How to get more done in less time

Laura Vanderkam, author of “Tranquility by Tuesday,” joins TheStreet to share some tips on how you can get more done in less time.

Transcript

00:00Well, the first thing I would tell people who are worried about not having enough time in the day

00:04is to stop looking at your life in terms of days. We all say, you know, there's not enough hours in

00:09the day to get to everything I want to get to. And that may be true, but we don't tend to live

00:13our lives in days. We actually live our lives in weeks. And so often the key to finding space for

00:20things that matter to you is to stop trying to do it every single day and maybe look at the whole

00:25of the week and see where you can fit it in. So, you know, if you want to exercise, you don't

00:29actually have to exercise seven days a week. Maybe you could find three or four days a week to do it.

00:34Or maybe something like family meals is important to you. It's probably not happening at 6 p.m.

00:40Monday through Friday, someone setting a pot roast down in front of you, Norman Rockwell style,

00:45or anything like that. But maybe you could find three or four times to eat together in the course

00:49of the week. So first, look at the whole of the week, see where you can fit things in. But then

00:55I think we can also take a good look at how we are spending our time. One of the first things I

01:02always suggest people do when they are feeling like life is a little more crunched than they

01:06would like is to try tracking your time. Most of us do not really know where our hours go. We might

01:13have a general sense of our work days. I mean, particularly if people have to report their time

01:19somewhere. But the time after that can get incredibly vague and amorphous and we don't

01:24know what's going on. And you know, you wind up going to bed at some point, but what happened in

01:28those hours in between and weekends are an entirely different thing altogether. So try keeping track of

01:34your time. And I think you'll start to see that there are things you wish to spend more time on.

01:39And there's also probably things you want to spend less time on or that you could

01:43move around to try to make space for the things that matter to you.