by Marie Forleo
You might say, “This is ridiculous, Marie. I have to pay taxes, otherwise the IRS will find me and cart my ass off to jail!” Or, “I have to give the kids a bath, otherwise they’ll turn into little spaghetti-crusted zombies.” Or, “I have to go to work, otherwise I’ll get fired and lose my house.” You’re right. There are consequences for not paying your taxes, not bathing your kids, and not showing up for work. But consequences don’t negate the fact that you’re still making the choice. You’re making these choices because they matter to you. And that’s the point: You make time for what matters most.
No one is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to read and respond to emails. No one is strong-arming you into watching the news or back-to-back episodes of The Sopranos. We choose it. All of it.
As motivational speaker Michael Altshuler says, “The bad news is time flies. The good news is you’re the pilot.” There is no time fairy that’s going to swoop down and magically clear your calendar. Embrace the fact that if you were powerful enough to create an overcommitted and overstretched life, you’re powerful enough to uncreate it.
We must focus on the one and only thing we can control in life: ourselves. Our thoughts. Our beliefs. Our feelings. Our behavior.
Remember . . .
It’s never about having the time, it’s about making the time.
Is changing your ingrained habits easy? No. To free up your time, will you need to say no to people? Disappoint people? Yes. Are you going to disrupt societal norms, ruffle feathers, have uncomfortable conversations, and dismantle a few long-held assumptions? Most definitely.
But here’s a good place to start—realize that you can’t manage what you don’t measure. If you’re serious about eradicating time excuses, do this. For the next seven days, write down every single thing you do from the moment you wake up to the moment you go to sleep.
Don’t change your normal routine. Record what you typically do, without embellishment or judgment. Your ego may be tempted to fudge the numbers or adjust your behavior to make yourself appear better on paper. Don’t do that. The whole point of this exercise is to understand precisely how you spend your time. Plus, you need a baseline of how you’re currently spending your time before you can alter it.
Very important: Leave no minute unaccounted for. Be an obsessive, note-taking little freak for the next seven days. Grab a notebook and track your time in two-, ten-, or thirty-minute increments—whatever helps you capture the most accurate snapshot. Include things like lunch breaks, text threads with family, eating hummus over the sink, walking the dog, watering the plants, going to the post office for stamps, grabbing a coffee around the corner, tweezing stray chin hairs.
I guarantee the benefit of seeing exactly where your time goes will far outweigh the effort. Most of us don’t realize how much time we fritter away on dumb shit that has no connection to our deepest values nor moves the needle ahead on our treasured dreams. What’s worse, modern environments are designed to distract us, fracture our time, and steal our attention.
The result we’re ultimately aiming for? Freeing up two hours a day. Before you throw this book against the wall or think, You’re out of your damn mind, Marie! I can’t find an extra two minutes, let alone two hours a day, stick with me and, at the very least, experiment. As you track your time, pay particular attention to our society’s biggest time sucks:
Social media (no surprise there)
Email
The internet in general (shopping, scrolling through news, going down the rabbit hole)
Inefficient meal planning and prep
Traffic and commuting
Meetings (many of which don’t really add value to our jobs, or could be more quickly and effectively addressed in email)
Television (yes, Netflix counts)
Running errands (that are not essential or could be done later when they’re less distracting to our most creative, high-energy hours)
Being on your cell phone for whatever reason (e.g., talking, texting, gaming, watching YouTube videos, or listening to podcasts)
This last bullet deserves extra attention. Few of us can imagine a world without smartphones. We wake up with them. We take them to the bathroom. We go to bed with them. We have them at the dinner table. Billions of us are addicted to screens. If you haven’t noticed, technology now controls us more than we control it. While everyone is unique in their tech usage, one recent study estimates Americans now spend nearly five hours a day on their phones. That’s seventy-six days a year—roughly a third of our waking lives—glued to a glowing box!
This addiction to technology isn’t by accident, it’s by design. Devices are built to keep you hooked. Every color, sound, and feature is intentionally engineered to get you to spend more and more time on your screen.
Companies with billions of dollars employ some of the most intelligent, creative humans on the planet to mastermind new ways to lure us into spending our lives on their apps and in their platforms. Remember, stock prices rely on keeping engagement metrics high. Many tech companies’ survival is based on continuously inventing ways to capture an ever-growing share of your time and attention. If you think you’re a customer of these products and platforms, think again. Your time, attention, and data are their product.
Here’s how it works. Your brain interprets every text, alert, or like as a “reward,” which triggers a dopamine surge. Over time, those chemicals change how your mind functions, training you to need more and more “dopamine hits” from your devices. It’s a feedback loop that’s almost impossible to resist.
The most addictive platforms get us hooked by exploiting five universal psychological vulnerabilities: the slot machine effect of getting intermittent, variable rewards (“Did I get a new email, text, or DM!?”); the need to be seen (“Notice me, acknowledge me, like me, love me!!”); the need to reciprocate (“I have to respond and say thanks—can’t seem rude!”); the fear of missing out (FOMO); and our most masochistic impulse—to constantly compare ourselves to others (what I call doing shots of Comparschläger*).
It doesn’t matter how many hours a day you meditate or how intellectually or spiritually superior you think you are, everyone is susceptible. Steve Jobs knew this all too well. That’s why he wouldn’t let his kids use iPads. When the tablet first hit the shelves in 2010, New York Times journalist Nick Bilton asked this of Mr. Jobs, “So, your kids must love the iPad?”
“They haven’t used it,” he told Nick. “We limit how much technology our kids use at home.” Nick’s article went on to detail how a fair number of technocrats follow similar screen-limiting practices. Chris Anderson, the CEO of 3DR and former editor of Wired magazine, put stringent device rules in place for his family. “My kids accuse me and my wife of being fascists and overly concerned about tech, and they say that none of their friends have the same rules,” he said of his five children, aged six to seventeen. “That’s because we have seen the dangers of technology firsthand. I’ve seen it in myself, I don’t want to see that happen to my kids.”6
It begs the question: If some of the world’s most powerful tech pioneers don’t allow unlimited screen time in their homes, why should we? I’m not demonizing our devices—I’m grateful for the countless benefits technology has brought to my life and to humanity—but appreciating the upside doesn’t negate the hazards.
Most of us are grossly unaware of how much time we actually spend on our screens. Research shows that we’re likely to underestimate our phone usage by nearly 50 percent. According to psychologist Sally Andrews, a lecturer at Nottingham Trent University and the lead author of a smartphone study, “The fact that we use our phones twice as many times as we think we do indicates that a lot of smartphone use seems to be habitual, automatic behaviors that we have no awareness of.”7
When I started to become suspect of my own habits, I genuinely believ
ed I was on my phone far less than I was. My wake-up call? A free app called Moment.* It tracks your phone and app usage and shows you exactly how much time you stare at your little addiction box each day. Prepare to be horrified.
Let’s say you’re a holdout and scoff at so-called smartphones. I respect that. But don’t think you’re off the hook. Nielsen shows that, on average, American adults are still watching some five hours of TV a day.
A DAY.
Even if you’ve sworn off all screens and tech and you’re living like it’s 1926, do the time-tracking exercise for the full seven days. Get curious about exactly what you do and how long it takes. Research has proven that roughly 40 percent of our daily activities are habitual. Which means we humans spend a significant portion of our existence on autopilot with no awareness of what the hell we’re doing when we’re doing it.
Remember, your mission is to free up at least two hours a day. Why two, you ask? First, because two hours a day is enough of a stretch that it forces you to challenge deeply held assumptions about how you’ve constructed your life. My hope is to inspire you to have some uncomfortable-yet-necessary conversations with yourself, family, friends, and coworkers. Whether it’s about finding ways to be more effective in less time, rebalancing responsibilities, or setting boundaries, use this as an opportunity to communicate what you need and enlist support.
Second, because the cumulative effect of spending two hours every day toward a meaningful goal will alter the trajectory of your life. Honestly, even if you don’t free up two hours but end up with one, that’s enormous progress. Over the course of a year, you’ll have created an additional two weeks of free time.*
Push yourself. If you don’t strive for two free hours a day, chances are you won’t even get one.
You Can Get with This, or You Can Get with That
THE OPPORTUNITY COST OF WASTING YOUR TIME
Today’s
Unconscious Cost
Total Time
Spent per Year
What You Could’ve
Accomplished Instead
30 minutes a day dickin’ around on your phone/social media
182.5 hours a year or 22 full 8-hour workdays
Michelle-Obama-like arms
Built a brand-new website
Learned how to meditate
60 minutes a day on news, email, and celebrity gossip
365 hours a year or 45 full 8-hour workdays
Written a first draft of your book
Launched a new revenue stream
Secured a raise or made a career change
90 minutes a day watching TV
547.5 hours a year or 68 full 8-hour workdays
Learned to speak conversational Italian
Finished your degree
Launched a profitable side business
Opportunity cost is no joke. Every choice has a price. Everything you say yes to means you’re saying no to something else. Translation? Each time you pick up your brain-draining gadget and say YES to watching another cat video, you’re saying NOPE to ever reaching your biggest and most important long-term goals.
Want to speak another language? Write a book? Transform your body or health? Get your financial life together? Launch any kind of business, side hustle, or a whole new career? Save the oceans? Find time for a real relationship? Reignite your sex life? You absolutely have the time, right now.
The thirty minutes a day you spend screen sucking your phone could be used to get in a HIIT workout and take your fitness level from “blah” to “badass” in a matter of months.
The hour you spend browsing the internet for more shit you don’t need could be used to write a few paragraphs of your memoir. You’d have a workable first draft within a year.
The two hours you spend watching mind-numbing TV each night could instead be used to learn a new language, study for that degree, or work on a relationship you really care about.
I can hear some of you saying, “Okay, Marie, I see your point. But I still can’t see how to find two hours a day.” Remember, thirty minutes here and fifteen minutes there add up fast.
Here are a few more strategies to kill the time sucks mentioned above. You don’t have to make these changes permanently. Some might not be possible given your job or life situation, but I strongly encourage you to experiment with a few—if not all—for one month. You can do anything for thirty days. Use these suggestions as jumping-off points to invent your own experiments. Remember to ask, “How can this work for me?”
Nothing changes if nothing changes. Be bold. Break your patterns. Step away from societal norms that suffocate your life. With a few tweaks, you’ll see how possible more free time really is.
1. Eliminate Media Consumption
Eliminate all media including social media, TV, online videos, magazines, catalogs, podcasts, news, and any other information-based inputs. If the thought of no media is making you hyperventilate, relax. Go on a media fast for four weeks. You’ll survive. After that, you can create better boundaries for your consumption (e.g., no media before 11:00 a.m. so you can capitalize on morning energy).
Here’s the mantra I use to curb my own media consumption: “Create before you consume.” Meaning, it’s imperative that I create the life (and work) of my dreams before I unconsciously and habitually consume the creations of others. For example, ten minutes of meditation helps me create a stronger brain and experience more clarity, insights, and creativity; a fifteen-minute home workout can help me create more energy and strength; twenty-five minutes of writing can help me chip away at a book or marketing idea and create major progress in my career. Heck, even five minutes of quiet thinking—distraction-free—creates breakthroughs!
Which highlights an important point. Yes, I’m challenging you to carve out two free hours a day. As your coach on this journey, I’m here to push you. But even upgrading your behavior in small pockets of time—five minutes here, fifteen minutes there—will give you small wins to build on, the cumulative effect of which creates miracles. Ten minutes is better than no minutes.
2. Break Out of Your Inbox
Put up a vacationesque autoresponder and limit email checking to one to three times per day, maximum. Do not check email right after you wake up. If you can check every few days, even better. This is admittedly easier for entrepreneurs and freelancers than it is for some employees, but difficult does not mean impossible. As a boss, I encourage my team members to declare times when they’ll be in focus mode (not available via email or Slack) for multi-hour chunks—sometimes full days—in order to make progress on important projects, distraction-free.
Even if it’s not possible at work, how can this idea help curb your personal inbox? Whatever changes you make, inform family, close friends, coworkers, and top clients about your new email policy. Chances are, they’ll respect it. Once key people are in the know and you turn on your autoresponder, do NOT open your inbox.
The best way to break a compulsive email-checking habit is to set up your environment to support you. That means removing visual and audio email temptations completely. If possible, delete the email app from your phone. If you’re unwilling, take your email app off the home screen of your smartphone and move it to at least the fourth or fifth screen. The few seconds it takes to swipe over to find that email icon can be enough of a pattern interrupt to stop you from habitually checking it.
The most important thing is eliminating all notifications from any device or computer you use. No dings, buzzes, swooshes, notifications, or visual pop-ups. This is nonnegotiable. Take back control over your mind, time, and attention. Do not allow your technol
ogy to dictate your to-do list. Other people’s agendas shouldn’t derail your own.
The world has been writing extensively about how to better manage email since the year 2000. Search online and you’ll find a treasure trove of email-taming tools and practices.
3. Eat Better, Faster, and Cheaper
For some of us, one of the biggest recurring time sucks is feeding ourselves and our families. Figuring out what to eat, and then shopping, prepping, cooking, and cleaning up—it feels like a whole other job.
I’m sure you know this, but a nonstop diet of fast, processed, packaged foods is not a viable, long-term option. I say this as someone who grew up on Chef Boyardee, Pasta Roni, peanut butter cups, Pop-Tarts, pizza, and White Castle. It wasn’t until my late twenties that I realized the error of my ways. Processed food drains your energy, clouds your cognitive abilities, and triggers a host of mental, physical, and emotional health issues.
If figuring out what to eat is one of your biggest time sucks, try this. Learn to batch cook and embrace being boring and repetitive with your meals. Find three to five simple, whole-food-based recipes that can be made in large quantities (soups, stews, one-pot meals, bowls) and designate two times a week (e.g., Thursdays and Sundays) to plan, shop, prep, and execute. There’s an ever-growing free library of healthy, fast, and easy-to-prepare recipes and how-tos online.
Let’s talk money, too. Here’s another myth we need to debunk. You don’t have to shop in expensive health-food stores or farmers’ markets, or eat only organic foods. The goal is to select the healthiest options possible, no matter where you shop. New York Times columnist Mark Bittman wrote an insightful 2010 op-ed called “Is Junk Food Really Cheaper?” In it, he explained that to feed a family of four at McDonald’s costs about twenty-eight dollars. To feed a family of four a roast chicken with vegetables and a simple salad costs about fourteen dollars. To feed a family of four rice and beans with garlic, peppers, and onions costs about nine dollars. Search for “The Environmental Working Group’s Guide for Good Food on a Tight Budget” or follow their Clean Fifteen and Dirty Dozen lists for fruits and vegetables. These resources help us eat well and save money. Remember, everything is figureoutable—including fueling yourself and family with real, nutrient-dense food without breaking the bank.