By Phoebe Farag Mikhail

Read till the end to find out how to win a giveaway copy with a SIGNED BOOKPLATE of Off the Clock by Laura Vanderkam!

I have not stopped talking about Laura Vanderkam’s new book Off the Clock: Feel Less Busy While Getting More Done on social media, so now it’s time to deliver on the review I have been promising. I have been a long-time fan of Laura Vanderkam’s writing on productivity and time management, and reviewed her previous book, I Know How She Does It, on my blog here. I have gifted I Know How She Does It to several mom friends as a gift when they start navigating the back to work world with children. I enjoy her productivity and time management advice because I can sense from her writing and her podcast with fellow blogger and doctor Sarah Hart-Unger, “The Best of Both Worlds,” that we come from a similar worldview about how we understand and value time. I also connect with her experiences because she is also a working mother—of four children, the youngest still a toddler.

So I could not wait to get my hands on her new release, Off the Clock, and was thrilled to receive an advance copy from her to review. The book did not disappoint. This is one of the best books she’s written, both from a content perspective and a writing perspective. This is not just a book about making time or being sure to take vacations, but it is really a book about how to live are very full and meaningful lives with our families and friends in the limited time we have. In the book she offers seven suggestions for how to do so, based on a time perception and time diary study she did of almost one hundred people who have families with children and who work full time. She calls them “the secrets of people who have all the time in the world.” They are:

• Tend your garden.
• Make life memorable.
• Don’t fill time.
• Linger.
• Invest in your happiness.
• Let it go.
• People are a good use of time.

In the “Linger” chapter, Vanderkam writes,

Off the clock at the Cherry Blossoms in Branch Book Park, photograph taken at dusk as I lingered over the beauty.

“… lingering isn’t just about ending the rushing caused by knowing you are supposed to be somewhere ten miles away and you aren’t even in your car. It is about actively savoring the present, and thus stretching your experience of time.”

I tried to “stretch my experience of time” recently when I took my two older children to a Cub Scouts activity at a park. Usually when I take my son or my daughter to Scouts, I bring my laptop with me and sit in the car or the meeting room to work. This time the older Cub Scouts were leading an obstacle course for younger scouts at a nearby park.

Since the weather was great and the event was outdoors, I made a deliberate decision not to bring work with me. I left our toddler with my husband and took the older two kids, and instead of work reading I brought a magazine to browse as the kids played. When my children were done with the Scouts activity, they enjoyed some ice pops and then we went over to the nearby playground. The magazine reading was pleasant but not as intense as a book, nor as commanding as a smart phone, so I never felt interrupted if my children wanted me to push them on a swing or walk with them to a specific area. I often put my reading down just to watch my kids laugh as they spun around the round-about, lingering on the sight of their fun. Being intentional about the time I spent with my children there, instead of stressing about work, or trying to “multitask,” turned what could seem like a chore into an enjoyable outing for all of us. We all came home refreshed.

Although Off the Clock is a secular book, I still somehow found reading this book this book very spiritual, because it caused me to reflect on how I use my time, reconsider some of the ways in which I spend my time, and gave me ideas and tools to make changes. One of my favorite sections of this book, “invest in your happiness,” discusses joy as a “discipline,” in Vanderkam’s words. When struggling with the various challenges of life,

Relaxing, or perhaps reflecting, while reading Off the Clock

“The discipline of joy requires holding in the mind simultaneously that this too shall pass and that this too is good.”

She shares several stories about people undergoing challenges and somehow finding joy: a friend undergoing chemotherapy, another friend that runs ultramarathons, and her own struggle with a rambunctious toddler that regularly wakes her up before dawn and is capable of climbing out of his crib. I love how Vanderkam is quite realistic about all this. After describing a particularly difficult morning waking her up at 4:30 am:

“I wish I could write some glib personal essay with a turning point along the lines of “then he hugged me and said ‘I love you, Mommy’ and it was all worth it!” Life does not conform to a narrative arc. He said “I love you” and it was wonderful, and I was (am) grateful to have a healthy, happy child, but he was up at 4:30 A.M. I would have been grateful for health and happiness if he got up at 6:00 A.M. too.”

Nonetheless, Vanderkam manages to find joy. When her toddler wakes her at 4:30 am while they were on vacation, she took him on a walk to the boardwalk to enjoy the sun rise over the Atlantic. “There were long periods of my adult life when I was never up for the sunrise, so seeing those bright streaks was a prize that was possible due only to my son’s insomnia.”

Off the Clock is not a short book, but I read it quickly because it is very readable, making it a great summer read during a vacation, before a vacation–to help you be intentional about making the most out of it–and after a vacation to help you savor it.

Subscribe to my email newsletter, share a moment you have savored recently in the comments below, and you will be entered to win a copy of Off the Clock with a signed bookplate! Giveaway closes at 11:59 pm EST on June 14, 2018. You are free to unsubscribe to my email list at any time.

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