In December 2017, I called Laura Vanderkam to ask her what I needed to know about time tracking if I was going to attempt to do it. What's time tracking? It's exactly what it sounds like - keeping tabs on how you spend your time all day, every day, for as long as you want - and I was intrigued by the prospect of attempting to do it.

After reading Vanderkam's book I Know How She Does It, I knew I wanted to track my time for at least a week to see what I could learn (hint: so much). One of my biggest takeaways was that by analyzing the data on how you do spend your time, you can make better-informed decisions about how you want to spend your time and how you're going to do that.

When Vanderkam came out with her latest book, Off The Clock, I knew there was no better time to have her as a guest on our podcast, #WeGotGoals.

We've interviewed some pretty hardcore goal-setters and getters in the past, and discussed anything from how someone might attempt to sell every cup of coffee in the entire world, to doing whatever it takes to become the fastest woman in the world.

Vanderkam is a high achiever whose goals take a different spin: she led the goal setting conversation with what she calls "better than nothing goals" - not Big, Hairy, and Audacious, but incredibly powerful nonetheless.

Case in point, Vanderkam has run at least one mile a day for more than 500 consecutive days. She talks about how that wouldn't have been possible if she'd set a goal to run a marathon or even to run 30 miles a week, but that one mile is "like nothing," she says, and she's really content with and proud of that goal and the way it makes her feel.

Clearly, Vankderkam is a process-driven person versus an outcome-based goal setter, as proven by her three year time-tracking streak. Prior to writing I Know How She Does It, she set the big goal to track all of her time for one year. Turns out, she liked the accountability it gave her so much, she just kept going. And the lessons she learned over three years of tracking time - plus input from other case studies and experts - make up the newest addition to her collection as an author Off The Clock.

What time tracking taught her

All of this tracking has helped her as she sets goals and spends her time in two key ways:

1. She remembers how she spent her time more fondly and with gratitude: By looking over her own spreadsheets to reflect back on where the hours went, Vanderkam sees all the things she's done - something our brains don't tend to do without bias. Vanderkam notes that our brains have the tendency to remember the negative over the positive (a phenomenon that's been tested and proven), but she's able to reminisce on her past more fondly and strip some of those negative connotations away.

2. She's able to separate the days from one another: She also took notice of what habits she tends to fall into and asks herself, "How is today going to be different from other days?" Vanderkam does this because it helps her to expand time by making memories more, well, memorable.

"When the brain thinks about time, its sense of memory perception is affected by how many memories you have in that unit of time," Vanderkam says. When we talk about time flying by, she continues, we're experiencing the shortcut our brain takes to group similar memories together. "So that's how life starts to disappear into these memory sinkholes."

Sure, we need routines to help us make decisions quickly and efficiently, but what are we turning into a routine that would be more fun if we did something otherwise? Vanderkam encourages doing things differently, from trying something new to simply walking a different route to work to make your brain remember days differently and apart from each other.

Ready to hear all of her big goals?

Listen to her on the full episode of #WeGotGoals on Apple Podcasts here. You'll hear the big goals she's outlined for the future and why she's still tracking her time down to the half-hour each and every day.

If you like the show as much as we do, be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and leave it a rating and a review it really does help. And stick around until the end of the episode, goal getters. We have real life goal getting to share from a listener.

Transcript:

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C:Welcome to #WeGotGoals, a podcast by aSweatLife.com on which we talk to high achievers about their goals. I'm Jeana Anderson Cohen; with me, I have Maggie Umberger and Kristen Geil.

MU:Morning, Jeana.

KG:Hey Jeana.

JAC:Thanks for joining me ladies. Maggie, you did the podcast today and you interviewed Laura Vanderkam.

MU:I did. I interviewed Laura Vanderkam, who is a writer, an author, a speaker. She's written so many books that just the title alone makes you just think, I need to read this book. Recently she just finished off the clock and so it has just been released. She's a time management expert. She tracks her own time. She helps other people become more productive by analyzing how they spend their time and it's a really fascinating job that she has, that she's also turned into a career in multiple different facets. So companies work with her, she works with individuals and she, she tracks her time personally and kind of describes her experience doing that as well.

JAC:Now when you say time tracking, it gives me flashbacks to agency life, but she means it differently, right? Maggie?

MU:Yes and no. She tracks her time down to the 30 minute increment, which does remind me of agency life for having to remember who you're working with and what clients you're working on, all the way down to the quarter hour. But Laura tracks our time by analyzing where she spends her time with work, with her personal life and doing life admin things. She keeps the categories really broad, but it gives her information about really where she's spending her time and what her habits are and if she is aligning what her goals are with where she is spending her days.

JAC:Super interesting and she even gets right down to the sleep time, which you'll hear more about in the episode. I don't want to blow it for you. But Maggie, I know you tracked your time personally right around the New Year, so you have experience with this.

MU:I do, I got to interview her already for just a phone conversation and ask her how to go about starting to do this task because it seems pretty daunting at first, but she, she told me not to get too bogged down or in the weeds with it. I could keep it really general, but just to keep a log and I did it in my google calendar of how I'm spending my time. And it did a lot of things for me as in terms of showed me where I was spending more time than I thought. Sometimes I would say that I was completely bogged down with some assignment or some piece of work and then when I looked at where I was spending that time, sometimes it was just in the transition of getting from place to place and so it wasn't actually with that task or whatever it was.

MU:It's just a nice way to see where you're actually spending time and then the story you create around that. But it also helped me see where I could be a little bit more productive and so if I would put it in my calendar that I was going to do it. I actually did it during and I try to do that more often than not. But when I was doing that exercise, I was super accountable to myself by saying this is realistically going to take me 90 minutes and then I would make sure it took me 90 minutes and if I needed more time I would carve out a separate hour or whatever it was later in my week so that I could be really realistic about how long things were going to take me. I was checking more things off of my to-do list and I felt like I was actually doing the things I was said I was going to be doing.

KG:Maggie, Laura also mentioned something that I had never heard of before that she called better than nothing. Goals. Can you give us an idea of what that is?

MU:Yeah. So, and I also don't want to spoil it in the episode either, but we could have talked forever about just time tracking because it is really fascinating. But, uh, the idea of looking at time tracking and how it can help you set your goals is something that we kind of focus this episode on. She talks a little bit about those better than nothing goals. And one of those, um, goals that she has was just running a mile every day. She talks about it being almost like nothing. Like she could just slough it off and just that could, she could attain that goal no matter what. But if she set even a medium sized goal of trying to run x number of miles in a week, even that could get too daunting.

MU:Like forget setting a goal to run a half marathon or a marathon, like when we're busy, sometimes our bigger goals that we want to do start to feel like shoulds or need to dos. And then more like burdens. So the goal is that she keeps pretty small and almost like a no brainer achievement are the ones that she can feel really, really proud of every single day. And I totally resonated with that. Like if I think I can't make it to a workout class, but I can do 10 squats, that's better than nothing, and it's a nice, almost refreshing take on feeling accomplished.

JAC:One other concept that I thought was really interesting and I grabbed onto was the idea that time is sort of collapsible and expandable based on the novelty of your experiences, whether you're doing the same routine things every single day or whether you're going out of your way to experience new things. I always talk about how my life every day is a little bit different, so maybe we're living very long days around here, but can you talk a little bit about that, Maggie?

MU:Yes, absolutely. So Laura talks about how our brains condense things and make things a little bit more truncated in order for us to remember things in sort of blocks of time. And when we create habits that's really valuable for being efficient and for getting more things done. Habits are a very useful tool for us, but those habits can then lead to us doing very routine things that our brain starts to chunk together and that's where we start to have those thoughts like, where did the week go, where did the time go? And so she talks about just switching your routine ever so slightly, in big ways if you can, but even if it's just walking a different way to work, it's going to help your brain think differently about a routine thing and then it's going to actually create a little bit more opportunity for you to have memories of that time and so therefore your time becomes more valuable, more memorable. It was a different and unique take on the power of a routine. I think we all agree that they're important to have, but just thinking about how to make today a little different than yesterday and a little different than tomorrow places more value on the present moment.

KG:It sounds amazing and as someone who lives and dies by my planner, my google calendar, I cannot wait to learn more about Laura's tips. So here is Maggie with Laura.

JAC:And stick around listener for the end of the episode where you'll hear from real life goal getters and what they're achieving out there in the real world today.

MU:Welcome, Laura to the #WeGotGoals podcast. I am Maggie with aSweatLife and I'm so excited to get to talk to you today about not only the launch of your new book Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done, but also about what we love to talk about on this podcast, which is going after and achieving really big goals and getting to talk to high achievers and entrepreneurs and CEOs in different industries about how they think and go after big goals. And so, so this is going to be a really, really fun conversation I feel, but thank you again for, for taking the time to be on the #WeGotGoals podcast.

LV:Thank you so much for having me.

MU:So I know this is gonna sound kind of funny, probably considering your line of work, but I always like to ask the question to our guests, how you spend your days just for some listeners at home who might not know about the time tracking work that you do.

LV:Yeah, so I’m, I write books on and I speak on the topic of time management and productivity. I pretty much work out of my home office most days. That's where I'm recording this from. I live outside Philadelphia. I get up in the morning, get my four kids breakfast and ready and all that good stuff. Three of them go off to school. I have a sitter for the youngest one and then I work during the day. My work is about how people spend their time and how they can spend it better. I probably travel once every week or two to go give speeches different places on the topic, but if I'm not speaking that I'm here writing books and articles and running a podcast and blog and all that good stuff. Kids see activities after school, dinner, homework, you know, all that good stuff. So that's pretty much my life.

MU:And so you've written, you've written many books, but the last book that just came out on the 29th of May I want to hear a little bit about what inspired you to, to talk about how people feel about time and their perceptions about time.

LV:Well, I've long been fascinated by why some people who seem to have a lot going on in their lives still feel very relaxed about time. You know, some people who are, who have a lot going on, run around like chickens with their heads cut off going, I'm so busy, I'm so busy. But some people just act like they have all the time in the world and I say, well, what is the difference? Why do some people feel calm about time while others feel stressed? And so for Off the Clock I decided to explore this question more deeply and I did some research on it too. I had 900 people with full time jobs who also had families track their time for a day, March 27, 2017, and then I asked them questions about how they felt about their time so that I could then compare the schedules of people who felt starved for time with those who felt like time was abundant and the strategies that I learned from those books are what make up the book Off the Clock.

MU:And I'm sure I could ask a gazillion questions just based on that little snippet, but one thing that really sticks out to me is the idea that I think it's prevalent that we think we have to be stressed for time or kind of like we don't have enough time and that kind of sense of urgency in order to feel productive or successful. Did you feel like that coming for, or based on your research or that you maybe saw based on seeing some people that felt more productive versus not?

LV:Yeah, I mean I think time is often just what we perceive it as and there's this idea that if we're not filling every minute we're not being productive, but in fact I think the opposite is often true. Having open space in your schedule is a great way to kind of invite opportunities into your life. If you think about it, you know, having a longer conversation with someone in the hallway might lead to a new way of working on a project or if somebody who reports to you has these great ideas, she wants to come and talk about like you don't want to be like, yeah, I got an eight-minute window at 4:12 come back then. You want to actually be able to have these conversations and I think not filling every available minute is what leaves time for these things to happen.

MU:Exactly. I think about the little time tracking exercise that I did when I actually got to speak with you before I did it, and doing a 30 minute, in in blocks of time of 30 minutes all week long, just for one week I noticed certain things that I was spending time on that I didn't think that I prioritized and somehow I did and then vice versa, the things I thought I prioritized, I didn't really spend time doing so there was some disconnect there, but I think I. I probably said that I was busier than I actually was based on looking at the time, looking at the data, so I think that's one piece of this book that I love getting to read the data behind it. Can you talk a little bit about some of the overarching themes that you saw based on pulling 900 studies per se?

LV:Yeah. No, I mean I think you're not alone in finding that how we perceive time as often not the way we actually spend our time. We all have stories we tell ourselves about where the time really goes and and those are often not based on real data, like not on reality. I don't know a better way to say this, that they're not rooted in reality at all. Which is what always strikes me as hilarious when you read these studies out there and be like, Americans are increasingly sleep deprived. Well where did that number come from? Well you asked a bunch of people how much they think they sleep on a typical night. Well, what is a typical night? Did they actually record it or is that what they thought they slept? Are they remembering like the worst night in the last week or the best night? Are they thinking Tuesday night? Are they thinking Saturday night? Like what? What is this? And and and in fact when you have people keep track of it, like the Americant Time Use Survey, which is this huge study that has thousands of Americans track their time rolling through the year finds that in fact the amount of sleep Americans is getting is going up. It has risen by in a statistically significant amount over the past 15 years. You never read that anywhere like you never actually hear people say, whoa, actually, we're sleeping more than we were in the past, which is actually true. Yet we prefer the story of like, oh, we're increasingly sleep deprived. Anyway. A little bit of my own tangent on this because I, you know, I think that's so much of what we talk about in our modern society of time is not actually based on data. It is based on what people think they do with their time and it is not true.

LV:That's it. Going back to my 900 people tracking their time. I mean, there's some fascinating things, I mean, one is that, you know, people who are intentional about their time, who actually think about what they want to do before they are in that unit of time, are far more likely to make progress on their goals. I mean, that doesn't seem very surprising when you think about it, but I think a lot of people just sort of roll around with time I mean it keeps passing whether we think about how we spend it or not. And so like eventually you're gonna be on the other side of tomorrow. Like tomorrow will have come and tomorrow will have gone. But if you think about how you would like to spend tomorrow, that vastly increases the chances that tomorrow is spent doing things you care about. So not, not surprising, but uh, but you can see that in, in, in how people spend their time.

LV:You know, kind of an interesting phenomenon that is more unexpected is, is that people who felt like they had a lot of time, were far more likely to do kind of fun interesting out of the ordinary things on the March Monday that I had them record. I mean we're talking like a normal March Monday and the people with the biggest highest time perception scores were doing stuff like going to salsa dancing lessons on Monday night and you know, on some of them might say, well, oh, once you put commitments into your time, then you have less time because you've filled your time with stuff and to a degree that's true if you're filling your time with things you don't actually want to be doing. But when you fill your time with things that you want to do and that you find interesting and exciting and novel and all that, you actually feel like you have more time because in your mind you become the kind of person who can go to salsa dancing lessons on a Monday night and clearly you must be the kind of person who has time for that. And so you feel like you have time for the things that matter to you. So I found that kind of interesting too.

MU: That is so fascinating because it really is all about our perception and this kind of leads into the conversation about goals, which is something that we're pretty obsessed with a aSweatLife thinking not just about fitness goals, but any type of goal that you go after. I'm interested to know. I want to get to our big question that I'll ask you, but based on your research and the the countless hours that you've spent studying sort of the process by which people live, has it, does it make you think one way or another about setting goals?

LV:Well, I explore the topic of goal setting a little bit in Off the Clock. I think often the way people go about setting goals is problematic. We have a tendency to focus on outcomes, which makes sense on some level. I mean that's what you kind of. I mean that seems like what a good goal would be. Like I want to, you know, run a mile in 7 minutes or I want to lose 15 pounds or I want to bench press x amount of pounds or whatever it is, right? They seem like very good ways to set goals. They're specific, they're measurable. The issue is that, you know, outcomes can often be achieved by many means, some of which are good and some of which are not. I mean the quickest way to lose 10 pounds is to get the stomach flu, but I don't really recommend it.

LV:And that's not, that's not what you really meant. Like hopefully the, the reason to lose 10 pounds is that it's, it's part of a healthier lifestyle that you are taking care of your body in great ways and so I think focusing more on process goals is better, because those tend to be within your control and when you focus on things that are within your control, you have more of a sense of agency and that's just more motivational in general. I also think that setting very small process goals to the point where I call them like better than nothing goals. They're just better than nothing. They're not huge, but they're better than nothing. Also increases the chances that we stick with them. So. So one example is I've actually been running every day since December 24, 2016, so I've run at least a mile every day, for it's over 500 days now.

MU:Oh my gosh.

LV:If I had, if I had set a goal of saying like, Oh, I need to run three miles every day or five miles every day, there's no way I would've stuck with it, right? And in fact, if I'd even set a goal probably saying like 30 miles a week or something, I wouldn't have stuck with it. But one mile is like nothing, right. You know, it's, it's not that much. I can run it in 10 minutes or less, like I can run it in eight minutes if I'm running fast, but it's, you know, so once I normally run one mile, I'm fine to keep going. It's just saying, okay, well I'm just going to run that. Like it's just a few minutes, I'll run it and then it can go on my day. I can always find 10 minutes in my life to, to run. So, you know, setting a very small goal means I don't feel any resistance to sticking with it and that's what's made it possible to run more than 500 days in a row now.

MU:A small tangential question to that. By running those one mile a day, like making that habit for yourself, did it lead you to setting a goal, like since I already run every day, maybe I'll train for this half marathon? Did it lead to bigger goals?

LV:I don't know that it has per se. I mean partly because I've done races in the past and one of the things I was doing with this daily goal is kind of getting away from the whole race thing. So I was a bit burnt out on that. I can say that since I've started running a mile a day, I’m definitely faster. I've been able to run faster miles. Uh, I recently did a 10 mile race that it was just, I was running with somebody else, so I was running a little bit slower than I would have, but I felt like at the end of it I could have kept going for quite a ways. I mean, it's interesting to run a race and, and feel very strong through it, you know, and I can tell things like that with, with the running, you know, I mean maybe I'll set some other goals for right now. I think I'm happy with a mile a day. I don't know that I need to pile onto that one.

MU:Yeah, no, I, that's, that's a fantastic goal. So getting onto the big question that we ask all of our guests is what is one big goal, whether it's this year or just in the past that you've accomplished and why was it important to you slash how did you get there?

LV:Well, I certainly wanted to write books in my life. I've always wanted to be a writer and I am. And so that's pretty cool and sometimes when I have some issues with like, oh, things aren't going how I want or whatever, you know, I remind myself of that, like I could be doing something totally different with my life that I don't want to be doing, and in fact that I'm getting to write as a living is pretty cool. So I think reminding yourself of these goals that you have achieved can be very helpful for those moments we all have when we're feeling a little bit down on life in general.

MU:I completely agree with that. I think it's also very compelling for me to hear you talk about kind of acknowledging your accomplishments because that is in essence kind of using the data that you've been collecting for more than just seeing the data like you, you're, you're using it in your real life as well to notice those accomplishments along the way.

LV:One of the great things about tracking my time and you're like, wow, okay, so this is one of these kind of funny women. She runs a mile a day, she tracks all of her time, like, you know, okay, I'm a bit of a freak on some of these tracking things, but I, I have tracked my time in half hour blocks for three years at this point. Not that anyone else needs to do that. I do think tracking a week in life is very useful just to see where the time goes, but I have one of the best things about is not just saying, oh well I have time here. I could do x, y, or Z. I also get to look back on these logs and say like, Oh, you know, life, life is pretty good. Like I might feel like, oh, what am I actually doing with myself? And then I look back on a log and be like, wow, that's pretty cool. You know, in one week I gave two speeches and wrote this and also took my kids to an amusement park and went for a good dinner this place, and saw an art museum. I'm like, wow, that's kind of a lot to happen in one week. And I think looking back on my time logs reminds of those sorts of things, that life isn't just whatever your current annoyance is. Um, it's a bit broader than that.

MU:Absolutely. I think there's, I think it's common for us to complain if there, if there's a reason to complain versus think about the good and just project the good and then kind of bring in, bring in more good into your life. It's, it's easier to just lean on something that wasn't so great versus boasting about what is great. But that's what's so cool about the exercise of time tracking because it, it doesn't lie, it is what it is right in front of you.

LV:The brain naturally focuses on the negative. I mean that's just sort of an assumed state in life. And so I think you have to be very conscious of calling your attention to good things because you know, bad stuff will, will kick you in the face, but a good stuff, not so much.

LV:How, how did you, or at what point did you decide to start tracking your time? Was it based off of seeing other accomplished people? Do it or just a curiosity?

LV:Well, I think originally it was more a curiosity and because I've been writing about time management for so long and then one of the exercises I always have people do is to track their time like I, you know, had had hundreds of people track their time over the years and I had tracked various weeks here and there, you know, fair play, right? If I'm asking other people to do what I should do it as well. But, but what happened in April of 2015 as I just had this idea, well what if I undertake this project of trying to track my time for a year is what my original goal was. And it was, I knew it was going to be kind of a busy year. I had a different book coming out then it was called I Know How She Does It in June of 2015. I had also just had my fourth child in January of 2015.

LV:So it was it, you know, and it was gonna be an interesting year in terms of adjusting to having life with four kids, having this book come out, my speaking career was kind of taking off, so lots of lots of exciting things going on and I wanted to see, well what does life really look like on this sort of half hour by hour basis? So I started tracking continuously and then just kept going. I mean I got into a rhythm of it. It doesn't really take me much time. It takes me about three minutes a day. I check in maybe three or four times during the day and write down what I've done since the last time I checked in. At the end of the week. I look over the week and then save it and then I've probably every six months or so I do a bigger, deeper dive into my time log, see where the time has gone. Add up different categories, things like that, work, sleep, whatever time in the car, housework, doing whatever it is I'm doing.

LV:So you know, every, every six months or so, add that up and get the data on that. I guess I just, I wanted to see where the time went and I knew obviously I could write about it being a time management person I could probably turn it into something and I, I did and it was actually a great the project bore a lot of fruit for me, which is, which is wonderful in terms of my professional life, but I found it so interesting that I just kept going and so, you know, in Off the Clock I talk about basically three years of time tracking data and talk about what other people have learned as well.

MU:And, and you also traveled to speak, as you said, and work with companies. I'm talking about productivity and time management and so I'm curious to know maybe in that setting when you're thinking about just the productivity at work and your work life, what are some big misconceptions that companies or people have about productivity at work?

LV:Well, I think one of the worst things that happens is people start to associate work with the term scheduled meeting. Having these two become sort of intertwined with each other and, and it's very easy for companies to sort of slip into this issue of people being booked in constant meetings. Obviously other people have stuff that we need to work with and they have ideas they have, you know, they help us with projects and they don't tend to show up at our desk at the exact moment that we want them to. So hence you schedule meetings. I mean there are reasons that this happens, but when, when people start packing their schedules too tightly, you know, a, everything runs over and so, so then nothing is ever happening when it's supposed to happen. People don't just call each other because they feel like you need to have a scheduled meeting so then you're waiting for two days to get on somebody's calendar to just get a very quick answer for something that probably didn't need to happen anyway.

LV:Like people don't have space in their calendars to deal with things that come up because they're already so packed in. And so, you know, I think you really have to push back against it. The first question should always be not like, oh, are you free to have a meeting then? It’s like, well, do we actually need to meet? And so if people can start thinking about that question first or this, could we just have a two minute conversation right now and solve this issue? Like why do we need to have a meeting? Or do all these people need to be in this room for absolutely every single minute of this meeting and if not like, well why are they there? Are people being able to multitask while they're on this conference call? If so, then they probably don't need to be on the call because their presence wasn't required. All of these are good questions to ask. I think, you know, we can all waste our own time and that's fine, but when you get six people in a room and you're wasting all of their time, that starts to get expensive pretty fast. So treating time a wee bit more preciously would be a major breakthrough for a lot of places.

MU:And, and I hear you talk about, you know, time is money from, from a company or a corporate perspective, but also those realizations or kind of questions to ask apply to individuals as well. And I think about how people go after goals and then are not sure why they're not getting there and probably taking inventory and getting that real time feedback, analyzing like what are you actually doing with your time? Could I be spending it a little bit differently? Is it going in the direction towards where I want to be heading? Can yield faster, more productive results.

LV:Oh definitely. Um, yeah, I think we all need to be aware of where our time goes and when you are aware of where it's going and then you ask what you would like to spend your time doing, you vastly increase the chances that that is what you actually spend your time doing.

MU:And I love that question. Like where, how do I want to be spending my time? And another question that you pose in off the clock is how is today going to be different from other days, which really spoke to me. Can you, can you talk a little bit more about, I guess the power behind asking questions like that and if there are other ones that you typically ask yourself?

LV:Yeah, I mean the reason to ask why is today different from other days is that adult life winds up having a high degree of similarity day today. You know, if you think about when you were a kid and you're experiencing a lot of firsts and new things and you're like a teenager or something, you have a lot of memories of this time because of that novelty. The brain, when it thinks about time, its sense of time perception is affected by how many memories you have of that unit of time. So if you think about like the first day of a vacation to somewhere interesting, it seems very long because your brain is taking in all this new information. It doesn't know what of it is important. So it's trying to remember all of it and that makes time seem a lot faster than if you're just doing the same thing day in, day out.

LV:I mean, if you've commuted to work in the same way for the past like 500 days, you're not—your brain is that remembering each of those 500 days of sort of just remembers one day and and so that's how life starts to disappear into these memory sinkholes that whole years pass by without seeming very different from each other. So, you know, some of this is inevitable. I mean, I'm not saying you need to commute 500 different ways to work because that's not really gonna happen. But if you ask yourself this question, how is today different from other days, then that can nudge you to think about how I could make today slightly more memorable. Like could I plan in some mini adventure into my day? Like let's say you always walk by some little stationery store on your way into work from the parking garage.

LV:And you’re like, oh, I should stop there sometime. Well, why don't you do it? Go in there, explore it, see maybe you'll find something really cool or, you know, grab your colleagues and go have a picnic lunch somewhere. Um, or maybe you go for a bike ride on that trail you've been eyeing after work or try a new restaurant or something, you know, there's just a million ways you could do little tiny adventures into your life or put in some sort of emotional intensity like speak to someone you've been meaning to speak to and actually have a good conversation with them. But doing these things makes a day memorable and when you have more memories of a day, then time seems to expand and that's what keeps time some sort of slipping through our fingers.

MU:That's so, so fascinating to me because that is when I think about wanting to achieve big things, ultimately it's every single day that would get me there and doing something like that means everyday becomes more meaningful. Like you say, like you talk about the process being the ultimate goal, setting yourself up for success when you elevate the process. So I love that because it makes it tangible. It makes it doable every single day.

LV:Yeah. No, I think that that, I mean we can't do everything every single day, but certainly how we live our daily lives is important.

MU:So this leads me to the next big question. What is a big goal now that you want to go after in the future or that you are going after and how do you plan on getting there?

LV:Well, let's see. I mean I do set goals. I think one interesting goal that I'm trying to think about is a philanthropic goal and I know that sounds funny, like I'm not, you know, Bill Gates here, but we could all be more intentional about our charitable giving. Like, what we give money to and what we're hoping to do with it and I would like to spend some time this year thinking about that. I have an interest in new music and I have been a donor for a choir I was part of for years in New York. I left New York but I've still donated money to it that runs a competition for young composers that comes up with new music every year and I've enjoyed doing that and I'd like to do more of that. I'd like to have some more new music come to be, new choral music come to be and you know, it's generally less expensive than you might think to support this sort of thing, but you know, being a real patron of the arts in that sense, would be cool. I want to think about how I want to go about doing that.

MU:Very cool. So, so I want to make sure that people know how, how they can find you. Not only can they now buy your book, Off the Clock, Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done. They can listen to your podcast, Best of Both Worlds. And then how else can people find you and what do you want them to know about all of these different channels?

LV:Uh, yes. You can come find me at my website, LauraVanderkam.com. Listen to my podcast, the Best of Both Worlds and the check out my time management books like Off the Clock, which is recently out now on May 29 and the others as well.

MU:And if people want to start time tracking, you have some sources for them to go about this process on your website too.

LV:Yeah, if you come to my website, you can fill out the subscription form. I'll mail you a time log. You can do that. You can also just Google Vanderkam manage your time if you want to find it directly. But yeah, you can download these timesheets. Use the 30-minute log, which is what I do. The 15-minute log is also there. Some people like to get a little bit more granular on their time tracking details. So yeah, no, I think it's really fascinating to see where the time goes and once you do you can decide what you like, what you don’t; celebrate what's working and maybe change things that aren't.

MU:I love it. Thank you so much for spending the time, the 30 minutes of precious time on your calendar to speak with me for the podcast. It was, it was a wonderful conversation.

LV:Well thank you so much.

CK:Hey, goal-getters! This is co host and producer Cindy Kuzma here. Just checking into the to know that we are once again bringing you a goal from one of you, a goal-getter out in the community, this one we recorded live at the SweatWorkingWeek Michelob Ultra Fitness Festival last month, and hey, if you'd like to hear about your goal, if you have one in mind or one that you've accomplished or one that you're setting your sights on and you want to tell us about it, we would love to have you as part of this podcast. So here's what you can do. You can record a quick audio memo on your iphone, android, whatever kind of phone you have, and email it to me, cindy@asweatlife.com, and you could be on this very podcast. Just say your name, where you're from, and then tell us about your goal. Thank you so much for listening and here is one of your goals.

M:My name is Meg, I'm from St Louis, but I've lived in Chicago for just over two years and a big goal that I have for the future that I'm currently working on is to really dive into fitness and wellness as more of a career path and something that I'm doing currently is I'm studying for my NASM certification, which hopefully I will be certified very soon and then from there just doing more and more events like this, networking with people, meeting with lots of likeminded individuals in both of the industries of wellness and fitness and just learning as much as I can and hopefully eventually creating a client base and just helping people as much as I can with my knowledge and growing knowledge and fitness and nutrition and holistic wellness.

CK:This podcast is produced by me, Cindy Kuzma, and it's another thing that's better with friends, so please share it with yours. You can subscribe wherever you get your podcasts and while you're there, please leave us a rating or review. Special thanks to J. Mano for our theme music; to our guest this week, Laura Vanderkam; and to Tech Nexus for the recording studio.