by Laura Vanderkam
I heard an interview with Laura Vanderkam on Jon Acuff’s podcast. Since I’m going through a very busy and disorganized season of my life, it sounded as though her wisdom and findings on time management and productivity were exactly what I needed.
Tranquility by Tuesday is founded on 9 rules:
1. Give yourself a bedtime
2. Plan on Fridays
3. Move by 3 p.m.
4. Three times a week is a habit
5. Create a back-up slot
6. One big adventure, one little adventure
7. Take one night for you
8. Batch the little things
9. Effortful before effortless
She conducted a study of volunteers from her email list on the efficacy of these rules. She had each of them implement these rules one week at a time and report back how or if they improved their lives.
She goes over each rule, where they came from and how they will help. She then gives guidance for putting them into practice. She discusses the feedback from the study participants and uses it to illustrate how the rules helped and also how to overcome perceived obstacles the rule may face.
Mrs. Vanderkam has a gift for foreseeing excuses that may be raised and then having answers to overcome them. You can tell she knows the ins and outs of these rules thoroughly and has seen positive results come from them when people put them into practice.
I can absolutely see the logic in each of the rules and how each would help when introduced into a busy life. For someone who has acquired some very bad habits on how I utilize my time, I’m pretty sure implementing these rules is going to feel like hours have magically shown up to each of my days. I’ve already started the bedtime (she’d discussed it on the podcast) and I have to say that that morning me is much more refreshed and not so mad at night me. (The Seinfeld reference is in the book. You can’t go wrong with non-fiction books that are meant to improve your life that have Seinfeld references in them.)
This seems like an excellent book for anyone with a busy – or even not so busy life – that wants to get more time out of each week and to live more tranquilly.
From this book, I also learned that War and Peace has 361 short chapters making it an ideal work of literature to read a little each day in order to finish it within a year.
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