TED笔记31：如何掌控你的自由时间

Laura Vanderkam: How to gain control of your free time

Vanderkam uses an analogy to form her core idea, that is you always have time for your priorities.

The story is about a super occupied businesswoman. One night she found her water heater broken, which caused a sopping mess down the basement. All the fixing job cost her 7 hours. It seems inconceivable to squeeze these extra hours when you first think about it, but since the problem is a priority, it has to be fixed no matter how much time is spent.

So it's not a problem about how you do your time management. It's that you treat what you are about to do as a priority. This change of mindset can be really tricky. I put aside a lot of things, annoying parts in the work, a reading plan, growth projects... All seem way much more important than a broken water heater, but I'm pretty sure I will act quickly if faced with this soaking trouble.

One may start with this, do not use "I don't have time" as an excuse. If you don't have time for something, it's you don't treat it as a priority.

Vanderkam is smart to transform the question of "how to do it" into that of "why to do it", which makes her reasoning seem appealing, but not much use in practice. Nevertheless, it can be a different thinking.

We don't build our lives we want by saving time. We build our lives we want, and time saves itself.

Time is highly elastic. Time will stretch to commodate what we choose to put in it.

I don't have time = it''s not a priority

shave bits of time off everyday activities

this idea has it completely backfired 这个理论彻底落后

dust my blinds 擦百叶窗

come December

scintillating

main job 正职 side hustle 副业

putter around the house 在屋子里闲逛