Top 50 Laura Vanderkam Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “I don’t have time’ means ‘It’s not a priority.’ We always have time for what matters to us.”

— Laura Vanderkam

2. “You don’t build the life you want by saving time. You build the life you want, and then time saves itself. Recognizing that is what makes success possible.”

— Laura Vanderkam

3. “Time is elastic. It stretches to accommodate what we need or want to do with it.”

— Laura Vanderkam

4. “In 168 hours, there is plenty of space to nurture yourself alongside your career and your relationships.”

— Laura Vanderkam

5. “You don’t build the life you want by saving time. You build the life you want, and then time saves itself.”

— Laura Vanderkam

6. “The discipline of joy requires holding in the mind simultaneously that this too shall pass and that this too is good. This alchemy of mind isn’t easy, but 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.”

— Laura Vanderkam

7. “Being off the clock implies time freedom, yet time freedom stems from time discipline. You must know where the time goes in order to transcend the ceaseless ticking.”

— Laura Vanderkam

8. “Successful people know that small things done repeatedly have great power.”

— Laura Vanderkam

9. “Planning a few anchor events for a weekend guarantees you pleasure because – even if all goes wrong in the moment – you still will have derived some pleasure from the anticipation.”

— Laura Vanderkam

10. “Sometimes life is hard for a good reason. Sometimes narratives serve no purpose beyond keeping you from the life you want.”

— Laura Vanderkam

11. “Since life comes up and emergencies happen, making success possible hinges on two things: being choosy about each day’s priority list, and developing an accountability system that works.”

— Laura Vanderkam

12. “The key to this is realizing that life isn’t lived in epiphanies, and that looking for lessons and the necessity of big life changes in dark moments profoundly limits our lives.”

— Laura Vanderkam

13. “This is what happens when you treat your 168 hours as a blank slate. This is what happens when you fill them up only with things that deserve to be there. You build a life where you really can have it all.”

— Laura Vanderkam

14. “The majority of people who claim to be overworked work less than they think they do, and many of the ways people work are extraordinarily inefficient. Calling something “work” does not make it important or necessary.”

— Laura Vanderkam

15. “In life, you can be unhappy, or you can change things. And even if there are things you can’t change, you can often change your mind-set and question assumptions that are making life less goof than it could be.”

— Laura Vanderkam

16. “If you wait until the end of the month to save what you have left, there will be nothing left over. Likewise, if you wait until the end of the day to do meaningful but not urgent things like exercise, pray, read, ponder how to advance your career or grow your organization, or truly give your family your best, it probably won’t happen, If it has to happen, then it has to happen first”.”

— Laura Vanderkam

17. “You need to hit Monday ready to go... To do that, you need weekends that rejuvenate you, rather than exhaust or disappoint you. Cross-training makes you a better athlete, and likewise, exercise, volunteer work, and spiritual activities make you a better worker.”

— Laura Vanderkam

18. “It is a metaphor for life, perhaps, in that everything is a metaphor for life. The berry season is short. So how full, exactly, do I intend to fill the box? Or, if we slice away the metaphor, we could just ask this: what does the good life look like for me?”

— Laura Vanderkam

19. “Fortunately, being mindful of family time – making a commitment to be there physically and mentally and enjoy life while doing so – makes memories possible. We control a lot less about our children’s outcomes in life than we think. They are their own people. But one thing parents do shape is whether kids remember their childhoods as happy. Creating a happy home is a conscious choice, as is creating a happy marriage.”

— Laura Vanderkam

20. “Am I making progress toward things that are important to me?”

— Laura Vanderkam

21. “Before the rest of the world is eating breakfast, the most successful people have already scored daily victories that are advancing them toward the lives they want.”

— Laura Vanderkam

22. “We have plenty of time. Averaged over the entire American population, people watch almost as much television as they work. If people don’t exercise, it’s because they don’t want to exercise. Time becomes the scapegoat. Time becomes the scapegoat for all sorts of things, which explains the phrase “If you want something done, ask a busy person.”

— Laura Vanderkam

23. “Ultimately, self-control lets you relax because it removes stress and enables you to conserve willpower for the important challenges.”

— Laura Vanderkam

24. “Getting adequate sleep is a sign that the world doesn’t need your attention for seven to nine hours each day. It keeps spinning as usual in its orbit. Who wants to admit that?”

— Laura Vanderkam

25. “If you choose your life’s work well, something bewitching can happen through your labors. Each hour you log can be a source of joy.”

— Laura Vanderkam

26. “I believe that consciously choosing to create such memories will stretch the experience of time.”

— Laura Vanderkam

27. “Reading fiction as you commute to a job you don’t like will make you feel somewhat more fulfilled; being in the right job will make you feel incredible.”

— Laura Vanderkam

28. “You have fewer than 1,000 Saturdays with each child in your care before they’re grown up.”

— Laura Vanderkam

29. “You don’t become a better parent or employee by not enjoying your life.”

— Laura Vanderkam

30. “I can accomplish more before breakfast than I used to do in a day.”

— Laura Vanderkam

31. “This is the 168 Hours principle for work: Ideally, there should be almost nothing during your work hours – whatever you choose those to be – that is not advancing you toward your goals for the career and life you want.”

— Laura Vanderkam

32. “We seized the opportunity to take a grown-ups-only hiking trip in Acadia National Park.”

— Laura Vanderkam

33. “You cannot remove randomness from the universe. You can, however, use your 168 hours to stack the odds in your favor. To do this, you have to place many bets, and leave nothing you can control to chance. In other words, you have to be open to possibilities, and plan for opportunities.”

— Laura Vanderkam

34. “Getting things down to routines and habits takes willpower at first but in the long run conserves willpower,” says Baumeister.”

— Laura Vanderkam

35. “This is all true, and yet not really an argument against ownership. It is easy to believe our own excuses, particularly if they’re good ones, but in a world of 7 billion people, there is always someone facing Y who is doing X. All of us have to assess the plot of life we are allotted every twenty-four hours and figure out how we can make the most of what we’ve been given.”

— Laura Vanderkam

36. “Think of a typical full-time worker, who’s in the office from nine to five daily, but takes thirty minutes for lunch, leaves an hour early on Friday, and comes in an hour late on Tuesday due to a dental appointment. That puts her at 35.5 hours for the week. One errand tacked on to the end of lunch one day or a longish midmorning break will pull her under that thirty-five-hour threshold that defines “full time.”

— Laura Vanderkam

37. “Though you will save many hours by seizing control of your calendar, and clearing away non-core-competency activities, in the long run, the best way to create more time is to actually get better at your professional craft.”

— Laura Vanderkam

38. “Calling something “work” doesn’t make it a more noble use of time than anything else. Work that doesn’t advance you toward the life you want is still wasted time. You will never get those hours back, and we only get so many. Wrote Shakespeare in Richard II, “I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.”

— Laura Vanderkam

39. “Consciously lingering in pleasurable downtime reminds us that we have downtime. And that can make us feel like we have more time than when we let is slip through our hands.”

— Laura Vanderkam

40. “But what if this logical leap – these stressful things happened, and therefore life is crazy and unsustainable – limits our stories? The human brain is structured for loss aversion, and so negative moments stand out more starkly than positive moments, particularly if they fit a popular thesis.”

— Laura Vanderkam

41. “As with the principals tracking their time, it is this second step, envisioning how a schedule could look, and the third step, holding yourself daily to this design, that leads to time freedom.”

— Laura Vanderkam

42. “If a negative state is assumed in life, then you have to call attention to its absence.”

— Laura Vanderkam

43. “Exercise doesn’t take time, it makes time. Afew years ago, I gave a talk at a rather vast corporate campus. Teams aimed to cluster together, but as you might imagine with a big organization, this did not always happen. One woman told me that she had recently started working with a group located several buildings away. This meant that at least.”

— Laura Vanderkam

44. “Work was all I did, and I realized that was upsetting.” It was upsetting philosophically – there is more to life – but it also felt financially foolish. “I live in New York City. If all I was doing was working, I could do that from anywhere. I could do that from a shack in the middle of the desert,” she says. “Why pay to live in one of the world’s most expensive cities if I wasn’t taking advantage of it?”

— Laura Vanderkam

45. “Rich memories can expand time both as they are being created and in the rearview mirror.”

— Laura Vanderkam

46. “The truth is that even ten minutes spent looking at the sky with nothing to fill the time can feel long.”

— Laura Vanderkam

47. “Time is elastic. It stretches to accommodate what we choose to put into it.”

— Laura Vanderkam

48. “A better question when asked to take on something in the future: “Would I do this tomorrow?”

— Laura Vanderkam

49. “What do I like about my schedule? What would I like to spend more time doing? What would I like to spend less time doing? How can I make that happen?”

— Laura Vanderkam

50. “Strategizing boosts efficiency; planning your toughest work for the time when you have the most energy means a task might take one hour instead of two.”

— Laura Vanderkam