I’m really enjoying the writing of time-management writer Laura Vanderkam.  More important, I’m using her ideas to change my life.

I discovered Laura on TED. Last week I read her 2018 book, “Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy while Getting More Done.”

Laura’s first order of business: In order to know how to get more out of life, you need to track your time to learn how you are actually spending your hours. Creating this inventory is critically important because humans are notoriously error-plagued when they attempt to intuitively account for how they use their time. We fool ourselves relentlessly. Laura points to studies showing that we claim to be working far more hours than we actually work. For example, people claiming to work 75 hours per week typically worked only 50 hours per week.

I’ve been tracking my time for more than a week using a free spreadsheet, Google Sheets. My rows consist of 20 categories (sleeping,attorney work, exercising, entertainment, altruism, eating, reading, wasting time on social media, etc). My columns are the days of the week. Fitbit keeps exercise and sleep counts accurate and an insurance company app tells me house much time I’m actually driving. I estimate the other activities, inputting the data several times per day. It only takes a few minutes per day once you set up your spreadsheet.

Using pie charts and other graphs, I was quite surprised at many things. I have been frittering away time doing things that are most definitely not my priorities. I was surprised to see I was driving a car almost as much as I exercised. It didn’t seem like this, but the numbers don’t lie.

A few days ago, Laura started a new podcast that she calls “Before Breakfast.” Each day she will offer a tip on how to reclaim the hours of your life in order to spend your time on the things you declare to be important. For the first few episodes, she is introducing herself and giving an overview of her work. It’s a good time to jump in.

The time you have in your life is a zero sum game. If you use up your hours in the rabbit hole of social media, you won’t get to use those hours for other things that you yourself declare to be more worthwhile, in my case, things such as giving back to my community, quality writing, composing music, and spending time with the people I care about. Tracking my own hours drives this all home in a stark incontrovertible way. I don’t know that I’m ever going to stop tracking my time. I should have been doing this decades ago.

There’s a saying:

Q: What’s the best time to plant a tree?
A: Twenty Years ago.
Q: What’s the next best time to plant a tree?
A: Today.