If there’s one thing Americans can agree on — beyond the fact we hate data centers and love Dolly Parton — it’s that we’re busier than ever, and it’s all too much. We don’t have time to socialize, we don’t have time to sleep, and we don’t have time for fun. We’re a uniquely overworked and overbooked people who now get more joy out of canceling plans than we do following through with them. 

Except that narrative is not quite true. For one thing, Americans actually work far fewer hours than our great-grandparents did, with annual hours worked in the US falling from around 2,300 per worker in the 1920s to about 1,750 today; the average American work week is now 34 hours, not 40. If we were truly so ridiculously busy, we probably wouldn’t be averaging more than two and a half hours a day in front of the TV. 

We all get the same amount of time in a year: 8,760 hours. Subtract about 1,750 hours for work and around 2,700 hours for sleep, and that still leaves over 4,300 waking, non-working hours. And while some of us have responsibilities that occupy much of our “free” time — and some of us decidedly don’t — almost all of us have more free time than we may realize. 

That’s the argument of Laura Vanderkam, a time management expert and the author of the new book Big Time: A Simple Path to Time Abundance. She aims to show readers how to abandon our scarcity-based mindset around time in favor of something much more spacious. “Everybody has some discretionary time, even if it’s not as much as they want,” she told me. “I can’t promise it’s time well spent, but I can promise it’s there.”

Vanderkam knows because she has the receipts. She’s been tracking her own time in 30-minute chunks since 2015, and has helped countless people learn to get more out of the time they have by better understanding how they’re using it. (Having known her since college, I can also say that Vanderkam has always been preternaturally good at time management — she managed to write two separate graduation theses her senior year, when most of us slackers got by with one.)

Here are five ways you can start making your time work for you.

Track your time for a week

This is the big one. One of the reasons our calendars can feel so unmanageable is that while we can measure our lives down to the second, we’re rarely aware of what we’re doing with it. You can’t manage a resource that you can’t see.

In January 2023, Vanderkam had nearly 300 people take a time tracking challenge for one week. Participants who completed the challenge reported that they felt they were less likely to waste time on things that weren’t important to them, and that they were more likely to feel they had enough time to do the things they wanted to do. 

One repeated finding was that people worked fewer actual hours than they expected, which in turn meant they actually had more free time than they realized. “We are often telling ourselves these catastrophic stories about how we’re working around the clock, that we have no time for ourselves,” Vanderkam said. “A time log will almost universally show that isn’t true.”

Vanderkam herself uses a basic spreadsheet to track her time, checking in three or four times to review the day. (You can download trackers from her website.) The point here isn’t to make you feel ashamed about failing to optimize every single minute. But accounting for all 168 hours in their week often made people feel less trapped by time, not more.

Run a weekly planning session

If tracking tells you where time went, planning decides where it should go next.

In Big Time, Vanderkam uses the metaphor of a circus, complete with an interview with an actual human cannonball. Her point is that while our lives can feel like a circus, “a circus isn’t chaotic at all. It’s very well organized.”

So be like a good ringmaster and corral your circus, starting with weekly planning sessions. Look at both work and personal commitments over the coming week, and do it in tandem with family members if you have them. Make a priority list in three categories — career, relationships, and the self — and don’t overstuff it. A priority list that’s too long is a list without priorities. Rather, ask yourself: What matters at work? What matters to the people I love? And what matters for me? 

Don’t neglect that last bit, part of what Vanderkam calls “managing for delight.” She cites a 2020 study that found that when people actively treated the weekend like a vacation, rather than just as a normal weekend, they increased their subsequent happiness. Planning ahead actually made the time feel more special.     

Engineer a better workday

Even if we’re working less than we think, we can still manage the time we do spend working better. Vanderkam urges readers to do important work as early as they can, “when the day is less likely to get away from you.” Make a short priority list the day before, and try to budget your day around those goals.

But she’s also interested in a strange paradox about how we feel toward work and time. People simultaneously report being broadly satisfied with their jobs, yet also rank work, hour to hour, as one of the least pleasant ways to spend time. So how can those hours be a little less unpleasant?

Vanderkam suggests three small 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. There is a difference between a break that happens to you and a break you choose. By choosing your own time off, you’re replacing a “low-value break with higher-value leisure.” And that can pay off — one study found that microbreaks had small but significant positive effects on vigor and fatigue.

This isn’t about squeezing ever more output out of our limited hours at work. It’s trying to make the hours themselves feel less like dead time. 

Claim your golden hours

Productivity literature may be written for 9 to 5, but the most under-managed time isn’t the workday, but the hours after work and before bed that “a lot of us write off as unusable,” Vanderkam said.

If you finish your work by around 6 pm and go to bed between 10 and 11 pm like many Americans, that leaves four to five evening hours per weekday. Even if you’ve got kids — like the five children Vanderkam and her husband have — and need to get dinner and other domestic tasks done, there’s still time left over. But our time management tends to fall apart without the enforced schedule of the workday, which leads many of us to spend those two and a half hours in front of the TV.

It doesn’t have to be that way, though. Vanderkam had nearly 200 people run through her “Evening Hours Challenge,” which called on participants to look at their schedule and find time for one 30- or 60-minute activity beyond work, housework, or physical care. It could be reading a crime novel, learning tennis, tending your garden. The point is you’re actively choosing it. Participants who finished the challenge reported feeling better about those evening hours.

“You think about what you’re going to do, notice what you’re doing, and reflect on it after the fact,” she said. “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.”

Dream big, plan small

The most ambitious tip in Big Time urges readers to think longer-term, a year into the future. Vanderkam herself 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 what she calls “yearlong projects.” Each one sounds intimidating until you break it down into micro-segments. War and Peace, for instance, is 361 short chapters, each of which takes maybe 10 minutes to read. Read one a day, and you finish before Christmas.

That’s her suggested mechanism. Ten minutes a day, sustained for a year, comes out to about 60 hours — the equivalent of a week and a half off work. “People overestimate what they can do in the short run,” Vanderkam writes. “They underestimate what they can do in the long run.”

And that’s the paradox. A 2012 study 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 made time feel more abundant, not less. Take on a big enough project that you can break into small enough pieces, and those 8,760 hours start to feel bigger too.

You don’t need more hours in the day. You just need to harness the ones you already have. 

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