11 ways to make your time feel less rushed

make your – A conversation with author Laura Vanderkam lays out practical, research-informed ideas for easing the sense of a jam-packed week—by thinking in weeks, protecting “golden hours,” experimenting at work, and designing routines that lower decision fatigue.

By the time the workday ends. many people already feel behind—like the clock is dragging them forward whether they want to move or not. But in a recent conversation, author Laura Vanderkam argued that the rush is often a misread of time itself. The solution, she says, isn’t to stuff more into the day. It’s to savor what’s already there—and shape the week so it fits a life you actually want to watch.

Vanderkam’s books, including 168 Hours and Tranquility by Tuesday, have pushed readers away from productivity as a goal. “It’s never about stuffing more into our days,” she emphasizes. “It’s not about productivity. It’s about savoring and being creatively thoughtful about what we choose to do.” Her newest book. Big Time. released last month. makes the case for time abundance—arguing that there’s more time than many people think. and that there are surprising ways to enjoy it.

Her approach starts with a shift in how you view time, then moves into small, concrete habits that can change how a week feels.

Your life is a circus—so run it like one

When people say “my life is a circus,” they usually mean chaos. Vanderkam pushes back on the metaphor. A real circus, she says, is a super-organized performance: “Nobody gets shot out of a cannon at the wrong time.”

In her view, life works like a well-orchestrated three-ring circus—career, relationships, and self. You’re the ringmaster. Each ring can have a bigger or smaller act at any given moment. The key is management for delight, with backup plans when complexity grows—so complexity doesn’t tip into chaos.

Think in weeks, not days

A week contains 168 hours. Vanderkam argues that number matters more than 24.

Even if someone works 40 hours and sleeps 56, that still leaves 72 hours for other things. That isn’t “all free time,” but it’s more discretionary time than people often realize. For her. the time-crunch feeling typically comes from looking too narrowly at today; zoom out to the week and the room becomes clearer.

Track your time—simple, not obsessive

Vanderkam tracks time on a basic Excel spreadsheet. Her method uses half-hour blocks from Monday through Sunday. She checks in three times a day and writes down what she did since the last check-in.

There are no pie charts. The entries are plain language—“Email. ” “Cooking. ” “Reading. ” or “Driving”—whatever someone would casually say to a friend in the moment. At the end of each week. she reflects on highlights and what was most memorable. as well as what was frustrating. Then she archives the log and starts a new one.

Because she has done this long enough, she can pull up an old log from the same week in a prior year. She recently compared April with April 2020, creating a personal time capsule. (A related time capsule idea was also mentioned through Gretchen Rubin’s 5-Year One-Sentence Journal.)

Enjoy work more with 3 small experiments

Vanderkam tested three tactics with hundreds of people over three weeks. Each tactic improved work satisfaction to a statistically significant degree. Importantly. the strategies don’t require changing jobs and don’t depend on having a lot of autonomy—so they’re designed for different kinds of roles.

The experiments are specific:

Spend one more hour per week on the work you like best. Every job has tasks someone prefers. Even a short conversation with a manager can shift the balance toward more of the preferred work.

Spend 15 more minutes per week at work with someone you like. Friends at work count as people someone would choose to spend time with outside the office. Social time at work, Vanderkam says, matters more than many people realize.

Take two intentional breaks per day. Everyone takes breaks, but most happen without planning. When someone decides in advance how the break will be spent, it can be something rejuvenating rather than default scrolling or other screen time.

One participant told her: “I thought about leaving my job. I may still do that. But now I see ways to make work better whether I quit or not.”

Reclaim your golden hours

Vanderkam’s “golden hours” are the stretch of weekday time after work and before bed—roughly 6 p.m. to 11 p.m. for most people, about five hours. Her challenge is to set one golden hour intention each day: 30 minutes of something chosen and genuinely enjoyed, not work and not housework.

It could be reading, a puzzle, a walk, a board game, playing music, or even watching a movie with a loved one if that’s what’s chosen. The point is awareness and intention. Once you claim 30 minutes of chosen leisure, Vanderkam says, you’re less likely to tell yourself there’s “no free time.”

She also noted that Golden Hours is the title of her next book.

Try effortful fun before effortless fun

One of the most memorable tactics she learned earlier returns here: start leisure with effort. When a schedule allows a bit of downtime, she suggests beginning with at least a few minutes of something that takes effort before defaulting to screens.

Read three pages of a book before opening Instagram. Start drawing or playing an instrument before picking up a phone.

Two outcomes follow: you might get absorbed and keep going, or you might switch to Instagram anyway—but after enjoying a few minutes of something you actually care about first.

Vanderkam also described how she likes big. year-long projects. like listening to all of Bach or Beethoven or reading all of Jane Austen or Shakespeare—projects that can be sustained by doing just 10 pages a day or listening to one piece. Sprinkle effortful moments through the week and it can turn into real momentum over a year. Without it. the alternative becomes a year’s worth of scrolling or mindless diversion that may not add up to anything memorable.

Her insight is that effortful fun is especially enjoyable once you clear the initial hurdle of getting started, while starting with effortless fun can make it easy to get stuck and hard to switch into something that takes friction.

Go outside after dinner

Vanderkam’s family uses the acronym TOAD: Time Outside After Dinner. When daylight extends past dinner, go outside—walk, play, and be out there. It breaks the post-dinner drift toward screens.

Practice active patience

Some things take time, and Vanderkam treats her own writing and practice as proof. Her books reveal themselves slowly as she writes: she can begin with a detailed outline, but the nuances within each chapter emerge gradually.

A piece of music becomes part of you only after many hours of practice. She described years spent on favorite violin pieces, with new details showing up even after hundreds of hours—like dynamics or articulation marks she hadn’t paid much attention to.

After 11 years of tracking, she knows what fits in 168 hours. Her weekly priority lists are short and realistic. If something is on the list, she’ll do it; if not, it gets pushed to a future week.

That precision reduces guilt. She doesn’t assign herself things she won’t actually do, and she doesn’t feel bad about things she chose not to do that week. (A productivity-guilt alternative was also mentioned through Madeleine Dore’s I Didn’t Do The Thing Today: Letting Go of Productivity Guilt.)

Leave room to say yes

Many productivity tips focus on saying no. Vanderkam flips it: most new opportunities, relationships, and breakthroughs come from saying yes to something you’re not entirely sure about.

Clearing your schedule isn’t just about having less going on. It creates mental space to say yes when something unexpected appears. If someone is completely swamped, they might not even consider new possibilities.

Managing mental load, in her view, is also about staying open to what could come next—making room for serendipity. She calls these “little bets”: giving time to something new that might end up being terrific.

An approach is linked to Daniel Coyle’s Flourish, where he describes opening yellow doors. They’re yellow like a yellow traffic light because they aren’t a clear GO. You may instinctively resist them in favor of more obvious green doors. but they can lead to surprising places you wouldn’t otherwise go.

Remember: it’s probably not your last day

“Live every day as if it’s your last” can sound inspiring, Vanderkam says, but it’s not practical for making consistent decisions about how someone spends time.

If everything were about living only for the moment, saving money, learning a new language, or practicing cello would seem futile or foolish. Vanderkam prefers a different frame: “Someday we will die. But on all the other days, we will not.” She attributes it to a Snoopy cartoon.

The idea is to invest in what pays off later—build skills, start long projects, and let time do the heavy lifting.

She also pointed to the Social Security Administration’s actuarial tables as reassurance about life expectancy. For most ages. the odds of making it to next year are excellent. whether someone is in their forties like Vanderkam or 92. She added a specific detail: only when someone is 105 do odds of dying within a year start to exceed 50%. according to those tables.

Make fewer decisions with presets

For her family, routine meal schedules reduce daily negotiation: pasta on Mondays, fajitas on Tuesdays, breakfast for dinner on Thursdays (with bacon). Weekends are for trying something new.

Vanderkam said the same logic applies beyond food. Sticking to formulas frees up mental energy for decisions that matter more. She frames it as strategic: you’re not being boring; you’re being strategic about where decision-making effort goes.

She also referenced Jeff Bezos and other visionary leaders who talk about separating reversible small decisions from impactful ones that can’t be easily reversed. If someone doesn’t like one lunch, there’s another coming. But decisions like firing someone or leaving a partnership may not be easy to redo.

Under the surface, the message is less about managing time as a resource and more about reducing the feeling of being trapped by it. Vanderkam’s tools—weekly thinking, simple tracking, intentional leisure, and routines that protect mental space—are designed to make the week feel wider, not tighter.

Laura Vanderkam Big Time 168 Hours time management golden hours effortful fun workplace satisfaction time tracking Excel time log mental space decision fatigue