Andrik Langfield via Unsplash

Some of us squeeze LOTS into 15 minutes as we bounce between various tasks and responsibilities. Making school lunches, while answering an email on our phones, feeding the dog, then jumping across the room to clean up a spilt juice accident. When we look at our lives though, do we feel like we’re accomplishing everything we want to get done? I know when I looked at a given day I felt like I couldn’t get it all in. There just wasn’t time in that one single day to do everything.

It’s not like anyone can give us more time. Time is the great equalizer, we are all bound by it. But what if someone could shift the way we think about time and how our tasks, hopes, aspirations, responsibilities fit into it. Laura Vanderkam does just that in her book, I Know How She Does It. She encourages readers to broaden their view of time to encompass all 168 hours of the week when we think about all we want to accomplish.

When we plan what we want to do across an entire week (vs feeling like we have to get all of it in everyday), it starts to look more doable to do all the things we want and need. Laura offers sample spreadsheets on her website to help readers plan what those 168 hours look like. Dividing our days into 15 or 30 minute intervals also helps plan and categorize what we do throughout all 168 hours in a week.

My husband and I did this several years ago and it has been transformational in how we manage our very full lives. Both of us working full-time and having four young children makes juggling a constant reality. When we wrote down what our family needed (and wanted!) and translated that into tangible slots of time, we found that we could achieve these things on a weekly basis. It often felt like we weren’t getting enough alone time, but when we actually added up how much we get over the entire week, it was a good chunk!

People often ask me, "How do you do it? How do you manage your family, house, career?". There's lots of things that go into that answer and this weekly planning technique is one of them.