Broken Water Heater Priority System
Treat your priorities like emergencies and time will stretch to fit them
Laura Vanderkam's framework challenges the conventional time management wisdom of saving bits of time here and there. Instead of trying to squeeze productivity from microwave settings and fast-forwarding commercials, she argues that we should treat our priorities as the equivalent of a broken water heater — an emergency that forces us to find time we didn't think we had. Through studying 1,001 days in the lives of extremely busy women, she discovered that when a woman's water heater broke, she found seven hours in her week to deal with it — the same seven hours she would have said were impossible to find for training or mentoring. The key insight is that time is highly elastic: we cannot make more of it, but it will stretch to accommodate what we choose to put into it. The framework involves writing next year's performance review and family holiday letter now to identify six to ten goals, breaking them into actionable steps, and then scheduling them into your week during Friday afternoon planning sessions.
- Time is highly elastic and will stretch to accommodate what you choose to put into it
- We don't build the lives we want by saving time — we build the lives we want and then time saves itself
- Small moments can have great power when used for bits of joy rather than defaulting to the phone
- Write Next Year's Performance Review NowPretend it is the end of next year and you have had an absolutely amazing year professionally. Identify three to five things that made it so amazing. This forward-looking exercise clarifies what actually matters to your career rather than just reacting to what shows up in your inbox day after day.
- Write Next Year's Family Holiday Letter NowPretend it is the end of next year and it has been an amazing year for you and the people you care about. Identify three to five personal things that made it so amazing. This gives you clarity on personal priorities like relationships, health, and experiences that often get crowded out by work demands.
- Break Goals Into Doable StepsTake your combined list of six to ten professional and personal goals and decompose them into concrete actionable steps. For writing a family history, that means reading other family histories, preparing interview questions, and scheduling conversations with relatives. For running a 5K, it means finding a race, creating a training plan, and digging out your running shoes.
- Schedule Priorities First on Friday AfternoonsUse Friday afternoons as a low-opportunity-cost time to plan the coming week. Create a three-category priority list covering career, relationships, and self, with two to three items in each category. Then look at the full week ahead and slot these priorities in before other obligations fill the space.
- Reframe Language From Scarcity to ChoiceReplace the phrase 'I don't have time' with 'it's not a priority' to reveal the truth about your choices. If you would dust your blinds for a hundred thousand dollars, time is not the issue. This language shift forces honesty about what you are actually choosing to prioritize, reminding you that with 168 hours in a week, even after work and sleep, you have 72 hours for other things.
When her water heater broke, she immediately found seven hours to deal with plumbers, cleanup crews, and aftermath. By treating her training goal with the same urgency as the emergency, she discovered the hours always existed but were being allocated to lower-priority activities by default.
Rather than saying she doesn't have time, she says everything she does is her choice. She reframes obligations as priorities and explicitly acknowledges what she is choosing not to do, treating personal well-being as equal to business demands.
Laura Vanderkam developed this framework while studying time diary projects tracking 1,001 days in the lives of extremely busy women. The pivotal insight came from a woman whose water heater broke on a Wednesday night, forcing her to find seven hours in her week for plumbers, cleanup, and repairs — the exact amount of time she would have insisted was impossible to find for personal goals. This pattern repeated across her research: time is not found by saving bits here and there, but by choosing to treat priorities as emergencies.