Round-up: News and press from this week

Yesterday was the official launch date of All the Money in the World. It’s always exciting to send a book out into the world and see what happens. The first thing that happened is that Amazon sold out. So if you tried to order through Amazon, please know that they are getting more copies right now. Kindle copies are, of course, unlimited. And all the other retailers have the book. So please order away!

Curiously, though yesterday was launch day for ATM, I’m getting a lot of media hits related to my prior book, 168 Hours. I’ll take attention in any way I can get it. I had three CBS MoneyWatch pieces:

What the Happiest People Do On Their Lunch Hour” — they take a friend to lunch, of course! I explain the happiness research that leads to such an activity being so pleasant.

5 Ways To Spend a Windfall” — a quick discussion of the “$10,000 Game.” Figuring out what you’d do with found money that you had to spend in a memorable way can teach you what your long-term goals might be.

How Every Day Can Be Leap Day” — You don’t need extra time to live the life you want. You can live the life you want in the time you have now.

I wrote an essay for Fortune on “What should we teach our kids about money?” Teaching kids to be smart, rather than wasteful or tight, is a very fine line, and one that’s hard to teach in the toy aisle. I quite liked this essay, so please give it a read and share it around.

I’ve got a guest post over at Free Range Kids (Lenore Skenazy’s blog) claiming that “You can’t helicopter parent three kids.” It’s an extension of my marginal-costs-of-kids idea from ATM: it’s hard to fret three times as much about three kids as you do about one.

Various media hits:

The Economist’s Game Theory blog mentioned my USA Today column on inequality in an article claiming golf was “The Cruelest Sport.” (It all ties in, trust me).

The Sydney Morning Herald ran 10 time-saving tips from me, telling readers to “Slow down to save time.” This ran in 5 sister newspapers across Australia, so we’re getting a lot of visitors from Melbourne, Sydney, Canberra. Fun! I spent 4 months in Australia in college and had an amazing time. This was where I first formulated my philosophy that if you have the chance to travel, you should, even if you’re spending more money than you planned. You can work more later, and you can often travel pretty cheaply.

I was on NPR’s Talk of the Nation on Tuesday, talking about time; you can access the audio file here.

Great posts from several friends of this blog: Lindsey Pollak reviews ATM, Manisha Thakor does a Q&A, Dan Schawbel does a Q&A, and so does Kim Palmer over at US News & World Report.

The Boston Globe runs an interview with me on “Secret to gaining time and money: It’s all in your head.”

The Los Angeles Times mentioned 168 Hours in a rather off-beat column called “The 24-Hour Day: It’s so yesterday.”

Phew! More to come later, but I’m in a place with buggy internet access so I’ll post another round-up next week.

9 thoughts on “Round-up: News and press from this week

  1. I’m headed over to the library this morning to pick up your new book which just came in. I’m first on the hold list. Can’t wait to read it!

  2. The post on “You can’t helicopter parent 3 kids” reminds me of a discussion I had with an emergency room nurse and mother of 1 at the indoor park. She was explaining that accidents happened and “Parents weren’t even in the same room!!”

    In a nice way, I explained to her the logistics of housework, especially putting away laundry, in my home. Was I really going to haul each baby, and all the laundry, and corral the just-turned two year old, to put away laundry? (No) Did I have a lot of laundry (Yes, and I didn’t cloth diaper) Did I have family in-state? (No, her mother watched her baby while she did housework for a few hours.) Did my husband travel? (Yes, including a 16 day stint to Israel. A random person in line at the pharmacy took my money and bought me milk because my two year old had no shoes and I couldn’t carry three children to the milk.)

    Overall, my children are OK. And to the extent they weren’t OK, it had to do with their prematurity/birth defect, not with whether or not I schlepped them around the house while putting away laundry.

    1. @Twin Mom- yes, it doesn’t seem possible, from my understanding of physics, to always be in the same room with three children, some of whom can move on their own… I’m learning to get comfortable with letting the 2-year-old roam around the house some.

      1. Friendly doctor suggestion for those of us who let toddlers roam- replace your ball point pens that have caps with the kind that click. Ball point pen caps are one of the biggest problems she sees and easy to forget in an otherwise childproof house.

  3. I liked your Fortune essay, too.

    And the Economist blog entry was pretty funny, even though I don’t get the allure of golf at all!

  4. Just want to say that I am really enjoying All the Money in the World. Well done.
    I enjoyed 168 Hours just as much.

    I am a well organized person who values her own free time and the time I put in at my full time wondeful job. I have ONE (yes, 1) child and not planning to have anymore. I DO NOT helicoter parent my child, in fact the only reason I am going to stay with one is because I am not prepared to spend 5+ years doing any kind of heavy duty helicoptering that people with 2 kids have to do or even more with 3. (esp. with husbands who are not involved as much in baby care)

    I know plenty of stay at home mums who helicpoter parent their 3 or 4 kids, they homeschool, they don’t let them do anything on their own and they overschedule. In fact they think I am nearly abusing my child for not spending hours with him in, for example, “sensory” type activities or whatever you are supposed to do with 2 year olds, etc.

    I find it repeatedly in your book(s) and on your blog that you are a bit prejudiced against parents with only children. Just because I choose to make it easier for myself (kudos to those who don’t mind doing baby stuff over and over), I don’t need to be stereotyped.
    I mean, it is your concept after all – what can get you more happiness – more money, more quality time? For you it may be more kids, for someone else not so much….

    1. @Stella – thanks for your comment, and I’m so glad you’re enjoying All the Money in the World! I think we should all have the family size we want, and I’m sorry to hear that I come across as prejudiced against single-kid families. I think someone pointed out on Lenore’s blog that on her TV show there had been a family with 6 kids who still had a helicopter parent. I write from the perspective of thinking that the modern world pushes toward the smaller family size rather than the larger family size, because people think kids need various ridiculous things like sensory activities (isn’t the world a sensory activity?) Single kid families certainly do have some advantages — I helped do a survey of alumni for my university and we found that the highest labor force participation rates 25 or so years out were for women with 1 kid. Higher than for women without kids! We hypothesized that women whose careers had not been in any way interrupted or slowed by children decided they were done and wanted to try other things, whereas 1 kid gave you something time-consuming out of work, but not so much so that it interrupted your career progression…

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