Extensive listening: How to get control of your free time

There are 168 hours in each week. How do we find time for what matters most?

Time management expert Laura Vanderkam studies how busy people spend their lives, and she's discovered that many of us drastically overestimate our commitments each week, while underestimating the time we have to ourselves.

She offers a few practical strategies to help find more time for what matters to us, so we can "build the lives we want in the time we've got."

Extensive listening: The passing of time, caught in a single photo

In this TED talk, photographer Stephen Wilkes crafts stunning compositions of landscapes as they transition from day to night, exploring the space-time continuum within a two-dimensional still photograph.

Journey with him to iconic locations like the Tournelle Bridge in Paris, El Capitan in Yosemite National Park and a life-giving watering hole in heart of the Serengeti in this tour of his art and process.

You can read a full transcript here.

Reading test: 10 ways to feel less busy

In this week’s reading test we are going to use The Guardian article 10 ways to feel less busy to practise the heading-matching kind of task.

Match the headings A-H below with their corresponding paragraph 1-6. There are two headings you don’t need to use.

A - Accept defeat
B - Build up walls
C - Give your time away
D - Practise strategic incompetence
E - Respect your rhythms
F - Slow down
G - Stop feeling proud about how busy you are
H- Try to-do lists

10 ways to feel less busy

1
“There are no solutions; there are only trade-offs,” said the economist Thomas Sowell – meaning that with resources such as time or money, spending some of it on one thing always means not spending it on something else. It’s literally impossible to get everything done – time is limited; “everything” isn’t – and that’s great news, because it means you needn’t feel guilty for failing. You can turn, instead, on the far more manageable question of which things to deliberately not to do. The vacuuming? The weekly meeting that nobody cares about? Start from the assumption that something’s got to go, and focus on figuring out what.

2
If you want more productivity from a machine or a computer, you just run it for more hours, and it’s tempting to assume that humans are the same. But in fact, we’re creatures of pace: two hours of intense work, when you’re at your most focused and refreshed, can be vastly more worthwhile than six when you’re feeling exhausted. If you have the flexibility, organise your day so that the most important matters get your best time, not necessarily the most time.

3
In office jobs, there’s one way to avoid being given certain time-consuming tasks: develop a reputation for being rubbish at them. Act as if you don’t understand and panick around the stuck coffee machine, or a frozen computer, and you’ll soon find nobody asks you to deal with it next time around.

4
When you’re doing things quickly, it seems sensible to keep your time, saving as many minutes as possible. Yet research on the experience of time suggests we’ve got things wrong: a better way to gain a sense of “time abundance” is to be generous with your time, for example through volunteering. The explanation for this curious effect, researchers speculate, may be the feelings of self-efficacy caused by the voluntary work: successfully do something useful, and you’ll be subconsciously reassured of your capabilities, making you more confident about the chances of getting more useful things done in future.

5
The last thing you want to hear when you’ve got lots of tasks to do is that cultivating patience might be part of the solution. But our urgency-addicted culture is at the centre of the busyness problem, according to the addiction researcher Stephanie Brown. We’re convinced that with just a bit more speed we could stay in control. When you’re already on this urgency dynamics, it can feel painful to try to go slowly – but you may end up getting more done if you try. Experiment with doing nothing at all for 10 minutes between tasks: the harder that feels, the more you may need it.

6
Complaining about how busy you are is “pretty obviously pride disguised as a complaint,” in the words of the essayist Tim Kreider: “Your life cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.” But the truth is that all that pride probably makes you feel even busier, because we believe the things we tell ourselves, while making others feel rushed, too. And if you insist that, no, you’re genuinely that busy… well, are you sure you can spare the time to be complaining about it?

KEY:
1A 2E 3D 4C 5F 6G

Talking point: Time

This week's talking point is time. Before getting together with the members of your conversation group, go over the questions below so that ideas flow more easily when you meet up with your friends and you can work out vocabulary problems beforehand.

What activities do you prefer to do with your time?

In what situations do you feel time flies?
In what situations do you feel time drags? 
What do you think you would learn on a time management course?
Would you like to do one?
Have you ever run out of time to do something?
How often do you take time off work?
When did you last feel you were wasting your time?
How important is to be punctual for you? And in your country?
Do you ever feel that there aren't just enough hours in the day?

To illustrate the point, you can watch the video How to Manage your Time Better.

Speakout Advanced: Time

There are very few episodes of our Speakout series left. As a matter of fact, this video podcast about time is the last one but two.

This week passers-by are asked the following questions:

In what ways do you feel different today than you did ten years ago?
What’s the best time of life do you think?
In what ways has ageing affected your life?



Now it's over to you. Go over the questions above and answer them about yourself. Try and use some of the expressions you heard in the video.

You can read the transcript here.