Time Management: Trading Time Scarcity for Abundance with Laura Vanderkam

Time management and time abundance are at the center of this conversation with Laura Vanderkam , bestselling author and time-use researcher. Laura Vanderkam has spent over a decade studying how people actually spend their time — tracking her own hours for 11 years and collecting data from thousands of others along the way. Her new book, Big Time: A Simple Path to Time Abundance , makes the case that time isn't the scarce resource we assume it is, and that shifting how you see it changes how you live it. In this conversation, we cover: The lottery ticket reframe — why Laura argues we should treat the time we've been given as an unearned windfall to manage, not a resource we're constantly running out of. The "not actually more overworked" argument — what a century of time-use data really shows, and why the story you tell yourself about having no time matters more than the data itself. Complexity isn't the enemy, chaos is — Laura's circus metaphor for running a full, complicated life without it feeling like it's running you. Dream big, plan small — how reading War and Peace one short chapter a day (the same time it takes to brush your teeth) is the model for tackling anything that feels too big to start. Active patience — Laura opens up about a brutal year of chronic pain and the hardest lesson in the book: sometimes the answer isn't a better system, it's time itself doing its work. This one's for anyone who's ever ended a Tuesday feeling like the whole evening just disappeared. Grab Big Time: A Simple Path to Time Abundance wherever books are sold, and find more of Laura's work — including her podcast, Before Breakfast — at lauravanderkam.com . Connect with Erik: LinkedIn Threads Facebook Bluesky This Podcast is Powered By: Brain.fm - 20% off your first month Descript Descript 101 Castmagic Ecamm Podpage Rodecaster Pro Grab Shortcasts from Beyond The To-Do List by Blinkist: http://beyondthetodolist.com/blinkist See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info .