Get it here: 168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think
Laura Vanderkam has written a great book encouraging us to think deeply about how we spend our time. As Vanderkam points out, everyone gets the same 168 hours in their week. We’re gifted with a new week 52 times a year, each with the same number of hours. Looking at the week as a bucket with a fixed number of hours, each hour, its value, is brought into sharp focus. In general, 56 hours are spent sleeping, leaving a full 112 hours available. When I was working at an office, I had 40 hours committed office time plus about 5 hours of commuting. This leaves a full 67 hours for family, fitness, spiritual, artistic and intellectual pursuits. But you can spend those 67 on valued activities only if you refrain from squandering those riches.
In January of this year I returned to work with a Contract Research Organization on the service side of drug development after a two year stint as Chief Medical Officer at a biotech. Personally, this meant going back to a home office where I manage my own activities most of the time. There’s a wider variety of projects now and much more unstructured time outside of a more formal office setting. That flexibility has allowed me to pursue some projects biostatistics and neuroscience in addition to regular work responsibility.
Without feedback, there is no learning. I’m an pragmatist and the world is a data source, life an ongoing experiment. I’ve used many systems over the years, trying to refine the tracking process to suit current activities. Sometimes tracking needs to be granular, other times it’s the timely progress to big events like completing a clinical trial. I think it always comes down to choosing a unit of time and looking both back over what did and did not happen and forward to what can be done in the next unit of time. I generally operate at the level of quarters (3 months), weeks, and days. This book really helped me up my game in the area of time commitment.
168 Hours is a book with a big idea, lots of illustrations, examples, and anecdotes, but also an action plan. Just like a food diary is the best way to loose weight and a budget is the best way to save money, time tracking is the best way to gain control of how those hours are spent. I’ve refined my time tracking, but more with an eye toward focusing on the work that inspires.
Highly Recommended
