Complexity vs. Chaos: The Circus Metaphor

What would you do with four extra hours a day? Probably say you don't have them. But according to Laura Vanderkam, one of the world's leading thinkers on time, they're already there. You're just not seeing them. 

Laura has tracked her own time for 11 years. She's run large-scale time-tracking studies with hundreds of participants. And what she keeps finding is the same thing: the stories we tell ourselves about our time are almost always wrong. The tasks we dread feel longer than they are. The free time we insist we don't have keeps showing up in the data. 

In this How I Work episode, I sit down with Laura to dig into what 11 years of time diaries actually reveal, why tracking your time for just one week can make you feel dramatically better about your life, and how to reclaim those post-dinner hours that most of us write off as dead time. Laura is a bestselling author of many books on time and productivity, and her latest, Big Time, is one of the most practical and perspective-shifting reads I've come across in a long time. 

If you've ever ended a weekend convinced you had no time to yourself, this conversation will change how you see the week ahead. 

Laura and I discuss:

• Why tracking your time for a single week raises time satisfaction scores by nearly 18%, and what's actually driving that shift 

• The gap between how people think they spend their time and how they actually do, particularly for those who work flexibly or check email on weekends 

• The concept of "golden hours" and why the four to five hours between dinner and bedtime are far more valuable than most of us treat them 

• How to tell the difference between a complex life and a chaotic one, and the circus metaphor that reframes what a well-run household actually looks like 

• The weekly planning ritual Laura swears by, including the three rings of the circus she reviews every Thursday morning 
• Three surprisingly small changes that can make your workday feel genuinely better, without changing jobs 

Key quotes 

"Four to five hours is a lot of time to just write off as unusable. The day is not over after dinner." 

"Complexity and chaos are not the same thing. We're aiming for controlled complexity." 

Connect with Laura Vanderkam on Instagram placeholder], X (Twitter), and LinkedIn and her website, and check out her latest book Big Time: A Simple Path to Time Abundance wherever you get good books. 

And if this episode resonated, I recommend my conversation with Oliver Burkeman on how to make time for the things that actually count. Check that out here. 

My latest book The Energy Game is out on July 7, 2026. You can order a copy here: https://amzn.to/48ID29M 

Connect with me on the socials: Linkedin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/amanthaimber) 

Instagram (https://www.instagram.com/amanthai) 

If you are looking for more tips to improve the way you work and live, I write a weekly newsletter where I share practical and simple to apply tips to improve your life. You can sign up for that at https://amantha.substack.com/ 

Visit https://www.amantha.com/podcast for full show notes from all episodes. 

Get in touch at amantha@inventium.com.au 

Credits: 

Host: Amantha Imber  

Sound Engineer: The Podcast Butler 

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