Transcript

Episode 85, "Time Management and Relaunching" with Laura Vanderkam

 

Carol Fishman Cohen: [00:00:00] Welcome to 3, 2, 1, iRelaunch...the podcast where we discuss strategies, advice, and success stories about returning to work after a career break. I'm Carol Fishman Cohen, the chair and co-founder of iRelaunch and your host for today. Today, we welcome Laura Vanderkam, time management expert and author of six books on the topic including one we think is so relevant for relaunches 168 hours. She has a new book out, which is fiction of first called Juliet's school of possibilities. We're going to talk about both books and focus on the most relevant topics for relaunches. Hi Laura, welcome to 3, 2, 1, iRelaunch!

[00:00:50] Laura Vanderkam: [00:00:50] Thank you so much for having me!

[00:00:52] Carol Fishman Cohen: [00:00:52] Well, I'm so excited to have you...I've been a big fan of yours for years now. And just for our audience, before we get into the books themselves, can you please tell us a little bit more about yourself and how you got into the whole time management space? Well, let me say that again... before we get into the books themselves, can you tell us a little bit more about yourself and how you got to be a time management expert?

[00:01:21] Laura Vanderkam: [00:01:21] Well, I didn't grow up saying I want to be a time management expert. It's not one of those things like firemen or something that sounds like something a kid wants to do. I've always been interested in the topic of productivity though, and I was certainly a self-help book junkie over the years. But, I became more interested in this topic about 12 years ago when it became came apparent for the first time. And obviously many of your listeners have been through that transition.

[00:01:47] And I was trying to figure out how to make the various pieces of my life fit together in a situation where it was suddenly way more accountable for my time and aware of my time than I had been before. And so I started looking around to see how other people were making the pieces of their life fit together and studied the schedules of, of successful people.

[00:02:06] And most of my books have come out of that. Yeah. And it's been a learning journey for me as well. One of the upsides of interviewing so many people is I get to learn how to put all these tips into practice in my own life. I do a lot of speaking, write books, I have two podcasts now, and I'm raising my four children with my husband, we live outside Philadelphia.

[00:02:28] Carol Fishman Cohen: [00:02:28] Well, that actually brings me to the next question, which is, do you feel pressure to be the perfect model of time management and high productivity in your own life? Because you're the expert and you have all the books out and the podcasts, and there's a lot of social media, like, do you.

[00:02:47] Do you ever admit to the public when things don't go as perfectly as you usually advise?

[00:02:56] Laura Vanderkam: [00:02:56] Well, I, I am under no impression that life goes perfectly and I would actually say that part of. Real time management mastery is figuring out how you'll deal with it. Things when life goes wrong. And so many of my posts have been things of like, well, here is how I managed to not miss a deadline.

[00:03:15] When I spent half a day in the ER with one of my kids or here's how, you know, we are dealing with snow days or, you know, illnesses or anything like that. I've written about flight delays. This is just, this is life, right? I mean, anyone can plan a perfect schedule that shows me nothing. it's how you deal with life when it, when it doesn't go as planned, that really shows if you have figured out how to manage time or not.

[00:03:44]the one thing I would say about being publicly billed as a time management expert is people always think it's hilarious when you're late to things, which is. you know, also I try not to be, but it happens. And so we had a, a funny situation the other night, that I was giving a reading at a bookstore up in Doylestown, which is theoretically only 45 minutes from my house, but I got stuck behind a big accident on six 11, just the highway that leads there.

[00:04:13] And so I was late. And just like, Oh my goodness. We'll just, we'll just joke about this because there's nothing else you can do, right.

[00:04:22] Carol Fishman Cohen: [00:04:22] Well, I have to say, I felt pressured when we were in the planning stages for this podcast that I needed to be, especially prompt with responding to you and scheduling and doing everything as I thought. You would, you would ideally instruct someone to do so. So I think, just by working with you, I have become better about my time management.

[00:04:48] Laura Vanderkam: [00:04:48] I didn't even have to do anything. That's really exciting.

[00:04:51] Carol Fishman Cohen: [00:04:51] So thank you. but actually, I just want to dive into a little bit about how you researched and what some of your books have been based on. I understand that you asked large groups of people to track their time, and I can't remember it was in small increments and then how, how many people did this and for how long and in what kind of increments, and then did you look at all of these trackings and, and then derive your conclusions, or how did that work?

[00:05:23] Laura Vanderkam: [00:05:23] I've done a couple of time diary projects over the years, and some of my books have been based on this. I wrote a book called I know how she does it a few years ago. That was based on time diaries from 1,001 days in the lives of women who had, demanding professional careers and were also raising children.

[00:05:40] And I, most of the time it was half hour blocks that they tracked a few people were really gung ho and did 15 minute blocks. But, yeah, then I could analyze the data that came out of that and see, you know, how many hours people were working. And when they worked those hours, I could see how many hours people were sleeping and how they slept those hours.

[00:05:58] You know, things like housework or television or reading, time with family, all of that could be analyzed and, and get my conclusions as a result. I also did a time diary project for a book called off the clock where I had 900 people who also had full-time jobs and families, but it was both men and women.

[00:06:15] This time. I had them track their time for a day. And I looked at, how they were spending their time. And then also how they felt about their time. I asked them many questions that got at their perception of time, where their time was abundant and that they felt they did have enough time for the things they wanted to do, or people who felt most stressed and starved for time.

[00:06:36] And so I could compare the schedules of people who felt like time was abundant with sort of equivalently busy people who did not have that feeling and see, well, how, what, what's different about how they are spending their time.

[00:06:47] Carol Fishman Cohen: [00:06:47] Right. And there is a related exercise to all this in the back of Juliet's school of possibilities and we'll talk about that in a minute, but did anyone come away from that exercise feeling like, Oh my gosh, I had no idea. I was spending so much time on acts and now I'm going to eliminate that or reduce it that time.

[00:07:06] Laura Vanderkam: [00:07:06] Well, I can tell you that I have had that experience. I mean, I think everybody has.

[00:07:11] That experience of there being some blind spot in our time, unless somebody is already incredibly aware of their time. most people will discover something that they were spending more or less time on than they thought. And actually it's, it's usually not the thing. They think many people assume that they're working around the clock for instance.

[00:07:29] And it, it seldom is the case that people are actually working around the clock. you know, people have seen some things where like, Oh, Assume they never see their families again, they turn out to see their families quite a bit, which is also good to know. and in my case, I had a couple of surprises. I mean, one was the amount of time I spend in the car.

[00:07:47] Because I run my business out of a home office, so I don't have a daily commute. So kind of in my mind, I was never in the car. but anyone who has a family can understand that that was not actually the case. And most of it was very short trips. I mean, it's, you know, eight minutes to swim practice and eight minutes home it's, you know, things like that.

[00:08:07] But those do add up and these short trips were. Enough that I was spending more than an hour, a day in the car on average. And once I realized that as I, well, I need some thing to do with this time and sort of my interest in podcasts. And Dave came out of realizing I had these small chunks of time in the car and wondering if other people had small chunks of time in the car that they might also wish to listen to something entertaining or enlightening during that time.

[00:08:35] Carol Fishman Cohen: [00:08:35] You know, having raised kids myself, but now being an empty nester, I have had this experience of, comparing,  long periods of unbroken amounts of time to times where yeah you might have to get in the car here and there, but even though it's only an eight minute drive, the break in concentration, when you have to break away from something that you're immersed in and then have to get reengaged in that is often way more than just those eight minutes.

[00:09:05] Laura Vanderkam: [00:09:05] Yeah. Yeah. And that's true for any sort of activity like this. I mean, one of the reasons that meetings extract such a attention cost and I caution people to sort of be careful about how many meetings or phone calls you schedule yourself into, is you stop any other work about 10 minutes before your meeting or your call cause you're kind of waiting for it to start, and then afterwards you kind of cycle through your various things you check after you come back...whether your email or headlines or whatever...an hour long meeting can easily take an hour and a half of concentration, and it's broken up maybe a longer period of time that you might've had. So these are the things you gotta be very careful about in terms of scheduling.

[00:09:43] Carol Fishman Cohen: [00:09:43] Yes. So let's talk about the impact of all of your thinking on relaunchers. So, you know, we look at the relauncher community very broadly. Initially we were hyper-focused on women who took career breaks for childcare reasons, but now we see men who take career breaks for childcare reasons and women and men who take career breaks for reasons that have nothing to do with childcare could be elder care or pursuing a personal interest or a personal health issue. And we're even looking more broadly at the population to include non-traditional candidates like retirees are unretiring or ex-pats repatriating or military spouses or veterans transitioning back to work. So we're looking at this very broad category of people transitioning after doing something else. And we think about this concept of relaunch, making this dual transition. So you're transitioning to work on the personal side and on the professional side at the same time. And this relaunch differs significantly from the typical job search because of that personal transition piece. And, you know, at the end of the day, our relaunches are fitting in a full-time job into an already full life.

[00:11:01] And that's a quote from Michelle Freedman, from Advancing Women's Careers who is a frequent co presenter with me in career re-entry programs. So I wanted to know if you can talk about that a little bit. Thinking about a transition where, you know, you're doing something else during your career break and now you're, transitioning into a full-time job and you still have the rest of that life going on around you,so that's pretty significant insertion of a major time commitment into a full life.

[00:11:31] Laura Vanderkam: [00:11:31] Yeah, but I do think that time. Here's what I always say that time stretches to accommodate what we have chosen to put into it. And when you've chosen to fill it with one thing, that's what fills, many kinds of work, expand to fill the available space.

[00:11:45] And so if you are not in a paid job, you find other things to do with your life. that. We'll fill the time. obviously anyone who's been out caring for children or other family members knows that, but it's not just the childcare. That's part of it. And you become involved in various community organizations.

[00:12:00] There's probably more housework that's done. We've got time diary studies looking at that. There's certainly, because you're in your house more, if you're not at a, at a job outside your house, you naturally do more things in your house. People make messes in your house that you then clean up and then they make more messes you clean them up again. Whereas if nobody was there, none of those messages would have occurred in the first place. so I mean, that's kind of what's going on. And sometimes it's almost funny to think about it. And I have written in the past about a question that somebody who asked me in a conference that was focused on people who are looking to get back into paid work, generally caretakers of young children who are looking to get back into paid work. And one woman sort of said, well, I, you know, I'm thinking of going back to work, but I'm trying to figure out like, you know, the first thing that was out of her mouth was like, well, when are the bathrooms going to get cleaned?

[00:12:48] And it wasn't so much the bath, like what are the bathrooms going to get clean? I'm like, well, you know, I would suggest maybe every other Saturday morning, I don't know that that's what I would do it, but, it wasn't that wasn't the point. It was more that she. Had felt very busy already, with her home responsibilities.

[00:13:03] And she was trying to figure out the same thing. How do I fit a job in and say, well, all that stuff will take less time when you're not there doing it. And that may seem crazy, but time really does expand and contract. I mean, one of the things I've, explained to people to get this there, your head around this idea is.

[00:13:22] You know, a lot of people say, well, I have no free time whatsoever. And then they start a binge worthy TV series or pick up a book that it, you know, you have to find out what happens next. Like maybe one of the John Grisham novel or something. And all of a sudden you find a magical amounts of time to read that John Grisham novel.

[00:13:39] Right. It's like, you know, it you've consumed it in one weekend. Like, well, where did that time come from? You didn't think you had 10 hours to read over a weekend, but what it is, you. Wanted to find out. And so those other things didn't happen. but that same thing can happen once you transition into a paid job is that other things will sort of shrink a little bit, you know, there may be things that are less of a priority now that that were before. some things naturally, again, if everyone's out of the house, there's not mess as being made in the house. so they don't have to be cleaned up. So that's something that will take less time. you know, there are maybe errands, you don't do but maybe they didn't need to be done. maybe there are things that would have been fun to do, you know, that are with friends or community. And you'll just be a little bit more judicious about which one of those you take on. So, you know, their life and time is always a negotiation. And when we decide to spend more time on one thing, we often figure out those trade-offs, you know, just more automatically, I would almost say than others. So I tell you, I wouldn't worry too much about it, I guess.

[00:14:43] Carol Fishman Cohen: [00:14:43] Yeah. You know, we talk about a general lowering of standards that we hear from relaunchers in terms of, you know, the house is messier now, and I don't care, because they're priorities as you, as you're talking about your, your priorities, get, get changed and you're prioritizing what you're doing at work and you're prioritizing less, maybe some of the standards of perfection you would held yourself to, in your home life or whatever you were doing, on your career break and also this idea of the power of no, of, of starting to say no, when you're making the transition from, you know, running that, all time, it's the most successful of all time, you know, international night that they're going to come to you to run it again.

[00:15:25] And you have to say, You know, I just went back to work and we'd have to pass the Baton now to someone else to run that event. For those of you who just tuned in you're listening to three, two, one, I relaunch. This is your host, Carol Fishman Cohen. And I'm speaking with Laura Vanderkam about her new book, Juliet school of possibilities, her previous book, one of her previous books, 168 hours and time management advice for launchers.

[00:15:50] So Laura, let's talk about Juliet school of possibilities, your new book, and this was my synopsis, but, please correct me, or, but, as I saw it in the early chapters, you have a protagonist Riley who's at 29 year old workaholic. Her friend, a good friend and boyfriend are distancing themselves, breaking up with her and she's not doing that well at work and she just responds to hundreds of emails and doesn't have this opportunity to really step back and prioritize and be her best self in any way. And part of a corporate retreat she sent to, they send all the women or certain senior women and Riley to the Juliet school of possibilities and she meets Juliet, who is also doing many, many things, but seems to do it in a calm and cheerful way and is present and has these quality relationships and get so much done. And, and she notices the change in her life. And I don't want to give anything away, but, first of all, is that a fairly accurate description of, of the book, or would you describe it in a different way?

[00:17:01] Laura Vanderkam: [00:17:01] Yeah, no, it's a, it's a fable. A story yes o, this young woman whose life is falling apart on all dimensions. And she goes to see Juliet to the Juliet school of possibilities and gets different visions of what her life could be based on, different ways she would choose how to spend our time.

[00:17:18] And we sort of hope by the end, she learns her lesson and learns how to make good choices in order to build the life she wants.

[00:17:25] Carol Fishman Cohen: [00:17:25] Right. And so I just had this question for you is, is this is Juliet autobiographical in any way? Like, is she, you.

[00:17:34] Laura Vanderkam: [00:17:34] Oh, no. I, I admire people like Juliet. She isn't any particular person that I know but she does have many of the characteristics of successful people I've interviewed about their time over the years. One of the phrases she says to Riley at at one point was like, Oh, I have all the time in the world. And that is something that somebody did say to me, once in an interview, when I had been like, Oh, well, I won't take much of your time. Like, you know, I've gotten on the schedule this fabulous woman. She's like, Oh, you know, I said, I won't take much of your time. She's like, Oh, I have all the time in the world...which of course isn't true, but what she meant is that she had chosen to spend this time with me.

[00:18:10] I mean, she would've had perfect ability to say no if she didn't want to spend the time with me. But once she had decided to do it, she was going to fully focus on the matter in front of her because this is what she had decided was the right thing for her to be doing at this given moment. And it was such a gift... full focus for me and for her. And I wanted to convey that sense of calm and abundance in the character of Juliet.

[00:18:32] Carol Fishman Cohen: [00:18:32] Yeah. That is the ultimate gift is complete, presence with whoever you're with and focus. I think both on the personal and professional side.

[00:18:42] Can you tell us a little bit more why you wrote this book and all you, you know, you're, you're the queen of nonfiction and you wrote this fiction book all of a sudden did this idea come to you all of a sudden that you could convey some of the ideas you're trying to put forth in your nonfiction books in a fiction context? Or how did that come about?

[00:19:04] Laura Vanderkam: [00:19:04] Well, I've always written fiction on the side and I've participated in National Novel Writing Month, a handful of times, this is a challenge where you write a 50,000 word novel in the month of November. The idea being that a lot of people say like, Oh, I have a novel I want to write. And then they never get around to writing it. But if you give yourself just the month of November, You just get something down and it won't be good. Like, can't be, that's a lot of words in one month. Yeah.

[00:19:28] You can press that, you do that and you fit that into your already busy schedule, but then you'd go back and you make it better. And it's easier to turn something into something better than to turn nothing into something. So, you know, Little time management tip for people listening. That might be something you should try if you ever have a big creative work you want to produce. however, anyway, I had been doing this on the side, s, I had tried my hand at fiction and my publisher came to me in the summer of 2017 and said they were looking to commission some fables. This is a genre of literature that has actually has a decent audience. A lot of the most successful business books of all time are in fact stories, things like the one minute manager or who've moved my cheese. These are stories that teach a lesson and, and so they asked if I was interested in trying one. And so I was, so I had some material for something else I had been working on that had the characters of Juliet and Riley and some other people, but entirely different format but I could repurpose them into this fable construct and turn this into Juliet school of possibilities. So it was, it was a lot of fun to write a different from the nonfiction in many ways, in that I'm not interviewing people and looking for studies and statistics to cite, but I'm still making stuff up and then have to go through the process of writing chapters. There's working from an outline, you know, working back and forth with my editor. So that part was pretty similar.

[00:20:52] Carol Fishman Cohen: [00:20:52] Right. And can you, without giving too much away about the book on, can you tell us what you wanted your readers to come away from app from the book after they've read it? I really do want people to understand that time is a choice.

[00:21:10] Laura Vanderkam: [00:21:10] And at one point in the fable, Juliet explains to Riley this phrase that she has carved all over the school of possibilities, which is that expectations are infinite. Time is finite. You are always choosing choose well. And the reason I like this phrase, I mean, the expectations are infinite.

[00:21:32] There's no limit to the things you could be doing with your time or that other people might expect you to do with your time or that you might personally think are good or important to do with your time. These things are infinite, but you only have 24 hours in a day. And so because of this, we are always choosing how to spend our time.

[00:21:49] Even if it doesn't seem like we're making a choice, the sheer fact that you are doing one thing means you're not doing something else. So we are always choosing, which could sound sort of depressing, right? There's always something we're not doing, but I actually think it's kind of liberating because once we realize that everything is a choice that frees us to make these choices consciously and to hopefully make these choices.

[00:22:11] Wisely or as Juliet says, choose well. And so Juliet has this bracelet that she's wearing that says choose well, I made myself a bracelet that says choose well, and I think it's a good way to always ask at any given moment, is this the best thing to be doing with my time? Is this what I wish to be doing with my time?

[00:22:29] And if it is great, And if it's not, what can I do to change it? Hmm.

[00:22:33] Carol Fishman Cohen: [00:22:33] I like the idea of the bracelet. It's just kind of always being there as a reminder to think about that. So at the end of a Juliet school possibilities, you have what are kind of like worksheets that I and maybe they're they're these like time recording, sheets and you're asking readers to do some visioning, long-term and short-term for their professional and personal lives and I just wanted to know if you can talk about why you put those sections in the back and talk a little bit about the power of visioning.

[00:23:09] Laura Vanderkam: [00:23:09] So one of the things that Juliet does with Riley shows her alternate visions of her future. It's a bit like a Christmas Carol in that way... she sees the different visions of what might come to pass in her life based on different choices that he makes.

[00:23:24] One is continuing to just react to whatever is right in front of her, whatever is blinking brightest, seems most urgent at the time. And then the other set of choices is if she really thinks about what she wants to do and what deserves her time and makes wise choices based on this and the outcomes are entirely different... and so I think it's important for readers to also try to envision your future self. And Riley goes like 20 years in the future because she's so young....those of us not so young, don't need to go that far in the future, but a couple of years in the future. I mean, you might picture yourself at like a dinner that's being given in your honor, and people are up giving toasts about the amazing things you are accomplishing and have done and the sort of person you are. And if they were doing that, like what, what would they be talking about? Right. What would be the toast and what would be the thing they're celebrating? And when you have this vision, then you can start breaking it down and just sort of, well, what steps could I take to get me closer to that? And I encourage people to think about steps that they can put into their near-term schedules to start getting toward that picture. And then of course, as always, if you want to spend your time better, I think it helps to figure out where your time is going now, so I encourage readers to track their time... ideally for a week, a couple of days is okay, but ideally for a week, because the week is the cycle of life as we live it. And once you see where the time is going, then you can make choices based on reality, as opposed to various stories you've been telling yourself. I mean, people, again, I would tell stories like, Oh, you know, I can't do anything because I'm working all the time.

[00:24:57] Well, that's highly unlikely to be true. Like even if you're working 60 hours a week, if you're sleeping eight hours a night, so that's 56 hours a week, like you still have 52 hours for other things. There's a lot of time, you know, you're probably doing something else in those 52 hours per week. So we want to make sure that people are making choices based on fact, as opposed to larger cultural narratives that might not actually be true.

[00:25:19] Carol Fishman Cohen: [00:25:19] Got it. And that was one of your breakthroughs, right? With 168 hours for people to think about their life in the chunk of a week of 168 hours instead of the 24 hours.

[00:25:33] Laura Vanderkam: [00:25:33] Yeah. Beause I mean, a day is interesting as a unit of time, but it is not the unit of time, we actually live our lives in, if you think about it. Tuesday and Saturday both have 24 hours. They both occur just as often. But most people's lives look quite different on Tuesday and Saturday. So if I tell you to tell me about a typical day, which one are you going to tell me about? If you only tell me about Tuesday, that's going to give me a very different picture of your life. Then if you tell me about Saturday...but neither is more right than the other. So I want people to think in terms of a whole week and partly, this is also just the math. I mean, what I was saying about this, if you work 60 hours, but most people don't work anywhere near 60 hours. I mean, if you were between work and commute got you to 50 hours, like you'd have 62 hours for other things.

[00:26:18] If you were sleeping eight hours a night, which again, many people claim not to do that. You know, we have big chunks of time and nobody spends that much time on housework. Nobody spends that much time on childcare either. Like, even if you have personal responsibilities, there are, there is space. And I want to encourage people to see that and to start saying, well, how can I maybe carve out a little bit of time for these various long-term priorities? Even if it's just half hour to an hour a day over, over time, that really does add up.

[00:26:48] Carol Fishman Cohen: [00:26:48] Right, right. Well,  at one point in Juliet's school of possibilities, Riley thinks up a great idea. I think I'm remembering right while she's biking on the boardwalk during the retreat. And it was reminding me that I've always thought of my best ideas business or otherwise when I'm in a spin class and sometimes it's all I can do to not get off the bike in the dark room and run out and write them down because I'm worried I'm going to forget them by the time that the class ends. But I had this injury and I haven't been able to beat on spinning for the last five months. And I've definitely felt a shift and I wanted to know if you could comment on when you allow yourself to be in these different environments. Does it unleash your mind in a certain way? And that's why you tend to come up with better ideas or what is, what is your thought around that?

[00:27:45] Laura Vanderkam: [00:27:45] Yeah, well, we spend so much of our time in reactive mode and when we're taking in various inputs, whether it's reading email or headlines or surfing the web or anything like that, and because our brains are occupied with that. They're generally not occupied with coming up with ideas. Whereas when we put ourselves in situations where we are not doing that. So for instance, when you're on, in spinning class, or for many people, it could be other forms of exercise you're out walking or running for instance, or maybe you are driving somewhere and there's a lot of people say they get their best ideas while they're just like driving in the car somewhere because their mind is wandering, or in the shower, another place where you tend not to be checking email, you know, this, this is the related, thread between all these places... you are not checking email in these places. So you can, you can do this, you know, try to generate some time in your life where these inputs are not coming in like that, your brain, it might be just a little bit bored. It doesn't have to be a pleasant thing per se, but that is what triggers your brain to start entertaining itself.

[00:28:52] And as it is doing that, it will piece things together. It will remember things that used to do. It will  put itself into the future. A lot of what our brains are doing when it's on autopilot is what they call autobiographical scripting. You're sort of thinking of yourself in feature situations so if you try to direct that a little bit like, Oh, here is, you know, how I'm solving this problem in the future, in my career. Well, you'd probably come up with some interesting ideas and, you know, I guess the problem that we always have is there's no good way to capture it. If you're in this situation where you have controlled the inputs, that's one of the reasons I actually do bring my phone with me while I'm running, partly for safety, but partly to send myself a note, if I get a good idea. And it's not that I'm listening to music, I'm not checking stuff while I'm out on the run, but. I have it so I can write it down.

[00:29:41] Carol Fishman Cohen: [00:29:41] That is so interesting. What did you call that autobiographical, what? When your brain thinks about the future?

[00:29:47] Laura Vanderkam: [00:29:47] Autobiographical scripting, you're writing the story of your life because I blog, I always think of it as writing a blog post. Like my brain is writing blog posts while I'm, while I'm out running. Maybe, maybe not ones I'll ever write,  but that is what our brains are doing.

[00:30:04] Carol Fishman Cohen: [00:30:04] I've never heard of that before, and I'm going to check it out. So thank you for telling us about that. Do you know Laura, we're wrapping up now, we're coming to the end of our podcasts and I wish we could be talking longer, but we have to finish. So I want to ask you the question that we ask all of our podcast, guests, and that is what is your best piece of advice for our relauncher audience, even if it's something that we've already talked about today.

[00:30:31] Laura Vanderkam: [00:30:31] Well, I think the part we did talk about... how time will stretch to accommodate what we choose to put into it is just so important. And in my speeches, I tell a story that really illustrates this. I've had thousands of people track their time for me over the years. And this one particularly stood out because of how it made this point. It's a very busy lady, you know, worked in finance. She had kids, she goes out for a Wednesday night for something. She comes home to find that her water heater has broken and there's water all over her basement. So you know, anyone ever had that happen, know somebody who's had that happened to him, it's a pretty big mess. So she has to deal with it. She has to the deal with the immediate aftermath that night, the next day, the plumber is the day after that, the professional cleaning crew because their carpets pretty much has to be replaced. So, all this is being recorded on her time log that she's keeping for me.

[00:31:18] And it winds up taking seven hours of her week. And what we're talking about in the workshop where we were looking at this log and just you know, if we talked about this at the start of the week and be like, Hey, can you find seven hours to like set up those coffee dates with the people who keep asking you to mentor them at work?

[00:31:33] Or could you find seven hours to write the first chapter in that novel? You keep saying you want to write. Like I'm sure she would have said what all of us would have said, which is, no, I cannot find seven hours to do that because can't you see how busy I am...but when she had to find seven hours, because there was water all over her basement, she found seven hours.

[00:31:52] And so really, I mean, the point is that time is elastic and it will stretch to accommodate what we choose to put into it. And so the key to time management is really. Treating our priorities as the equivalent of that broken water heater. And so if, for instance, it's important for you to get back in the workforce, why don't you treat the time devoted to working on your resume, to meeting with people, to setting up those coffee dates, treat it as the equivalent of a broken water heater.

[00:32:19] You know you're going to get to it, whatever else is going on in your life. Or as you are, you know, in the workforce for the first time, starting a new job, you know, to just treat maybe even the career capital building parts of it, and really getting to know your colleagues as, as the water all over your basement, right? That can be the important thing this week. And you can choose to focus on it, even if there's there's chaos everywhere else. Like, cause there's always going to be chaos everywhere else. There's always going to be a ton of stuff going on. And you know, I still remember my, my mother-in-law went back to work well before I knew her, but when her children were like in high school and on her first day back at work, one of her daughters crashed her car.

[00:33:02] Of course, of course. But you know, she handled it like these things will happen, but she still made it work. and I love that story because it's like, yes, of course stuff is going to go wrong and naturally it's going to go wrong on the first day that you're not, you know, driving her to school or whatever, but you know, you, you still can make it work.

[00:33:24] And, you know, you have chosen to make this a priority in your life right now and just ignore the rest of the stuff that's going crazy,

[00:33:33] Carol Fishman Cohen: [00:33:33] Such excellent advice for our relaunch or audience, our listeners. So, thank you, Laura Vanderkam so much. Thanks for joining us today.

[00:33:41] Laura Vanderkam: [00:33:41] Thank you for having me.

[00:33:42] Carol Fishman Cohen: [00:33:42] Laura, before we close, can you tell us how people can find out more about your work?

[00:33:47]Laura Vanderkam: [00:33:47] So please come visit my website, which is Laura Vanderam.com, L A U R A V A N D E R K A M. I blog usually about four times per week. So there's lots of new content there and you can also learn about my various books, 168 hours as we were talking about, and also the new one Juliet school of possibilities, the time management fable and to learn about my podcast as well.

[00:34:11] I have one called best of both worlds, which is about the intersection of work and life. And then I have another short daily one that's called before breakfast. So you might build that into a short drive. In the morning, have something to give you a little shot in the arm for the day.

[00:34:24] Carol Fishman Cohen: [00:34:24] Excellentent. Thank you.

[00:34:26] And thank you. Thanks for listening to 3, 2, 1, iRelaunch! The podcast where we discuss strategies, advice, and success stories about returning to work after a career break. I'm Carol Fishman Cohen, the chair and co-founder of iRelaunch and your host for more information on iRelaunch go to www.irelaunch.com

[00:34:43] And if you liked this podcast, be sure to rate it on iTunes and your favorite podcast platform, and be sure to share this podcast with a friend on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media. Thanks for joining us.