168 Hours: Laura Vanderkam

Quotes

"We don't think about how we want to spend our time, and so we spend massive amounts of time on things—television, Web surfing, housework, errands—that give a slight amount of pleasure or feeling of accomplishment, but do little for our careers, our families, or our personal lives. We spend very little time on things that require more thought or initiative, like nurturing our kids, exercising, or engaging in the limited hours we do work in deliberate practice of our professional crafts. We try to squeeze these high-impact activities around the edges of things that are easy, or that seem inevitable merely because we always do them or because we think others expect us to. And consequently, we feel overworked and underrested, and tend to believe stories that confirm this view."

Paradigm shift

This book is one of the first ones I recommend. Taking responsibility for all of our time is more or a paradigm shift than it aught to be. Our single most finite resources are our time and attention (effectively the same thing), and Laura's book is a phenomenal wake-up call to realize how poorly we manage it.

One such stark realization was around her discussion about TV. The american adult spent an average of something like three hours on TV a day, which adds up to years of our lives just sitting consuming mildly mind numbing content. Nowadays with social media and the rampant attention economy, I'm certain we spend far more than that on trivialities. 168 hours is a fabulous start at reigning in the habits we've acquired as a society of wasting our time by default.