I Know How She Does It

            This is the great time-management book describing strategies used by successful women to have it all in life: successful career and quality family time. Author of this book is Laura Vanderkam, speaker and writer, of the following books: “What the Most Successful People Do Before Breakfast”, “168 Hours: You Have More Time Than You Think”, and “All the Money in the World: What the Happiest People Know About Wealth”. The book “I know how she does it” is based on Mosaic project that is time diary study of 1001 days in lives of professional women and their families. Including criteria for women to participate in this study were that they earn more than $100,000 per year and that they have at least one child under age eighteen living at home. The task of those women was to keep track of their time and record it in the spreadsheet over period of one week. 

            This book is divided intro three parts: work, home and self. In the first part author writes about importance of finding out how much hours we really work and gives advice about how to manage our working hours, how to plan in advance, and about part time work. In the second part, author gives great advice about how to spend quality family time, and offers some good childcare strategies. In the third part, author writes about importance of self-care and gives advice about how to incorporate good night sleep and exercise in daily life. 

            In every part of the book author gives some of the participants’ time logs. It’s amazing and inspiring to see how they manage to work every day, have quality family time, take care about themselves etc. I especially like author’s insight that we have 168 in the week and even if we sleep work 60 hours per week and sleep 50 hours we still have 58 hours left, which is plenty of time to do many things. Also, I like how author argues that we can have it all with good time management skills, and she shows real life examples of this. 

            I recommend this book to everybody whether you think that you have good time management skills or not. I recommend this book especially to those people that “are busy, and do not have time for reading this book”, you will learn a lot from it. I took so many notes during the reading, but some of my favorites are: 

            “Time is elastic. It stretches to accommodate what we need or want to do with it”;

            “Leisure time is a choice, and celebrating life’s fullness means not only making leisure a priority, but acknowledging that is happening, and relishing one’s own sweet time in the nail salon when it does”;

            “The happiest people know that in mosaics of our lives, there is space for both work and family, and sleep and our own interests”;

          “In life, you can be unhappy, or you can change things. And even if there are things you can’t change, you can often change your mindset and question assumptions that are making life less good than it could be”.