Meeting planners are very good at scheduling, planning speakers, lunches and educational sessions up to the very minute in an effort to manipulate time and ensure smooth transitions during an event or meeting.
However, many planners are so busy that they barely have any free time to schedule personal activities for themselves.
In the TED Talk, “How to Gain Control of Your Free Time,” Laura Vanderkam addresses how people spend their lives, often drastically overestimating their commitments while underestimating the time they have for themselves. She uses the example of a busy workingwoman having to find an unexpected seven hours of time to fix a broken water heater. This proves Vanderkam’s point that “time is highly elastic” and that the key to time management is treating priorities as the equivalent of that broken water heater.
“We cannot make more time, but time will stretch to accommodate what we choose to put into it,” says Vanderkam. “Over the long run we have the power to fill our lives with the things that deserve to be there.”
Watch the TED Talk here to learn more about how to manipulate time in a way that can be used to your advantage.
