EP557: Laura Vanderkam - Time Abundance Is A Story: Zooming Out To Find Space During Busy Seasons

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Tax deadlines, month-end, and a dozen clients who all need something at once make "I don't have enough time" feel like plain fact. Laura Vanderkam, author of Big Time: A Simple Path to Time Abundance, returns to the show to argue that time scarcity is a story, and that a different story is more useful even when you're slammed. Her ideas are practical and easy to test: zoom out, plan like a ringmaster, protect your own priorities first, and track your time the way you'd track any other resource.

Chapters

• [00:00] Meet the ringmaster: episode preview
• [01:30] Laura's fascination with how we spend time
• [04:00] Why time scarcity is just a story
• [09:00] Zooming out to the week and year
• [14:00] The ringmaster mindset: complexity, not chaos
• [19:00] Pay yourself first with your time
• [25:00] Why cramming tasks backfires
• [29:00] Small steps, War and Peace, little bets
• [34:00] What time tracking reveals
• [41:00] Resources and a gift idea for clients

Zoom out from the day to the week and the year

When the day you're in is packed, Laura suggests looking at a bigger window. "We don't only have one day. Most of us live our lives in kind of cycles of weeks." Zooming out shows you that things don't have to happen daily or at the same time every day. That might mean a 45-minute gym session on Tuesday morning and a 20-minute walk on Thursday, even in a crunch week. Zoom out to the full 8,760 hours of a year and a brutal deadline season looks like one season among several. She uses her own choir schedule as an example: one very full week, balanced by a summer with no rehearsals at all.

Be the ringmaster, not the one buried in chaos

Laura makes the case that a real circus is "the most orderly thing you will ever see." Complexity and chaos are not the same, and you can have a lot going on without it being chaotic. She suggests managing three rings (career, relationships, and self), doing a weekly planning session to look at what's running in each, and thinking ahead about what might go wrong so there's a net under every act. Michael adds that a ringmaster is enjoying the show, and Laura agrees: "A good circus is managed for delight." The point is to put fun in your schedule too.

Pay yourself first with your time

Bookkeepers often build the schedule around client requests and squeeze their own priorities into whatever is left. Laura compares this to saving money: if you save what's left at month-end, there usually isn't anything. She suggests blocking an hour or so at the start of your workday for your own goals before you open client email. If mornings don't work, try keeping Tuesdays and Thursdays protected. She also draws a line between being responsive and being constantly available. "There is such a huge space between being instantly responsive and being one of those weird people who won't get back to people for a week." Michael adds that setting clear expectations with clients takes pressure off you.

Stop cramming tasks into every spare minute

One thing that feeds the feeling of scarcity is trying to do a productive little task in every open moment. Laura recommends keeping a running list of small tasks and plowing through them in a single 30-minute block at the end of the day. That frees up the gaps between meetings for a real break, like a short walk outside, which leaves you more rejuvenated than booking a flight or answering a personal email would. Michael notes how rarely we let ourselves be bored, quiet, or still.

Small steps and little bets on big goals

Whether you want to hire, build a new system, or add advisory services, Laura says any big project is a series of small steps. Break it down until there's no resistance, put the steps in your calendar, and keep going. Her own example is reading War and Peace one chapter a day for 361 days. She pairs this with "little bets": try something small, see how it goes, and keep or drop it. For example, send four feelers a week to grow your network. Some won't go anywhere, but over a year you may end up with ten solid new connections.

Track your time like any other resource

Laura tracks her own time on a weekly spreadsheet with half-hour blocks and recommends every busy person try it for a week. Logs usually disprove the catastrophic stories we tell ourselves. If you worked 55 hours and slept 55 hours, there are still 58 waking hours left in the week. She describes a client whose log showed a clear hour and a quarter at night that vanished into wandering and tiredness because she hadn't picked anything she wanted to do. Michael points out that bookkeepers will recognize it as "mystery spend" for time.

Links mentioned

• Big Time: A Simple Path to Time Abundance by Laura Vanderkam
• Laura's website: lauravanderkam.com
• Free time trackers (Google Sheets, Excel, and more): lauravanderkam.com/manage-your-time
• Before Breakfast, Laura's short daily podcast on productivity and mindfulness
• Signed stickers for client gifts (US and Canada): email laura@lauravanderkam.com
• Previous episodes with Laura on The Successful Bookkeeper

About the guest

Laura Vanderkam is an author and speaker who studies how people use their time. She is the author of Big Time: A Simple Path to Time Abundance and several other books on time management. She hosts the daily podcast Before Breakfast, and she has tracked her own time for over a decade and worked with hundreds of people on theirs.

About the host

Michael Palmer

Michael Palmer is the host of The Successful Bookkeeper podcast — almost 600 episodes and counting — and founder of The Successful Bookkeeper Global. He's spent over 15 years in the bookkeeping industry, working one-on-one with thousands of bookkeepers across the globe. He started this work because of his father — a brilliant electrical contractor who worked twice as hard as he should have had to, because nobody on the financial side was in his corner. That gap is what The Successful Bookkeeper exists to close. His view: bookkeepers are the most undervalued force in small business — and every bookkeeper who builds a real business changes two families: theirs, and their clients'.