I usually spend my Tuesday nights rehearsing with the Young New Yorkers’ Chorus, but after a great concert this past weekend, we decided to take the week off. I have a regular Tuesday night babysitter so that my ability to go to rehearsal is not dependent on my husband’s work and travel schedule. So rather than canceling, I decided to use the time to knock another item off that List of 100 Dreams.

I’d been meaning to see more dance performances. So I got a last minute ticket to the Paul Taylor Dance Company’s show at NY City Center. Parts were silly, but parts were intensely beautiful — moments when you wonder how the human body can move that way, moments both ecstatic and sublime.

And moments, incidentally, that did not involve me being up on stage. While this might be a surprise to many people who know me, for a few years, dance was actually on my list of potential career choices. I’ve never had a ballerina’s body, but I taught modern dance for a while as a teenager and did some choreography as well. I loved the idea of coming up with a dance in my head and then seeing it staged in a frothy mix of costumes, movement and music.

But there is only room for so much in life. I drifted away from dance as I devoted more time to academics in order to get into college. As you spend less time doing things, eventually you lose the skills that make a professional path possible. I decided I liked singing better to feed my performing urge, and while choreography creates more of a spectacle, I do get the chance to create something new every day. Hey, I write for a living.

So at this point, I have made my peace with the fact that dancing will never play a significant role in my 168 hours. I will go to the occasional show and enjoy it. But much of the time stress people experience stems from thinking they should be doing things that they are not. Better to accept that you are not going to do them, and focus on the things that you will.

My (mostly positive) review of Dan Pink’s Drive ran over at City Journal’s website on Friday. Pink argues that the best motivation is intrinsic, which is hard to argue with. We naturally spend more of our 168 hours on activities that we love. He writes with an eye toward corporate managers, hoping to get them to see that the best way to keep people motivated is to give them a lot of control over their time, their technique, their tasks, and their teams.

I hope corporate managers get that message. But what if you’re not in corporate management?

The answer, I believe, is that you can build your own career with this motivational standard in place. Figure out what you love so much you’d do it for free. Find an organization that will hire you to do that, or take a job at a company that you think is flexible and sensible, and then make your job description into the job description you want. For instance, if you want to be a puppeteer (a la Being John Malkovich) you can hunt through the classifieds for a puppeteer job. Or you can take a job in HR somewhere, and start staging motivational puppet shows which are just so awesome that no one ever wants to leave your company again, and turnover drops by 75%. If that happens, I’m guessing your manager will let you keep at it.

But if not, then you’re going to have to go out on your own. As Pink recounts in a previous book, Free Agent Nation, self-employment is the path he took to turn his quirky and fun writing style into his full-time career. And ultimately, it’s the path that many people who truly want to experience the pure drive of doing what they love will have to choose.

These days, corporate ladders are few and far between.  The chances that you will retire at age 65 from the place that hires you at age 25 are nil. People move around between companies, companies disappear and new ones form, and people move in and out of solo work and professions.

That means that achieving career breakthroughs is slightly less straightforward than getting promoted by sheer endurance. When I was interviewing people for 168 Hours, one of the metaphors people used was planting seeds. In order to grow a tree, nature will scatter thousands of seeds. Eventually it becomes a numbers game. Plant enough and most likely you’ll get at least one tree.

So it goes with careers. These seeds can take different forms. Here are a few that have happened in my life, which I had absolutely no idea would sprout when I planted them:

* Writing a column on kids who skip high school for USA Today in August, 2002. That column was read by educational philanthropists Jan and Bob Davidson, who hired me to help them write a book on gifted education called Genius Denied. That project was more or less the bridge that enabled me to become a professional writer.

* Reading Mediabistro’s Revolving Door newsletter. About 2 years ago, I saw a small notice that Ivan Oransky (who’d also written columns for USA Today) had just taken a job as editor of ScientificAmerican.com. I sent him an email congratulating him on his new job. He wrote back, we met to discuss ideas, and shortly thereafter, I began writing a weekly column called Where Are They Now? about former Westinghouse Science Talent Search finalists. The column ran for a year (basically, until Ivan left Scientific American. I’m not claiming seeds can’t then go back in the ground!)

* Writing a review of Geoff Colvin’s Talent is Overrated for The American. That review was read by Will Weisser, an executive at Penguin, who then contacted me to ask if I had any book ideas. 168 Hours is the result of that little meeting.

That last seed is particularly interesting to me because in the year and a half before I met Will I had planted dozens of other seeds trying to get the 168 Hours material into print. I’d written a 9-part series for the Huffington Post. I’d written columns about the topic for USA Today and elsewhere. I’d put my book proposal through three different iterations. Who knew it would be an unrelated book review that would finally sprout?

No one knows that. That’s why we have to plant so many seeds. So right now, I’m trying to notice when I am planting seeds. I’m trying to keep track of them. I’m asking some other people to do so as well. I’m trying to see if there’s some magic range where you start getting momentum of one form or another. While the biggie may happen randomly, I’m guessing that if you plant 50 serious seeds, something has to come of it. But wouldn’t it be fun to find an exact number?

One of the ideas people shared with me as I was writing 168 Hours was to plan ahead and find space in my schedule for pleasurable activities with my kids. While playing with trains can be fun, it can also get old, especially when you’ve been doing that as much as we have of late with this dreary streak of winter weather. Everyone needs to get out of the house from time to time. The best activities to plan are ones you’ll all enjoy — but it’s especially great if you come up with activities that the adult has interest or expertise in. That way you can align your time: investing in your children while also doing something you love.

I’ve been trying to get in the habit of coming up with such activities for weekends, but one of the great things about having a flexible schedule is that you can do stuff on weekday mornings, too, if you’d like.

So today, I decided to do that. I bought tickets to the New York Philharmonic’s Very Young People’s Concert at Merkin Concert Hall (where my choir, the Young New Yorkers’ Chorus, has performed twice). This particular concert featured Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, or at least one of the four seasons: winter — I don’t think they thought pre-schoolers could sit through the whole cycle!

It was definitely a different experience listening to classical music  in an auditorium of 3-year-olds. The ban on eating and drinking was not observed (I tried to hold out on the granola bar Jasper found in my purse, but he was not dissuaded). Many people, including my toddler, did not stay in their seats the whole time.  I’m not quite sure that Vivaldi would have pictured his work being accompanied by a story about a penguin and a bear eating apples in an orchard and then hibernating as the snow came down.

But then again, Vivaldi served as music director in an orphanage, so maybe he would have thought that was perfectly all right. I love this baroque composer’s joyful music, and I’ve sung his Gloria several times, so I relished getting to hear the music as a break from my workday. And Jasper talked about the violins during the ride home. And the penguin and the bear.  So I think that was a success.

The 168 Hours video is ready for viewing! There is a link from this blog to the video in the menu at right; for people who are having trouble loading it in that format, try this permalink.

Many thanks to Kathryn Murphy (who makes an appearance in Chapter 9) for letting us film in her gorgeous house, two weeks before she gave birth. What a trooper!

Some warm morning, nearly 200 years ago, John Keats was lying outside enjoying the breeze:

“My idle days?  Ripe was the drowsy hour;
The blissful cloud of summer-indolence
Benumb’d my eyes; my pulse grew less and less;
Pain had no sting, and pleasure’s wreath no flower.”

Into this lethargy crept an image of three figures: Love, Ambition and that demon Poesy, who disturbed this bliss by stirring in him the desire to, well, do something. Like write poetry. He was not happy:

“O, why did ye not melt, and leave my sense
Unhaunted quite of all but – nothingness?”

Of course, he did go on to do something, namely get up and pen his “Ode on Indolence,” a delightful poem written in iambic pentameter, following a somewhat tricky ABABCDECDE rhyming scheme. He did this despite his warning to the figures that:

“Ye cannot raise
My head cool-bedded in the flowery grass.”

In other words, he got up and did his work, but like all of us, he liked to complain, and so his Ode on Indolence survives as an argument that lying in the grass on a summer day doing nothing is a great use of time.

And you know what? I totally agree. Keats’ poem arrived in my in-box the other day from a friend who was reading through 168 Hours, and thought he’d send me the counter-argument. Time management often gets a reputation as the discipline of scheduling every minute and always being “productive.” Many of us viscerally don’t like the idea because, like Keats, we find lying in the grass doing nothing to be quite pleasurable. We also recognize that these fallow times are when our best ideas can come to us; Keats scorned his three visitors, but he did write a great poem about their appearance. We complain of being starved for time because we don’t spend much time lying in the grass letting the ideas in our brains sprout as they will, and therefore like to assign blame – to society, capitalism, the monster under the bed, whatever – for this state of affairs.

But this argument is problematic for a few reasons. For starters, we have plenty of time for indolence. The easiest place to find it? The 19-24 (or 30, if you believe Nielsen) hours per week the average American spends watching TV. Keats lived before the electronic age, an age in which a spot of boredom could not be immediately ameliorated with 500 channels piping in everything from sex to murder to home repair, or email, if there’s nothing on. We may claim to like indolence, but we certainly don’t choose it when it’s an option.

Second, Keats, who died tragically young at age 25, never had children. Some people would argue that having a family inevitably depresses one’s creative tendencies, whether you feel the need to support the family financially (as society often asks of men) or care for the children (as society often asks of women). I don’t necessarily think this is the case, or at least I hope not given that I’m the mother of two small children trying to build a hopefully lucrative career as a writer!

But the reality is that if you want to enjoy hours of indolence as a parent, you’re going to have to schedule them in. You are going to have to create space for indolence, because otherwise it will simply get buried under the joys and needs of small children, under the demands and triumphs of making a living, or it will steal away in the arms of Love, Ambition and that demon Poesy.

And so I am trying to do this. I carve out an hour here and there just to amble outside (or run, which I find relaxing, though I realize other people don’t). I sit in coffee shops sometimes and stare at a blank page or look out my window and simply admire the brilliant canvas of a snowy day. I don’t think these activities are a bad use of my time, because I log my time and I know I’m spending plenty of time interacting with my kids and working on more concrete projects.

I hope people who read 168 Hours get that message. At least Martha Beck did! The Uber-Life Coach graciously gave a blurb for the book. My publisher had to make it short to fit on the front cover, but originally, Beck noted that while 168 Hours convinced her that she had time to read War and Peace in Russian, it “convinced me that my natural tendency—-squalid lethargy—-is also a perfectly viable option.” Indeed, “The advice in 168 Hours will suffuse every joyfully indolent hour.”

These days, growing numbers of us have projects, not jobs. If we work in traditional settings, we may be responsible for different activities, and many of us work for ourselves, and so are constantly juggling multiple clients. How do you do your work for all of them?

Over at the Wall Street Journal, Sue Shellenbarger’s Work and Family column today discusses this question. The headline, “Recession Tactic: The Mini-Shift” makes this out to be an economic issue. The thesis: in a recession, people unable to find full-time work have to juggle freelance projects or multiple part-time jobs. So they are working “mini-shifts” of 1-3 hours at a time, and toggling between them all.

She makes this out to sound rather harrowing, talking of brain freezes and, as organization guru Julie Morgenstern puts it, “mental gear-stripping.” (I intend to do a Julie Morgenstern fan post one of these days — I’ve been test-driving her Balanced Life Planner over the past few weeks).

But there are a few things to keep in mind. First, everyone works in 1-3 hour shifts–even people in “normal” jobs. That’s why coffee breaks exist. Going back and forth to meetings, or lunch, or to a different location all serve to break up the work day. Indeed, given that many people take email breaks every 15 minutes, I’d argue that devoting a full 1-3 hours to any given project actually shows shocking focus in our distracted world.

Second, Shellenbarger talks of people working until 10:30pm like it’s a bad thing. But I’d argue that splitting your workday into two chunks — 9am to 5pm, say, and then 8-10:30pm — is actually a great way to combine work and family. If your job requires more than 40 hours a week, and that is certainly the case for some of us, then working split shifts allows you to spend time with your kids and still get in your hours after they go to bed. The alternative is working later (a la people who work 9am-8pm), not seeing your kids at all, but then having the evening free to watch TV. You should only choose this option if television is more important to you than your family. That may be true for some people, but if so, you should acknowledge it.

The only caution I’d give with split shifts is that some parents of very young children–moms more often than dads–attempt such a work style in order to avoid using any childcare. The idea is that you get up before your kids and work, say, 5-7am, then hang out with them until nap time (let’s say 1-3pm), and then work from 8pm until midnight after they’ve gone to bed.

This does, in fact, give you an 8 hour workday. But it’s exhausting, as you don’t get to sleep. While giving up TV to balance work and family is a great idea, giving up sleep is not. And this sacrifice is prefaced on an odd idea, namely that non-parental childcare is bad. This would certainly be a surprise to our ancestors, who left their children in the care of their grandmothers, eldest daughters, neighbors, etc., while they worked in the fields or trekked to water sources.  In theory, it’s a way to save money, but as I was writing 168 Hours, I interviewed parents who added a shift of childcare in order to have longer stretches of focused work time. Inevitably, they made the money back fast.

In my sole proprietor journalist life, I don’t have many conference calls. Basically, the only calls I’m ever on involve me and one other person, and hence we both need to pay attention and talk. Or at least I need to pay attention; I can’t vouch for the people on the other end, but I can never do something else at the same time. I am typing, taking notes, trying to get the right quote or bit of information for a story.

But apparently, my experience with phone calls — namely, that they are a way to get information and require my full attention — is not a universal experience. There appears to be an epidemic in the working world of conference calls that are so long and require so little attention that whole games have been designed so people can play them during these calls.

Or at least that’s the message I took from this CNN.com article on “The Facebook games that millions love (and hate).” I just joined Facebook last year (I know, early adopter, right?), and was startled to suddenly hear from various friends about their farms, their mafia wars, and so forth. Games can be lots of fun, and if Farmville brings you pleasure, by all means play it. As John Lennon, or possibly Bertrand Russell, once said, “Time you enjoy wasting, was not wasted.”

But I’d like to argue that if you are playing Farmville during a conference call, this should be interpreted as a sign: Maybe that call wasn’t actually that important to take. Maybe it didn’t need to be scheduled. Maybe everyone didn’t need to be on it. Maybe it could have been shorter. There is no such thing as multi-tasking; it is inefficient single-tasking. If you can play a game during a call, then you are saying that call isn’t worthy of your full attention. And if it isn’t, then why are you on it?

Maybe the answer is that your boss expects it, but then this requires some deeper thinking. Why does your boss not respect your time? Can you change your work situation so your boss will respect it? Or find a different working situation? Or make a convincing case that time spent on conference calls you didn’t add value to is time you’re not working on other projects that will make your company more profitable?

One of the reasons people “work” long hours is that they schedule hours and hours of conference calls or meetings, which then crowd out time for the actual substance of their professional craft. Meetings and calls “feel” like work. But often, this isn’t work, if you define work as activities that are advancing you toward your professional goals–particularly if you can play Farmville at the same time. Better to only take calls that you need to be on, and get home earlier.

Americans watch a lot of television. More than 30 hours a week, according to Nielsen, though time diaries put that number closer to 20 hours (19.33 hours averaged over all Americans; 23.86 if you only include people who watched TV on any given day).

Still, 20 hours is a lot of time. It is the equivalent of a part-time job. Since we spend so much time watching TV, it’s important to understand exactly why we do. The easy answer is that it is pleasurable, but it is a particular kind of pleasure — namely, one that is very easy to incorporate into our lives. Turning on the TV takes no effort, nor does sitting on the couch to watch it. The TV doesn’t care what you look like, or if you only watch for 30 minutes or so. The TV doesn’t care if you don’t pay complete attention, and most shows are accessible, even if you’ve never watched them before.

It’s important to know, though, that while TV is pleasurable, it is not that pleasurable. It scores in the middle on scales of human enjoyment that go from taking the car to get repaired to sex. Unfortunately, since it is so easy to turn on the TV, and since TV is so cheap as entertainment, it winds up crowding out things that would be more pleasurable.

But this suggests that the problem is solvable. TV time is a very easy place to find extra hours if you are not devoting as much time to some other aspect of life as you want.

For instance, instead of working until 7pm, spending an hour with your kids, and then watching TV in the evening, you could work until 5pm, spend 3 hours with your kids, and then make up the work hours after they go to bed.

Instead of getting ready for work in an inefficient fashion because you’re watching the morning shows, you could get up 20 minutes earlier, go on a very brisk short run around your neighborhood, and then power through the morning routine with no distractions.

Instead of losing a weekend afternoon on the couch, you could go to an art museum or do a project you might find meaningful, like building a dollhouse with your daughter, gardening, creating a family photo album, or volunteering at a soup kitchen.

Instead of watching TV before bed, you could use that time to read, or to write in a journal, to have sex or just to go to sleep. The earlier you go to sleep, the better the chances that you’ll have enough energy in the morning to tackle whatever difficult tasks you’re facing.

The easiest way to keep TV from controlling your life is not to have one, but your computer can be just as easily abused. Anyway, I do think that TV can be incorporated into your 168 hours. The key is to make sure that you can control it, rather than it controlling you. This is difficult, because the multi-billion dollar TV industry is all about trying to get you to watch that extra half an hour (and hence be exposed to more marketing messages). Here’s how to keep it in check:

1. First, step back and examine your life. If you’re watching a lot of TV, maybe it’s because there aren’t enough pleasurable, meaningful other things happening in your 168 hours. One recent University of Maryland study found that unhappy people watch 20% more television than happy people. If you don’t like your job, you’ll come home drained and watch TV to perk yourself up. You could try to set limits on TV… or you could get a different job. If you’re working in a job you love, getting enough exercise, focusing on making time to play and read with your kids, going on dates with your spouse, volunteering for a cause you believe in, and filling your time with hobbies that bring you joy, you will naturally watch less TV. Assuming you are doing all that…

2. Choose exactly how many hours you want to watch TV. Seven — one a day — is plenty. If you’re logging your time, one useful challenge might be to see if you can spend more time exercising than you do watching TV. Or only watch TV when you’re using exercise equipment as a way to combine them!

3. Get rid of your extra sets. No one needs a TV in their bedroom. Kids or adults. A high TV-to-person ratio only encourages more consumption.

4. Plan ahead to choose which shows you want to watch. If you only have 7 hours, you will naturally be picky. Is this show meaningful or pleasurable for me? If not, don’t watch it. Simple as that.

5. Buy a DVR and record those 7 hours of shows. That way you can watch them at a time that’s convenient for you and fast forward through the commercials. Snuggle with your kids or partner while you’re watching, and when the show is over, turn it off.

If you want to lose weight, you keep a food diary. If you want to get out of debt, you record your spending. Likewise, if you want to use your time better, you should keep a time log.

But how do you do that?

That’s a question I’ve been asked a lot lately. Here are some instructions:

1. Print up the spreadsheet from My168Hours (scroll down to the PDF at the bottom of the page).
2. Start whenever you want; it doesn’t have to be Monday morning. Now is a good time.
3. Write down what you are doing, in as much detail as you want. “Work” and “wrote up op-ed pitch for USA Today” are both fine, but one gives you more info to work with later.
4. Think of yourself as an attorney billing your time to different projects. Keep the spreadsheet with you. If you forget to record what you’re doing for a while, just approximate the time later.
5. Keep going for 168 hours. You might want to try a second week too, as recording your time is a habit, and building habits takes time.
6. After you’ve recorded 168 hours, break your activities down into categories. How much time did you spend working? Commuting? Interacting with your family? Sleeping? Exercising? Doing personal care (like showering or doing your hair)? Doing housework or household administration? Watching television? Reading?
7. Do these numbers reflect the number of hours you’d like to “bill” to these projects? What do you think would be ideal?
8. Can you change your schedule to get closer to that ideal?