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You have more time than you think. Here are 5 science-backed ways to find it

There are 8,760 hours in a year. You can spend them better.

If there’s one thing Americans can agree on — beyond the fact we hate data centers and love Dolly Parton — it’s that we’re busier than ever, and it’s all too much. We don’t have time to socialize, we don’t have time to sleep, and we don’t have time for fun. We’re a uniquely overworked and overbooked people who now get more joy out of canceling plans than we do following through with them.

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Except that narrative is not quite true. For one thing, Americans actually work far fewer hours than our great-grandparents did, with annual hours worked in the US falling from around 2,300 per worker in the 1920s to about 1,750 today; the average American work week is now 34 hours, not 40. If we were truly so ridiculously busy, we probably wouldn’t be averaging more than two and a half hours a day in front of the TV.

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We all get the same amount of time in a year: 8,760 hours. Subtract about 1,750 hours for work and around 2,700 hours for sleep, and that still leaves over 4,300 waking, non-working hours. And while some of us have responsibilities that occupy much of our “free” time — and some of us decidedly don’t — almost all of us have more free time than we may realize.

That’s the argument of Laura Vanderkam, a time management expert and the author of the new book Big Time: A Simple Path to Time Abundance. She aims to show readers how to abandon our scarcity-based mindset around time in favor of something much more spacious. “Everybody has some discretionary time, even if it’s not as much as they want,” she told me. “I can’t promise it’s time well spent, but I can promise it’s there.”

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Vanderkam knows because she has the receipts. She’s been tracking her own time in 30-minute chunks since 2015, and has helped countless people learn to get more out of the time they have by better understanding how they’re using it. (Having known her since college, I can also say that Vanderkam has always been preternaturally good at time management — she managed to write two separate graduation theses her senior year, when most of us slackers got by with one.)

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