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A review by heykellyjensen
I Know How She Does It: How Successful Women Make the Most of Their Time by Laura Vanderkam
I do not fault Vanderkam at ALL for focusing on women with families who make $100,000+ a year. That is a super easy bench-marker socially for "successful" and the ideal "she has it all" woman. So her explaining all of that in chapter one made some of the obvious privilege things in this book work for me.
That said: holy hell, I LOVED this book. Talk about a productivity guide and look at time management that makes perfect sense, especially for someone who works non-traditional hours and who chooses energy management, rather than strict hour-by-hour management. Vanderkam had successful women fill out half-hour "mosaics" of how they use their time in a week; looking at the picture for 168 hours a week makes so much more sense than trying to micromanage 24 hours a day. I'm going to try this and see what it looks like.
Her results essentially show a lot of what bothers me in life: "busy" is a narrative we love, "tired" is a narrative we love, and both are total lies. Most people work fewer than 40 hours and most people sleep 7+ hours per night over the course of a week. There's no shame in any of that, but rather, it's enlightening knowing that people love to buy into false narratives of management/tips/tricks/hacks/what have yous.
I'm going to go back and read some of Vanderkam's other books. But she's definitely given me food for thought on how to pair up activities in order to get the most out of them (i.e., if there's a TED talk I want to watch, perhaps I can pair it with a 15 minute elliptical workout and do double duty without needing to "find time" -- it's there already, I just need to make it work for me).
That said: holy hell, I LOVED this book. Talk about a productivity guide and look at time management that makes perfect sense, especially for someone who works non-traditional hours and who chooses energy management, rather than strict hour-by-hour management. Vanderkam had successful women fill out half-hour "mosaics" of how they use their time in a week; looking at the picture for 168 hours a week makes so much more sense than trying to micromanage 24 hours a day. I'm going to try this and see what it looks like.
Her results essentially show a lot of what bothers me in life: "busy" is a narrative we love, "tired" is a narrative we love, and both are total lies. Most people work fewer than 40 hours and most people sleep 7+ hours per night over the course of a week. There's no shame in any of that, but rather, it's enlightening knowing that people love to buy into false narratives of management/tips/tricks/hacks/what have yous.
I'm going to go back and read some of Vanderkam's other books. But she's definitely given me food for thought on how to pair up activities in order to get the most out of them (i.e., if there's a TED talk I want to watch, perhaps I can pair it with a 15 minute elliptical workout and do double duty without needing to "find time" -- it's there already, I just need to make it work for me).