Contents

Author Bio

Also by Laura Vanderkam

Title Page

About the Book

Copyright Page

WHAT THE MOST SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE DO ON THE WEEKEND

The Paradox of Weekends

How to Plan a Weekend

Minimize the Have-To-Do’s

How to Win the Weekend Ahead

All There Is

EXTRA!

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

PORTFOLIO/PENGUIN

WHAT THE MOST SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE DO ON THE WEEKEND

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, and What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast. 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 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 ON THE WEEKEND

A Short Guide to Making the Most of Your Days Off

Laura Vanderkam

A PENGUIN SPECIAL FROM

About the Book

Many of us breathe a grateful TGIF when Friday rolls around, envisioning a weekend full of both productivity and refreshment. Yet too often our precious weekends seem to disappear, eaten up by unproductive work or leisure that fails to energize us. Monday morning comes too fast, finding us still unrested with tasks still undone.

Time management expert Laura Vanderkam, continuing her What the Most Successful People Do series, shows how we can take control of our weekends to get necessary rest while also using our downtime as a springboard to a productive week.

Drawing on real-life anecdotes and scientific research, Vanderkam explains why doing nothing can be more exhausting than doing something and why happy people make weekend plans in advance. She shares weekend tips gleaned from busy people, such as politician and news host Mike Huckabee, former CEO Frank Baxter, and TV producer Aliza Rosen. She also lists the kind of weekend activities that make people happiest, explains why it’s important to unplug at least for a little while, and shares the secret of why Sunday nights may be the most important hours of the weekend.

PORTFOLIO/PENGUIN

Published by the Penguin Group

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First published in the United States of America by Portfolio / Penguin,

a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc. 2012

Copyright © Laura Vanderkam, 2012

All rights reserved

ISBN 978-1-10162-028-1 (ePub)

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THE PARADOX OF WEEKENDS

Mike Huckabee is a busy man. The ordained Baptist minister and former governor of Arkansas ran for president in 2008, but when that didn’t work out he became a Republican Party influencer, raising money and campaigning for candidates who share his views. He’s just published his tenth book, he hosts a three-hour daily radio show during the week, and on Thursdays he travels to New York City from his home in Florida in preparation to tape his Fox News show, Huckabee. You don’t have to agree with his politics to see that this is an exhausting schedule, particularly because he records his television show on Saturdays, guaranteeing him a six-day workweek. What makes it all possible?

Sundays. “That’s pretty much my day to try to rest and have what I call some ‘Mike time,’” Huckabee says. “It’s almost like running a marathon. You think, I know the finish line is out there, and you start visioning the finish line. Many days of the week I start visioning Sunday as the day I can kind of catch my breath. I’m not on someone else’s schedule and I don’t have to turn on a mic at a certain time.” From the time his plane lands at 7:45 p.m. on Saturday to the time he’s recording a short Huckabee Report commentary later Sunday evening, “it’s my time just to mentally recharge.”

But what Huckabee describes as a “leisurely” day is far from slothful. “I’m a structured and orderly person,” he says, and because his downtime is so limited, he has to be careful about how he spends it. “I almost never just sit and watch television,” he says. Instead, Huckabee has a plan. He gets up around 6 a.m. on Sunday morning and works out on the recumbent bike and elliptical machine while reading several newspapers (physical papers on the bike; electronic papers on the elliptical). He and his wife, Janet, attend the 10:45 a.m. service at Destiny Worship Center, where the music is contemporary, the preacher is “fantastic,” and “if you want to wear shorts and dress in beach style, that’s perfectly fine.” After lunch, Huckabee does in fact hit the beach. “The weather almost compels me to be outdoors,” he says, and he usually spends the afternoon “sitting on the beach and listening to nothing but the seagulls and the waves crash against the shore.” Come dinner time, the Huckabees often have friends over, with Huckabee cooking—a hobby he confesses to enjoying. Mostly it’s steaks or fish on the grill, or a tenderloin or ribs in the electric smoker. “It’s really kind of a good time,” he says. Indeed, if weekdays feature the things he has to do, Sundays feature “all the things that I would want to do.”

Having recharged the batteries, Huckabee hits Monday relaxed, refreshed, and ready to take on the world. As he ponders how to describe his philosophy toward weekends, he offers two seemingly contradictory ideas. First, you have to commit to taking time off—to keep a Sabbath of sorts, and carve out space for rest in a frenetic world. But second, you have to realize that this rest time is too precious to be totally leisurely about leisure. “Don’t enter into it with such a lack of structure that you don’t do anything because you spend all day thinking about what you want to do,” Huckabee advises. “If you know you want to read a book, then get the book out and have it set aside and make plans to read it. Say it’s going to be at one. When that starts, get on it. Don’t wait until that afternoon, then think—could I read? Or listen to some music? Or take a walk? Then you’ll sit about wasting an hour of what little time you have figuring out what to do with the rest of it.” To make the most of your weekends, “you tell yourself, look, what would make me really, really enjoy this day and kind of get me out of the normal routine and give me pleasure?” Then say, “this is what I’m going to do,” and come that time, be disciplined about that commitment, telling yourself, “this is my appointment, just as if it’s a doctor’s appointment or an appointment to go to work.”

This is the paradox of weekends: “You have to set an appointment to go off the grid as surely as to go on it.”

The quest for rejuvenation

Having seen hundreds of time logs over the years, I think Huckabee is on to something. If you have a demanding job—the kind that requires turning off your cell phone at midnight because otherwise it will keep ringing, where you leave on a plane Monday and come home Thursday just hoping you haven’t crossed too many time zones, where whole afternoons disappear into e-mail firefights—then you know weekends are what stand between you and a smoldering burnout. Success in a competitive world requires hitting Monday refreshed and ready to go. The only way to do that is to create weekends that rejuvenate you rather than exhaust or disappoint you.

Yet many of us have trouble using our weekends well. Even people who are mindful of how they spend their weekdays find weekends slipping through their fingers. These days disappear into chores, errands, inefficient e-mail checking, unconsciously chosen television marathons, or a death march of children’s activities that suck the energy out of chauffeuring adults. Learning to create restorative weekends requires thinking about weekends differently than we’re used to and, in many cases, than at first we think we want to. We need to be strategic with these hours.

How many hours? Just as using weekends well requires embracing a paradox, weekends themselves are both expansive but not as infinite as they seem. While some folks like Huckabee have six-day workweeks, most of us think of the weekend as Saturday and Sunday—and in fact, the weekend is a little longer than that. There are sixty hours between the moment you crack open a beer at 6 p.m. Friday and the time the alarm goes off at 6 a.m. Monday. Sixty hours is a decently high percentage of a 168-hour week. Even if you’re asleep for twenty-four of those hours, that still leaves thirty-six hours for waking rejuvenation. That’s the equivalent of a full-time job—and this is a helpful mindset to have. You would not take a thirty-six-hour per week job without asking what you intended to do with it and what you expect the outcome to be.

On the other hand, while these sixty-hour blocks are lengthy, they don’t come in an unlimited supply. You have fewer than 1,000 Saturdays with each child in your care before they’re grown up. Even more fleeting? Those perfect weekends that so encapsulate their season that they become entwined with your memory of that time. Here in the Northeast, each autumn there are only about three weekends when the trees flash their full, glorious color before winter winds scuttle the leaves away. If you live to be eighty, that’s only 240 weekends when the maples are blazing scarlet—and you likely don’t remember at least a tenth of those. These numbered weekends pass whether we think about how to spend them or not. While it seems like there will always be another weekend—another weekend when we will be less tired, less stressed, more adventurous—time is far from infinite.

Successful people know that weekends deserve even more care than you bestow on your working days. Every week, you are granted another chance to spend your time becoming happier, more creative, and whole. How do you achieve this rejuvenation? How do you arrange your weekend hours to create, over time, a full life? That is the subject of this book, and the answer starts by taking a slightly different approach to a common question.

“What are we doing this weekend?”

If your household is like mine, the question of what you’re doing this weekend often doesn’t get asked until Friday sneaks up on you, and sometimes until everyone rolls out of bed on Saturday morning. If you’ve spent the week battling traffic or collecting frequent flier miles, you may think you want the answer to be “nothing.”

It holds a certain appeal. We picture lazy days spent lounging around in pajamas, or as John Keats wrote in his poem “Ode on Indolence,” lying “cool-bedded in the flowery grass.” It’s an alluring image, as long as you remember that Keats didn’t have children, and he lived long before television and the Internet. In our distracted world, we’re constantly battling electronic temptations that threaten to take over our available time. While “nothing” in Keats’ day meant watching the clouds float by, nothing now means weekend hours parked on the sofa watching television we didn’t mean to watch, surfing Web sites we didn’t plan to surf, and checking e-mail in an inefficient manner. One recent study from UCLA’s Center on Everyday Lives of Families found that adults in dual-income, middle-class Los Angeles homes spent fewer than fifteen minutes of leisure time per week out in their backyards. They had leisure time—far more than fifteen minutes per week. They had great weather and lovely porch furniture. They just didn’t use it. In a world of constant connectivity, even loafing time must be consciously chosen, because time will be filled with something whether it’s consciously chosen or not—and not choosing means that the something that fills our hours will be less fulfilling than the something our remembering selves will likely wish we’d elected to do.

This reality is more pronounced if you have little ones at home. In my house, doing “nothing” still means caring for three children under the age of six. Stay-at-home parents certainly don’t think of themselves as doing nothing during the week, and one reason they make playdates and go to art classes is that staying home with bickering small children is more exhausting than distracting them with something else, something chosen—ideally something that the parent would enjoy, too.

What all this means is that Huckabee’s appeal to structure is worth a thought. I find it leads to two decisions that together create weekends that leave you rejuvenated and ready to go: choosing labors of a different sort, and embracing the benefits of anticipation.

Choose labors of a different sort

Yes, your weekends should be different from your workdays. Yes, you need a kind of rest. Ted Devine, CEO of Insureon and former CEO of Aon Re, who coaches youth hockey on his weekends, draws an analogy from that sport. “You have to go as hard as you can for a minute and a half on the ice, then get off the ice and rest your legs—and if you don’t do that, you won’t go out the next shift and play nearly as well,” he says. But I think (given that Devine is coaching hockey on his weekends, and not sitting on a bench!) the best sports analogy is that of “active rest” or cross-training.

I discovered the benefits of cross-training in the athletic side of my life when I signed up to run the Big Sur Marathon in April 2010. I’d had a baby in late September 2009, and while I’d run through the pregnancy, my volume of miles in the last trimester and first postpartum weeks was—not surprisingly—lower than most training plans recommend. I knew that ramping up mileage too quickly could cause the shin splints, busted knees, and cases of Achilles tendonitis that plague would-be marathoners. Fortunately, I came across a training book called Run Less, Run Faster by Bill Pierce, Scott Murr, and Ray Moss. Their plan advocated skipping “junk miles” and biking, swimming, or doing other sports instead. “If running is your only mode of exercise, the same muscles are always stressed in the same way, increasing the likelihood of injury,” the authors write. “Cross-training allows for a tremendous volume of central circulatory training without overusing a particular muscle group. . . . [Cross-training] helps you avoid boredom and burnout and keeps up your zest for training.” I never ran more than thirty-five miles per week, but I finished the marathon in good enough shape to hike with my family the next day. Cross-training was better for my running than sitting on the couch, or more running. Likewise, other kinds of work—be it exercise, a creative hobby, hands-on parenting, or volunteering—will do more to preserve your zest for Monday’s challenges than complete vegetation or working through the weekend. As Anatole France once wrote, “Man is so made that he can only find relaxation from one kind of labor by taking up another.”

This theme—trading one labor for another—pervades the New York Times series on famous New Yorkers called “My Sunday Routine.” Architect Rafael Vinoly, according to his November 13, 2011, profile, on Sundays plays the piano for several hours. “My pianos are my only big indulgence, but they’re a necessity,” he said. “When I’m playing the piano is literally the only time I can be completely abstract and disconnected from the regular world and yet be connected—to my music.”

Celebrity chef Marcus Samuelsson, according to his profile, on weekends plays soccer in Chinatown with fellow Swedish expats. “It’s not so much about the playing as about being with friends with a common background,” he told the Times. “On the field, anything goes. It’s a way to blow off steam and say things you can’t say in the kitchen anymore.” If Samuelsson doesn’t have a game, he runs six miles or so in Central Park. “While I run, I think about food,” he said. But needless to say, one likely has different thoughts about food while sweating around airy running paths than one would in a crowded kitchen.

This different approach to thinking is why Dominique Schurman, CEO of the stationery company Papyrus, calls exercise “almost a job requirement. It allows me to kind of release the tension and clear my head. I get a lot of ideas when I’m exercising,” she told me. She goes on long runs and swims, and also gardens—a physical activity that she calls “a creative outlet. I just like to work on what goes well together.” As she moves her pots around, she studies different ways to combine color and texture, not unlike what she asks her card designers to do during the week. “Since I do that in my job, I kind of enjoy a tactile dimension,” she says. “I find that relaxing.”

Of course, sometimes the appeal of doing something physical is that you can’t ruminate in quite the same way as you would at your workplace. Bill McGowan, a television correspondent who’s won two Emmys for his coverage, calls himself a “big woodchopper.” He and his wife moved to a somewhat overgrown property on the Hudson River in Westchester, New York, about five years ago, and had a few trees taken down. “I like to take these big cylinders—two to three feet wide in diameter—and chop them into firewood,” he says. Aside from being very good exercise, “I find it this incredibly Zen experience,” he says, as he tackles a challenge that’s very different from the nine to five.

Embrace anticipation

While playing the piano, meeting friends for a soccer game, and chopping wood could be spontaneous activities, for the busiest people, Huckabee is right that you have to make an appointment to go off the grid as surely as to go on it. If you have a three-year-old, for instance, and you wish to chop wood, you need to make sure someone else is dealing with the child so he doesn’t decide to “help” you. That requires thinking through your plan for the day and communicating it with your partner or someone else who might watch the child, or even just sticking him in front of the TV so he doesn’t stick himself anywhere near the axe. If you’re meeting friends to play soccer, you all need to know where and when to meet—even if it’s a long tradition. Joan Blades, co-founder of MoveOn.org and MomsRising.org, plays soccer every Sunday. “This is the same game [my husband] Wes and I met at thirty years ago,” she tells me. “Some of the players are in their sixties and others are kids. It is a fun game!” But, of course, it’s also a game happening at a certain time and place. Playing the piano for hours means making a commitment not to call an equally busy client or look over endless project plans at that time. Eating dinner somewhere lovely often requires a reservation. Any parent knows it’s near impossible to get a Saturday night sitter on Saturday. Going to worship services often requires getting up and getting dressed at a certain time. Failing to think through what you wish to do on the weekend may make you succumb to the “I’m tired” excuse that keeps you locked in the house and not doing anything meaningful within it—even though we draw energy from meaningful things.

And so we come to the insight on weekends that I find people resist: a good weekend needs a plan. Not a minute-by-minute plan, not a spreadsheet full of details, but just a few fun anchor events sketched in ahead of time. Indeed, some research is finding that skipping the planning stage means cutting yourself off from the major mechanism via which weekends can deliver joy.

Harvard psychologist Daniel Gilbert talks about this phenomenon in his 2006 book, Stumbling on Happiness. “The greatest achievement of the human brain is its ability to imagine objects and episodes that do not exist in the realm of the real,” he writes. “The frontal lobe—the last part of the human brain to evolve, the slowest to mature, and the first to deteriorate in old age—is a time machine that allows each of us to vacate the present and experience the future before it happens.”

This time travel into the future—otherwise known as anticipation—accounts for a big chunk of the happiness gleaned from any event. As you look forward to something good that is about to happen, you experience some of the same joy you would in the moment. The major difference is that the joy can last much longer. Consider that ritual of opening presents on Christmas morning. The reality of it seldom takes more than an hour, but the anticipation of seeing the presents under the tree can stretch out the joy for weeks. One study by several Dutch researchers, published in the journal Applied Research in Quality of Life in 2010, found that vacationers were happier than people who didn’t take holiday trips. That finding is hardly surprising. What is surprising is the timing of the happiness boost. It didn’t come after the vacations, with tourists bathing in their post-trip glow. It didn’t even come through that strongly during the trips, as the joy of travel mingled with the stress of travel: jet lag, stomach woes, and train conductors giving garbled instructions over the loudspeaker. The happiness boost came before the trips, stretching out for as much as two months beforehand as the holiday goers imagined their excursions. A vision of little umbrella-sporting drinks can create the happiness rush of a mini vacation even in the midst of a rainy commute.

On some level, people instinctively know this. In one study that Gilbert writes about, people were told they’d won a free dinner at a fancy French restaurant. When asked when they’d like to schedule the dinner, most people didn’t want to head over right then. They wanted to wait, on average, over a week—to savor the anticipation of their fine fare and to optimize their pleasure. The experiencing self seldom encounters pure bliss, but the anticipating self never has to go to the bathroom in the middle of a favorite band’s concert and is never cold from too much air conditioning in that theater showing the sequel to a favorite flick. Planning a few anchor events for a weekend guarantees you pleasure because—even if all goes wrong in the moment—you still will have derived some pleasure from the anticipation. I love spontaneity and embrace it when it happens, but I cannot bank my pleasure solely on it. If you wait until Saturday morning to make your plans for the weekend, you will spend a chunk of your Saturday working on such plans, rather than anticipating your fun. Hitting the weekend without a plan means you may not get to do what you want. You’ll use up energy in negotiations with other family members. You’ll start late and the museum will close when you’ve only been there an hour. Your favorite restaurant will be booked up—and even if, miraculously, you score a table, think of how much more you would have enjoyed the last few days knowing that you’d be eating those seared scallops on Saturday night!

I’m a planner, so this seems intuitive to me. Yet whenever I suggest planning weekends at least a day or two in advance, I get grumbles. First, a sizable proportion of people simply dislikes the idea of planning their leisure time. I think this (mostly) stems from a misunderstanding of what I’m talking about. As one person commented on my blog, “Not everybody wants to fill in every hour every day of the year.” I don’t want to fill every hour either. Life would be dreary if you kept your work schedule—planned in fifteen minute increments—on weekends, too. But there is a wide gap between planning every minute and planning nothing. This is a false choice. I find that three to five anchor events, spread over the sixty hours between that Friday beer and Monday alarm clock, should give you a nice balance. Three things taking three hours apiece is nine hours of your thirty-six waking ones. That leaves a lot of time for sitting and nursing a scotch, if you don’t have three small children, or watching The Backyardigans, if you do.

Second, I think people have a visceral reaction to the word “plan” that makes them think of things they don’t want to do. I’m suggesting planning things that you want to do. Taking your car to get repaired isn’t an anchor event unless you collect antique cars and have a group of friends who meet every Saturday morning to tinker with them. You seldom hear from a Phillies fan, “Man, I have to go to the game this weekend—I wish I were doing nothing instead.” That is the sort of thing that’s an anchor event. Humans don’t do well with suffering long term. As one reader told me, “Weekends are precious and ought to be cultivated with an eye toward enjoyment.” When you plan enjoyable things ahead of time, you magnify the pleasure.

HOW TO PLAN A WEEKEND

Your list of 100 dreams

With that in mind, we come to the more specific question of figuring out what to do this weekend. Perhaps the best way to frame this question is to ask “what do you want to do more of with your time?”

We may have vague ideas, but it’s more effective to have a really good list. In my first time management book, 168 Hours, I suggested people create something called a List of 100 Dreams. This exercise, shared with me by career coach Caroline Ceniza-Levine, prompts you to brainstorm anything you might want to do or have in life. When I have people try this in workshops, inevitably the first dreams people suggest are along the lines of “go see the pyramids in Egypt.” By Dream 100, however, you’ll be coming up with more everyday founts of joy, which tend to make excellent weekend anchor events. You won’t have a private dinner catered by Alain Ducasse at the Louvre this weekend. You could, however, let the munchkins run wild on the kiddie rides at the county fair while mom and dad indulge in some comically large milkshakes. Keep going until you have a good long list of these doable dreams. You could also think of these as a bucket list focused on activities within a two-hour radius from your house.

Some entries in my most recent List of 100 Dreams:

- Bike the Lehigh Gorge State Park trail near Jim Thorpe, PA

- Eat lobster on the waterfront near Cape May, NJ

- Go for a long run (or a bike ride with the kids in tow) at the Valley Forge battlefield

- Enjoy the Friday evening hours at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

- Eat dinner anywhere with a Zagat rating of twenty-three or above

- Go on a forty-minute trail run right by my house

- Take in a good choral concert

- Pick apples or strawberries with the kids

- Get my husband to grill a steak for me

- Have friends over for summer dinners and a dip in the pool

- Visit Longwood Gardens during spring weekends when the trees look like cotton candy

What’s on your list of 100 dreams?

Set anchors

Start working on your list, and ask your significant other, kids, or anyone you spend weekends with to come up with a list, too. Keep adding to it. If you’re stumped, you might hit the library and check out a book on tourist highlights for your city. Also, feel free to modify the list as needed. Once you try a particular activity, you may decide that you’ve had enough strawberry picking to last a lifetime and need not try that again. But be sure to keep the list somewhere accessible. Because ideally, in consultation with your fellow travelers at some point before the weekend, you can pluck items from your happy list, add new opportunities that come up, and peg them to the major weekend spots:

- Friday night

- Saturday day

- Saturday night

- Sunday day

- Sunday night

This planning meeting can be as fun as you want: one busy woman tells me that she and her husband sit down with beers on Friday to plan out their weekends. It’s more about catching up and brainstorming what they’ll do (and drinking beer) than a chore.

You can plan as loosely as you like. “Dinner with Joan and Bob along the waterfront” is perfectly fine—you can meet and stroll along, checking out restaurants and picking one that’s most enticing. Andrea Wilhelm, a quality assurance specialist at Epic, a healthcare software company, moved to Madison, Wisconsin, last year after graduating from college. Madison is often ranked as one of the best U.S. cities for young adults, and she’s been trying to take advantage of the city as systematically as possible. “I like having things loosely planned because it gives me the freedom to do lots of different things,” she says. She also wants to avoid the feeling that she’s wasting her time in the town. “If/when I move on from Madison, I don’t want to look back and be like, ‘Man, I wish I went there’ or ‘I never got around to doing that.’” On Friday nights, she goes to different restaurants or bars with friends. On Saturdays, after mornings devoted to taking online classes and an afternoon volleyball game, she goes to shows and different entertainment centers around the city. “Being an outdoorsy person, Sundays are great for getting friends together for these types of events”—meaning hikes, bike rides, and the like—“because they usually attract smaller crowds.”

Even “fun family excursion” can work as a planning entry. Simply knowing that you and the kids will be leaving the house for the afternoon can add order to the day. Laura Overdeck, founder of the Bedtime Math Foundation and a trustee at New Jersey’s Liberty Science Center, does a lot of these excursions with her three kids. “It’s different every time, and usually on a whim depending on our collective mood,” she says. “Examples of favorites are Liberty Science Center”—of course—“and in fall and spring, if we wake up and the weather’s nice, we’ll head to the beach just to dig in the sand, or take the kids apple or berry picking, or hang out with Grandma and Grandpa, who luckily live nearby.”

Your three to five anchor events can be whatever you like, but research suggests some optimal pairings. Huckabee’s weekend features time on the bike, church, and dinner with friends, and it turns out this sort of portfolio maximizes happiness returns. One study of Texas working women, published in Science in 2004, charted their experienced happiness through the day. Beyond obviously pleasurable activities like eating, relaxing, and sex—all of which are great to do on weekends—the researchers found that these women were happiest when exercising, engaging in spiritual activities, and socializing. So why not aim for at least one item from these three categories? You can even combine them. Lorie Marrero, founder of The Clutter Diet organizing company, reports that “One of the things I have done with weekends is used the time to catch up with friends doing the ‘walk and talk.’” She meets a friend on Sunday mornings at a trail and walks for about an hour and a half. “It’s exercise, it’s chatting, and it’s not a typical ‘let’s have lunch or coffee’ thing,” she says. “I don’t have to wear makeup and it feels very relaxing.”

Here are some other examples of awesome weekends:

WEEKEND #1

- Friday evening: Friends over for game night

- Saturday day: Family beach trip

- Saturday evening: Family dinner at a restaurant near the beach that you’ve been meaning to try

- Sunday day: Church

- Sunday evening: Leisurely walk around the neighborhood

WEEKEND #2

- Friday evening: Karaoke at a bar with friends

- Saturday day: Volunteer shift at a soup kitchen

- Saturday evening: Concert in the park

- Sunday day: Long run to local farmers’ market, then take bus home

- Sunday evening: Yoga class

WEEKEND #3

- Friday evening: Dinner and a movie

- Saturday day: Hike with friends

- Saturday evening: Birthday party

- Sunday day: Meditation session

- Sunday evening: Dinner and dancing at a street fair

WEEKEND #4

- Friday evening: Bike rides and then out for ice cream

- Saturday day: Picnic lunch while watching a soccer game

- Saturday evening: Cookout with the neighbors

- Sunday day: Trip to the zoo

- Sunday evening: Volunteer as a family to help clean a local park

Six secrets of successful weekends

Here are a few more tips to remember as you’re making your plans:

1. Dig deep. Just because you haven’t done something in years doesn’t mean it can’t be on your List of 100 Dreams. Maybe there are activities you haven’t done since childhood that could become a regular part of your weekends. One reader tells me that she and her husband decided to sign up for piano lessons on Saturday mornings. Now they and their teenage son all have lessons back to back. It’s easier to nudge a kid to practice when mom and dad are doing it, too. Sometimes we get so concerned about scheduling our kids’ lives that we forget to schedule our own.

2. Use your mornings. Weekend mornings tend to be wasted time, but they’re great for personal pursuits. If you’re training for a marathon, it’s less disruptive for your family if you get up early to do your four-hour run than if you try to do it in the middle of the day. To get up early, you’ll probably have to avoid staying up late the night before, but this is a good idea in general.

3. Create traditions. Happy families often have some special weekend activity that everyone loves but no one has to plan each time. Maybe it’s pancakes on Saturday mornings or a family walk to worship services, but whatever it is, make a ritual of it. These habits are what become memories—and comforting rituals boost happiness.

4. Schedule downtime. Jess Lahey, a New Hampshire–based teacher and writer, has official weekend naptime in her house that takes place each afternoon between one and three. Her kids—who are pre-teens, not toddlers who actually need to nap—know it’s coming, and they save up screen time for it. They play games together, watch a movie, or read. Everyone turns their phones off, and Lahey and her husband close the door to the upstairs, read for a bit, “then dive in for what always proves to be kick-ass sleep. That deep sleep that leaves you a little disoriented when you wake up,” she says. “Once I’ve figured out where I am and what day it is, I leap out of bed recharged and head out to weed the garden or get down to the business of making dinner.”

5. Make time to explore. A run, walk, or bike ride can turn into an adventure—with plenty of opportunities for that spontaneity people seem to think planning quashes—if you choose the right neighborhood. Use weekends to stretch your routine a bit.

6. Plan something fun for Sunday nights. This idea may be the most important tip in this book. Even if you love your job, it’s easy to feel a bit of trepidation on Sundays about the stresses waiting for you on Monday morning. And if you don’t like your job, Sunday trepidation can become a full-on case of the Sunday-night blues as time slides, inexorably, into the next day. You wonder what you’re doing with your life. You wonder if any of it is worthwhile.

If you’re asking such existential questions, it may be time to shake things up. But in the meantime, or even if you just feel weary when you think of your commute, you can combat the Sunday-night blues by scheduling something fun for Sunday evening. This extends the weekend and keeps you focused on the fun to come, rather than on Monday morning.

Caitlin Andrews, a librarian, calls it a “necessity” to end Sunday night on a high note. Her extended family gets together for dinner almost every Sunday, alternating houses. “The host house cooks the main meal but the others bring something to add—an appetizer, a bottle of wine, a side dish, or dessert. It’s a little stressful when I have to cook and clean for people coming over,” she reports, “but I don’t spend too much time on it and my husband helps. Plus, we always end up with leftovers for the rest of the week when we cook. It’s just a couple of hours—everyone comes over about five thirty and we’re home by eight or nine.” That’s plenty of time to plan and decompress before bed, and she looks forward to this tradition all weekend. “It takes my mind off any Sunday-night blues that might be coming on.”

Aliza Rosen, a reality TV producer who’s dreamed up series like Farm Kings and Curvy Girls, does Vinyasa (“hot”) yoga at 6 p.m. on Sundays. “It’s a great way for me to sweat out the toxins of the week and center myself for Monday,” she says. “I reset myself.” She admits that for her, the yoga is not particularly spiritual. “I’m making a mental list,” she says. But it gives her something to anticipate as she’s sliding toward each Monday firefight. That may be the same thing that Ina Garten, the chef otherwise known as the Barefoot Contessa, was thinking when she created her 6 p.m. Sunday ritual of getting a massage. According to the June 29, 2012 “My Sunday Routine” New York Times profile of Garten, this twenty-seven-year tradition stemmed from a 1985 realization that “I was working really hard, and one day I told myself, ‘I’m not having enough fun.’ So I did two things: I got myself a red Mustang convertible and started having massages. I don’t have the Mustang anymore, but I still have the same masseuse!”

One equally great way to end the weekend is to volunteer. Nothing will take your mind off any problems associated with your decent-paying and steady job like serving people who aren’t so fortunate. Savvy volunteer coordinators know that it’s easier for most people to make Sunday night volunteering a part of their lives than other times. Jacob Lee runs the Orange County (Calif.) chapter of the Fellowship of Orthodox Christians United to Serve (FOCUS). Every Sunday night, his volunteers serve a meal, restaurant style, to homeless families living in an area motel. Sunday is “generally kind of a dead night,” Lee says. “On Saturday night people have things to do. On Sunday . . .?” Miraculously, everyone is free. So you get a much more diverse group of volunteers than the retirees and homemakers who might volunteer during the week. After the volunteers serve the meal, as the evening starts to wind down, everyone sits together, telling their life stories and “learning about why people end up where they end up,” says Lee. It’s a way to connect with humanity before everyone goes their separate ways for the week.

MINIMIZE THE HAVE-TO-DO’S

Even if you plan three to five anchor events for your weekends, you’ll still see that this leaves plenty of open time. So what should you do with it? You can relax, of course, or be spontaneous. You can play with your kids or lie in the grass. But what about those have-to-do’s? What about chores, errands, and playing catch-up on busywork for your paid job? Successful people know that the best weekends feature activities you love and a minimal amount of anything else. In this section, we look at how to handle three common causes of weekend stress: chores, children’s activities, and work that follows you home.

Compress the chores

If you put in long hours at the office or travel much of the week, weekends may seem like a great time to get caught up on chores. But I’m not so sure they are, or that the accomplishment of chores should be too central to your weekends.

The big reason is that many chores expand to fill the available time. Take the procurement of groceries and household supplies. Some items, like diapers, are hard to substitute. Others less so. If you go to the grocery store when the cupboard starts looking bare, you’ll buy your usual breakfast cereals. If you don’t go? You might eat through that Costco-sized bag of English muffins you’re storing in the freezer. Chances are you won’t starve. Obviously, grocery shopping has to happen at some point, but a late-weekday-evening visit can make for an efficient trip. Or, if you live near a big city, you can order groceries online during a boring conference call. Then it’s done without sacrificing weekend time.

A similar thing happens with laundry. We do it most weeks, but we have enough clothes to go longer between loads and we could re-wear more items than we do. As for house cleaning, whole treatises have been written on the elasticity of standards. You can clean the toilets once a week and pick up the kitchen when it’s awful, or you can dust every bit of your millwork daily. A lot of this comes down more to preference (or budget to pay a housekeeper) than anything else. If you use weekdays for chores, rather than weekends, you may just spend less time on chores—because you have less time. The time you don’t spend on chores can be freed up for more meaningful things. Choices are seldom black and white, but I do think if you have the option to go for a long bike ride with your kids or spend the day organizing your attic, the former is the better choice. Spiritual edification is more important than cooking and cleaning, a point Jesus made to Mary and Martha in the gospels. Comforting a teen after a rough high school dance is more important than finishing the dishes in the sink.

Of course, I understand that for some people, hitting Monday with empty hampers and clean floors feels like an accomplishment, much like ending the workday with an empty inbox feels satisfying, too. Some people even tell me that they can’t relax if they know the house is a mess! The key thing with chores and weekends is not to focus so much on easily seen and measured goals, such as scratching everything off that grocery list, that you divert energy from your highest value projects: nurturing your relationships, nurturing your career, nurturing yourself.

One way to do this? Designate a small chore time. Perhaps it’s Saturday evening while you’re waiting for a babysitter, or Friday evening right after dinner and before watching a movie. Regardless of when you choose, if you find yourself looking at a dirty floor at some other time, you can tell yourself that there’s a time for cleaning floors—and now is not that time. Creating a small window also makes you more motivated to get the chores done quickly, so you can go on to the fun things.

Rethink children’s activities

Another common weekend woe is the alleged tyranny of children’s calendars. Parents complain that they’d like to use their weekends well, but the entire time is consumed by children’s sports.

Often this isn’t true from a numbers perspective. A weekend where one child has a four-hour baseball game and another has a four-hour swim meet sounds packed, though eight hours of sports is just 25 percent of the time you’re awake (thirty-six hours) during a sixty-hour weekend. I think what makes these events loom large is that practices and games are scheduled at certain times and involve commitments to other people. It’s the same phenomenon that makes any random conference call seem larger and more important than spending an hour thinking about a business idea, even though the latter is objectively a bigger priority in your life. In workshops, I tell grown-ups to schedule in hours for top work priorities like strategic thinking or creative work, so these priorities seem like commitments alongside those conference calls we all spend too much time on. It’s a good idea for leisure, too. Write alongside that four-hour baseball game on the calendar that “I will do a six-mile run along the river at 8 a.m.” That reminds you that there are other parts to the weekend than children’s sports and—as a bonus—when things are written down and scheduled, they are more likely to happen.

You can also make the most of children’s activities. Make games into family outings. Pack a picnic lunch and get to know the other families so you can socialize with them. That’s one reason I never mind going to birthday parties for the under-eight set. Viewed in the right light, they’re a chance to nurture relationships while someone else is entertaining your kids. You can trade off with other parents to carpool for practice, use practices to score one-on-one time with your other children if you have a brood, or even just sit in your car and read or think. While her daughter is playing tennis, “I’ll read through the whole Sunday Times,” says Kirsten Bischoff, co-founder of the online scheduling service HATCHEDit.com. “I would otherwise feel like I was wasting huge amounts of time as a chauffeur. I’m still using my brain on weekends.”

While stories of overscheduled children make headlines, research into children’s use of time finds this is a smaller cultural phenomenon than people make it out to be. The average child spends far more time in front of screens of various sorts than she does doing sports, hobbies, religious activities, or homework. Only a small percentage of children are enrolled in multiple activities at any given time, and regardless, if your weekends feel overscheduled, this is a problem you can address. Pare down to the activities they and you enjoy most. When it comes to making the most of leisure time, depth and focus tend to bring more happiness than a scattershot approach where you never get a chance to go all-in toward mastery.

Keep a (tech) Sabbath

As for the encroachments work makes on weekends, I keep coming back to the concept of a Sabbath—a holy day for rest. In the well-known Biblical narrative, God spent six days creating the earth, and then on the seventh he rested. He commanded the Israelites under Moses to “remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.” Big chunks of the books of the law spell out what one can and cannot do on the Sabbath, and it’s something Orthodox Jews are often defined by in popular culture: a prohibition against working, and for many, driving, using electricity, and so forth, from sundown Friday until sundown Saturday.

Christians have often viewed the Jewish Sabbath rules as legalistic. In Mark 2:27, after the Pharisees have complained about Jesus’s disciples picking grain on the holy day, Jesus explains to them that “the Sabbath was made for man, and not man for the Sabbath.”

But our distaste for the legalism may stem partly from how comfortable we are. Many of the prohibited tasks, like driving and shopping, aren’t that unpleasant. Contrast this to the worldview described in Exodus 23:12, where the rule is that “on the seventh day do not work, so that your ox and your donkey may rest and the slave born in your household, and the alien as well, may be refreshed.” Picture the brutally hard life of a slave—and then ponder the social importance of powerful people believing that God would sit in judgment on them for making their human chattel work without a break.

It’s a mindset that perhaps some people in demanding jobs now would appreciate, because you don’t have to be religious to see the benefit in not doing your normal work for at least one day a week. Perhaps the Sabbath is made for man—and man turns out to need a time for renewal. As author Joshua Foer told Gretchen Rubin on her Happiness Project blog about one of his major happiness secrets, “I keep the Jewish Sabbath, which is not something I did when I was eighteen. For twenty-five hours each week, everything gets turned off. No e-mail. No phone. I don’t make anything. I don’t destroy anything. No matter how much stress I have in my life, it all evaporates on Friday night.”

Rinna Sak lives in Toronto and is a partner in a major accounting firm. She’s an Orthodox Jew and observes the Sabbath. “It’s very common in my field, during the busy season, for people to work seven days a week,” she says. This will go on for two to three months. When she was “fresh out of university it was tough to go to senior managers and say, ‘I can’t work on Saturdays.’ That was a tough thing to do.” But here’s the thing—like the wandering Israelites who didn’t starve despite manna not falling from heaven on the seventh day, “I didn’t get any less done. If anything, I got more done than my peers.” She was always rated at the top of her class. She made partner working substantially fewer hours than others. She credits this reduced workweek with her success. “I knew that at four thirty on Friday I was leaving. I wasn’t just futzing around. There were always time wasters, but I just knew that I had to get something done, so I was lightning focused. Other people just can’t maintain that. You can’t maintain that seven days a week, twelve hours a day.” That’s why, when she moved up the ranks, “I made it a rule on my jobs. Everybody got one day off on the weekend.” Because of this, “my teams have always operated at a pretty optimal level. They had time to decompress.”

A stretch of time apart from the computer, phone, and work stresses creates space for other things in life. Sak’s Sabbaths more closely resemble the cross-training we talked about earlier than complete rest. There are Shabbat services and then get-togethers for meals with friends. Parents never get a real break from parenting and Sak has three little ones, which means that for a day of rest, “it’s really not restful.” But the good thing about a Sabbath is that the kids can’t spend the time mom has off from work locked in their rooms playing video games. With a twenty-four-hour break from technology, they have to spend the time together. “It forces you to have a different kind of relationship with your spouse, your friends, your children,” she says. Left to her own devices she might work around the clock, but while she answers the question “does God really care if I use my BlackBerry?” with “probably not,” the reality is that “it forces an environment on that day for me.” And that break makes a big career and a big family possible.

Even if you don’t have religious prohibitions against working, you might try carving out periods of time on the weekend when you don’t check your devices. Plenty of successful people do wind up working on weekends, but I was struck, in interviews, by how people tried to keep it under control. Harsh Patel, who did a two-year Teach for America stint at PFC Omar E. Torres charter school in Chicago, said that “Coming back from work on Friday, I didn’t want to do anything, so I didn’t. But I found myself wasting Saturday mornings sleeping in too long, so I started getting up earlier and finishing my work—which allowed me to do whatever I wanted worry-free Saturday night and Sunday.” That kept him “sane enough to teach for two years.”

Bill McGowan says that “I try not to be checking e-mail every ninety minutes on the weekends.” Instead, like Patel, he gets up on Saturday mornings to take care of some things. He makes himself and his wife coffee and then “I have just this really lovely, enjoyable spot on this porch we have. I take my coffee and my laptop, and—this is like seven thirty, eight in the morning—just dive in, and try to get my inbox down.” Because the time isn’t as fragmented “I think a little more creatively in terms of new business to go after.” This ninety-minute bout of work is made better by the delightful scenery: “I lift my eyes from the screen to see a woodpecker.” There’s a nice breeze and “I try to make it a very relaxing, peaceful, tranquil setting.” He knows that if he takes care of lingering work in a short burst, “it eliminates the nagging and gnawing that stays somewhere in the back of your mind the whole weekend.” (Incidentally, he throws many of the e-mails he writes into the draft folder to avoid people e-mailing him back later in the day and then expecting a response. “I don’t want to reinforce that I’m doing a seven-day week,” he says. The e-mails will go out early Monday morning.)

Just as with chores, compressing professional work into a small time frame on weekends lets you relax the rest of the time, knowing that there is a time for work, and now is not that time. The rest of the time can be Sabbath mode. Without the distractions of the Internet, you may find ideas rushing at you. I find that I get an amazing volume of ideas in church. I don’t go there to brainstorm, but we get very few chances in our distracted world to just sit and be still. The one major challenge to unplugging? In the smartphone age, our cell phones come with an inbox attached. You may have your phone with you so your teen can call you to pick her up at her friend’s house, but once you’ve got the phone you can see if you have new messages in your inbox. It’s tempting to do a quick check—which breaks the spell. One quick way around this? Hide the inbox icon if you find that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.

HOW TO WIN THE WEEK AHEAD

In the section on planning weekends, we talked about how important it was to schedule something fun or meaningful for Sunday night. This stretches out the weekend and focuses the mind on the pleasure you’re about to experience, rather than whatever stresses are waiting for you Monday morning.

But after you have friends over for an early dinner, volunteer with Jacob Lee at the motel in Orange County, or have a massage like the Barefoot Contessa, you still have one more thing to do to secure your weekend’s awesome status: carve out at least a few minutes to plan the week ahead. Schedule not just what you have to do, but what you want to do.

In The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, the late Steven Covey called this “putting first things first.” He suggests an exercise that involves thinking of the roles that matter to you. I’m a writer, a wife, a mother, a runner, a friend, and a volunteer as the president of the board of directors of the Young New Yorkers’ Chorus. If your list of roles starts getting unwieldy, you could compress them into the major categories: career, relationships, and self (which includes exercise, hobbies, and anything that moves your soul). Then think of your top two or three priorities in each area that you’d like to accomplish over the next 168 hours. Block these priorities into your calendar first. Once you do this, you’ll likely notice something. First, blocking six to nine priorities into a 168-hour week still leaves a lot of blank space. But second, if you accomplished all those things, you would have an absolutely amazing week. Frank Baxter, former CEO of Jefferies & Co (the investment bank) and former ambassador to Uruguay, does Covey’s “first-things-first” exercise most weeks and describes it as “invaluable.” On Sundays, he sits down and looks at the calendar in order to “prioritize the coming period and to leave room to be flexible to negotiate the unexpected.”

Dominique Schurman, the CEO of Papyrus, likewise designates Sunday afternoons as “my planning time, to regroup and get myself organized for the upcoming week.” Once the week starts, “things just start coming at me,” so she needs to keep her top priorities in mind and map out her battle plan of when those things will get accomplished. “Otherwise, the time just gets eaten up by other people’s requirements encroaching on my time.”

What should your priorities be? Anything you like, of course, but I find it helps to have weekly goals that make progress toward annual goals—those things you’d mention in an end-of-year performance review or in that wretched genre of literature known as the family holiday letter. Try writing both of these in January for the coming December. What would you like to say you’ve done by the end of the year in the major categories of life? What would you like to accomplish for your career, in your relationships, and for yourself? Then break down these goals into smaller steps, and try to incorporate at least one of these steps into your weekly plan.

The reason to do this on Sunday is that if you wake up on Monday morning without a plan, you can easily lose the day as you figure it out. You burn up willpower deciding, rather than diving in before your focus is lost. I find that making a priority list for the coming week helps me end the weekend and start the new week with a sense of purpose. I’m not just flailing, or if I am, the flailing at least has some forward motion.

ALL THERE IS

In the busyness of daily life, it can seem like there will always be another weekend, but, like all things, time is finite. If you live to be eighty, you’ll have a grand total of 4,160 weekends in your biography. There are probably at least that many things you’d like to do or experience during your life. Some must wait for vacations, but it’s hard to cram all your desires and achievements into two or three weeks per year. While we often crash into weekends feeling overwhelmed, the impulse to do nothing leads, as one reader told me, to feeling like we’re missing out on our own lives.

I was thinking of this upon seeing a round of story ideas recently on “simplifying Christmas.” In the narrative these experts and companies were invoking, we’re so overworked and put-upon that we should just trim the holidays to the necessities. Relax. Slow down. You don’t have to bake, or throw parties, or curl the ribbon on the pile of presents stacking up under what is hopefully a minimalist tree.

Reading these ideas, I could see the wisdom in some tempering. Certainly, there’s no point in filling the holidays with things that don’t bring you joy and expensive stuff that no one wants.

But if you’ve got young kids, it doesn’t take long to realize that there won’t be many Christmas seasons when the little ones will race downstairs in the morning to see what Santa brought. They won’t always be eager to bake with you, spilling flour on the counter in their excitement. Eventually they won’t care if you put up a giant tree, or go caroling, or make hot chocolate. You can beg off making a snowman because you’re tired. But there are only a few winters—and only a few days each winter when it’s snowy and you all are home together—that your children will ask to make snowmen with you. Someday, perhaps, you will be staring at the snow from the too simple room of a hospital or nursing home, dreaming of the days when making snowmen with your children was an option. This realization leads to a different question than that suggested by all these tips on simplifying the holidays. Namely, what are you saving your energy for? This is all there is. Anything could happen and you are not guaranteed another snowman. So make a fuss. Make a show. Spend your energy now.

It’s the same with weekends, which are miniature versions of the holidays we struggle to optimize. It is always easier to do “nothing” (meaningless somethings) and do only the things we have to do. Cast loose from the schedule of work and school, we list around. We don’t think about what we’d like to do with our time, and so we live a constrained version of life.

But we can choose differently. I am writing this right after Labor Day weekend on a drizzly, dreary Tuesday as my backyard is a mash of overgrown green. The leaves, though, are already turning mottled yellow at the edges. September brings a melancholy sense of time passing, as my oldest child is off to kindergarten, the three-year-old starts preschool, and even the baby turns daily into a little girl who laughs and stumbles toward her first steps. In the photos from last Labor Day she was simply a very round belly. Now we’ve gotten to know the sweet, toddling child once contained in that roundness.

I hadn’t been planning anything special for Labor Day weekend, but it seemed a shame not to wring every last drop from summer. And so my family wound up taking a road trip to the coast and the mountains—through Ocean City, Maryland, with its Ferris wheels and margaritas, and on through the Manassas battlefields in Virginia, and ultimately out to Shenandoah National Park. As we wound our way down Skyline Drive, we paused to hike any trail under two miles that the kids could handle. They relished scrambling over the rocks on one summit, looking out at the green fields, the hay bales, and shapes of other mountains bearing shadows of the clouds.

Traveling with little ones is always challenging. There are highs and lows—always in the same day, often in the same hour. In the rear view mirror, though, the experiencing self who spent forty minutes trying to get the baby to lie down in her portable crib is replaced by the remembering self. The remembering self has turned what could be fallow, forgettable days into memories sown into the brain. These memories are there to nourish that brain through its weekday labors. They are there to fortify the soul in years to come when the busyness of now is replaced by a quieter life—as quiet as an off-season amusement park when the kiddie rides have been packed up after Labor Day empties the shore.

What the most successful people know about weekends is that life cannot happen only in the future. It cannot wait for some day when we are less tired or less busy. If you work long hours, then weekends are key to feeling like you have a life that is broader than your professional identity—even if, and probably because, you take that identity very seriously. The marathoner knows that rest days and cross-training days spur physical breakthroughs. Likewise, the mind needs to lay different pathways, needs to stretch itself to coax a nervous child to blow bubbles in the swimming pool so it can more cleverly negotiate a business deal. As you summon the willpower to pedal up that last hill, you develop the discipline to calmly lead a classroom or comfort a patient in the last minutes of a long shift. By treating the weekend part of one’s 168 hours as different and precious, you can recharge the batteries and hit Monday ready to go.

Also Available from Portfolio/Penguin

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.

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