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Copyright © Laura Vanderkam, 2013

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ISBN 978-1-101-62029-8

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PORTFOLIO/PENGUIN

WHAT THE MOST SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE DO AT WORK

LAURA VANDERKAM is the author of 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think; All the Money in the World: What the Happiest People Know About Getting and Spending; What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast; and What the Most Successful People Do on the Weekend. Her work has appeared in The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, USA Today, Scientific American, and Reader’s Digest, among other publications. She lives outside Philadelphia with her husband and their three children.

Visit lauravanderkam.com

Also by

Laura Vanderkam

• • • •

WHAT THE MOST SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE DO ON THE WEEKEND:

A Short Guide to Making the Most of Your Days Off

WHAT THE MOST SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE DO BEFORE BREAKFAST:

A Short Guide to Making Over Your Mornings—and Life

ALL THE MONEY IN THE WORLD:

What the Happiest People Know About Getting and Spending

168 HOURS:

You Have More Time Than You Think

GRINDHOPPING:

Build a Rewarding Career Without Paying Your Dues

WHAT THE MOST SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE DO AT WORK

A Short Guide to Making Over Your Career

Laura Vanderkam

A PENGUIN SPECIAL FROM

About the Book

In her bestselling mini-ebook What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast, Laura Vanderkam showed us how to take advantage of our often ignored morning hours to achieve our dreams.

Then in the sequel, What the Most Successful People Do on the Weekend, she revealed why the key to a better week is a better weekend.

Now, in the third mini-ebook of this trilogy, What the Most Successful People Do at Work, Vanderkam shows us how to ignite our careers by taking control of our work days.

Too often the typical workday makes us feel like hamsters on the proverbial wheel. Plagued by crises and distractions, we work hard all day. But when we go home we’re not much closer to reaching our goals.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. Vanderkam shows how successful people employ certain daily practices to make sure their work hours are invested, not squandered. Drawing on research and interviews with people as varied as children’s book illustrator LeUyen Pham, productivity guru David Allen, fitness personality Chalene Johnson, and former race car driver Sarah Fisher, Vanderkam shows how to take control of your career by taking control of your 9-to-5.

Contents

Copyright Page

Author Bio

Also by Laura Vanderkam

Title Page

About the Book

WHAT THE MOST SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE DO AT WORK

Introduction

The Secret of Astonishing Productivity

Discipline 1

Mind Your Hours

Discipline 2

Plan

Discipline 3

Make Success Possible

Discipline 4

Know What Is Work

Discipline 5

Practice

Discipline 6

Pay In

Discipline 7

Pursue Pleasure

EXTRA!

Chapter 1: The Myth of the Time Crunch from 168 Hours

Introduction

THE SECRET OF ASTONISHING PRODUCTIVITY

Deep in the countryside of Bordeaux, France, anyone out wandering one early-January night in 2013 might have caught a curious sight: a black-haired woman in a lit studio window scratching out ink drawings of the Alaskan tundra.

Outside the otherwise dark house the scene was tranquil. Inside, it was considerably noisier. Artist LeUyen Pham paints and draws best with the TV or radio on—“something to occupy the right hemisphere of my brain,” she explains. “If I’m thinking too much, my paintings look horrible. They look overthought.” During the afternoon, her media diet consists of Seinfeld or Mad Men reruns. At night, it’s often NPR, piped in through the magic of technology to her temporary home in rural France, where she moved with her husband and 5- and 2-year-old sons in the summer of 2012. This particular night, she had two iPads fired up simultaneously: One was for playing a movie, and one was for “looking up things I might need at the last second—how a fabric might look, what a moose hide might look like.”

Such authenticity was necessary for Pham’s portraits of a fictional girl named Bo who grew up in a 1920s mining village on the Yukon River, a place depicted in hundreds of old photographs crammed into Pham’s studio since she took on the project of illustrating a children’s chapter book by Kirkpatrick Hill called Bo at Ballard Creek. The book was due out in June, 2013, and so she was racing toward a deadline. “On a non-deadline day, between nine and eleven in the morning is when I flow best, when I’m most invested in my work,” she says. On deadline days, though, “my best time is around eleven at night. There is absolutely no distraction to be had. You’re pretty much shackled to your desk.” She pauses. “There’s something really nice about that.”

Indeed, Pham was so captivated by this Little House on the Prairie–type tale, set in the far north, that although she’d originally been contracted for one illustration per chapter, she proposed dozens more (“it’s a great, great story,” she says). The publisher loved them all. And so night after night in January, she took to her desk for another shift, drawing energy from her drawings. At times like those, “I’m actually in heaven,” she says. “I don’t realize what time it is. I don’t think I’m tired” until a wee-hours yawn proves otherwise.

Whether she’s tired or not, Pham’s schedule sounds wearying. After starting her career at DreamWorks, and then going out on her own a decade ago, she has become one of the most prolific children’s book illustrators working in the field. These days she’s conjuring up 8 or 9 titles a year, including board books (like Whose Toes Are Those? written by Jabari Asim), picture books (like the Freckleface Strawberry books, written by actress Julianne Moore), and chapter books like Bo at Ballard Creek. “I know it’s an insane amount. I don’t know a whole lot of illustrators who do that many,” she says, given that a 32-page children’s book can consist of, in essence, 32 fully executed, gallery-quality paintings. Four or five titles a year would be a full schedule for most people, and so “I’m working on multiple projects at the same time,” she says. “Always.”

Yet she manages to maintain high standards. Her secret? For one, she is careful with her time. “I absolutely quantify my hours,” she says. She’ll monitor her work to see “what have I produced in half an hour, in an hour—it’s half hours to hours to days to weeks.” She’ll set goals for all those time periods, like giving herself one episode of Seinfeld (22 minutes plus commercials) to finish a drawing.

That intimate knowledge of her hours means she can quickly describe what a usual workday looks like for her. She’s up around 6 a.m., working on “thumbnail” sketches that help her plan what she’ll paint or ink later. She also tackles any administrative work—e-mails with editors and the like. Her boys rise around 7:30, so she plays with them and helps her husband get them out the door to school. Then at 8:30, it’s back to work for more thinking and planning while she’s still fresh. Around 10, she’ll switch over to executing on her thumbnail sketches. That’s when she puts Seinfeld and similar shows on, until 4 or 5 p.m., when she might try to reach people on the East Coast. After that, she turns her attention to the children again, playing with them and eating dinner. Before their bedtime, she reads them a story—sometimes one she’s written, but she also uses this as a chance to check out the competition—and then it’s back to work for a third shift. With the pastoral view of the Bordeaux landscape reduced to blackness outside, she starts making art almost by instinct. “It’s like driving a car to a place you know so well you almost don’t look where you’re driving,” she says.

Of course, her ability to summon that instinct is due to her other secrets of astonishing productivity. She makes time to keep improving at her craft, something she says she ponders “with every single project I get. I have so many different styles, and I try to cultivate that. When I was first in the business, people told me you’ve got to have a single style for which you become known. That gets you more work. But I could never get excited about that. It’s so boring to paint in one particular way. Yes, you get better at one style, but you get out of your mind sick of it.” In fact, “other artists cautioned me against doing that.” Any one style of painting can go out of fashion, but keeping yourself a nimble student of the discipline makes learning new styles possible. “It’s a lot of extra work, but it’s like reinventing yourself for each book,” she says.

She has learned to be creative basically on demand—even if she’s tired, even if she’s interrupted by family matters—by honing tactics that prime her brain. She keeps abreast of what other artists are doing; she researches things like moose hides and Alaskan fabric every time she starts a project so that the aesthetics of the world she’ll depict permeate her consciousness. And when that fails, she’s got other tricks in her paint pots. While updating a book called There’s No Such Thing As Little during December, 2012, she faced such a block that she could only tiptoe through by making Christmas ornaments. “We forgot to bring Christmas ornaments when we moved to France,” she explains, so she coaxed out her creative impulses by making holiday decorations: 40 carefully crafted sculptures consisting of pine cone elves, cork Santa Clauses, and cork angels. She painted a face on a hazelnut, glued black felt on it, and made a vampire. “I was really surprised at how well the tree came out,” Pham says. The book got made, too, and, since she was recently offered a job illustrating a book on the 12 days of Christmas, her hours did double duty as she pondered Christmas visuals.

Indeed, all of Pham’s hours seem to count multiple times. She is constantly learning new ways to illustrate as she absorbs what is around her. Even a trip to a town café can turn into art, as it did with another book coming out in the summer of 2013 called The Boy Who Loved Math. It’s a children’s book about legendarily prolific mathematician Paul Erdos. When she first got the manuscript, Pham said “you’ve got the wrong person.” But—perhaps intrigued by Erdos’s sheer quantity of output—she threw herself into learning about the man and his mathematics. She found that she loved the idea of using his beautiful proofs in the compositions themselves. One of his conjectures had to do with how many squares of different sizes could fit in a larger square; on one page, the text conveys that Paul couldn’t find a way to fit into the world, he was different from everyone else. Pham painted people sitting in a café, and each of them occupied a differently sized square. Erdos got a pentagon. The squares and shapes were all him, but the café was Pham’s invention from wandering around France. “Everything, whatever’s around me at the moment, finds its way into my work,” she says.

What makes Pham’s schedule possible is that she only takes on work like Bo at Ballard Creek or The Boy Who Loved Math—work that challenges her and allows her to find joy in steady progress toward a goal she thinks matters. I asked her if she chose stories that she could picture delighting children, and she laughed. “I would love to say that was it, but my initial attraction is that it’s a project that I, myself, would love to do,” she says. “I would assume in consequence that kids like it, because I have a very childlike mentality, and my kids seem to like the same stories and same ideas,” but ultimately, she chooses work that she loves for its own sake. That makes near miracles possible. Her output increases as the years go on. After her friends started having kids, Pham says, many had identity crises of sorts, pondering whether their work was worth the time they put into it. But rather than scaling back, she scaled up, even as she spends many hours with her little ones too. “I don’t really care the extent of the work,” she says, “if I’m sure at the end it’s going to look good.”

*

I’ve interviewed many people about their jobs and daily schedules over the years, but I’ve come back to Pham several times. I always enjoy talking to her, partly because her work is so fascinating to a book lover like myself, but also because I think she sees, clearly, both the effort success requires and how joyous work can be. The combination of the two is rare. My head spins every time I get off the phone with Pham.

Of course, few people make their living drawing mathematicians or girls who lived during the Alaskan Gold Rush, so I’m guessing your workdays look a little different than Pham’s. Children’s book illustrators will naturally work differently than nurses, farmers, teachers, postal clerks, corporate vice presidents, or any of the other vocations represented among the world’s 7 billion souls—a fact many productivity tomes obsessed with a corporate environment miss. Nonetheless, we all face the truth that our lives are built in hours. What you will accomplish will be a function of how you spend those hours. And so the mind-set Pham has toward her hours, and, by extension, her life’s work, can be transferred from the canvas of her life to anyone else’s.

Many of us could use the help. As with money, we have a tendency to fritter away the time in front of us as if it were infinite. For some of us, that’s because our hours are sucked into the Reply-All maw of an inbox. Others, perhaps, can see that the customer who wandered into a store left with her real need unaddressed, and won’t be coming back. A dentist sees that a patient didn’t absorb her half-hearted pep talk on flossing and knows that the patient will be back soon for more fillings and another tepid pep talk. We find ourselves counting minutes and wishing ourselves elsewhere. These hours pass, inexorably, with little promise of leading to much that matters. They are spent and the transaction is done, like paying a late fee on a cell phone bill or buying a sweater that you never wind up wearing.

But as with money, people who build wealth take some chunk of what is coming in and invest it in ways that generate returns. Successful people know that hours, like capital, can be consciously allocated with the goal of creating riches—in the form of a changed world, a life’s work—over time. Indeed, successful people understand that work hours must be more carefully stewarded than capital because time is absolutely limited. You can earn more money, but the mightiest among us is granted no more than 168 hours per week, and it is physically impossible to work for all of them.

If you make certain choices in your work, though, if you develop certain disciplines and invest your time instead of squandering it, you can do more with the time you have. Pham describes it as a sort of magical thinking. “I cannot understand how I produce the amount of work I do in the time I have. My husband says, ‘you have a carefully constructed sense of self-delusion,’ which is totally true.” But no matter how deluded the deadlines are—she jokes that she’d be tempted to take a project requiring 100 paintings in 3 and a half days—“between eleven and two, when I’m on a roll and inspired and it’s just coming out, I don’t even know how to quantify time any more. I’m whipping through it and it feels really, really lovely.”

How do you build your career so that hard work feels lovely? How can you spend your hours to make a prodigious amount of your best work possible? How can you invest your time so that your work then speaks for you, multiplying what you can do on your own? How can you experience the joy of doing what you feel matters?

These are difficult questions. They may also be depressing questions if you are reading this on your iPhone under the conference table during a meeting that should have ended 30 minutes ago. The good news is there are lots of ways to start tending your time more carefully. Even if you think you lack complete control of your time, and even if you feel battered by the gales of creative destruction swirling through the economy, you can look at your calendar and see the possibilities inherent in minutes rather than seeing them as sands sifting through an hourglass. The secret to astonishing productivity lies in a handful of daily disciplines that, as Pham and other successful people have discovered, have the power to make work hours count more. “I will never get over the fact that I’m super lucky to be in this position,” she says. “My kids can see that I love what I do.”

Discipline 1

MIND YOUR HOURS

I first came to the topic of time not because I was interested in time management but because I was fascinated by the academic study of time use. Hunting through data from the American Time Use Survey, conducted annually by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and other time diary projects, I came to the inescapable conclusion that how we think we spend our time has little to do with reality. We wildly overestimate time devoted to housework. We underestimate time devoted to sleep. We write whole treatises glorifying a golden age that never was; American women, for instance, spend more time with their children now than their grandmothers did in the 1950s and 60s.

These curious blind spots continue into the realm of work. People who get paid by the hour know how many hours they work. People who inhabit the world of exempt jobs have a much more tenuous grasp on this concept but, as a general rule, the higher the number of work hours reported, the more likely the person is to be overestimating. A study published in the June 2011 Monthly Labor Review that compared estimated workweeks with time diaries reported that people who claimed their “usual” workweeks were longer than 75 hours were off, on average, by about 25 hours. You can guess in which direction. Those who claimed that a “usual” workweek was 65–74 hours were off by close to 20 hours. Those claiming a 55–64 hour workweek were still about 10 hours north of the truth. Subtracting these errors, you can see that most people top out at fewer than 60 work hours per week. Many professionals in so-called extreme jobs work about 45–55 hours per week. Those are numbers I can attest to from time logs I’ve seen over the years. I’ve given speeches at companies known for their sweatshop hours and had up-and-comers keep time logs for me. Their recorded weeks tend to hover around 60 hours—and that’s for focused, busy weeks with no half days, vacation days, or dentist appointments, and, most importantly, for weeks that people are willing to share with colleagues. We live in a competitive world, and boasting about the number of hours we work has become a way to demonstrate how devoted we are to our jobs.

That would be funny, except that numbers have consequences. If you think you’re working 80 hours per week, you’ll make different choices in your attempts to optimize them than if you know you usually work 55. That’s why Pham is careful to quantify her hours, and it’s why people who want to use their hours better figure out how they’re spending their hours now. If you’ve ever tried to lose weight, you know that nutritionists will tell you to keep a food journal, because evidence shows it works. One study of a year-long weight loss program, published in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics in 2012, found that women who kept a food journal lost about 6 pounds more than those who did not. Writing down what you eat keeps you accountable for what you put in your mouth. Likewise, writing down how you spend your time keeps you accountable for the hours that pass, whether or not you’re conscious of them.

There are lots of apps that can help you keep a time log, or you can download a decidedly low-tech spreadsheet from my Web site.[1] I use the even lower-tech solution of writing down my hours in a spiral notebook. If you’ve never kept track of your time before, I encourage you to try logging a whole week and think of yourself as a lawyer billing time to different projects. How much time do you spend checking e-mail? Thinking? Planning? Traveling? In meetings? Doing the substance of whatever work you were hired to do?

Tally up the totals and study them. Do those totals seem reasonable? What do you over- or underinvest in? Perhaps the most important insight to come out of this experiment is an understanding of exactly how long activities take. If I’ve got a blog post written, it takes me half an hour to format it with links and photos—a good thing to know before attempting to post between the 11:45 a.m. end of a phone call and lunch with my kids at noon. People who do a lot of something often develop a good sense for this, and consequently have a more accurate understanding of how much they can produce in the 2,000–3,000 annual work hours that a 40–60 hour workweek entails. For Pham, a painting takes a certain number of Seinfeld episodes. An October 2012 Wall Street Journal profile of Connie Brown, an artist who specializes in personalized maps, reported that a map took her more than 200 hours to complete, and so she did about 12 a year. Even adding administrative time, that puts her in the 2,000–3,000-hour bucket. A less experienced artist might attempt to tackle 50 such projects per year, but since that’s 10,000 hours, and a year has just 8,760 hours (8,784 during leap years), that clearly wouldn’t work.

You don’t have to log your minutes forever, but even doing it for a few days gives you a mindfulness about time—a mindfulness I imagine monastic sorts were pursuing as they meditated through their books of hours. That mindfulness can lead to more productive choices by itself. One busy doctor who kept a time log for me subsequently took her log to her clinic director to make the case for more administrative support so she could see more patients. Having logged many weeks over the years, I no longer propose phone calls before 11 a.m. if I get a say in the matter. That’s because I know that morning hours are when I am best able to turn an idea into words.

You may be frustrated to discover that how you’re spending your time isn’t how you wish to be spending your time, but the stark truth is that time is a non-renewable resource—when it’s gone, it’s gone. There is no point lamenting how many of your hours have been lost in the past. There is much to be gained, though, by committing to doing things differently in the 2,000–3,000 work hours you are granted as a blank slate each year.

Discipline 2

PLAN

Once you know how many work hours you have available to you, the next step for transforming your career is figuring out what you’d like to do with them. Teachers’ contracts often allow for a planning period so they can set objectives and create lessons in a time separate from their “on” hours in front of children. It doesn’t always work, but having that designated time creates a culture where thinking through what you intend to do before you do it is possible. Erica Woolway, the chief academic officer of Uncommon Schools and coauthor with Doug Lemov and Katie Yezzi of Practice Perfect: 42 Rules for Getting Better at Getting Better, studied effective teachers and found that they were “Really, in a detailed way, scripting out lesson plans, scripting out questions you will ask students. That type of planning is a big distinguishing factor between the good teachers and the not-so-great.”

But when’s the last time you gave yourself a planning period? When I poll audiences about what they’d like to spend more time on, planning and thinking land near the top of the list. People lament that they’d love to have strategic-thinking time, but they’re just too busy! This always strikes me as a bit backward. You hope whoever built your house wasn’t so busy hammering and sawing that he couldn’t look at the blueprint. Likewise, successful people—who have the same 168 hours per week as the rest of us—simply build planning into their lives. Pham’s thumbnail sketches help her and her publishers decide the order of panels and what each one will contain. It would not make sense to attempt 32 sequentially related paintings without thinking through what would be in them. It would be a colossal waste of time to start a painting only to realize halfway through that the cloud would look much better on the left side of the moon.

Design is half the battle, and this is true in business contexts, too. The Executive Time Use Project, run out of the London School of Economics and Political Science, has had executive assistants keep track of CEO time use at publicly listed companies in multiple countries. Preliminary analysis from CEOs in India found that a firm’s sales increased as the CEO worked more hours. But more intriguingly, the correlation between CEO time use and output was driven entirely by hours spent in planned activities. Planning doesn’t have to mean that the hours are spent in meetings, though meetings with employees were correlated with higher sales; it’s just that CEO time is a limited and valuable resource, and planning how it should be allocated increases the chances that it’s spent in productive ways.

This is the thinking behind Michael Soenen’s work ritual of a weekend planning period. Soenen was the CEO of FTD (the florist network) for years, and now runs EmergencyLink, a company that stores emergency information in a way that’s accessible to family and first responders. He says that his most important personal habit is to carve out the back half of Sunday for strategic thinking. He spends a few hours considering “What are our priorities, and I make sure those priorities are distributed to the team. I think through any questions I have, what are the important projects. If those are made clear Sunday night, coming into Monday morning, everyone really knows what to do.” The team can have a quick call Monday morning and go. Such planning makes the whole week more productive, says Soenen, because his role, as a leader, is “To help my people be as efficient as possible with their time. It’s hard for them to be efficient if you don’t think, institutionally, what are the best ideas.” If he waits until Monday morning to plan, then it’s not until Monday afternoon that people figure out what they need to do, and he risks his people running hard in the wrong direction. If you’ve got 10 people working for you, 4 haphazard hours on Monday morning means 40 misdirected hours. That’s like losing a full-time equivalent from your staff. But if Soenen has a great Sunday afternoon, then everyone else has a great week. “For me, I’ve noticed when I spend that time it makes a big difference,” he says.

Devotees of David Allen’s GTD system—which stands for “Getting Things Done”—carve out time for a weekly review. During this time, they look at loose ends, put things on the “someday/maybe” list, and define the next actions required on big projects. Allen himself finds that “the end of the week is a nice time to do it,” he says, or on Sundays, or on long plane trips. “That’s a good time to sit down and do that kind of back-off thinking.” The key is finding a time and place where “the world kind of slows down, the phones aren’t ringing, people aren’t pinging me instantly while I’m at my desk.” Since some of his clients almost never experience a slowdown like that, he reports that some of them don’t schedule anything before 9 a.m. so they can start at 7 a.m. and “get zeroed out before the madness.” Some of them decide to work at home on Fridays and use the first half of the day for reflection time so they can review their weeks without the world clawing at them at the office. Whatever you choose, get everything out of your brain and figure out unfinished business. “I don’t want to add any new creative stuff on top of stuff that’s stale,” says Allen, but with work defined, he can then welcome new ideas and ponder what’s next.

I tend to do my own planning on three levels. Each December, I think of questions I’d ask in the “performance review” I hope to give myself at the end of the next calendar year. What would I like to accomplish in my next 2,000 working hours? To be sure, the future is unknowable, and goals can be changed. Nonetheless, setting annual goals—such as “double my blog traffic” or “write a draft of a novel”—focuses my brain on actions that would help achieve those goals. With my annual goals in mind, I then make a priority list every Sunday night of what I plan to accomplish in the next week. That priority list will include both immediate assignments and steps toward my annual goals (like “study Google Analytics for 30 minutes to see what drives traffic” and “write 2,000 words of fiction”). I tightly schedule Monday and loosely schedule the rest of the week. Then on Monday night I schedule Tuesday more tightly, based on what’s left on the priority list and what’s come up on Monday. Tuesday night I schedule Wednesday, and so forth. I’ve usually gotten most things done by Friday, which can be a mop up day or a time for more planning.

People work in different ways, so there is no one version of planning that will work for everyone. If you work very closely with another person—an assistant, for instance, or the librettist who writes the words for all your operas—that person will need to participate in some of your planning. If you have many requests for specific chunks of your time, your planning might require more careful scripting than if your work culture permits wandering into a colleague’s office and spending 4 hours debating a mathematical proof. The important thing is not so much the format. It’s getting in the habit of scheduling a planning period. Once you get in the rhythm of planning, though, of thinking through things before you do them, you’ll find it’s quite addictive. You might start working at strange times just to be sure you get your planning fix. Durval Tavares, CEO of Aquabotix, a company that makes underwater robots, confesses that he’s sometimes up at 4:00 a.m. “not because of the alarm,” but because he has lots of things on his mind. “You want clarity,” he says. “It’s hard once you get into your office to have a moment to just think and strategize and figure out things.” So he plans before breakfast and comes to work ready to face the day.

You might also start planning your personal life. Mike Williams, a former executive at GE who is now the CEO of the David Allen Company, reports that he spends a few minutes at the end of the workday reviewing what he’d like to focus on in the evenings. For instance, he’ll mark on his calendar that his daughter had a presentation that day: “Ask her how it went.” That way, when he walks in the door, he’s truly present for his family. As he notes, he has just four more years before his teenager leaves home, and he sees the chance for communication and to do special activities together “as gems I don’t want to lose. In the past, if I didn’t write those down, I’d miss those opportunities.” As with work hours, leisure and family hours pass whether or not you think through how you intend to spend them. Knowing where you’re going vastly increases the chances that you’ll get there.

Discipline 3

MAKE SUCCESS POSSIBLE

Once you start scheduling regular planning sessions, you’ll gather all sorts of kindling for lighting a fire under your career. You’ll think of 100 new people you want to meet. You’ll think of 100 new ideas for growing your business. But, as counterintuitive as it sounds, resist the temptation to put all these wonderful ideas on the to-do list for Monday. Pace yourself. Successful people tend to view their primary to-do lists a bit differently than others do. They aren’t just lists. They’re more like contracts. Whatever is on the list will get done, often as a matter of personal pride. This is true even if your deadlines turn out to be squishy. Pham, for instance, reports that “In the past year, I think my publishers thought I’d slow down with my second kid, but I keep hitting all these deadlines.” Now, a few projects are in a dormant phase as she waits for other people to catch up.

Since life comes up and emergencies happen, making success possible hinges on two things: being choosy about each day’s priority list, and developing an accountability system that works.

Chalene Johnson, the fitness personality best known for creating the TurboJam exercise videos, tends to limit her daily priority list to 6 items: 3 things that must get done that day, and 3 small steps toward what she calls her “push” goal for the year. This is a measurable goal whose achievement would make her other big goals possible. Sometimes that means it’s not her most obvious goal. For instance, in 2011, she wanted her book, PUSH: 30 Days to Turbocharged Habits, a Bangin’ Body, and the Life You Deserve!, to hit the bestseller list. That’s a goal in its own right, but she realized that the key to making that happen was to accumulate at least 100,000 fan e-mail addresses so she could reach out and market to these people. The promotional activities necessary to create that database became her push goal. Another push goal? Roughly a year before we talked, she sold two of her companies to Beachbody, the home fitness company. She stayed on as a consultant for a year, with part of her payout hinging on Beachbody’s success. So that year’s push goal was helping Beachbody hit a solid level of profit. The day I interviewed Johnson, one of the three steps was to set up an appointment with a man she was working with on a project. The second was to set up a teleconference with the CEO for the next day. The third was to revise an outline for a presentation.

Getting through the list is “pretty easy when you only have six things,” she says. “I breeze through them and feel very accomplished. It creates an adrenaline rush, a snowball effect for me to want to stay on a roll.” Indeed, “the reasoning behind limiting, editing your list to fewer items is you never feel defeated. You got everything done that had to get done. Most people think they have to sprint and that’s why they never hit their big push goals—because they run out of steam.” Doing three things per day in pursuit of a big goal may not seem like much, but doing three things every work day without fail could put you 750 steps closer to your goal in a year. If your goal for the year was to write a 75,000-word manuscript, each small step could be writing a mere 100 words—less than the length of this paragraph—and you’d easily hit that. Successful people know that small things done repeatedly have great power.

Like Johnson, David Allen limits his list. After glancing over the “hard landscape” of his day—getting familiar with appointments and the like—he says that “Given the potential discretionary time, I choose one, two, or maybe three things I’m going to focus on.” He tells people to aim for the small number, and then “If you say ‘wow, I got all that stuff done,’ and you have any more time, great, go pick some more. But don’t overwhelm yourself.” People have a tendency to “After coffee, totally overcommit.”

Johnson increases her chances of success not only by limiting her list but by developing habits that ensure accountability. She creates certain mental triggers—for instance, if she sees the number 11 somewhere—to check her list. “My to-do list is on my phone,” she says, and if an item on her to-do list is as simple as sending a text message, she can do that while she’s standing in line at the grocery store. “It’s a no-fail situation,” she says.

Another way to build in accountability is to join an accountability group or to choose an accountability partner. Nika Stewart, who owns a New Jersey–based social media marketing business called Ghost Tweeting, is part of the 7-Figure Club, an accountability group sponsored by the Savor the Success network of women business owners. Every Monday, each entrepreneur checks in online to set a weekly goal that will advance her toward her annual goals. Then on Friday everyone checks back in to say if she did or didn’t do it. If Stewart’s weekly goal, stated on Monday, was to send out 10 proposals, “Thursday night, if I didn’t do it, I might stay up and do it,” she says.

No one wants to look like a failure in front of people whose opinions they value.

This insight led to the creation of one of my favorite business concepts, an organization called StickK.[2] Users set goals to stop smoking, work out regularly, lose weight, or a host of other things. To ensure accountability, a person signs a commitment contract, which states his goal, and then he can put a financial wager on achieving that goal. He also produces a list of supporters who will be kept apprised of his progress. If you, as a StickK user, slip up and grab a soda when you vowed not to, your money might go to a designated person, or even an “anti-charity,” which is one whose values you don’t support (think along the lines of Karl Rove’s super PAC if you’re a liberal Democrat). Your friends will also be informed of your failure. “Not only are you challenging yourself by saying ‘Hey, I can do this,’ you’re also putting your reputation at stake,” says StickK’s FAQs. Research from StickK’s founders has found that commitment contracts along these lines more than triple a person’s chances of success.

Successful people understand that willpower is great, but it is also a virtue many of us possess in limited supply. Your boss will keep you accountable to some goals, but if you’ve got broader goals, or if you don’t have a boss, you’ll need a secondary system. Figure out what app, Web site, person, financial wager, or group will make failure as uncomfortable as possible, and use that to make your goals happen.

Discipline 4

KNOW WHAT IS WORK

From time to time I am contacted by companies that make time-tracking software, which is generally designed for employers who wish to discourage employees from goofing off. Often, these pitches feature intriguing statistics such as “Businesses lose nearly $1.1 billion a week in time spent on fantasy football teams.” Monitor your employees’ time to see how many minutes feature screens full of ESPN.com instead of Outlook and boom! Productivity will go through the roof! Right?

Well, maybe. I seldom write about such programs because, aside from the Big Brother aspect, the truth is that most professionals don’t consider spending 8 hours a day watching cat videos on YouTube as a good use of time. You may do a quick check of your fantasy football team’s status after an intense meeting, but this wastes, maybe, a few minutes, and no one is under any delusion that this is “work.” A more insidious problem—a problem that drains far more cash than the $1.1 billion lost weekly to fantasy football—are the things that look like work, but aren’t actually work. They may, theoretically, be part of your job, but they’re not work if they’re not advancing you or your organization toward your goals.

Take e-mail. According to a 2012 McKinsey Global Institute report on the social economy, knowledge workers spend 28 percent of their time wading through their inboxes. According to Lookout, the mobile-security firm, 58 percent of smartphone users say they don’t go an hour without checking their phones. And not just waking hours. Lookout reported that 54 percent of smartphone users check their phones while lying in bed. Almost 40 percent say they check their phones while on the toilet. Some 9 percent admit to checking their phones during religious services. Much of this constant connectivity is about checking e-mail, and e-mail certainly looks like work. But if checking e-mail 10 times per hour means that writing a presentation takes two hours instead of one, it’s hard to say that was a better use of time than writing for 30 minutes, checking e-mail for 15, writing for another 30 minutes, then watching cat videos for 45 minutes straight. And if some of those e-mails didn’t need to be read at all—think of how many threads you delete after coming back from vacation—then you would have done just as well to cruise over to your fantasy football Web site while you were at it.

Or consider that bane of white-collar existence, meetings, and their remote-work sibling, conference calls. I’m often astonished by the sheer volume of meetings that show up on people’s time logs. Jackie Pyke, vice president for brand strategy and governance at Capital One, estimates her meeting load is 70 percent of her schedule “And it could be 100 percent if I let it and if I did not actively manage who is making meeting requests. We’re an extremely inclusive and collaborative culture, so people err on the side of including lots of people.” Collaboration is wonderful, but it has a downside because the volume of meetings soon turns into a vicious cycle. The best way to get people to pay attention to a project is to schedule a meeting—because meetings become deadlines. If you don’t schedule a meeting, your project will fall behind the other 6 meetings people have for that day in the priority list. That’s not because your project is objectively less important. It’s because things that happen at a specific time and involve commitments to other people automatically seem more important than they are.

To be sure, people do need to meet, just like they need to send and read e-mail, and in many cases, meetings—at least the one-on-one sorts—are critical to good management. What successful people do is to constantly calculate the opportunity cost. Pyke says that “I challenge myself once a year or more to study how I’m spending my time and see if I can make some game-changing moves.” She’ll clear the calendar of meetings scheduled in perpetuity, so those meetings have to earn their way back into her life. She’ll look at meetings she used to think she had to be in and ask “How could I not be there? Maybe it’s uncomfortable, but it presents an opportunity for someone else on my team to step up.” Or sometimes she’ll notice that someone is already stepping up—and that’s a red flag that she doesn’t need to be there. Her team members are smart people, and they can probably handle it. Of course, part of working with good people involves meeting with them and supporting their development. “I really try to protect an hour a week with each of my direct reports,” Pyke says, but she realized “That’s not realistic for me or them. They’re moving up in seniority as well. An hour a week is a lot. They’re much more autonomous than when they were at the more junior level.” Maybe the check-in should be an hour every other week.

Or you can block an hour but not take an hour. Colin Day, CEO of iCIMS, an HR software company, has time in his calendar to meet for an hour, weekly, with each of his 5 direct reports at his 250-person company, but they “don’t feel the need to hang around for an hour because it’s an hour,” he says. Nothing makes him happier than to get everything clarified in 5 minutes, or just via IM. Then he and they can go recapture that time—because successful people are always asking some version of the question what else could I do with that hour? A good reason to mind your hours and to know how long things take is that you can then translate any given request for your time into those terms. You know that calling six old clients—and spending 20 minutes on the phone with them apiece—is quite likely to result in at least one request for a proposal. A two-hour meeting is thus the equivalent of giving up a good lead on new work. Is it worth that? Or could the meeting take only an hour, giving you the other hour to reach out? Sometimes it helps to put this question in terms of cold, hard cash. A recurring meeting that involves 10 people getting together for 2 hours per week costs the same as having another part-timer on staff. Are you getting as much value out of that 2-hour meeting as another employee would add? Or are the first 15 minutes critical, and the rest is just a voluntary tax on your organization’s time?

This question of opportunity cost is particularly important if you’re running a small business. Entrepreneurs often have a terrible time delegating the tasks they know they’re good at, but the problem with having just 2,000–3,000 work hours per year is that a choice to write the first draft of that report yourself, because you have a zesty way with verbs, is a choice not to figure out which of your revenue streams is growing fastest and deserves more attention. Those who leap from microbusiness to million dollar business tend to make this calculation. Traci Bild’s Bild and Company provides consulting services for senior housing companies. The organization generates $4 million in revenue each year, yet Bild leaves work at 3 p.m. to tackle the after-school shift at home. Her secret? “I’m constantly trying to replace myself,” she says. “In my work, my number one strategy as a leader is to replace myself. If I give my duties away, it frees me up to go to the next level. That’s been my strategy for years and it’s worked incredibly well.”

Josh Skolnick, a 20-something entrepreneur, started mowing lawns in high school in suburban Philadelphia. He was so entrepreneurial that by the time he graduated, he had multiple crews working for him. He decided to go into tree care and trimming after sensing it was a profitable market. A client asked him to deal with a dead tree, so Skolnick hired a contractor and, since the guy was there, started knocking on doors to see if the neighbors needed any tree services too. He sold $20,000 worth of work in a day. Clearly, Skolnick is very good at retail selling. But as he’s building the company that became Monster Tree into a national franchise, it no longer makes as much sense for him to go knocking on doors, even though he does it well. So, he’s trained his crew foremen to walk around properties with homeowners and point out looming limbs and potential rot. He’s also trained them to say hello to neighbors who are out in their yards and make soft sales that way. “People will shock you. It’s amazing what people are capable of doing,” he says. “I’ve got guys working for me who I’d never guess would be able to sell tree work,” but they’ve learned and mastered it and generated thousands of dollars in sales, which Skolnick makes sure to reward them for. “What I find with my business is that I gain respect from employees when I treat them as I would want to be treated,” he says. “From a financial perspective, I take care of my employees, and provide a bonus structure to incentivize them to accept more responsibility.”

Of course, in your quest to make sure you don’t mistake things that look like work for actual work, there’s a corollary, which is that you shouldn’t fail to see as “work” things that really are. Productivity involves working with your temporal body, as opposed to against it. All kinds of things that don’t look like work, when viewed from the right angle, are in fact great uses of time.

For most of us, that means activities like taking breaks. Pham gets up and does yoga stretches every hour. I’ll go for a walk, a run, or to run an errand during my low-energy time in the afternoon. I know that if I stay at my computer, I’m likely to find myself drifting over to e-mail every 30 seconds rather than cranking things out. Curiously, these breaks often enable me to process ideas that haven’t quite fit together during my active work time. While writing this book, I considered canceling a 6-mile jog with my running partner because I was falling behind on my deadline. But I went and hashed out the outline with her as we puffed along. Perhaps it didn’t look like work. But I got a lot more done than I would have sitting at my desk.

Some research finds such breaks—and general self-care—have a fairly strong financial return. In 2006, Tony Schwartz and Catherine McCarthy studied productivity at several Wachovia bank branches in New Jersey. They put 106 employees through a 4-month wellness program that involved instruction on energy management, with guidelines for eating regularly, defusing negative emotions, and getting up from their desks from time to time. Compared with a control group, the energy-management group achieved a 13 percentage point greater increase in revenue from loans and a 20 percentage point greater increase in revenue from deposits. (As Schwartz and McCarthy pointed out in their 2007 Harvard Business Review write-up of the study, Wachovia used those metrics to evaluate employees.) To be sure, it’s hard to know exactly what motivates a person. A wellness program may simply make someone believe that her boss cares about her as a person—and that’s the key motivating factor, not the program itself. That said, plenty of people who’ve tried scheduling regular breaks have found that the time “lost” is more than made up for with renewed focus.

Matt Hall builds such breaks into the culture of Hill Investment Group, a wealth-management firm in Saint Louis. Hall cofounded Hill Investment Group in 2005 with the goal of helping clients to “take the long view.” Good investing is about achieving maximum sustainable returns—with the emphasis on sustainable—and likewise, Hall tries to manage his hours like he manages his clients’ money: carefully.

The week as a whole, and the hours within it, are well choreographed. On Monday and Friday he does the work of scheduling and prepping so that he can focus on clients on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. Hall knows that 10 a.m. to noon are his peak-focus hours, so “I treat it like real estate. What’s the most valuable real estate you have? You wouldn’t just give it away,” he says. The week is scheduled with the aim of matching his most valuable time—the 6 hours comprised of the 10 a.m. to noon block on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays—to the task of nurturing the firm’s most important relationships. “That sets us up for success,” he says.

Lunch follows these peak productive hours at noon. It’s a group affair, which encourages people to take this break, often with continuing education built in. “We have frequent lunches where we stay in and watch a video together and discuss it,” Hall says. There are TED talks to watch, or someone talks about a book that inspired her. After lunch can be a somnolent time, so these hours are for activities like writing communications for clients, or other activities where no one can see you yawn. The civilized ritual of tea time is observed daily around 3:30 p.m. Everyone tromps down to Starbucks, which is a few blocks away. “None of us really drink tea,” says Hall. “The whole point is to get up, get the blood moving, and get out.” That enables people to focus for the last stretch until 5:30 or so.

It’s a very sustainable schedule. It’s one that—despite growth of 35 percent per year during a time when the economy hasn’t been booming—“lets us maintain some sense of balance that allows us to feel good when we go home.” Things weren’t always like this. When Hall and his cofounder Rick Hill launched Hill Investment Group in 2005, things “felt chaotic.” With client meetings happening all over the place and no sense of rhythm, “at some level we got overwhelmed.” They realized that “We needed to get a structure—not the kind of structure that overwhelms creativity and spirit, but the kind of organization that allows us to do more.”

Hall has a particular reason for wanting to monitor his energy. In 2007, at age 33, he was diagnosed with chronic myelogenous leukemia (CML), a form of blood cancer. Staring cancer in the face as a young man had a stark effect on him. “What that does is give you a pretty good perspective on your life,” he says. “You really get a very clear sense that there is a finite amount of time.” When he came back to work, Hill Investment Group reorganized the calendar, designing each week with the goal of making work meaningful and leaving time for happiness in other spheres. “We wouldn’t have a meeting, a phone call, or go anywhere with any relationship if it didn’t create any energy back to us,” he says. “We are picky and selective and serious about that.”

Because CML is now treatable with a class of drugs that includes Gleevec, Hall can expect to live a relatively normal life. In other words, his time is no more limited than the rest of ours. The difference is that Hall can see this more clearly than other people. He sometimes fields jokes from friends who drive past him and his colleagues all enjoying the afternoon sunshine on the way to Starbucks. “I think people associate hard work with sitting in a workplace crunching the numbers, but we don’t see it that way. We don’t view activity and value as connected,” says Hall. “I could create a lot of activity but it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s doing anything for you or for me.” It’s just the white noise of white-collar work. Better to have work be about getting what matters done.

And if that means watching a few cat videos? So be it. Successful people know that astonishing productivity—particularly in creative fields—requires filling the pot. Pham browses through book stores and art blogs. You could try getting a library card and checking out something serendipitous from the stacks. You could visit an art museum. You could read professional journals in related but not immediately similar fields. You could pop over to Starbucks and talk to fascinating people. That might not look like work if your definition of work equates watching a Khan Academy video on differential equations with stealing money out of your employer’s wallet. But if your definition of work focuses on output—knowing that at your retirement dinner no one will talk about your daily achievement of Inbox Zero—then it all looks perfectly fine.

Discipline 5

PRACTICE

Sarah Fisher has spent much of her life exceeding the speed limit. She started racing quarter midgets and karts seriously in elementary school and won her first World Karting Association Grand National Championship as a preteen. In 1999, the year she turned 19, she became the youngest woman ever to compete in the Indianapolis 500. By the time she retired in late 2010 she’d competed in that race nine times.

The regimen required to stay in peak racing form for all those years was “grueling,” she says, laughing. “I’m glad I don’t do that any more!” After spending the first half hour of the day attending to the administrative work of what became Sarah Fisher Hartman Racing, the team she founded in 2008, she’d spend 90 minutes to two hours lifting weights, running, and doing other drills with the USA Diving team, which is also headquartered in Indianapolis. In addition to working out, she’d do mental training. “Our sport is so fast, you have to have very good reaction timing,” she says, so she’d practice that. Then, after lunch, she’d come back to the shop to dive into any marketing or accounting tasks necessary to run her 25-person small business, but also to focus on other aspects of performance improvement. With race cars, “it’s not like you can fire it up and go around the block,” she says, and renting a facility and running an average test could cost $50,000–$100,000 per day. So she did a lot of simulator-based training and wind tunnel tests, and studied the data that came out of the race car. “Reviewing that data—how the car rides on the road, how it rolls, different displacement—that gives you really good feedback,” she says. If you decipher that, “you can figure out changes to make next time.”

Judging from her schedule, it seems Fisher spent around half her time as a professional driver actively trying to get better at her job. The professional musicians I’ve interviewed over the years develop similar schedules. Even as they face e-mail barrages, travel woes, and demands from their PR reps to have breakfast with reporters, they are still there at the piano, with the violin, or singing scales for hours each day. Obviously, there’s something to the old joke about how you get to Carnegie Hall.

Most people have no intention of playing on that historic stage or driving in the Indianapolis 500. Yet, if you think about it, your job is likely a performance of sorts, too. And you, too, would take your career to a new level if you spent time every day trying to improve at the tasks associated with your job.

Practice is, simply, performing or working at something repeatedly to become proficient. We do a lot of things repeatedly but seldom with the goal of improving. Unlike Fisher, “we drive almost every day, but we rarely get better at driving,” says Doug Lemov, managing director of Uncommon Schools and coauthor with Erica Woolway and Katie Yezzi of the Practice Perfect book mentioned in the section on planning. “The economy is full of tasks like that. Mammographers get better when they start the job, but after the initial improvement at the job, they totally flatten, or even get worse.” It’s often the same with teachers—something Lemov knows from training 10,000 of them over the years—with sales people who go on autopilot, or with scientific researchers. “Think about the social and economic cost of the failure to get better—of repeating every day, but not practicing. It’s kind of dizzying.”

Anything that involves skill can be practiced and, if you’d like to become better and more efficient at what you do, probably should be practiced. The best kind of practice—the “deliberate practice” identified by Anders Ericsson, Ralf Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer in their famous 1993 Psychology Review paper on the schedules of elite musicians—ideally involves immediate feedback on one’s performance and a high volume of repetition to shore up specific skills.

Take writing. The red pen gets a bad rep. You can improve at writing by having people critique your prose and then revising with those edits in mind. Sure, receiving that criticism can be painful, but it’s how you learn and get better. Over time, you can serve as your own critic (“What is my point? Do I come out for it or against it? Can I say this in fewer words?”). In a pinch, a machine can help. In his essay on “Structure” for the January 14, 2013 New Yorker, John McPhee describes using the text editor program Kedit’s “All” command to show how many times he’s used “the legions of perfectly acceptable words that should not appear more than once in a piece of writing.” These are words like “expunges” or “ameliorate,” he notes, which McPhee then expunges to ameliorate his prose. To increase the volume of your writing, you can keep a blog or a daily journal. The higher the volume you require of yourself, the more efficient you will become. In three years of writing 6–7 posts per week for my various blogs, I have probably doubled my speed in cranking out 500-word persuasive essays. The posts may not be perfect now, but they’re certainly better than they were the first time I figured out where the “publish” button was on WordPress.

Or consider public speaking. The best speakers are not necessarily gregarious individuals. They’re simply well-practiced sorts who’ve honed their material to the point where they know what people will react to and they’ve learned to manage that reaction. Negotiating can be practiced. Cold calling can be practiced. Meetings can be practiced, particularly those in which you might encounter hostile questioning. Anything that happens live, that you can’t do over again, is ripe for practicing, says Lemov. “I couldn’t imagine going into a performance review and wasting that opportunity by not practicing beforehand,” he says.

If you’re not sure which skills you can practice, try polling your coworkers on which skills they think matter in your line of work. Start with the most frequently mentioned one first. What is the standard of excellence for that skill? How can you practice to get better?

The employees of Hill Investment Group build practice into their days through a culture of constant feedback. “If we had a meeting with you, and you were considering hiring our firm, after you’d leave we’d gather and ask ‘what did we do well,’ and ‘what do we need to fix in presenting our story or message, listening, or asking better questions,’” Hall says. “That can be a fragile discussion, unless culturally you have a commitment really to view it as an opportunity.” Everyone is subject to feedback, including Hall. “The most common feedback for me,” he says, “is to make it shorter, make it tighter, give the bullet point and then be quiet. Don’t get so hung up on inspiring them to see it the way you see it.”

Lemov, Woolway, and Yezzi recommend instituting drills, which are distorted simulations of reality that allow you to focus on a specific skill, just as a basketball player, in practice, might attempt 20 3-point shots in a row. If you’re practicing for media interviews, for instance, you could have friends ask you potential interview questions over and over again so you can memorize how to respond. Once you memorize plausible responses, practice delivering them in a casual, spontaneous manner. As Lemov notes, “repetition sets you free. It automates things, so your mind can think of bigger things” like remembering to smile at the television camera when the host says your name, because chances are the camera just cut to you. If your team is facing a meeting with an unhappy client next week, you might stage a mock meeting and drill the presenters with potential questions. Yezzi suggests that “At staff meetings, carve out 15 minutes to practice.” Even a little goes a long way, because people crave practice. Once you start, people want to do more. In general, people want to get better at their jobs. They want feedback and they want suggestions of what to do with that feedback.

That’s what Grace Kang has discovered. Kang started New York City’s Pink Olive boutiques after spending the early years of her career at major department stores, including Bloomingdales. “I am mentally trained to look at my selling every Monday,” she says. With the data in hand, she can improve her own performance as a curator, experimenting with new product mixes, like a larger paper and home decor section, for instance, after her reports showed that these products moved fast. She also carves out time to get on the phone with her designers to share the data on “what’s working, what’s not working.” Curiously, Kang reports that these designers, who may sell through multiple channels, often don’t hear back from customers. “Offering that feedback to our designers is invaluable to them,” Kang says. “My manager and I spend a lot of time really educating them about what sells. If something is doing well by another designer, we really do share that with our designers, so they can act on it and create something special for us,” she says. “It’s time consuming, but the return is huge.”

You may not be able to devote half your workdays to improving your skills and your team’s skills, but given how massively most people underinvest in this discipline, turning practice into a daily activity “Will make people better at their work,” says Lemov. That “is a fundamental competitive advantage.”

Discipline 6

PAY IN

I collect old magazines. My habit was greatly aided when I found a company, PastPaper.com, headquartered in Gap, Pennsylvania, near Lancaster, which offers roughly 1 million consumer periodicals, dating from 1835. Past Paper regularly ships me issues of Good Housekeeping, Forbes, and the like, as do some of my editors, electronically, from their own archives now that I’ve made my fascination known. As I crack open the covers or scroll through the scanned files, I am, for an hour, looking at history through the eyes of people who lived at that time. The ubiquitous trend pieces, unfiltered by hindsight, can show, very clearly, just how much certain things have changed.

Take how people think about and build their working lives. In 1956, Fortune magazine ran a story by Herrymon Maurer called “Twenty Minutes to a Career.” Maurer wrote that “This month of March, 1956, will be the most hectic month in the biggest year of college-senior hiring in U.S. business history.” Of “this year’s crop of over 200,000 men graduates, the great majority of them will eventually go into business.” (As I wrote in a piece for Fortune.com[3] on Maurer’s article, women earned 132,000 of the 379,600 U.S. bachelor’s degrees conferred in 1956, but their career choices were apparently of less concern.) American business was scaling up, and Sears, Roebuck would be recruiting 500 men, GM was aiming for 2,000 men, and GE wanted to hire 2,500. It was all very exciting, but there was inherent tension because, as Maurer wrote, the basic contact between companies and students would be a 20-minute interview. Students needed to understand that “For a great many of them, a brief interview will settle their careers for life.” Yes, the young men who planned to work for large corporations should “consider a job offer in terms of a lifetime career.” To be sure, “some large companies will hire men two or three years out of school, and a few will take them even after five years. But almost all of them hold to the policy of promotion from within.” And so “For the bulk of the men who aspire to a big-business career—and for the bulk of the companies hiring them—the year of college graduation is the year of decision.”

Except that it wasn’t. The men from the class of 1956 would generally have retired in the late 1990s. But nowhere near all of them would have retired from the corporations that hired them 40 years earlier, most notably because many of the companies Maurer wrote about don’t exist in anything resembling their 1956 form. Steel company Jones & Laughlin, which was recruiting at 35 colleges, merged with Republic Steel in 1984 to form LTV Steel, which then filed for bankruptcy in 2000. Two railroads, the Pennsylvania and New York Central, told Fortune they were eager to bring aboard men from the class of 1956. But by 1968 the rivals had become one company, which went bankrupt in 1970. Beyond the usual winds of Schumpeter’s gale, corporate America became less enamored with the policy of promoting exclusively from within. From 1995–2012, search firm Crist Kolder Associates calculated, 39 percent of CFOs and 20 percent of CEOs at S&P 500 and Fortune 500 companies were external hires. While that means the majority were still internal, Heidrick & Struggles calculated that among Fortune 500 CEOs appointed internally, the average tenure with the company was 16 years. Since the average age at appointment was 50, this means that the majority spent the first part of their careers elsewhere. Professionals have reacted rationally to decades of layoffs by becoming quite willing to change organizations for better opportunities. According to one recent Kelly Services survey, more than 4 in 10 American workers consider themselves free agents, as opposed to, I suppose, former Fortune editor William Whyte’s Organization Men.

What all this means is that it is no longer sufficient to be employed—one must remain employable. That means monitoring that excellent concept of career capital. Career capital is a convenient way to think about the sum total of one’s experience, knowledge, network, and personality characteristics. When your career capital level is high, you can cash in your chits at any point for a new situation, to take your career to a new level, or even to take a break without destroying your ability to earn a living. Successful people develop the discipline of paying in to this account every day.

These deposits take many forms. If practicing is about getting better at the skills you currently have, paying in is about figuring out what skills and knowledge you will need in the future. When you come across technical concepts you are unfamiliar with or new styles of drawing, do you write them down and make time to research them? At conferences, do you attend sessions on topics you’ve mastered or do you stretch to take in something new? For that matter, are you going to professional development events? Can you take a class on that topic that your boss keeps mentioning? Can you find a mentor who will help you figure out what skills and concepts you should be learning for success in 5 years, 10 years, or 20 years down the road?

The deposits can also take the form of creating a visible portfolio. The good thing about writing or illustrating books is that they are then out there in the market, speaking for you and your ideas even when you’re not around. That’s why experts in all sorts of fields (think medicine, politics, or business) write books or articles for industry publications, though, of course, writing isn’t the only way to create a portfolio. Any sort of tangible evidence of what you’ve done will do, and this bias toward visible outcomes is not a bad mind-set to have. Think through your projects with the goal of having a measurable or tangible result. It is one thing to have a sense that your employee engagement program at the department store you manage is making people happier. It is quite another to document that turnover is 30 percent lower than at comparable stores. Could you pin something on a bulletin board (or Pinterest) and say “I did that?” If so, that’s another big deposit in your career capital account.

And finally, the best way to pay in is to build up a network of people who are loyal to you. One of the harshest parts of losing a job is realizing how many people were loyal to your organization or your position, not to you as a person. But if you develop the discipline of paying in right, this need not be the case. The key is to realize that people—though occasionally inefficient—are a good use of time.

Sarah Fisher, the race car driver, started the transition from competing to team ownership in 2008, and retired from racing in 2010. Now as a full-time business owner, she’s putting the lessons learned from racing into day-to-day management. She calls racing “a roller coaster sport” because of its severe ups and downs. One moment you’re winning, the next you’re looking at the fiery wreck of a friend’s car.

This sense of victory’s impermanence has led her to focus on the human side of her job, which she thinks gives her a competitive advantage. As she told me for my CBS MoneyWatch blog on leadership,[4] “We care about our guys’ families, and our team’s families, so we take the time to have a five-minute conversation, a ten-minute conversation. Wherever an employee is, we’ll say hello and spend a couple of minutes with them.” This hasn’t always been easy, because as the public face of her company, she has to make numerous appearances and meet with the sponsors who are key to financing an extremely expensive sport. But she realized that “it’s OK to fit five minutes in.” Being brusque about an interruption will burn career capital—and probably won’t save much time in the long run. Paying attention and giving a person your full focus, on the other hand, puts a deposit in your account.

In a world where people no longer have the same jobs for life, it’s equally important to make time for people outside your organization. Racing is about fans, so Sarah Fisher Hartman Racing (SFHR) is quick on the social media draw; when I wrote about Fisher’s philosophy toward making time for team members, SFHR tweeted the link around before I could. Likewise, SFHR is expanding into a new 38,000-square-foot facility in Speedway, Indiana—the home of Indianapolis Motor Speedway—in part to bring fan foot traffic and all its distractions into the offices. “We want to be a part of that fan interaction and really showcase our racing team,” Fisher told me. “We think it will make us a little different from our competition.” That accessibility is how you become a fan favorite. “It increases our exposure and broadens our scope.”

That’s a good phrase to keep in mind. What have you done today to increase your exposure and broaden your scope? Anyone can reach out to someone who’s immediately professionally useful. Real career capital comes from having lunch, and sharing your network, with someone who’s just been fired from a job she loved. These are the moments that matter. If you have a tendency to shirk this daily discipline because life is busy, it might help to keep an actual deposit list like you would for a checking account. In a notebook somewhere, or in a private file, jot down any interaction that turned from mundane to meaningful, any evidence of your abilities sent out into the universe, any bit of new experience or knowledge gained. You never know when you might need your career capital—and maybe you never will—but like health insurance, you’ll definitely be better off having it than not.

Discipline 7

PURSUE PLEASURE

If I am enamored with the articles in old magazines, Cary Hatch is equally enamored with the other half of the editorial-advertisement divide. Hatch owns MDB Communications, an advertising agency based in Washington, DC. Anyone stopping by to visit will immediately have classic jingles ringing in her head, because “I have like 120, 130 advertising icons in my office,” Hatch says. “I’m surrounded by Snap, Crackle and Pop, the Trix Rabbit, all these different things.” She looks around and rattles them off. “I’ve got the Noid from Avoid the Noid. That guy’s 9 feet tall, catty corner to me. There’s the Fruit Loops guy, different kinds of beer icons, Mr. Peanut, the monster from Monster.com, the AFLAC duck, Mr. Clean, Ronald McDonald.” She explains that “the power of branding is making that emotional connection with your audience. There are so many ways to personify a brand. There’s the gecko from Geico. When you can do a personification of a brand, people become emotionally attached to the brand.” She finds that concept fascinating to the point where she has a gigantic Big Boy in the lobby. “Visually, it’s fun,” she says. “It gives everybody a lift.”

But what really gives her a lift is that she loves her work for the work itself. She relishes thinking about an advertising campaign or brand personification and seeing her team pull together to make it take shape. As she’s working at the drafting table, “I’m thinking to myself, I’m putting together ads and they’re going to pay me to do this!” She’s always enjoyed helping people advocate for different things, a passion she can trace back to being president of the Pep Club and a Pom Pom in high school and college. “To get compensation for something you love was like a big epiphany for me,” she says. It’s what makes her long hours possible. It’s what makes her not mind walking around with a new client’s files in her purse for two days because they kept missing each other by phone, and she wasn’t sure she’d be able to pull up the notes on her phone in a convenient way when they managed to connect. As she puts it, “I can’t imagine what it would be like to live for the weekend.”

This is the key insight that successful people have about how they spend their working hours—an insight often missed in stories on great places to work that belabor the countervailing perks of free M&Ms and an onsite gym, and also missed in the curmudgeonly bloviation of those who claim that “You’re not supposed to like it! That’s why they call it work!” Successful people know there isn’t any virtue gained by spending your 40–60 working hours each week doing something that doesn’t buoy your spirits, but that spirits are buoyed by very specific things.

Productivity, we are discovering, is a function of joy. Joy comes not from free M&Ms, but from making progress toward goals that matter to you. For their 2012 book, The Progress Principle, Teresa Amabile of Harvard Business School and Steven Kramer, a developmental psychologist, analyzed nearly 12,000 diary entries kept by teams at 7 organizations. They found that when “inner work life”—defined as the perceptions, emotions, and motivations people express as they go about their workdays—is good, “people are more likely to pay attention to the work itself, become deeply engaged in their team’s project, and hold fast to the goal of doing a great job. When inner work life is bad, people are more likely to get distracted from their work . . . , disengage from their team’s projects, and give up on trying to achieve the goals set before them.” So what creates a great inner work life? Analyzing the diaries, which included ratings of the subject’s mood and motivation, Amabile and Kramer found that the best days were characterized by progress, with 76 percent of the diary entries from the top scoring days featuring small wins, breakthroughs, forward movement on projects, and goal completion. Such progress was far more likely to be evident on the best days than what one might think of as important factors, such as encouragement from a boss. The worst days were highly likely to contain setbacks to that progress—more so than obvious toxins like an insult from a coworker. As Amabile and Kramer write, “making headway on meaningful work brightens inner work life and boosts long-term performance. Real progress triggers positive emotions like satisfaction, gladness, even joy.”

It is this idea of making progress—progress you can see toward a completed and delightful story—that makes illustrating children’s books so satisfying. You can see progress in creating ads that raise the profile of an organization you admire. “We’re doing this thing with the International Spy Museum,” Hatch says. “50 years of Bond villains. Who doesn’t love working on a campaign for the spy museum?” But these obviously fun sorts of work are not the only way one can tap into this mode that makes joy and productivity possible. Amabile and Kramer quote near ecstatic diary entries from a software team called in over a holiday weekend to come up with the data necessary for their organization to settle a lawsuit. Writes Marsha, “Today our entire office worked like a real team again. It was wonderful. We all forgot the current stressful situation and have all worked around the clock to get a big project done. I have been here about 15 hours, but it has been one of the best days I’ve had in months!!” The only thing that matters—evident in those double exclamation points—is that the progress is toward a goal that matters to you.

Ideally, your work naturally lends itself to this sort of progress. You make time for deep work rather than coasting in the easily interrupted shallows. You can see the accomplishment of one step after another. You feel the inherent bliss in the moment when you know that success on something difficult is possible. It is the moment when the proof makes sense, when a pupil grasps the beauty of the novel you’re teaching, or when an interview that pulls a thesis together makes you want to jump up and down.

If you haven’t felt this way in a while, then maybe it’s time to take a few of your work hours and think back to when you last took such pleasure in your work. Think about what you can do to recreate those conditions. There are likely ways to turn the job you have into the job you want, at least for a higher proportion of the day, particularly if you like your organization’s values and people. Small tweaks add up over time. Successful people constantly look at their days to evaluate what brings them pleasure and what does not, and they figure out how they can spend more hours pursuing pleasure and fewer hours doing what they don’t care about. Because while work hours sometimes seem lengthy, they aren’t endless—and life isn’t either. The daily discipline of seeking joy makes astonishing productivity possible, because then work no longer feels like work. It feels, as LeUyen Pham put it, “really, really lovely.”

Read on for a sample from Laura Vanderkam’s book, 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think, also available from Portfolio/Penguin.

CHAPTER 1

The Myth of the Time Crunch

Like many busy people, I live by my to-do list. Sometimes it’s scratched on my church bulletin (the “silent confession” part of the service includes an apology for not paying attention). Sometimes it’s scrawled in my must-not-lose black notebook that, alas, I once accidentally lost at LAX. Regardless, I obey its missives. I like nothing better than scratching off every entry. So, during one marathon late March day in 2009, when I saw a “to do” to follow up for this book with a woman named Theresa Daytner, who I’d interviewed a year before, I dutifully sent her a note.

But Daytner was not to be reached. I’m not sure what her to-do list said, but she was spending the day outside.

She told me later she had gone for a hike along a “babbling brook” near her Maryland home about 45 minutes west of Baltimore. It was a desolate area, so she’d borrowed her brother’s dog to keep her company. The two of them spent hours tromping through the mud. An early spring rain had turned the landscape green, bringing out tiny shoots on the trees and making the wildflower buds sparkle against the gray sky. There was simply no way she was going to miss one of the first warm mornings that offered up the opportunity to, as she put it, enjoy the “peace and quiet” and “recharge.”

As I talked to Daytner more, I soon realized that recharging was a normal feature of her life. This involved a reasonable amount of time in the dirt; she goes on trail rides on her hybrid bicycle in addition to her hikes. Until recently, she lifted weights with a trainer twice a week. She burrows into Jodi Picoult novels at night in addition to reading her book club’s fare; she confesses a slight addiction to watching 24. She gets massages. She gets her hair done. She recently planned an elaborate surprise party for her husband’s fiftieth birthday, featuring guests she had arranged to fly in from all over the country.

In other words, Daytner seems to have a lot of time. Relaxed time. Time she can and does use in any way she pleases. That includes knocking off for some blissful solitude on a weekday morning when more serious people are at work.

Of course, this begs the question. How, exactly, does Daytner have so much time on her hands? Is she retired? Unemployed? A homemaker whose children have grown?

The answer may surprise you. Daytner is certainly busier than I am. She’s busier than most people I know here in too-rushed-to-breathe Manhattan. Indeed, I would venture to guess that no matter who you are, you don’t have as much on your plate as Daytner does. Barack Obama himself was floored when he met her. Not long before that muddy March morning hike, Daytner seized a chance opportunity to visit the White House with a group of small business owners to talk about economic issues. She introduced herself to the president by her two main identities.

The first: Theresa Daytner, owner of Daytner Construction Group, a seven-figure-revenue company whose twelve-person payroll she is personally responsible for meeting.

The second: Theresa Daytner, mom of six, including eight-year-old twins.

“When,” Obama asked her, “do you sleep?”

But Daytner does sleep. Though a recent Men’s Health article testdrove the “Uberman” sleep cycle—during which one naps 20 minutes every 4 hours as a way to free up time to “excel at your job, bond with the people you love, indulge in your dreams, or just chill”—Daytner does all these things while sleeping at least 7 hours a night. She coaches soccer and spends weekends cheering at her children’s games. She is happily planning her twenty-one-year-old daughter’s wedding while growing her business. She became interested in construction years ago as a college student when she learned that being honest and competent could actually make you stand out in this space. Now, despite the recent construction slump, DCG (which oversees $10–75 million projects) was, when we talked, reviewing résumés to bring on new project managers. She was also on track to post year-over-year gains and was negotiating to enter the general contracting space, a move that could expand her business by an order of magnitude.

She was certainly not immune to the pressures of meeting a payroll (which includes health benefits for her employees’ families); she confesses to putting out fires at night, on weekends, and, if the earth would crash into the sun otherwise, by BlackBerry while she hikes. She has not been immune from other entrepreneurial pressures, either. She launched DCG when her twins were still toddlers, and since she wanted her husband to work with her, she mortgaged the house to pay for child care. As her business has picked up, it’s become at times quite “draining, mentally.” That’s why she watches 24.

Nonetheless, when I spoke to her, she told me that her children had the next Thursday off from school and she planned to take the day off again. She was going to load as many of the kids in the car as would fit to go see Washington’s cherry blossoms and just chill on the National Mall.

All in all, her life sounded pretty sweet. And so, as I’ve been writing this book, I’ve taken to recounting Daytner’s biography at cocktail parties. Like Obama, people always ask, “How does she do it?”—or, if someone is feeling more peevish, “I don’t know this woman but I already hate her.” Our cultural narratives of overwork, sleep deprivation, and how hard it is to “have it all” suggest that a big career and big family like Daytner’s should not be possible. Or if they are possible, we certainly don’t expect daytime hikes and Jodi Picoult novels to wind up in there, too.

I won’t claim it’s easy. But as Daytner told me about her scheme to screen her e-mail (which takes “too much damn time”), and shift some of her employees’ responsibilities to keep her workday at roughly 8:30–5:00, it soon became clear that she views her hours and minutes differently than most people.

For starters, she considers them all precious. She even takes advantage of the ten minutes between when her teens’ school opens (8:00) and her twins’ nearby school opens (8:10) to read Hardy Boys books to her sons in the car and nurture her relationship with them.

And second, “Here’s what I think is the difference,” she says. “I know I’m in charge of me. Everything that I do, every minute I spend is my choice.” Daytner chooses to spend those minutes on the three things she does best: nurturing her business, nurturing her family, and nurturing herself. “If I’m not spending my time wisely, I fix it,” she says. “Even if it’s just quiet time.”

But within these three priorities, she has found a little secret: when you focus on what you do best, on what brings you the most satisfaction, there is plenty of space for everything. You can build a big career. You can build a big family. And you can meander along a Maryland creek on a weekday morning because the day is too wild and beautiful to stay inside. Indeed, you can fill your life with more abundance than most people think is possible.

*

I thought about Daytner a lot as I was pulling this book together. Her life stands in such stark contrast to the way we twenty-first-century creatures have grown used to thinking about our time that she’s hard not to think about. It is safe to say that time has become the primary obsession of modern life. Some people are having enough sex. Some people have enough money. But no one seems to have enough hours in the day.

The futurists didn’t necessarily predict this. Back in 1959, amid the rise of labor-saving technology and massive productivity gains, the Harvard Business Review fretted that “boredom, which used to bother only aristocrats” had “become a common curse.”

But with the rise of two-income families and then extreme jobs, the story goes, the trend toward boredom abruptly reversed. By 1991, the sociologist Juliet Schor asked in her bestselling book The Overworked American, “Why has leisure been such a conspicuous casualty of prosperity?” The image she created, of people looking at their watches to remind themselves what day it was, stuck. And this was years before we tethered ourselves to our BlackBerries and cell phones. Now, Harvard Business Review runs anecdotes like those about “Sudhir,” a financial analyst who works 90-hour weeks during summertime, his “light” season, and 120 the rest of the year. “Joe” actually rescheduled a family member’s funeral so he wouldn’t miss a meeting. “The 40-hour workweek,” the December 2006 issue lamented in a story titled “Extreme Jobs: The Dangerous Allure of the 70-Hour Workweek,” “is a thing of the past. Even the 60-hour workweek, once the path to the top, is now considered practically part-time.”

Two decades into this narrative of the time crunch, most of us have fully accepted this worldview. And so, the parade of statistics supporting this argument marches on. We tell pollsters from the National Sleep Foundation that we sleep less than 7 hours per night; moms who work full-time and have school-aged children often claim to spend less than 6 hours in bed on weeknights, with about 60 percent claiming there’s just not enough time to sleep. About a third of Americans who work full-time say they work more than 50 hours per week. A recent Gallup poll found that 12 percent of employed Americans claimed to work more than 60 hours. We say that we don’t have enough time to exercise; about a third of Americans tell the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that we fail to do the mere recommended 2.5 hours of activity per week, and I suspect the only reason some people actually meet those guidelines is that the government counts vacuuming as a workout.

Being busy has become the explanation of choice for all sorts of things. The percentage of adults who vote in presidential elections hasn’t changed drastically over the past 20 years, but the percentage of nonvoters who blamed their failure to get to the polls on their busy schedules nearly tripled between 1980 and 1996. We say we are too busy to read—only half of us, according to the National Endowment for the Arts, read a novel, short story, poem, or play in the last year. We’re too busy to read to our kids. Moms and dads who are in the workforce clock a lousy 1–7 minutes of daily reading to or with children, but even stay-at-home moms of preschool-aged kids don’t top 8 minutes per day. That’s barely enough time to pull apart the sticky pages of Goodnight Moon. A full 92 percent of us say we believe in God, but only about 40 percent of us claim to attend religious services weekly—and some studies have shown that when it comes to confessing the frequency of our church attendance to pollsters, we put our souls in peril and lie. Actual attendance is probably less than half of that.

The narrative of busyness has so seized the culture that a group called the Simplicity Forum launched “Take Back Your Time Day” in 2003, publishing a companion handbook on “fighting overwork and time poverty in America.” The handbook featured essays from Schor and others with more alarming stories and statistics. Dual-income couples, one author noted, could find only 12 minutes a day to talk to each other. Some 80 percent of children weren’t getting enough sleep. A reported 20–40 percent of pets, primarily dogs, suffered from separation anxiety due to their absent, overworked owners. Medieval peasants, the cartoon illustrations screamed, worked less than we do!

Of course, medieval peasants also experienced a 25-percent-plus child mortality rate, which strikes me as stressful, so the idea that they somehow led more relaxed lives is odd.

Indeed, much of the time-poverty narrative takes on a rather absurdist tone if you think about it. For instance, the January 2007 issue of Real Simple magazine posed a question to its “time-starved” readers: If you had an extra 15 minutes in your day, how would you use it?

In wistful prose, the respondents daydreamed about all the leisurely, soul-restoring pursuits they’d indulge in if only their clocks would slow down for a while. Jenifer Thigpen of Orlando, Florida, wrote, “I’d play fetch with my dogs, who bring joy to my crazy, hectic life.” Julie Lane-Gay of Vancouver pledged to “write thank-you letters. Not perfunctory notes, but real letters that thank people for things they’ve done that have made a difference . . . Someday I hope to do it.” Sarah Nahmias wanted to “relearn how to play my flute. It’s something I enjoyed immensely when I was younger but lost touch with as I got busy with children and family obligations.” Andrea Wood of St. Augustine, Florida, lamented, “I feel as if there’s never enough time in the day to prepare the foods that are good and good for me, so I would spend some time chopping, prepping, and cooking large, healthy meals ahead of time.” Others wanted to soak in the tub, read, relax on the couch, or, as one woman wrote, try the hammock she had assembled but had yet to touch. Katie Noah of Abilene, Texas, mused, “Fifteen minutes of uninterrupted writing time would be a priceless gift,” though, presumably, she did find 15 minutes to read Real Simple and write a letter about her elusive dream.

Regardless, this message permeates the culture. An Amazon ad in my in-box highlights exercise DVDs that vie to offer the shortest workout, for example, “The 12 second sequence: Get fit in 20 minutes twice a week!” If we’re scrambling over 20 minutes to exercise, no wonder achieving big things, like building a career while nurturing children, leading a nonprofit organization, and training for a marathon, seems downright impossible. Or perhaps they’re possible, but only if you find a career you can do part-time, or downshift for a bit, which is the theme adopted by many work-life-balance speakers and authors.

Then there is Theresa Daytner with her six kids and her seven-figure business. While the rest of us lament our inability to find 15 minutes to read, she’s in a book club. While we dream of 15 minutes to try out the hammock, she’s out for a hike.

And here’s the crazy thing. She—and the people who claim they’re “too busy” to vote, or have only 12 minutes to talk with their spouses—all have the exact same amount of time. All of us. We all have 24 hours in our days, and 7 days in our weeks. If you do the math, that comes out to 168 hours each week to create the lives we want. We all have the same 168 hours, repeated until the span of our lives is through. And so, when we meet people like Daytner, we wonder: Why are they able to fill their time with so many meaningful things while others are dreaming of 15 minutes to take a bubble bath?

That is the central question of this book. 168 Hours is the story of how some people manage to be fully engaged in their professional and personal lives. It is the story of how people take their careers to the next level while still nurturing their communities, families, and souls. As a journalist who writes frequently about career issues and social trends, I’ve either interviewed or studied many such high-achievers—men and women—over the years for this and other projects. You know the kind—say, the mom of five and marathoner who happens to have governed the state of Alaska for a stint in her spare time. A man managing a nine-figure private equity fund who makes time to read The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn with his preteens. An entrepreneur working startup hours who tends a farm to nurture her connection to the earth. A father who finds time to train for a marathon by having his son bike along as he runs. A rising young biologist who earns her PhD while caring for one toddler and then interviews for, and lands, a tenure-track professorship while 8 months pregnant with her second child. When I hear these stories, I’m often tempted to ask, like Obama, “When do you sleep?” But I’ve learned that, like Daytner, many of these people do, and not in 20-minute spurts every 4 hours, either.

The point of these stories is not to make anyone feel bad or lazy. Rather, I view these stories as liberating, particularly as a young(ish) person trying to build my career and family—as well as nurture my personal passions for running, singing, and other things—in a world that continually laments how hard it is to do it all. Once you tackle the question of how some people do so much head on, you can start to ask others that the time-poverty narrative doesn’t allow. For instance:

What if you don’t have to choose between pushing your career to the next level and building forts in the backyard with your kids, because there is plenty of time for both?

What if you can have great health—because you’re sleeping enough and exercising enough to be in the best shape of your life—and volunteer more often than 90 percent of the population?

What if you can have enough time to get reacquainted with your partner, both as lovers and friends, not just as co-parents hashing out the administrative details of your household? And what if you can do all of this—and play the flute, or write in your journal, or whatever else you secretly desire—without fantasizing about an extra 15 minutes per day?

The hard—but hopeful—truth is that you can. Yes, you have a lot going on in your life. You may be wondering if you have time to read this book. But before you put it down to go check your e-mail, I want to make sure you take away two thoughts: you can choose how to spend your 168 hours, and you have more time than you think.

•  •  •

For a complete list of this author’s books click here or visit

www.penguin.com/vanderkamchecklist

1 http://lauravanderkam.com/books/168-hours/manage-your-time/

2 http://www.stickk.com

3 http://management.fortune.cnn.com/2012/07/20/fortune-1956-20-minutes-to-a-career-or-not/

4 http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-505125_162-57562346/building-community-is-a-smart-use-of-time/