Time Management: Trading Time Scarcity for Abundance with Laura Vanderkam

Time management and time abundance are at the center of this conversation with Laura Vanderkam, bestselling author and time-use researcher.

Laura Vanderkam has spent over a decade studying how people actually spend their time — tracking her own hours for 11 years and collecting data from thousands of others along the way. Her new book, Big Time: A Simple Path to Time Abundance, makes the case that time isn't the scarce resource we assume it is, and that shifting how you see it changes how you live it.

In this conversation, we cover:

• The lottery ticket reframe — why Laura argues we should treat the time we've been given as an unearned windfall to manage, not a resource we're constantly running out of.
• The "not actually more overworked" argument — what a century of time-use data really shows, and why the story you tell yourself about having no time matters more than the data itself.
• Complexity isn't the enemy, chaos is — Laura's circus metaphor for running a full, complicated life without it feeling like it's running you.
• Dream big, plan small — how reading War and Peace one short chapter a day (the same time it takes to brush your teeth) is the model for tackling anything that feels too big to start.
• Active patience — Laura opens up about a brutal year of chronic pain and the hardest lesson in the book: sometimes the answer isn't a better system, it's time itself doing its work.

This one's for anyone who's ever ended a Tuesday feeling like the whole evening just disappeared. Grab Big Time: A Simple Path to Time Abundance wherever books are sold, and find more of Laura's work — including her podcast, Before Breakfast — at lauravanderkam.com.

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