present and future as relates to that. Don't think about all the other things in life that you could be doing at that particular moment. There's a really funny family guy scene where Peter finally gets blasted off into space. Peter's out in space and he's observing the wonder of the earth, something that probably less than

less than a thousand people have seen the earth from a way a way outside of itself and uh he's there looking at things and this really mindful music comes on and then very slowly his phone rises up from the bottom of the screen and he start he starts watching funny cat videos on youtube yeah i i yeah i mean human nature right like uh i think that's what we're talking about of you know trying to be in the moment but you know if he'd thought about in that moment like

what I I've looked forward to this for so long and I'm finally getting to do this. Or once I land, I will look back on this experience and be happy. I did it. You know, those are more productive thoughts for taking you elsewhere. Yeah, I totally agree. Another example, Matt Fraser, a CrossFit games champion for the last few years, potentially the best CrossFit athlete on the planet ever. Someone asked him,

why do you continue to work as hard as you do? What's your motivation to do all the things that you do? And he said, when I'm old, I want to have the best memories that I possibly can. I'm like, if you use that as your canary in the coal mine for decision-making, is this going to make the sickest memory that I can in the future? Because again, remembering that the present moment is transient, but the future is forever. There's literally no better guiding principle that I can think of for when it comes to making decisions.

Yeah. Well, and I'd say, you know, it's interesting. I've, oh gosh, when I was read this book once that talks about, you know, when you like children, for instance, and you're deciding about your family and,

You make the decision in kind of as you're going into what is the really hardest time of children. So namely, like going through pregnancy and then when they're newborns and toddlers and it's really hard. But like they won't be like that forever. Like at some point they're going to be, you know, visiting you with their families at Thanksgiving. We are in the U.S. here, you know, for holidays in general. And it'd be like.

The question more to ask is how many people do you want around your Thanksgiving table when you're 60 versus how hard is it to take care of a toddler? Right. Now that doesn't, that doesn't mean you should have like 20 children, like there's some balance between here. Right. But you know, you, you have to take yourself out of the immediate difficulty and, and sort of take the longterm view. Yeah. So, um,

A lot of, as many of the listeners may do, I think that I have a, I tend to discriminate towards male authors. I tend to just naturally be attracted towards that. I don't know whether it's a back of my mind tribal thing, whether it's because I somehow feel that they're going to get me more or whatever it might be. But,

But a lot of the examples that you used in Off the Clock were to do with family. And I'm a 31-year-old single guy. My business partner, his missus, literally within two days is ready to pop with their second. So, I mean, she's like a globe at the moment. She's got her own orbit. She's huge. But she's absolutely fantastic. But, yeah, to see what – from someone who hasn't had a family yet, to see just how –

big of a commitment and a responsibility is and the fact that you still you're still able to get shit done like honestly it's because you spoke with quite a high amount of fidelity about exactly what what your day consists of this this uh one's got to be dropped off at football then we've got to pick this one up from lacrosse then there's a dance class then there's this then there's oh now i've got to get home because the babysitter on the and you just think like

The fact that I or anybody else who doesn't have those sort of commitments, those family commitments, which you can't turn up late to collecting the kid from lacrosse or getting them to ice hockey, I think is one of the examples that you use. Well, you can. I mean, you can. I mean, the earth won't stop spinning. Okay, yeah, fair enough. I mean, there's a big problem. Big things happen when that happens. And then just for me, having always read from a much more –

solitary kind of personal meritocracy approach to what I'm doing with my life, I just realized, I was like, I try and add three kids. At 31, quite happily, there'll be a lot of men out there who are trying to run a business like I am with a couple of side projects and then add three kids on top. And I'm like, what am I complaining about? Like, really, what am I complaining about? Yeah, well,

interesting you say that. There actually have been sort of fewer productivity books written by women. And I think some of that is that it's been a space that has historically been handled from the angle of

you do your thing and, you know, you're talking about maybe your time at work and how you're productive, accomplishing certain things. And the home front is sort of treated as someone else's sphere. Like it's not your thing or, you know, even if you do have a family, somebody else's is dealing with that. And, and,

I don't think that's the reality for many men now in any case. Um, so, you know, maybe 40 years ago, but I, you know, certainly most of the men I know by the time they do have families, it's, it's not somebody else's deal. It's their deal. And, um,

There's also women who might like to know how to manage their time and would like to see themselves reflected in the literature as well. And so I try to write from a perspective that, you know, men or women could read. But it is the perspective of people who, you know, your personal life isn't an afterthought.

And it's not a complete, you know, free and easy whatever. There are responsibilities within it, whether it's that you have children, whether you have other family members you're caring for, or whether you're deeply involved in your community and ways you need to meet your responsibilities to that. And, you know, honestly, I think that that's what time is really all about, that it's not just, you know,

oh, I can, when I am done with work, then I kick back my feet and relax and there's nothing else I need to think about. I think we really are full people. And so my approach to time is doing all of it. I agree. I think as well, especially with the,

hustle and grind mentality that is pretty sort of pervasive at the moment. Guys like Gary V that sort of push that kind of always on business mentality that a lot of people adhere to or think that they need to adhere to. It's like, right, well, I'm going to become more productive at work so that when I finished work, I can fit some more work in. Yeah.

I guess that's one idea. Yeah. You're totally right. And to the listeners at home, they'll have heard me use this example before, but I use a six minute diary, which is a journaling morning and night, three minutes on the morning, three minutes on an evening. And I use that every single day. And, um,

Although I haven't done my time management experiment yet, and I'm going to actually get me and some of the co-hosts. If I can get them to do it, I'm going to get them to come along with me and to any of the listeners that want to do it as well. If you want to give me a message, we'll try and organize it a week and we'll try and go through from a week and we'll do it all together. Ooh, that sounds great. That sounds cool, eh? I'll try and fire you over some of the stats at the end. Yeah, yeah. One of the guys I'm talking about is a chartered accountant, so his spreadsheet will have, it'll be color-coded with VLOOKUP. That'll be perfect.

perfect there'll be an animated gif yeah there'll be all sorts of stuff um

But yeah, this hustle and grind mentality and kind of people getting after it, making more time to then get more work done. What I realized when I was doing my end of the day reflection, which is three great things that happened today. Never once in that did I say like, I got 2000 likes on a photo on Instagram or I wasted an hour scrolling through Twitter or I...

I didn't complete my work with as much virtue or as expedited, as high class as I could have done. All the things that I found myself reflecting on, that I really valued, which presumably would be the things that were top of the list to make a memory from, they were all...

connections with other people or like I had a message from a listener who said that they absolutely loved the most recent podcast episode and they've decided to go sober for six months. We push sobriety a lot on the podcast. Or someone said that they had started reading a book that we recommended and they spent their best afternoon in Portugal on a holiday or something like that or whatever it might have been. I had a brief conversation and a coffee with someone at the gym. Like all of those things were things that

figured highly on what I was doing through the day. And by using that over time, before I read Off the Clock, over time, I started to use the things which were appearing as three great things that happened to me today to then guide me as I go forward. I'm like, look, if it doesn't feature on one of the great things, yeah, sure enough, maybe my commute to work is rarely going to feature on my great things that I do. But maybe one day, if I keep on listening to cool podcasts or

or listening to good audio books or ringing people while I'm in the car, ringing people. Like maybe one day I could actually convert that journey to, oh, caught up with mum. Like had a really cool chat with mum while she was out with the dogs or whatever it might be. But yeah, I think using that guiding principle as,

What were the things that I did today that I really enjoyed? I should probably look at doing more of those and then compare with, as you say, when hopefully people begin to track their time, the link to the beautiful Excel sheet will be in the show notes below, of course. Um,

When people compare it with that, it's like did scroll through Instagram for three by 30 minute sessions. Didn't do much for you. No, not at all. So are there any other tools or any other approaches or concepts that you think that people should be mindful of when they're talking about looking at their time?

Well, something you just said is that so many of your best moments had to do with your relationship with others. And I actually found that as well in my time diary projects that for off the clock, when I had 900 busy people track their time for a day and then answer questions about how they felt about their time, I found that the people with the most abundant perspective on time were

spent the most time interacting with friends and family. And so everyone had roughly the same amount of leisure time. I mean, most people work somewhere between seven and nine hours on Monday because that's what people with full-time jobs do.

People generally slept somewhere between seven and eight hours overnight because, again, that's what normal people do. So then what do you do with the other time? That's actually more discretionary. And so we talked about some people having little adventures on a Monday night. But, you know, spending more of that time interacting with people in real life, whether that's family members or friends or colleagues or anything like that,

is so much more memorable and more pleasant than interacting with people virtually or not even interacting with people, right? Like watching television or something like that. So the people...

who had the most abundant time perspective score, spent more of their leisure time with friends and family. The people with the lowest scores spent a higher proportion of their leisure time watching television. And I mean, it was the same chunk of time. I mean, they had, they watched more television than the people with high time perception scores. So it's not like they had the people with the high scores had tons more time. It's just what you choose to do with the time that you have control of.

influences how you feel about time in general. Why do you think that is? Do you think that's neurological that we're built to have connections with people? Yeah. I mean, I think it, you know, it feels good, right? Like, I mean, why wouldn't we enjoy spending time with, with people that we feel close to? Um, and, and it's hard to substitute for that sense that other people love us and esteem us. And, you know, the television doesn't do that. Like, I mean, it's,

It's entertaining, sure. But it doesn't give that back in the same sense. Time spent with other people tends to be more memorable. You know, it's just more engaging in general as the conversation is in person. But the thing is, obviously, it takes work to do that. Like, it takes no work to watch television. It takes no work to scroll around on social media, whereas it definitely takes work to decide to get together with two friends and go do something.

And so we tend not to do the thing with friends because it takes effort. Why should fun take effort? And so that trips people up. But a life of effortless fun is not memorable, whereas a life of effortful fun is. The present self is a dick.

Yeah, well, you know, a spoiled child. I like the image of a spoiled child because, you know, you see it sort of pounding on the ground and screaming like, I don't want to do it. I don't want to do it. Right. Whereas, you know, if you sort of step back and say, well, you handle it the same way, like, you know, we'll be calm and firm and sort of, you know, we'll

maybe offer choices. I don't know, like, you know, well, we could, we could, you know, do this first when we go to the art museum or we could do this first when we go to the art museum. Right. But you just handle it that way. Like a calm teacher or parent would do and recognize that it's, you know, the equivalent of a two-year-old pounding on the floor. It's not something you actually need to take seriously. I agree. As you're saying that, I'm drawn to remember Jordan Peterson's rule, treat yourself as if you are someone you are responsible for helping.

And he says that you can literally make deals with yourself like that. And I've tried to now. It's like, right, okay, I really do not want to do all of the dishes. I don't have a dishwasher. My business partner says my kitchen's like Basra because I don't have it. He was like, well, are we going back to the Stone Age here? Why have you got a dishwasher? I'm like, look, I can't be asking you. It's pretty easy to get them now.

I know, I just can't be asked to get it plumbed in. So there's always, it's like once every couple of days, there's like, you know, 20 minutes of washing up. And I'm like, look, but if you do the washing up, after that, we can have a coffee. We can have like a nice coffee. We do that. And it is bizarre to make these deals with yourself. But I think especially as you've mentioned before, Daniel Kahneman's work, there is a negotiating between people.

a number of different systems inside of yourself that you need to make. Yeah, yeah.

And you can do that. I mean, because, yeah, you'll enjoy having the coffee at the end of it. And, you know, sometimes it's just about getting over the present reticence and that ability to do something to focus on your future self is, of course, really the height of maturity and discipline. And it's hard. I mean, obviously, it's harder. Everyone would do it. But as much as you can get to that place, then you realize how much

power you have over your life and your ability to make your life very good. Has the tracking of your time and looking at the things that you valued through the day, has that influenced your goal setting or how you do your more long-term thinking? What we've talked about is quite short-term, at least in terms of tactics. How about looking at longer-term stuff? Have you found that that's been affected at all?

Well, I definitely think about how can I make my time memorable? I would say that I put more thought into vacations precisely because that and not just vacations, but like on a given weekend, like what sort of adventure can we have this weekend? I'm more inclined to think that through to spend some time during the week thinking

consciously thinking about the weekend. So the weekend is not this afterthought to the week, like, oh, I'm tired. I don't know. We'll do what we do. But to say, well, actually, this is a big chunk of time and I don't want to have it disappear into nothingness. Like, what could we do that would be a fun adventure on the weekend? That's something that will be memorable. But, you know, it's also certain things like

Being more conscious of using my low energy downtime to read versus other things that I could be doing. Everyone has some quantity of this time that, you know, it's leisure time.

But it's either late at night or it's when you've done something else. You don't have a ton of energy as you are going into this leisure event. And so that's when we tend to watch TV, we surf the web, just sort of do whatever because it's easy. But if you think about what else could I do with that time? And so reading is an obvious suggestion. But of course, if you don't have a good book, you're not going to read. You're going to do something else. So being more careful about...

getting good books. When I tracked my time for the first year, I had been telling myself I had no time to read because, you know, I was very busy. Like it was when my kids were at their youngest, like I, you know, I was busy. Okay. And I have no time to read.

And then I tracked my time and I saw I was reading almost an hour a day, but it was like nothing. It was like magazines. It was random articles online. And I was like, well, that's stupid. Like I could read I could have read War and Peace 10 times in this chunk of hours that I've spent reading like yet another article on how air popped popcorn is a great low calorie snack. Like I don't need to read that article ever again.

So now I make sure to have good books. And if I have lots of good books, I will read them. And if I'm really involved in a book, I'll start finding more ways to put time into it. Whereas if I don't have the book, I won't. So that's a big change I made. Yeah, for sure. Again, to draw a lot of what we've been talking about recently on the podcast together, James Clear, you don't rise to the level of your goals, you fall to the level of your systems.

If you don't have the system in place that allows you to read the book, if you haven't spent £60 on your Kindle or you haven't bought the new paperback or gone to the library or whatever it might be, you can't do the thing. And as we've identified, the present self, as you've said, is kind of a petulant child, but I've said he's a dick. And they...

naturally you go through the path of least resistance, which tends to be the scrolling, the Netflix or whatever. But it's a subtle point. It's a really important one that you've made there about the fact that it can't always be, right, let's go do salsa. It's like it's 11 o'clock on a Friday night. Like I'm not going to, there's no, I can't go do salsa. But what can I do with this time at this lower energy state? Yeah.

which then still will give me this sense of satisfaction. And again, the plan that the talk about committing to plans for the weekend reminds me of something from deep work, which is he's the Cal says strategizing is easy, but execution is hard. And it's because execution involves a genuine commitment. People can talk about plans. Yeah. One. Oh, I like, you know, we should do, we should totally go do that. Yeah. We should totally go do that. It's like no one books it.

No one books it. And when I think back to some of the plans that me and my buddies have been making, like we've been saying that we're going to go and do like a meditation retreat for three years.

You just needed to book a meditation retreat. Somebody needs to make that happen. Yes. If you want to do it. I mean, maybe you don't want to do it. There's always the possibility that plans without commitments on the calendar are sort of just a nice way of interacting with other people. Some people enjoy talking of possibility in a way that isn't about actually doing it. Just sort of it's nice in the abstract.

to do a meditation retreat. But if you actually want to do something, then it's going to take time. And where is that time? Well, you need to identify a time that you will do it. What is that time? If it's not on the calendar, it isn't there. It's not going to happen. Yeah, I totally agree. So as a final question, I wondered whether or not there was any people who you met that really surprised you with how much they could fit into their day. If there was some people who were like,

full-time as a mom combined with running like CEO of a company, or if there was some people who were just, you were super surprised at their capacity to expand their days out. Yeah. Well, so one of my, uh,

initial interviews many, many years ago, like, you know, 12 years ago as we're writing my first time management book, um, I had interviewed somebody about a totally different thing related to her business at one point. And then, you know, offhand, she mentioned her like six children and I was like, Oh, well that's interesting. And this was, you know,

I was very new in the parenting journey, so I was just like, oh my God, how do you do that? And so I called her back to interview her about that and that aspect of it. So she was running a successful small business with many people on the payroll, so she had the stuff she was managing for that. Then also raising her family. And I kind of asked her, well, spill your secrets. The world would love to know. And she...

The way she put it is something I've said, like in all my speeches sense, and I put it in most of my books, but that she said, you know, everything I do is my choice. And rather than say, I don't have time to do X, Y, or Z, she'd say, I don't do X, Y, or Z, because it's not a priority that I don't have time really means it's not a priority.

And if you think about it, that is more accurate language. I mean, people will tell you they don't have time to floss. It's not true. They don't want to floss. Like, you know, using this language reminds us that time is a choice. And it's not that there won't be consequences to making different choices. I mean, of course, there's going to be consequences. But over the long run, we have the power to fill our lives with the things that we deserve to be there. And so if you just substitute this language, every time you find yourself saying, I don't have time, I don't have time, I'm too busy, I don't have time. It's not a priority.

and see how that feels.

And if it's true, it's true. And like, you should just own that truth. I mean, it may be something that sounds wonderful. I don't know, you know, saving historic buildings and, you know, volunteering with puppies or I don't know. I mean, they're wonderful things in the abstract, but if you're not doing them, it's because it's not a priority to you. And that is fine. There may be other things that are priorities to you right now. But if something is a priority for you, then you owe it to yourself to figure out how you can put at least some

of that into your life? And I'm not saying it's going to be, you know, 40 hours a week, but could you put 20 minutes a week related to this into your life? I think it's pretty difficult to say you couldn't find 20 minutes somewhere in the course of the week. And if you get 20 minutes, awesome. See how it goes, you know? And if it didn't work, why not? Like what was the logistics? Did you not really want to do it? Was there something else that was a problem that you need to deal with? And when you get 20, okay, can we do 30? Can we do 40? Um, and you know, if you, if you get to the point where you are spending, um,

an hour a day on things that really truly feel meaningful to you. I think that's the tilting point. It doesn't have to be 40 hours a week. It can be one hour a day of something that is genuinely meaningful and enjoyable to you. Like the rest of life will feel completely different.

I totally agree. There's a David Dada, the way of the superior man. He has, I think it's rule number five or six. And he says, what do you consider to be your highest calling in life? Can you dedicate 30 minutes a day to it? Do it now. And it's totally the same thing. Like what are the things that you actually value? Carve out time to do them. And if you can't carve out the time, stop saying that the most important things in your life, because they're evidently not. I

Laura, today's been fantastic. I wanted to ask if there were any more resources. I know there's a TED Talk that you kept on citing in the book. Who was that? It may have been me. I'm self-referential here. Yeah.

That Laura Vanderkam, she's really great. Yeah, no, I cited my own. But no, Leila Zivaci is now, I think about this, a lady who, when I gave my TED Talk, she was also at the conference. And so I was very taken with her talk. And she was the one who's done a lot of, she's a memory researcher. And she's a lot of the information in Off the Clock on research.

time and memory comes from hearing her talk and then interviewing her later about that. She's the one who's really shown that time and memory are so related and that

wanting more time is about wanting more memories. And in fact, we can make memories sharper after the fact. She's done some fascinating research with that, that it turns out memories aren't just set when you do them. Like there are things you can do afterwards that make the memory sharper, that make it deeper, that make it more likely you'll recall it later. What are those things?

Well, I mean, in her case, one of the ways she showed this is that she shocked people, like gave them electric shocks. So, you know, this is sort of tangential here, but say she'd show you pictures of like shapes or show you pictures of animals. And at first you're just looking at whatever. And then she shocks you every time you see a shape. And amazingly enough,

After the fact, if you were shocked when you saw shapes, you remember the shapes better than the animals. But in fact, you also remember the shapes from the earlier run, like when you weren't being shocked, better than you did the animals. So the brain went back and said, this matters. Like this matters, and I needed to remember that. So it recalled it better than the stuff that it turns out your brain learned it didn't need to know. That's fascinating. You're not going to shock yourself. No, no, I hope not.

Looking at photos, looking at photos of a trip afterwards, talking with the people who were there. One thing, gosh, somebody told me this story, which I found so funny, but I love it. So when she was in college, she went on a European trip and one of her fellow travelers played the same song over and over and over again. And she's like, this is horrible. It's torturous.

But he's like, no, no, no. For the rest of your life, every time you hear this song, you will think of this summer. And it's true. Yeah.

Yeah she does and you know because it conjures up the feelings alongside the memories as well and so there are things you can do like that creating artifacts that you can then tap into in the future. Yeah I think you used the example that you've got a treasure trove of like receipts and different bits and pieces and then you can just have a little look through that and it gives you a reminder. I'm sure there'll be people who know that particular smells or whatever it might be

Definitely. All of those can conjure stuff up. Fantastic. So we've got Leela's TED Talk, which will be linked in the show notes below. Is there anything else? You've got some resources on your website?

Yeah, sure. I mean, I hope people will come visit my website, lauravandercam.com. You can learn about all my books there. I blog usually a couple of times a week. You can read about my podcasts. I have one that's every weekday morning called Before Breakfast. It's five minutes, just a short productivity tip every morning. So give that a listen and start your day with a bit of a jolt in the arm. Nice. Every weekday morning, that is a serious commitment. But then again, if it matters, you'll make time. Yeah, exactly. Well, it's like my job now.

So it doesn't seem like that. You know, theoretically, at least I'm getting paid for it. Well, Laura, it's been fantastic today. Links to Off The Clock, your social media, your website, and all the stuff we've talked about today will be in the show notes below. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks for having me.