Schedule Helps Saturday: Review of 168 Hours

                                    

The book 168 Hours, by Laura Vanderkam, is being mentioned everywhere. When I saw a copy in my local library, I knew people had been talking about it - although I didn't remember which people nor what they had said about it - so I picked it up and brought it home.

Here are the things I find positive about the book:

1. It is motivating, and it reminds people that each hour we choose what to do. Pretty much everyone who says, "I don't have the time for that," is being untruthful or inexact. They should be saying, "I don't choose to use my time to do that." This is Laura Vanderkam's most important point.
2. I am sure it works well for some people. In fact, I think I used a version of this process in college when I achieved two of my loftiest life goals.
3. I love the cover. Truly. For some reason, the spare design and vivid yellow are motivating in themselves.
4. Several of the details she mentions are helpful.
5. The book is well-written, and the research she includes is fascinating. A good read.
6. Core competencies (defined below).
7. Fitting the most important things into one's schedule first, and fitting everything else in later.
8. Her statement that no one will be able to do everything. Some things one wants to do will have to be dropped.

Here are the things I disagree with:

1. Optimizing time using a planning process like this one can backfire.
   
   I will have to use personal example here: When I tried mapping out my life by choosing what I would do in my 168 hours per week, it was exhilarating to see what I could fit in. One of Vanderkam's points is that you have to let go of some things. You just have to. Some things will not be possible. Absolutely. This is the strongest point of the book. But even so, I felt rushed during each half hour to get my planned item done so that I could move on to the next thing I had chosen to do. This was even after making a conscious sacrifice of things like a thorough cleaning regimen, reading fiction, most correspondence, knitting (a hobby I love), and some of the time I usually spend with my husband. To be fair, I admit that this could be a personal preference or tendency that I have to feel rushed and unsettled when trying to live life in half-hour or even one-hour increments. People who go out to work usually have a large chunk of time in which to do their work, so that segment of their lives does not have to feel rushed. As a stay-at-home mom who chooses to care for her young children herself, I can't do just one thing, to the exclusion of all others, for more than two hours at a time.
   
2. Outsourcing domestic chores. The author is all about outsourcing tasks that do not fall under one's core competencies - defined as the things one can do that no one else can do better and/or the things that one is good at and would be doing anyway even if it weren't a paid activity. Often, nurturing one's own family is a core competency. Writing is another potential core competency. The implication in this book is that domestic tasks are not core competencies.
   
   Vanderkam is zealous about the idea of outsourcing domestic chores. Each time a domestic chore is mentioned, it appears as a negative and unnecessary distraction, a horror of a waste of time that, sadly, could have been avoided if one would only hire someone else to do it.
   
   I disagree. After a few weeks living my life as planned through the 168 Hours planning process, I found that I was not satisfied with my life nor feeling fulfilled. I had to go back to a previous schedule I was using that was more relaxed and included lots of time for domestic chores. I feel that I am nurturing my family by doing the daily and weekly home routines, where Vanderkam would disagree with me. She makes the point that one can spend quality time with children doing things like museuming, walking, exploring, and reading in early mornings and evenings, with work in between and after. True. Those things can be done at those times. But I think that the home routine also nurtures children. She admits in the book that she and her husband were more comfortable living in a somewhat disorganized, cluttered home until they learned that their young child valued order and cleanliness. They learned this through his behavior at child care, where he picked up after other children.
   
   Healthy children grow into healthy adults in a variety of settings and ways of life. For me, and I believe for my family, the home setting needs to be an orderly, routinized place where someone can almost always be found at home tending to domestic needs. I have also found that, as a parent, I need to "waste" time just hanging around my children in order to get to the conversations that really matter. One can't schedule the deep questions and concerns that children bring up as they are digging in the dirt or helping bring groceries in from the car.

This book could be helpful for many people, so if time management and optimization books are your thing, 168 Hours is a well-written and interesting example of the genre. You can go to the 168 Hours website to download a free time management spreadsheet to see if the book is something you want to spend your time on.

In case anyone is wondering, I am not being compensated in any way for this review, unless you end up ordering the book through my Amazon link at the top of the post.