Archive for February 26th, 2009

I’m pleased to announce that I am signing a contract with Portfolio (Penguin’s business imprint) to write a book called 168 HOURS, scheduled to be released in summer/fall 2010.

The book looks at how successful people spend their time. We all start off with the same blank slate — 168 hours — each week. But some people manage to do a lot more than others with those hours. Specifically, I want to look at how people achieve career breakthroughs in the middle of already full personal lives (e.g. raising kids, running marathons, doing extensive volunteer work).  How do they allocate those 168 hours against all these priorities?

While this book is prescriptive, I am, primarily, a journalist. And so I approach this project from the perspective of finding stories of people who love their lives, and also looking at various misconceptions about time. We think that it’s hard to balance work and family, for instance, but the reality is that with 168 hours a week, there’s abundant time for all your core competencies. You can sleep 8 hours a night (56 hours a week), work 50 hours a week, and still have 62 hours left over for other things like nurturing your family members, training for a triathlon, etc. Indeed, if you look at the reality of how Americans do spend their time, you’ll see that there’s really no conflict between work and family at all. Stay-at-home moms, on average, according to the American Time Use Survey, only spend 31 minutes per day playing with their kids. They spend 6 minutes reading with them. You can definitely beat this in 62 non-working hours per week. The point is, most of us, in the workforce or not, do not spend our hours in ways that reflect what we want to be doing in life. This book is about people who do.

I am looking for stories about such people with full lives, and how they took their careers to the next level. Please let me know if you have suggestions of people I should interview.