Hello Monday with Jessi Hempel

Laura Vanderkam tracks her time in 30-minute increments and has been for over a decade. That’s 336 half-hour blocks over the course of a week. After reviewing thousands of people’s schedules, she finds, again and again, that most of us are sitting on more time than we think. We just have to shift our mindset to believe it. The time management expert and author of the new book Big Time: A Simple Path to Time Abundance returns to Hello Monday to talk about what it actually takes to move from time scarcity to abundance.

In this episode, Jessi and Laura discuss:

Why "I don't have enough time" is not just inaccurate, it's actively making things worse

The math that surprises everyone: what a full-time worker actually has left after work and sleep each week

Why we're bad narrators of our own experience and how to get better data

The biggest blind spots in a week: weekday evenings and weekends

How email and digital communication expand to fill all available space and what to do about it

The one-hour a week experiment that could change how you feel about your job

Why tiny tweaks beat lifestyle overhauls every time

How to carve out "play and possibility time"

The right way to think about learning something new at work, including AI

How to recast ambition when climbing the ladder no longer feels like enough

Laura's September time-tracking challenge and why she's been doing it every year since 2015

Follow Laura Vanderkam and Jessi Hempel on LinkedIn.

Join Laura’s time-tracking challenge here

Join us for Office Hours, Wednesday at 3pm EST

Most of us try to avoid conflict. But done right, fighting can be a path to stronger teams and healthier communities. On this episode of Hello Monday, Priya Parker makes the case for embracing “healthy heat” and learning how to navigate conflict with care.

Priya Parker is a conflict resolution facilitator and author of The Art of Fighting: The Transformative Power of Conflict. Drawing on her work with teams, organizations, communities and groups, she shares practical ways to face conflict effectively.

Jessi and Priya discuss:

Why conflict is often a sign of relevance, and why we tend to fight with the people and groups we care about most

The difference between healthy heat, unhealthy peace and destructive conflict

How healthy conflict can create connection, clarity, better decisions and stronger teams

Why our “fighting muscles” have atrophied, particularly after the pandemic

How digital communication can flatten or exacerbate conflict rather than help us hold productive tension

How to become an artful fighter by approaching conflict with curiosity instead of immediately trying to shut it down

How to identify “hairline fractures” before they grow into larger rifts within teams and communities

How to determine whether a conflict is worth facing

The role of an outside facilitator in helping teams navigate conflict and develop practical conflict-resolution skills

Why preparing your body for conflict matters, including breathing, grounding and learning to stay physically relaxed under pressure

How listening can transform conflict and why staying in the heat long enough to hear each other can create breakthroughs

A lesson from the Canlis restaurant team: how treating feedback as “an investment in you” can help people listen without becoming defensive

What the Seattle Seahawks can teach us about culture and hairline fractures

Why learning to gather and fight well is increasingly important as AI reshapes the workplace

Follow Jessi Hempel and Priya Parker on LinkedIn

Join us for Office Hours, Wednesday at 3pm EST

For a lot of people, work feels especially chaotic right now.. Projects start and don't finish. Layoffs happen, then reorgs, then new strategies, and through all of it, managers are expected to have the answers. Caroline Webb spent 25 years coaching leaders through exactly this kind of turbulence. She's a behavioral scientist, a former economist and the author of the new book Leadership Intelligence: Science-Backed Strategies for Mastering 21 Everyday Management Challenges. This week she joins Jessi to talk about what the science of the human brain tells us about leading through uncertainty.

In this episode, Jessi and Caroline discuss:

Why the current moment hits a stress trifecta — demanding, uncontrollable and unpleasant — and what that does to your team's brains

The "know-be-do" framework: how to lead people through uncertainty when facts are in short supply

Why naming how you feel is one of the most powerful things a leader can do and what affect labeling actually does in the brain

What "measured authenticity" means, and why "terrified" is not a word you want your manager to use

How to be honest with your team when you know more than you can say

Why letting projects die quietly is one of the most demoralizing things a manager can do, and what to do instead

What Astro (Google X's moonshot factory) does when it kills a project, and why it works

The "when-then" method for taking the sting out of worst-case scenarios before they happen

"Compassionate clarity": what it means in practice when layoff season arrives

Why walking people out of the building immediately is almost never necessary and what a seasoned CHRO said about it

Follow Caroline Webb and Jessi Hempel on LinkedIn

Join us for Hello Monday Office Hours, Wednesday at 3pm EST

Listen to Caroline’s previous Hello Monday episode on how to have a good day at a bad job

We spend a lot of energy trying to optimize our time, but what happens when we're forced to surrender to it? Writer, meditation teacher and lifetime student of Buddhism Sebene Selassie has been living with cancer for more than twenty years. In that time, she's learned something most of us spend a lifetime avoiding: how little control we actually have, and how to find joy anyway. This is the third and final episode in our month-long series on time. We’ve discussed how we spend our minutes, our days, our months and our years. Today you’ll hear about how we make the most of all of it..

In this episode, Jessi and Sebene discuss:

Why a cancer diagnosis at 34 became the entry point to a deeper spiritual life, and eventually, to teaching

The tight relationship between fear and control, and how Sebene has spent twenty years slowly loosening her grip on both

What Sebene’s ticking clock has taught her about the present moment

The difference between joy and happiness, and why joy is available even in the hardest moments

Why meditation isn't about feeling better, and what the saccharine corporate version gets wrong

The paradox at the heart of Sebene’s book You Belong: A Call for Connection

How grasping for time is often just grasping for control, and what we miss when we do this

What it means to show up to life openhearted, fully as yourself

Follow Sebene Selassie and Jessi Hempel on LinkedIn.

Join us this Wednesday at 3pm EST for the return of Office Hours!

Being busy and being productive are not the same thing. Cal Newport, computer science professor at Georgetown and author of Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, has spent years making that case. This is the second of three episodes from the archive that we're revisiting this month on the subject of time. In it, Cal joins Jessi to zoom out and ask: what does it really mean to get meaningful work done over the course of our weeks, our months, and even our years?

In this episode, Jessi and Cal discuss:

Why "pseudo-productivity" — using visible activity as a proxy for real work — was always a bad idea, and why mobile computing made it unsustainable

How the pandemic pushed knowledge work past a breaking point

The administrative overhead trap: why agreeing to too many things at once is slowing you down

How to say no to new work without actually saying no, and why transparency is the key

Why boredom is essential

What your phone has to do with short-circuiting the most human productivity tool we have

Cal's rule for his kids on smartphones and social media, and the age he thinks unrestricted internet access becomes safe

Why doing fewer things at once will get you to the finish line faster

What AI tools like ChatGPT are actually good for, and what Cal is waiting for them to do instead

The difference between technology that helps you do things faster and technology that takes things off your plate entirely

Follow Jessi Hempel on LinkedIn.