168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think; Review and Takeaways

THE GIST

168 hours details how to spend your week meaningfully. It chronicles multiple examples and hacks to increase your time spent on what matters, and less on things that frankly don’t.

HIGHLIGHTS

168 hours discusses the following helpful tips

  • Logging your time for a week
  • Planning your week based on that time
  • Spending your work time intentionally
  • Spending your free time intentionally toward desires and goals (She suggests listing 100 possible dreams, breaking them down into actionable items, and trying them out)
  • Delegating tasks to free up time. This ranges from
    • Hiring a personal shopper, virtual assistant, childcare, etc
    • meal prepping, doing food prep and meal prep separately, using a crock pot to cook
  • Cutting out the TV (and a more modern adaptation would most likely throw social media in the mix) and other activities that don’t actually benefit you long or short term

TAKEAWAYS

I genuinely loved this time management book. It was very realistic, straightforward, and felt very grounded in reality.

THE NEURO SPICY TAKE

168 hours was built with the neurotypical and middle class audience in mind, but modifying it isn’t actually that far of a stretch. Start with your list of 100 dreams, and logging your time. Knowing how much actual time you spend doing everything, down to fighting executive function and depression, is an essential starting point. This can be seen as another form of spoon theory If it takes you three hours to get out of bed and get ready, then it takes three hours. I want to emphasize at this point that as you log your time, try to remain judgment free about how and where you spend your time. At the end of the day, it’s your time. Not mine, not society’s, only yours! Do with it what you want. While we all have the same twenty-four hours, we all don’t have the same spoons or even the same resources to tackle that time. That does shift how and where people emphasize their time. There’s nothing to be ashamed about how your time is currently utilized, but to change it, keeping an accurate record of where it’s going is the first step.

100 DREAMS

Keeping a list of what you want in life, big, small, or gigantic, is the next step. After keeping a time log, it’s important to ask what you want to do with your time. What do you really want out of life? Are you working towards it? Vanderkam poses a unique approach to this. Instead of spending all your time and energy deciding on a goal, make a list of things you want instead. Big dreams, and smaller, more attainable dreams. Just pick one and test it out. If it feels great, amazing! If it doesn’t, there are 99 more dreams to pick from.

DELEGATING YOUR TASKS

Delegating tasks at first looks easier said than done. A personal grocery shopper sounds like a luxury when the minimum wage is $7.25 in the US. Terry Pratchet put poverty best in his play: Men at Arms, the Play:

Men at Arms

“The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.

This was the Captain Samuel Vimes ‘Boots’ theory of socioeconomic unfairness.”

In short, it’s easier to put up the annual membership for a grocery delivery service, like shipt or instacart, when you have the money to do so. It’s much cheaper than paying for the service each time. Shipt charges $10 a pop for each delivery or $99 for the yearly unlimited delivery. $9 a week per store is exorbitant compared to $1.50 a week fee for what covers unlimited trips. When I order groceries, sometimes I shop from multiple stores to maximize savings, or have to buy supplies for my cat.

All this being said, I think that these options are affordable. Due to COVID, many grocery pickup options waived fees for orders of $35 or more. Buying all your shelf stable essentials even once a month or every other month, and delegating that to a personal shopper, saves you that time, and spoons. Being in a grocery store is, at least for me, emotionally taxing and exhausting. I always forget my list. I buy food I don’t need. I know of people that get overwhelmed by the awful lighting, noise, and overall setting. Stores aren’t disability friendly. They just aren’t. Instead of forcing yourself to “toughen up” and be dealing with the consequences for the next day or week, consider outsourcing it. Doing pickup or delivery is way less taxing, for the same price for pickup, and even saving you time. They ask for a minimum two hour window to collect your items, and can be scheduled a week in advance. That makes it easy to coordinate with your schedule and payday. I worked as a personal shopper during the pandemic. I know of people that showed up with a wagon, bike, or via taxi to collect their groceries. 

CUTTING OUT DISTRACTIONS

Vanderkam is also a big proponent of spending your time intentionally. Including relaxation time, taking your breaks on purpose, and not using them to do things that don’t completely relax  you. In short: use the spoons you’re saving to benefit you. If that means spending time on a hobby, put it toward a hobby. Doom scrolling online is not a hobby. Find a self care activity that’s cheap and enjoyable and truly relaxing.

In Conclusion

Vanderkam wrote a self help book for the modern era that actually works for most audiences. We love to see it!