Book Summary: Off The Clock
Laura Vanderkam’s Off The Clock is full of practical productivity tips for getting more out of a busy schedule. Backed by science as well as personal experience, you can find out why so many people feel they have so little time.
Related Book Summaries:
The Power Of Less – Leo Babauta
Designing Your Life – Bill Burnett
Quotes:
Memories will stretch the experience of time.
The good life is not always the easy life. Happiness requires effort. It is not just bestowed; it is the earned interest on what you choose to pay in.
Off The Clock Book Summary Notes:
- Learn what your doing with your time by keeping a daily log for awhile. Keeping a log of our day forces us to be accountable to ourselves for our time. It also allows us hard data to then start to make some decisions from.
- Most people overestimate the amount of time they spend working each week. Sometimes by as much as 25%.
- Tracking time also allows us to extrapolate information from a week or month into the whole year. We can then look big picture at what our years are broken up into. Do you spend way to much time watching tv? Swap at least some of it for that other hobby you’ve always wanted to try.
- Excitement makes us remember days more clearly.
- Our brains make memories more easily out of new experiences because it’s unfamiliar and unsure what parts will be important to remember later.
- Having an epically busy schedule does not necessarily correlate to productivity and it’s certainly not a goal we should strive for.
- Keep realistic expectations. If you only have an hour for a project don’t set multiple hours worth of work and then become disappointed when you fail. Set yourself reasonable expectations bearing in mind your own limitations and schedule.
- Money is best spent on enlarging positive experiences and shrinking negative ones. If there’s something you hate but can outsource, do it!
