That's a brief summary of the main idea of US expert on time management, Laura Vanderkam, presented at the TEDWomen 2016 conference.
Her TED talk, titled How to gain control of your time, gives advice on how to make better use of our free time so that we can live the way we want.
Where there's a will, there's a way
When preparing one of her books, Laura Vanderkam mapped 1,001 days in the life of very busy women. The women, who had demanding jobs or their own businesses, looked after their children and parents and were active in their communities, recorded their activities in order to analyse how they could manage their time.
One of these women returned home in the evening and found a broken boiler that flooded the entire ground floor. Looking for a plumber and cleaning the house took her a total of seven hours. If you asked her before if she had seven free hours, she would only shake her head in disbelief, but when she had to find seven hours, she found them.
"And what this shows us is that time is highly elastic. We can't make more time, but time will stretch to accommodate what we choose to put into it. The key to time management is treating our priorities as the equivalent of that broken water heater," explains Laura Vanderkam.
Determine your priorities
Let's admit that the reason we don't do many things isn't a lack of time. It's simply because we don't want to. Time is our own choice, both in our professional and personal lives.
Try to think about your priorities for the next year, for example. Set two or three crucial goals in three categories - career, relationships, yourself. Then divide them into achievable steps. Do the same when planning a week.
"In 168 hours a week, I think we can find time for what matters to you. If you want to spend more time with your kids, you want to study more for a test you're taking, you want to exercise for three hours and volunteer for two, you can. And that's even if you're working way more than full-time hours," concludes Laura Vanderkam.
Laura Vanderkam's whole video is available here (in English with subtitles in other languages). There's also a transcript of the talk in English and other languages available here.
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