Stressed? Overscheduled? There’s More Time in the Day Than You Think

Testing the productivity strategies in Laura Vanderkam’s Big Time, and learning to live a life of abundance.

Saying no is a big business.

Every year, a half-dozen wordily titled books come out on the concept. Recent examples include The Power of a Positive No; Stop People Pleasing: How to Start Saying No, Set Healthy Boundaries, and Express Yourself; and The Art of Saying No: How to Stand Your Ground, Reclaim Your Time and Energy, and Refuse to Be Taken for Granted (Without Feeling Guilty!).

Last year’s Defy: The Power of No in a World That Demands Yes by Sunita Sah was a USA Today bestseller. And if you asked me to tabulate how many TED Talks there have been about refusing to do something, I’d get some practice in the art myself.

And yet, we don’t seem to get the hang of it. Part of the problem is human nature; as a species we are programmed to say yes because collaboration is necessary for our survival. But saying no — to requests, to distractions, to obligations, to opportunities — has also gotten harder. Technology has grown incredibly efficient at serving up our time and energy to others. Our phones make it hard to deny the expectation that with emails, texts and Slack, we are always on. Even our true downtime isn’t immune. Endless scrolls keep us glued to screens, notifications on social media leave us with FOMO, and videos and podcasts fill the darkest tunnels of the subway commute with ads for talk therapy. The purpose of much of the “saying no” economy is to reclaim our time — for our goals, for our families, for the restorative act of doing nothing.

Even the most powerful among us wrestle with the clock. At the DealBook Summit in New York in December, several chief executives talked passionately about the importance of saying no to meetings, unnecessary commitments and other time sucks — otherwise it’s a struggle to make wise decisions. “Y’all are going to think I’m crazy,” said Southwest Airlines’ Bob Jordan. “In 2026, I’m trying to hold the afternoons of Wednesday to Friday completely open.”

I cover luxury timepieces, so I think about time a lot. On the dial of a mechanical watch, time can pass as quickly as a second or as slowly as a phase of the moon — a gloriously expansive view. Mechanical watches, which have existed for centuries, demand nothing from you; instead they suggest that time is, quite literally, on your side. Contrast that with the Apple Watch, with its eternal connectivity and instant notifications. Brought out just over a decade ago, it has outsold every other watch in history.

We are in a battle for our own time, and “no,” it seems, is our mightiest weapon. But how can we win when the odds seem so stacked against us? Enter Big Time: A Simple Path to Time Abundance (W.W. Norton & Co.), the latest of seven books by time-management expert Laura Vanderkam. It’s a slim guide with a tantalizingly simple premise: We don’t have to fight to win back time; we already have it. We just need to find it. “Even busy people do have some space,” Vanderkam writes. “There is time to relax, to savor, to breathe. … For the vast majority of people, figuring out where the time really goes will reveal that there is already some margin available if you choose to see it.”

If I’m being honest, I found that sentiment patronizing. Silly Dorothy, the secret to getting back to Kansas has been on your feet the whole time! Between work, family, volunteering, having a social life and, yes, looking at my phone too much, I know where my time goes — even if I don’t always manage it well.

But Vanderkam’s guidance is alluringly basic: Start keeping detailed track of how you use your hours. There are 8,760 of them in a year, and when you think of your “time space” (how much room you have in your calendar) that way, it feels like you actually have a lot of it. I’m used to thinking about 24 hours in a day, 9 of which I’m at work and 6 of which I’m sleeping (if I’m lucky). But with thousands and thousands of hours in front of us, Vanderkam says, we can figure out how to not only get necessities taken care of but also find the time to write a book or train for a marathon.

The key is shifting your mindset from one of scarcity to one of abundance. In Vanderkam’s view, our own false imperatives — the habits we fall into, our artificially constructed time crunches and what we feel we owe to others — get in the way of loftier goals.

Many of her conclusions resemble those reached by Oliver Burkeman, the author of the 2021 New York Times bestseller Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals — namely, that saying no to unnecessary time clutter, indulging in idleness or noncapitalistic hobbies like making art, and saying yes to what really matters (i.e., spending time with loved ones) is what actually enriches life. But the two authors come from opposite starting points. Burkeman’s argument begins from a scarcity mindset: If we live to be 80, we have a mere 4,000 weeks to savor in our life. We shouldn’t try to be more efficient and productive but rather embrace our limits, focus on a few priorities and recognize that we’ll never really master our own time.

“The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control — when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer,” he writes. “Embrace the discomfort of knowing you’ll never get it all done — it’s the price of living a full life.”

Vanderkam is more of an optimist and optimizer. Through organization, we absolutely can and should do more, she argues. It’s abundance through efficiency. She suggests making a spreadsheet for each week and recording everything in half-hour increments: work, commute, picking up kids, looking at your phone, cooking. Many of us, especially lawyers and consultants, may be used to breaking down our workdays in such detail. But what exactly happens in the evening?

An accountant who tracked her work hours in small increments told Vanderkam she had no idea how she spent her personal time. Once she started tracking it, she could exercise command over it. “The more I have control over my time, the more I’m actively choosing it, the less stressed I feel,” the accountant noted.

Tracking your time so diligently is onerous, of course, but you don’t have to do it forever. Even just a week or two should reveal some potential for efficiencies, Vanderkam says.

Indeed, after I begrudgingly began looking at my own time space, I made some discoveries. I already mark my calendar when I have meetings outside the office, for example, but I don’t note how long it takes to commute to them. Turns out it’s hours every week. On Saturday and Sunday mornings, I spend at least one Sisyphean hour cleaning my house — only for my daughter to destroy it again by the end of the day. And on weekday evenings, there’s always that 30 to 60 minutes that goes … I don’t know where. Looking at my phone and checking emails and carrying objects from one part of the apartment to another, I guess.

One flaw in Vanderkam’s 30-minute block system: It doesn’t account for the 7 minutes here and 13 minutes there that are stolen by the carefully calculated dopamine drips of news feeds and social media. How often do you sit down to take your shoes off at the end of the day, only to realize you’ve been skimming through God knows what on Threads for 15 minutes? You didn’t even download Threads!

This may be more consequential than it sounds. The true casualty of the time suck of our screens isn’t our productivity, warns Jenny Odell in her prescient 2019 book, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy. It’s our capacity for original thought.

Spending time on social media means marinating in other people’s realities and priorities; it can become impossible to hear your own voice above the cacophony. You need a sufficient volume of distance and time away from it, she argues, “to be functional enough to do or think anything meaningful at all.”

A carefully kept spreadsheet won’t solve the problem of technologies designed to hook the human brain. But Vanderkam’s book is full of practical and genuinely helpful suggestions to at least get started, including setting an alarm for “pencils down” at the same time every night. I’ve found this effective. (I also use an app blocker called Bloom, which institutes multihour stretches when I can’t look at social media.) I clean the apartment only once, on Sunday nights, and I’ve said no to travel-intensive appointments during the week.

Instead, at Vanderkam’s urging, I plan two 15-minute midday breaks to do something totally different to make myself happy and thereby refresh my brain. A Saturday “planning meeting” to look at the week ahead has also been surprisingly stress-relieving; feeling a sense of control over the circus that is one’s life, as Vanderkam argues, is the first step in finding abundance.

Once you start to see that time is marked not in fleeting hours of the day but 8,760 ample hours in a year, she writes, you can begin to appreciate the moments when you are doing very little. A drive to pick up a kid at soccer practice can go from chore to opportunity, a chance to enjoy a Bach cantata in solitude. The ride back can be a mini date with your child, where you focus on each other and choose songs to play together.

I will sheepishly admit that I often look at my watch during those in-between times, thinking about the next task ahead. I’m working on that. But Vanderkam’s book reminds me that my watch also holds a crucial secret.

One thing most people don’t realize is how much kinetic energy goes into keeping time with a mechanical watch; as a watch is wound, it stores up a powerful force that must be managed. An escapement device prevents all this energy from spinning out and being wasted, using a simple toothed wheel and a fork to dole it out in steady tics. These organize the energy and pass it to the balance wheel, which in turn transforms it into the chunks of time that we know so well: seconds, minutes and hours.

It’s called an escapement because it lets little bursts of energy escape in regular intervals. I kept coming back to this image as I read Big Time. All the organization and tracking Vanderkam asks us to do is what allows for the little escapes we need — the joyful moments that free our minds to think for ourselves, that make the hours and years worthwhile.