find more – An approach to time abundance argues Americans feel busier than they are—and suggests five habits, from tracking time in 30-minute blocks to building yearlong projects, to help people feel less trapped by the hours they have.
Americans often describe their days as packed to the breaking point. leaving little room for sleep. social life. or even basic fun.. But a closer look at how people actually spend time points in the opposite direction—one that time-management author Laura Vanderkam says can change how people experience their days.
In the U.S.. annual hours worked have dropped from around 2. 300 per worker in the 1920s to about 1. 750 today. and the average work week is now 34 hours. not 40.. Americans also have the same number of hours in a year—8,760.. After subtracting about 1,750 hours for work and around 2,700 hours for sleep, that still leaves over 4,300 waking, non-working hours.
Vanderkam’s argument is built around the idea that most people have more discretionary time than they realize.. “Everybody has some discretionary time, even if it’s not as much as they want,” she told.. “I can’t promise it’s time well spent. but I can promise it’s there.” Her book. Big Time: A Simple Path to Time Abundance. promotes abandoning a scarcity-based mindset in favor of something “more spacious.”
To back her case, Vanderkam has been tracking her own time in 30-minute chunks since 2015.. She also draws on efforts she has run for others: in January 2023. she had nearly 300 people take a time tracking challenge for one week.. Participants who completed it said they felt less likely to waste time on things that weren’t important to them. and more likely to feel they had enough time to do the things they wanted to do.
One repeated finding from those exercises: people worked fewer actual hours than they expected. which left them with more free time than they had assumed.. Vanderkam put it bluntly about what people tell themselves: “We are often telling ourselves these catastrophic stories about how we’re working around the clock. that we have no time for ourselves.” She added. “A time log will almost universally show that isn’t true.”
The pattern appears consistent across the steps she recommends.. Time tracking is described as revealing a gap between expectations and reality. and weekly planning is then positioned as a way to decide what comes next; in turn. later challenges—like managing evening hours—ask people to choose specific activities rather than letting time “happen to you.”
The first habit: track your time for a week.. Vanderkam says calendars can feel unmanageable partly because people measure life “down to the second” without really knowing what they’re doing with it.. The basic idea is that you can’t manage a resource you can’t see.. She uses a spreadsheet for her own tracking. checking in three or four times to review the day. and she notes that the point isn’t to shame anyone for failing to optimize every minute.. Still, accounting for all 168 hours in their week often left people feeling less trapped by time than before.
The second habit: run a weekly planning session.. If tracking shows where time went, planning decides where it should go next.. In Big Time. Vanderkam uses a metaphor of a circus. including an interview with an actual human cannonball. to argue that what feels chaotic can actually be organized.. The advice: look at both work and personal commitments over the coming week. and do it alongside family members when applicable.
Her planning framework is a priority list split into three categories—career. relationships. and the self—and she cautions against overstuffing it.. “A priority list that’s too long is a list without priorities.” The questions that follow are meant to keep priorities anchored: “What matters at work?. What matters to the people I love?. And what matters for me?”
That last category connects to what Vanderkam calls “managing for delight.” She cites a 2020 study finding that when people actively treated the weekend like a vacation—rather than a normal weekend—they increased their subsequent happiness. Planning ahead, she argues, made time feel more special.
The third habit: engineer a better workday.. Even when people work less than they think. Vanderkam says they can still improve how they use the time they do have.. She urges readers to tackle important work as early as possible. “when the day is less likely to get away from you. ” and to make a short priority list the night before while budgeting the day around goals.
At the same time. she points to a paradox people recognize in their own routines: many report being broadly satisfied with their jobs. yet they also rank work. hour to hour. as one of the least pleasant uses of time.. To make those hours feel less like dead time, Vanderkam offers three interventions.. Spend an hour more a week on work you like the most; spend 15 intentional minutes deepening a work friendship; and build in two short intentional breaks per day.. She distinguishes between breaks that happen to you and breaks you choose. framing chosen breaks as replacing “low-value break with higher-value leisure.” She also references a study that found microbreaks had small but significant positive effects on vigor and fatigue.
The fourth habit: take control of the hours after work.. Vanderkam argues that the most under-managed time isn’t usually the workday. but the hours after work and before bed—time many people “write off as unusable.” She illustrates the window many Americans have if they finish work around 6 pm and go to bed between 10 and 11 pm: four to five evening hours per weekday.. Even with children—Vanderkam and her husband have five—she says there is still time left over after dinner and domestic tasks.
But she says time management tends to fall apart without the structure of the workday. which leads many people to spend around two and a half hours in front of the TV.. Her alternative is to choose a specific activity.. Vanderkam ran an “Evening Hours Challenge” for nearly 200 people. asking participants to find time for one 30- or 60-minute activity beyond work. housework. or physical care.. She describes examples ranging from reading a crime novel to learning tennis to tending a garden.. Participants who finished the challenge reported feeling better about those evening hours.
Vanderkam describes the mechanism in plain terms: “You think about what you’re going to do. notice what you’re doing. and reflect on it after the fact.” She added. “And this can start to make evenings feel more like they actually happened in addition to being more enjoyable. as opposed to just this interstitial time.”
The fifth and most ambitious habit is a yearlong project.. Vanderkam suggests looking forward a year and making time for bigger goals that can be broken into micro-segments.. She says she has found time to read all of War and Peace. all of Shakespeare. and all of Jane Austen. and in 2024 listened to all 1. 080 known works of Bach through yearlong projects.
One example is War and Peace, which she describes as 361 short chapters that take maybe 10 minutes each to read.. Read one a day, she says, and you finish before Christmas.. Her suggested mechanism is what makes it work: ten minutes a day sustained for a year comes out to about 60 hours—roughly the equivalent of a week and a half off work.. She writes: “People overestimate what they can do in the short run. ” and “They underestimate what they can do in the long run.”
Her final point connects those exercises to a broader observation about meaning and time pressure.. A 2012 study she cites found that people who spent time helping at-risk students felt less time-pressed afterward than people who’d been given a windfall of free time.. Doing something meaningful, the argument says, made time feel more abundant, not less.
Vanderkam’s takeaway is straightforward: you don’t need more hours in the day. You just need to harness the ones you already have.
time management discretionary time work week weekly planning microbreaks evening hours challenge yearlong projects Laura Vanderkam Big Time