PDF Summary:168 Hours, by Laura Vanderkam

How can you fit a meaningful job, time with your loved ones, and leisure time into your schedule? Many of us would say that it’s impossible. But in 168 Hours, productivity expert Laura Vanderkam argues that you can have a full, satisfying life as long as you manage your time intentionally.

Our guide will explore what it means to manage your time intentionally, and how to discover where all your time is going. (Spoiler alert: You’re spending way more time watching TV than you think!) You’ll also learn why and how to be intentional at work, at home, and with your leisure time—so that you can fit all your favorite activities in without overscheduling yourself. Additionally, we’ll compare Vanderkam’s advice to other experts’ ideas on how to practically and intentionally manage your time.

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Schedule Your Perfect Position

Whether you’re starting a business or adjusting your current position, Vanderkam argues that you should schedule your time well using a three-step process:

1) Decide what you mean by ‘work.’ Vanderkam asserts that anything that involves your unique strengths and furthers your career is work; any other task, even if it’s required for your job, is not work because it’s not helping you.

To discover what constitutes work, first review your bucket list and pull out your professional goals. Then, map out what you’d need to do over the next year, five years, and 10 years to achieve those goals. Break down your yearly goals into monthly and weekly steps, and decide how much time each step requires—either by researching or by reviewing your own experience.

Once you have a clear idea of what work you should be doing, plot it in your schedule. Vanderkam suggests that you work at least 30 hours per week—even if you’re working part time. If you work fewer than 30 hours, you won’t be productive enough to reach your career goals; if you work too many hours, you’ll grow tired and become unproductive. So you want to hit a sweet spot where you’re working enough to be productive without overexerting yourself.

Other Opinions on Redefining Work And Deciding How Much Time to Spend on It

In Your Money or Your Life, Joe Dominguez and Vicki Robin also suggest that you redefine work. However, they define work as any activity you do that aligns with your purposes and dreams. So finding the right work doesn’t involve mapping out a 10-year career plan, as Vanderkam recommends; it involves finding your purpose and dreams. To identify your purpose, try identifying your pain: If you’ve navigated a tough experience, you may have expertise to help others in similar situations. To identify your dreams, imagine that you only have one year left to live, and consider what you’d do during that time.

Once you identify what work you should be doing, how much time should you spend on it? Some experts agree with Vanderkam’s suggestion that 30 hours of work is ideal because your focus declines beyond that point. However, this ignores the economic reality of many people, who are financially incapable of devoting merely 30 hours a week to their work, especially if it includes both paid work and unpaid activities that further their career: A July 2022 report says that, due to inflation, more Americans than ever were taking on two full-time jobs and working over 70 hours weekly to support themselves.

2) Focus on your work. When you’re scheduled to work, focus solely on activities that further your career. Your 30-hour minimum shouldn’t include any time that you spend distracted or doing tasks that help your company but not your career. And don’t allow yourself to get behind—make contingency plans for potential issues that might arise during your work time, like a back-up babysitter you can call if your nanny is sick. And if you aren’t able to work as planned, immediately readjust the rest of your schedule so that you still achieve your weekly work goal.

(Shortform note: Whatever hours you spend at work, maximize the chances that you’ll stay focused by tracking your attention, as Chris Bailey suggests in Hyperfocus. For a few days, set an alarm to go off every hour. Each time it goes off, note what you’re supposed to be doing and what you are doing instead. By doing so, you’ll discover what tends to distract you so that you can make contingency plans and readjust your schedule not just for emergencies but for regular time wasters. For example, if your five-minute Instagram breaks often stretch into 20 minutes, move your phone from your desk and take five-minute stretch breaks instead.)

3) Delete, diminish, or delegate any job tasks that don’t fit your definition of work. To delete tasks, remove yourself from projects that won’t further your career. To diminish tasks, devote most of your schedule to actual work and schedule small blocks of time for minor but necessary tasks such as returning phone calls. To delegate tasks, assign non-unique strength tasks to someone who can do them better than you can.

Other Perspectives on Reducing Your Job Tasks

What if the supposed distractions from your work are job tasks that don’t fit in Vanderkam’s definition of work? Unlike Vanderkam, Your Money or Your Life authors Dominguez and Robin don’t recommend that you delete, delegate, or diminish these tasks. Rather, they note that your work can be paid or unpaid, and suggest that you reframe your point of view: Even if your paid work isn’t necessarily aligned with your purposes and dreams, choosing to see it as the avenue that allows you to pursue the unpaid work you care about will help you find meaning in unsatisfying tasks.

Dominguez and Robin’s recommendations may be more realistic than Vanderkam’s depending on your sex, your culture, and your title. In Invisible Women, Caroline Criado Perez points out that, if you’re a woman, refusing administrative work (like taking notes at meetings) makes you seem unlikable to your male colleagues and thus may harm your career. In The Culture Map, Erin Meyer points out that some cultures adhere to schedules only broadly, so you may be unable to devote several hours a day to actual work because you have no idea whether a phone call will take five minutes or two hours. And if you’re in a junior position at a company, you may lack the authority to delegate a non-unique strength task to someone else.

Why and How to Be Intentional at Home

You’ve learned how to be intentional at work, but how can you be intentional at home? Vanderkam argues that the key is to focus on your unique strengths—just as you would in business. Specifically, she recommends that you focus on your children and your partnership, and that you limit how much time you spend on your housework.

In this section, you’ll first learn why and how to be more intentional with your loved ones. Then, you’ll learn why you should delegate most of your housework—and how to do it.

Be More Intentional With Your Loved Ones

Vanderkam recommends that you be more intentional with your loved ones. This is important not only because it will benefit your relationships with them, but also because your relationships with your children and partner are unique strengths. Only you can parent (not babysit) your own children in your unique way; for example, you might be able to foster your kids’ love of the outdoors because you also love the outdoors, whereas your partner can’t foster that passion in the same way because they prefer being inside. And only you can invest time in your partnership.

What Other Authors Say About Being Intentional At Home

Like Vanderkam, Indistractable author Nir Eyal also recommends that you intentionally schedule your personal time, stating that unless you schedule dedicated time to your relationships, you’ll likely prioritize more urgent activities and thus only spend your leftover time with your loved ones.

But instead of scheduling your time around your unique strengths, Eyal recommends building your schedule around your responsibilities (which include your loved ones) and your values—whatever’s important to you—within each responsibility. So when scheduling your time with your children and partner, Eyal recommends that you focus on doing activities that align with your values. For example, if you and your partner both value mindfulness, you could schedule a meditation date.

Maximize Time With Your Children

By being intentional with your kids, you’ll spend meaningful time with them instead of watching too much TV or getting bored with the routine. To be more intentional with your children, Vanderkam recommends that you maximize both the quantity and the quality of the time you spend with them. To maximize the quantity, adjust your work schedule so that you work in chunks (like from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. and 6 to 9 p.m.) instead of throughout the entire workday (from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.). By chunking your workday, you’ll work the same number of hours but gain free time to spend with your kids while they’re still awake.

To maximize the quality, Vanderkam suggests that you first ask your kids to create their own bucket lists. Select activities that you’ll also enjoy, and schedule time to do those activities together. For example, if you both enjoy basketball, go to a game together.

Improve the Time You Spend With Your Kids

When deciding what times to spend with your kids versus what times you work, consider not just when you’re available but your and your kids’ energy levels. The Power of When author Michael Breus explains that we all have different biological clocks, or chronotypes, so we’re biologically programmed to be productive at certain times. So even if you’re able to work from 6 to 9 p.m., you might have low energy and not get anything done. Moreover, your kids also have biological clocks that may not match yours—so they might be tired at 2 p.m. even though you’re ready to play. To find a time that matches both of your energy levels, discover your chronotype with this quiz.

Once you decide when to spend time with your kids, how should you spend time with them? Consider broadening your horizons and trying activities from your kids’ bucket list even if you’re uncertain whether you’ll enjoy them. You can also try doing projects with them and fully engaging with them instead of trying to rush through the activities. In The Happiness Project, Gretchen Rubin explains that doing projects with your kids has high potential for happiness because you go through all four stages of happiness: You happily anticipate the project, savor the joy of doing the project, express your happiness when you complete it, and recall the joy of doing it.

For example, if you build dollhouse furniture with your child instead of buying it, your child anticipates the excitement of building it, you both savor the joy of building it, your child expresses her happiness each time she plays with the completed furniture, and you both can recall the happy memories of working on the project together and playing with the dollhouse.

Spend Time With Your Partner

By being intentional with your partner, you’ll nurture your relationships and develop a happy partnership that can withstand life’s inevitable challenges. To do this, Vanderkam recommends three strategies. First, schedule regular dates; if you can’t afford childcare, plan a romantic evening at home. Second, each night before bed, spend 30 minutes talking. Third, connect with your partner briefly throughout the day by calling or texting.

(Shortform note: In How to Not Die Alone, Logan Ury also recommends that you intentionally schedule time with your partner to nurture your relationship and withstand challenges. But rather than regular romantic dates, Ury recommends scheduling a weekly meeting to communicate things that might otherwise have been brushed aside. Also, Ury suggests you write and regularly revise a relationship agreement that articulates your relationship values and how you’ll express them.)

Delegate Housework

To maximize your time at home with your loved ones, Vanderkam suggests that you delegate your housework. Housework probably isn't a unique strength, so it’s better to delegate it while you focus on parenting and your partnership.

Vanderkam notes that many people resist delegating housework because it costs too much. However, she argues that you should delegate your housework despite the expenses involved for two main reasons. First, housework only seems expensive because it’s usually considered free female labor. Second, paying others to do your housework is likely worth the investment because it buys you back time to focus on more important tasks. For example, if you make $50 per hour and spend six hours weekly cleaning, this costs you $300. If hiring a housekeeper costs $100 but eliminates your cleaning time, you’re saving $200.

Why We Devalue Housework—and How Much You Should Pay to Delegate It

In Invisible Women, Criado Perez explains that when measuring a country’s Gross Domestic Product, or GDP, economists exclude the value of female household labor because determining its worth and measuring it is too difficult. Because our society largely ignores the economic value of unpaid female labor, paying for housework seems expensive by comparison.

So how much should you pay to delegate housework? Basing this number on your hourly rate comes with several issues. Notably, it assumes that you can earn back any money you spend by spending your newly freed-up time working. But if you choose not to work during your newly freed-up time, you should base your ability to pay on how much you value your free time, not how much money you could make if you otherwise spent that time working. Clearer Thinking’s “time worth” tool asks several questions to help you make that valuation, so you can determine how much you’re willing to pay to gain more free time.

To delegate your housework, Vanderkam recommends that you first decide which chores to delegate. Review your time record and figure out how much time you spent on the following chores: laundry, food preparation (from shopping to cleanup), general cleaning, and maintenance tasks (which are infrequent but time-consuming, like calling your internet provider when the wifi’s out). Then, select one to delegate—whether it’s the chore that takes the most time or the one you dislike the most.

(Shortform note: If you choose to delegate your housework, there are several techniques you can use to spend less money and save even more time. When grocery shopping online, select the right provider: One critic of Instacart, an online grocery shopping service, complained that male shoppers rarely got her order right. If you hire a cleaning service, ask them to rotate what rooms they clean so that you’re not paying to have your whole house cleaned every visit. And if you struggle to find a good virtual assistant or personal concierge, consider TaskRabbit: It helps you find freelance laborers and has customer reviews, so you can feel safer inviting a stranger into your home.)

Your next step will depend on which chore you’ve decided to delegate:

1) If you dislike laundry: Hire a laundry service to wash and fold your clothes. Your dry cleaner may offer this service; otherwise, a quick internet search will reveal the options in your area. To save even more time, select one that both picks up and delivers your clothes.

2) If you dislike food preparation: Vanderkam recommends two strategies. First, shop for groceries online. You can shop whenever it’s convenient, save time commuting, and easily refill your grocery order instead of looking for the same carton of milk you buy every week. Second, when shopping online, purchase pre-made foods to simplify meal prep. For example, you might buy a carton of broth and frozen vegetables for a simple soup.

3) If you dislike general cleaning: Hire a cleaning service. However, even if you do so, you’ll likely still spend a significant amount of time on daily upkeep—such as clearing your kitchen counter. Minimize this time by focusing on clearing your surfaces. If your surfaces are clean, your house will feel clean—even if your drawers look like a hurricane hit them.

4) If you dislike maintenance tasks: Vanderkam recommends that you hire an assistant. To do so affordably, search for a virtual assistant online. Alternatively, look for a personal concierge in your area: These people (or companies) will perform your maintenance tasks for an hourly, monthly, or per-project fee.

Other Ways to Spend Less Time on Housework

What if you don’t want to delegate your housework to strangers? For example, many laundry services only dry your clothes in a dryer, but you may prefer to line dry your clothes, which helps protect the fabric long-term. You may have health concerns that preclude you from buying pre-made foods, which are often high in sugar, fat, and salt. Or, like many of Vanderkam’s critics, you may be unwilling to spend money to delegate housework you could do yourself simply because housework isn't your unique strength.

One option is to ask your family to do more. For example, you may task your kids with doing more. Select age-appropriate chores: Toddlers are capable of picking up toys they’ve strewn around, while older kids can help more with daily upkeep.

If you’re a heterosexually partnered woman, dividing chores more fairly with your partner may ease your burden, as you likely do twice as many chores as your partner. To divide chores fairly, first determine what chores you value—for example, you may not care that the living room is cluttered but want clean floors. Then, divide them up after agreeing on the specifics of how that chore is done so that you both feel like you’re taking on a relatively equal share. If you think cleaning floors requires mopping but he thinks a quick sweep will do, you’ll both be unhappy.

If you’re unable to lessen your own load, there are some tricks you can use to make certain chores take even less time. To save time on laundry, experts suggest that you purchase separate hampers for your whites and colors, and that you enlist your family’s help to sort the clothes accordingly instead of spending precious time sorting through a pile of laundry before you wash it. Additionally, consider hanging most of your clothes instead of folding them. To save time preparing food, purchase appliances that will help reduce your prep time; for example, a mandoline makes quick work of slicing onions.

Why and How to Be Intentional With Your Leisure

Now that you’ve learned how to be intentional at work and at home, you’ll learn how to be intentional with your leisure time. In this section, we’ll discuss why you should schedule your leisure time and how to do it.

Why You Should Be Intentional About Your Leisure Time

According to Vanderkam, if you want your leisure time to be meaningful, you should schedule it—otherwise, you’ll spend too much time watching TV.

Vanderkam asserts that most Americans think they have less leisure time than they do because they spend too much time watching TV. Most Americans claim to have just 16.5 hours of leisure time per week. However, data indicates they have 30 hours —they just don’t realize it because they spend 20 hours mindlessly watching television.

Vanderkam argues that this underestimation is a result of not being intentional about leisure time. TV watching isn’t necessarily a fulfilling leisure activity: One study found that it brings less joy than several other activities, such as reading or hiking. However, we choose it because it’s easy: It’s affordable, mindless, and easy to do whenever you have a few minutes.

Why Modern Americans Aren’t Intentional About Leisure

Other experts, like Digital Minimalism author Cal Newport, agree that unless you’re intentional about your leisure, you’ll fill your time with low-quality activities (like watching TV or scrolling through your phone messages). Modern data suggests that Americans have more free time than Vanderkam suggests, and that we’re spending an even greater percentage mindlessly. A 2019 survey suggests that Americans think they have less than four hours of leisure time per week. But data from the same year suggests that, in reality, Americans had nearly 35 hours of weekly leisure time.

So where does all this time go? While Americans continue to devote 21 hours a week to watching TV, a 2020 study found that they’ve added on even more screen time by spending four hours daily on their mobile devices. The study didn’t differentiate between business-related apps and leisure apps. However, several of the most popular apps used were leisure-related (like Discord)—so if we assume that just half of the time Americans spend on their mobile devices is leisure-related, that adds up to 33 hours a week they’re mindlessly wasting on low-quality leisure activities.

Why is this happening? Unlike Vanderkam, Newport attributes this tendency not just to a lack of planning but also to a societal shift: In recent decades, employers have demanded constant access to employees, so the line has blurred between people’s personal and professional lives. As a result, community bonds and traditions have fallen by the wayside. These lifestyle changes have created a void in satisfying and social leisure—a void we fill mindlessly with easy and affordable activities.

Therefore, if you want to do meaningful activities in your leisure time, you need to be intentional about your leisure. But how?

Make Time for Leisure Activities

Vanderkam gives the following tips for being intentional about your leisure time:

1) Choose your leisurely pursuits. Experiment with several items on your bucket list to find one to three activities you’d like to spend up to 10 hours on weekly. Make sure to include exercise! As Vanderkam notes, it’s both essential to your health and a unique strength because nobody else can do it for you.

2) Schedule these pursuits in your weekly calendar. Vanderkam recommends that you be flexible when scheduling these activities during the week. Consider waking up early or trading childcare duties with your spouse one night a week. And don’t forget to plan at least one fun weekend activity! Brainstorm what you’d like to do with your family or friends at the beginning of each week, then confirm those plans midweek.

3) Create lists of leisure activities that you can do in short bursts. Review your bucket list and separate the activities you can do in less than 10 minutes from those you can do in less than 30 minutes. Then, do one of those activities whenever you have small bits of free time. For example, you could doodle a picture instead of scrolling through your phone while waiting at the doctor’s office.

How Other Experts Recommend Being Intentional About Your Leisure

What are other ways to intentionally spend your leisure time? Instead of specifying that you experiment with several activities on a bucket list or focus on your unique strengths (like exercise), Newport recommends in Digital Minimalism first that you do something demanding, which will energize you more than a passive activity. Additionally, Newport suggests that you create something with your hands: Humans are driven to prove their self-worth, and when you create something, you end up with a finished product that you can point to as proof of your competence.

Newport also suggests that you create a seasonal leisure plan. Each season, create a specific leisure-related goal that you want to achieve. Then, break down the steps that you’ll need to take to get there. For example, if your seasonal goal is to play 12 Beatles songs on guitar, your steps would include learning and memorizing each song. Finally, schedule time to work on them at the beginning of the week. Newport doesn’t specify how long each leisure block should be, but you could break these activities down into 10- and 30-minute segments you can do during unexpected bursts of free time: For example, spend 10 minutes searching for sheet music on your phone instead of scrolling Instagram.

However, not everybody recommends that you schedule exactly when you’ll pursue leisure: One study found that if you schedule your leisure activity at an exact time (like 9 a.m.), you won’t enjoy the activity as much because it feels like work. Combat these negative effects by making only a rough schedule and being flexible about how you implement it. For example, try telling yourself that you’ll practice guitar on two early mornings instead of specifying exact dates, or planning a social weekend activity for Saturday afternoon instead of Saturday at 2 p.m. Of course, this doesn’t work in all cases: If you’re trading childcare duties with your spouse, you likely need to schedule exact times so that you both can ensure you’re off work.