Laura Vanderkam is the author of seven time-management books, including Norton’s Big Time: A Simple Path to Time Abundance, as well as the host of two podcasts.

The start of the school year can always make time feel crunched. You may be juggling new courses and new expectations alongside deadlines and a lingering sense that there’s always more you could be doing. In your home life, perhaps family and community activities are starting back up. 

Yet even in busy stretches, I argue in my new book, Big Time: A Simple Path to Time Abundance, it’s possible to feel like a ringmaster, calmly in charge of the circus of your life. Here are three simple strategies to make time feel more abundant .
 
1. Track your time. If you want to spend your time better, it helps to know where the time is going now. After all, if you don’t know where the time is going now, how do you know if you’re changing the right thing? Maybe something you thought was a problem really isn’t. Maybe something you haven’t considered is taking more time than you thought. The start of the academic year can be a challenging time of trying to figure out how much time you should spend on teaching (from lesson prep and lectures to grading and office hours), on research projects, on service, and on everything else, but in the absence of data, it’s hard to make strategic choices. 
 
Tracking time may not be particularly fun, but I promise it isn’t onerous. I use a weekly spreadsheet with the days of the week across the top and half-hour blocks down the left-hand side (scroll down to step 2 on this page—https://lauravanderkam.com/manage-your-time/ —to download your own copy). I check in 3–4 times a day and write down what I’ve done since the last check-in. Broad brushstrokes are fine (“class prep,” “meet with students,” “drive,” “kids, etc.,” “sleep”). After a week, you can add up the major categories and see what’s working and what you’d like to change. Many people are pleasantly surprised with their logs. When I had 279 people track their time for a week for Big Time, agreement with the statement “Generally I have enough time for the things I want to do” rose 25 percent in a week. We often tell ourselves catastrophic stories about our time (“I work around the clock” or “I’m always in meetings” or “I have no time for myself”) that probably aren’t supported by the data. You probably have some free time. It may not be as much as you want, but it’s seldom zero. 
 
2. Put something in all three categories. Every busy person needs a designated weekly planning time. I like to plan my upcoming Monday to Sunday weeks on Fridays. Going into the weekend with a plan alleviates the Sunday scaries—when you know there’s a pile of work waiting for you Monday, but you don’t know what it is or how you’ll deal with it. On Fridays, look at the upcoming week, see what’s on your plate, and then make yourself a short priority list with three categories: career, relationships, self. What is most important to you professionally over the next week? What would make this a great week for your relationships with family and friends? And finally, what would make this week feel fulfilling for you personally? 
 
The upside of making a three-category list is that it’s pretty hard to make a three-category list and then leave one of the categories blank. Our brains don’t work that way. We think we need to put at least something in all three categories. My guess is that you know the big to-dos at work, but you may not be accustomed to thinking about relationship or self priorities. Making a three-category list will nudge you to put something in all three categories—and that, right there, can help you have a more balanced life. 
 
3. Think 8,760 hours, not 24. There are 24 hours in a day. There are 168 hours in a week, and 8,760 hours in a year. People often tell me “there are not enough hours in the day to get to everything I want to do,” and it’s true. In 24 hours you will not prepare and deliver great classes, meet with all the students who want to see you, do your committee work, devote hours to research and writing, exercise, go on a date with your spouse, spend time with other family members, enjoy leisurely chats with friends, and carve a ship in a bottle, or whatever your hobby happens to be. But we don’t need to do all those things in 24 hours because we don’t live our lives in days. Time is much bigger than that. My guess is most of those things could fit in a week. With 168 hours in a week, if you work 50, and sleep 8 hours a night (56 per week), you’ve still got 62 hours for other things. And when you start to zoom out and look at time from an even bigger perspective, even more becomes possible. Life might feel crunched during the weeks of the spring and fall semesters. But look at the whole year and perhaps the summer months might be more open for longer stretches of writing and research. Smart time management means looking at the whole picture. 
 
Big Time: A Simple Path to Time Abundance is full of practical tips for making time for what matters. As Cal Newport, author of Deep Work and a professor at Georgetown University, said about the book, “You can either see your schedule as a source of frustration or an opportunity to revel in the wonders of life.” Big Time “makes a compelling case that the second answer is not only possible, but the best way to approach time management.”  

Please click here to learn more about the book, or reach out to me at laura@LauraVanderkam.com to learn more.  

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