Time Management Research: Laura Vanderkam’s Surprising Discoveries
You’re convinced you have absolutely no time for anything. Work is crushing you, family needs are endless, and the
You’re convinced you have absolutely no time for anything. Work is crushing you, family needs are endless, and the idea of doing something just for yourself feels like a fantasy.
Now imagine I told you that you actually have 72 hours left over each week,even after working full-time and sleeping eight hours a night.
You’d probably think I was mad.
But Laura Vanderkam has the math to prove it. The bestselling author of “What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast” and “Off The Clock” has conducted groundbreaking time management research, analyzing thousands of time diaries from busy professionals, parents, and high achievers, discovering something that challenges everything we think we know about time.
The 168-Hour Revolution
Vanderkam starts with a simple but powerful reframe: stop thinking in days, start thinking in weeks. There are 168 hours in every week – a number most people never consider.
Here’s her breakdown that stops people in their tracks:
- Work 40 hours (full-time job)
- Sleep 56 hours (8 hours nightly)
- Remaining: 72 hours for everything else
Even if you work 50 hours a week, you still have 62 hours left. Work 60 hours? That’s still 52 hours for family, exercise, hobbies, and that novel you’ve been meaning to write.
“People say there’s just not enough hours in the day,” Vanderkam notes. “But mathematically, the time is probably there.”
Why Your Memory Is Playing Tricks on You
Here’s where Vanderkam’s time management research gets fascinating. She’s discovered that our perception of time isn’t actually about time. It’s about memory.
Think about it: when you go somewhere exotic on holiday, a single morning can feel like it lasts forever. Your brain is overwhelmed with new sights, sounds, and experiences, so it remembers everything. But a typical Tuesday? Most people can’t even remember getting dressed or driving to work.
“How much time we have is actually a function of how many memories we have of any given unit of time,” she explains.
This revelation led to one of her most practical pieces of advice: try to answer why today will be different from any other day in your life. If you can answer that question, you’re more likely to remember the day. And if you remember more days, you’ll start feeling like you have more time.
The Water Heater Principle
Vanderkam loves telling the story about priorities that makes everyone uncomfortable. Imagine someone insisting they don’t have seven free hours in their week. Then their water heater breaks, flooding the basement. Suddenly, they find seven hours to deal with the crisis.
“The question is: how can you make other things in your life feel that urgent?” she asks. “How can you treat the things that are a priority to you as the equivalent of a broken water heater?”
We don’t think of training for a triathlon or writing a book as “water all over the basement, gotta get to it.” But maybe we should.
The Friday Afternoon Game-Changer
One of Vanderkam’s most practical discoveries from her time management research came from studying when people waste time. Friday afternoons, she realized, are when most people do absolutely nothing of consequence. Everyone’s mentally checked out, scrolling phones, waiting for the weekend.
So she started using Friday afternoons to plan the following week. She creates a simple three-category priority list:
- Career
- Relationships
- Self
“The reason to make a three-category list is that it’s very difficult to make one and leave a category blank,” she explains. It’s a simple psychological nudge that ensures you don’t neglect any area of your life.
Her secret weapon? Front-loading the week. Put as many priorities as possible on Monday and Tuesday. When emergencies hit later in the week and they will, you’ve either already accomplished your goals or still have time to catch up.
The 100 Dreams Exercise That Changes Everything
When Vanderkam suggests people make a list of 100 things they want to do, the first third is easy. Travel to Italy, learn Spanish, run a marathon, the obvious stuff.
But after that, it gets interesting. You start thinking about that state park an hour away you’ve never visited, the bike trail near your house, that restaurant you’ve been meaning to try. By the time you reach 100, you’ve got a treasure trove of achievable activities.
“Having this list means when you have open time, you can pull something off it instead of defaulting to scrolling on your phone,” she says.
The Social Time Discovery
Here’s something from Vanderkam’s time management research that surprised even her: people who feel like they have abundant time spend significantly more time with friends and family than people who feel time-starved.
She studied 900 busy people and discovered that those with the highest “time perception scores” weren’t actually less busy, they just spent their leisure time differently. The time-abundant group socialised more. The time-starved group watched more TV and spent more time online.
“There are people you like, even if you’re very introverted,” she points out. “What you can do to spend more time with those people will be time well spent.”
She calls it the difference between “effortful fun” and “effortless fun.” Throwing a dinner party versus scrolling through Instagram photos of other people’s dinner parties. Both are ways to spend an evening, but only one creates lasting memories and makes you feel like you have time for awesome things in your life.
The Notification Experiment
During the interview, the host shares a revelation about switching costs—how much time we lose every time we check our phones. He’d tried an experiment: shutting off all notifications for an entire day and only checking messages at the end.
“It changed my day so fundamentally, I was in shock,” he admits. “It felt unbelievably efficient.”
Vanderkam acknowledges that going all day without checking might not work for everyone. Her compromise? Batch communication into 15-minute windows each hour. Be responsive for 15 minutes, then completely offline for 45 minutes.
“If you can figure out ways to control the inputs for chunks of time during your day, you can get so much more done and not lose all that time on task switching.”
The Thursday 5 PM Reality Check
Here’s a mind-bender that challenges everything about work-life balance. Vanderkam tracks time from Monday at 5 AM to Monday at 5 AM. The exact midpoint of that week? Thursday at 5 PM.
Think about that. When most people feel like the week is over, mathematically they’re only halfway through. Your work-life balance from Monday morning to Thursday evening might look terrible. But your work-life balance from Thursday evening to Monday morning? Probably completely different.
“When we see that and look at time holistically, we stop viewing life so much as either-or,” she explains. “There’s space for all of it.”
The Memory Creation Toolkit
Since memory shapes our perception of time, Vanderkam has developed techniques for creating stronger memories. When you’re doing something interesting, think about how you’ll describe it later. Engage your senses deliberately: certain smells or songs can anchor experiences in your mind.
She suggests asking yourself: “How can I make sure I remember this?” Maybe you talk about the experience with someone else while it’s happening. Maybe you consciously notice details you’d normally miss.
“Eventually the story becomes the memory,” she explains. “You can actually think about this as you are proactively creating memories.”
The Christmas Card Strategy
One of Vanderkam’s cleverest techniques involves writing your year-end Christmas letter in advance. Envision yourself in December writing about your amazing year. What would you want to tell friends and family you accomplished?
Maybe it’s the year you finally took that family trip to Ireland, ran your first 10K, or joined a choir with your daughter. If you write that letter in January, you know exactly what you want to make happen.
“If you think about that ahead of time, then you can actually do those things so the letter can come true.”
Why Success and Time Abundance Go Together
Vanderkam’s time management research revealed something counterintuitive: the most successful people actually have the healthiest relationships with time. They feel abundant rather than starved.
“When you’re telling yourself you have no time, well then you don’t have time for doing important things,” she notes. “You just have to react to everything.” But people with abundant time perspectives? They have time to start that business, take that class, build those relationships.
The secret isn’t that they have more hours, it’s that they’re incredibly intentional about how they use them. And crucially, they build in open space. Everything takes longer than expected, and the best opportunities often come from unplanned conversations or serendipitous moments.
The Big Mindset Shift
After studying thousands of time diaries, Vanderkam has concluded from her time management research that the biggest way people lose time isn’t through poor planning or bad habits: it’s by being unintentional.
“You don’t think about what you’d like to do with your time, so you could do something but you don’t because you haven’t thought about it.”
Saturday morning arrives, and instead of that bike ride you’ve been wanting to take, you sleep in, putter around, and suddenly it’s 1 PM and the day has vanished.
Her solution is beautifully simple: “Expectations are infinite, time is finite. You are always choosing. Choose well.”
The Revolutionary Findings from Time Management Research
What makes Vanderkam’s approach revolutionary isn’t just the math: it’s the mindset shift her time management research has uncovered. She’s proven that the narrative “I have no time” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. When you believe you have no time, you look for evidence to support that belief.
But when you adopt the story that you actually do have time for things that matter, you start looking for evidence of that instead. And surprisingly, you find it.
The busy mother of four who somehow manages to write daily, speak around the world, and sing at Carnegie Hall isn’t superhuman. She’s just operating from a fundamentally different assumption about what’s possible, one backed by solid time management research.
And her research suggests that same abundance is available to all of us: we just need to start counting differently.
