Ashley Whillans is the Volpert Family Associate Professor at the Harvard Business School. Professor Whillans earned her PhD in Social Psychology from the University of British Columbia. Her research seeks to understand the associations between time, money, and subjective wellbeing. She is particularly interested in understanding how individual, organizational and societal factors like gender, workplace policies, and income inequality predict how people value and spend time and money, with possible implications for well-being.

Technology has made our lives easier but it has also fragmented our leisure time, creating a near-universal feeling that we have too much to do and not enough time to do it. Today we speak with Harvard Business School Assistant Professor Ashley Whillans about how our views of money and experience of time poverty impact our sense of well-being. We open our conversation by exploring the idea of time poverty, with Ashley unpacking the many factors that contribute towards feeling time-poor. Diving into the specifics, we talk about how different income groups experience time poverty and how these feelings are influenced by job satisfaction. After looking into differences in how we value time and money, Ashley shares research into how lower-income women benefit as much from being given extra time as they do from being given money. We then discuss the predictors of whether someone will prioritize time or money before chatting about the best practices and tips that will save you time and boost your well-being. Later, we hear Ashley’s insights into why wealth doesn’t lead to happiness and the need to engage in meaningful activities that increase the value of your time. With such radical changes in our work environments, we reflect on how work-from-home often deepens our feelings of time poverty. We wrap our discussion with Ashley by touching on retiring early versus working for longer, why you don’t need wealth to feel consistent happiness, and how you can incorporate time poverty into your financial planning. As Ashley’s research shows, money can be as integral as time in living a happier, more fulfilling life. Tune in to hear more about the connection between time poverty and your well-being.

Key Points From This Episode:

• Introducing today’s guest, Assistant Professor Ashley Whillans. [0:00:02]

• Ashley unpacks the concept of time poverty. [0:02:24]

• Exploring the relationship between time poverty and well-being. [0:03:17]

• Whether financially wealthy people feel less time-poor. [0:06:58]

• How job satisfaction impacts dissatisfaction and feelings of being time-poor. [0:10:00]

• The data underpinning why people are so bad at valuing their time. [0:10:59]

• Why, for lower-income earners, it can be valuable to trade money for time. [0:13:37]

• What predisposes people to feel more time-poor than others. [0:16:12]

• The causal link between preferences for money, time, and well-being. [0:21:51]

• Hear how Ashley designs her studies to get truthful answers. [0:23:22]

• How you can think of time while boosting your well-being. [0:26:20]

• Ashley shares her best practices for maximizing your time. [0:28:22]

• How our mindsets can influence our sense of time poverty. [0:31:08]

• Time-focused versus money-focused and why money doesn’t lead to happiness. [0:33:14]

• Tips in making small changes that increase the value of your time. [0:37:08]

• How work-from-home has affected our time-poverty. [0:38:28]

• We hear Ashley’s views on the value of working longer to have a more secure retirement. [0:40:49]

• Why you don’t need to be wealthy to experience consistent happiness. [0:44:17]

• Incorporating time poverty into your financial planning. [0:46:06]

• How Ashley first became interested in time poverty and happiness. [0:47:46]

• Ashley shares how she defines success in her life. [0:49:47]

Read The Transcript:

This is awesome to have you. We're so grateful. To kick it off, the concept of time poverty is central to a lot of the thinking and research that you've done. To get us all on the same baseline starting point, what exactly is time poverty?

So I'm a social psychologist by training. I look at and define time poverty as the psychological experience of having too many things to do and not enough time in the day to do them. Unsurprisingly, this feeling is very pervasive in data that I've collected in North American samples, but really, all over the world. I'll use this one data set as an example. 80% of working Americans reported feeling like they had too many things to do in a day and not enough time to do them. That's true, regardless of where you live, how much you work, and how much money you make. These feelings of being overwhelmed by the demands of work and life are really universal.

Ashley, what's the relationship between time poverty and well-being?

The reason I'm interested in studying it as a happiness researcher is that people who report feeling time-poor, also report lower levels of happiness, more stress, lower quality social relationships are more likely to get divorced, less likely to exercise, less likely to eat healthy. My PhD students and I published a review paper in Nature of Human Behavior last year, documenting all the pernicious effects of the psychological experience of time poverty. Really, truly, there are many.

It makes sense, because we feel overwhelmed by the demands of work in life. It's hard to disconnect. It's hard to check in, be present, exercise, cook well. We can really see that in the data. In one data set, another different one that we analyzed of  3.1 million Americans, we found that time poverty had a stronger negative effect on happiness than being unemployed. We can see again that the effect sizes are not trivial when it comes to these feelings of stress. They've been on the rise all over the world, not just in the US, and they are coming at a cost to our happiness.

Wow, those are just a mind-blowing statistics. It's hard to believe it is that bad, but it really is.

I mean, that's what people report. There's a lot of social, psychological factors that make us feel overwhelmed by the demands of work and life. You can point to a number of factors over the last couple of decades in terms of our constant connection to technology that fragments our leisure. Even though we have more time available to us subjectively, because technology, of course, does save us time, it also takes time away and undermines our enjoyment of the leisure experiences that we have.

Even if we have slightly more leisure today than we did in the 1950s, it feels less enjoyable, because we're constantly getting pulled out of the present moment. Into all the other things we could or should be doing. Our leisure is constantly disrupted. Brigid Schulte has a term that I love that relates to this experience, which is time confetti, so our time is fragmented into all of these distractible units of time that make us feel stressed out.

Anytime we transition between work and home and home and work, even if we're not making a physical transition, but just a mental transition mediated by our phones. This can lead to goal conflict and make us feel stressed out. If we're trying to sit on the couch and enjoy a nice evening with our partner, or families and we get a work email, we wonder if we should go back to our desk. Then we simultaneously wonder if we’re being a bad partner, or a bad parent for having that thought. So our technology really does create a lot of goal conflict, which creates feelings of time stress.

Then of course, there's financial uncertainty, which leads us to prioritize money and productivity at all costs. There's changing norms in our organizations to look at work hours and constant responsibility as a proxy for commitment. Then there's our own psychological misgivings; we're not great at saying no and we often over-schedule our future time.

When you start to unpack the myriad of different factors that lead us to focus a little bit too much on work and not enough on leisure, the data I think, becomes a little less surprising. It is pretty hard to feel time affluent in the modern society that we live in.

Crazy to think about. Technology has given us more leisure time, but it's taken away, I guess, the quality of that leisure time.

Yeah. Social psychologists and organizational scholars call this paradox the autonomy paradox. Technologies boast to free us from the office, and yet, we take our offices everywhere we go. Although we have technically more freedom, we're also now under this assumption that we need to be more constantly responsive to work at all times of the day and night.

Do people who have more financial wealth feel less time-poor?

You would assume, so this question is really interesting. One, you would assume that people who have more money could potentially buy themselves out of chores and would do that at a higher rate. The best data by Hamermesh, Lee and some of their colleagues, or economists show that actually, time pressure increases as the economic value of your time increases. We know that things that are valuable are also perceived in our minds as scarce. As we make more money, our time becomes more financially valuable and more scarce. And we actually feel more stressed out as compared to less.

There is a bit of a quadratic pattern in the data. So you do see — and Hal Hershfield has some data on this with their collaborators, that people who are working a lot of hours and who are not working any hours, report feeling greater stress and unhappiness for different reasons. If you're not working very many hours, you don't feel productive with your time and that can come at a psychological cost.

In my data, I'm looking at employed individuals across the socio-economic spectrum. Not underemployed, or unemployed, but people who are fully employed on their own terms, whatever that means for them. They report that they're fully employed. What I see is that time-poverty is the strongest for those at the lowest and highest income bracket. Again, for different reasons. Our review paper unpacks this a little bit, but at lower ends of the economic distribution, employed adults have — might work multiple jobs, they might be more likely to be single parents, they might have to commute long distances to their place of employment, because they have to live in a cheaper neighborhood. And maybe they don't have reliable public transportation, and so it takes them a lot longer to run errands or get to work on a daily basis. 

There's a lot of social structural factors that are making individuals who are lower on the socio-economic status ladder feel time-poor. Then at higher ends of the income distribution, not only is it partially psychological, so people feel their time is more valuable. We might have more “freedom” in our jobs when we start to make more money. We have autonomy over how we spend our time, but there's much more expectation that we put our work first above everything else and that's what we sacrifice to have that autonomy.

Whereas, blue collar workers are not given a lot of autonomy, and that contributes to their stress. Because their shifts are constantly moving around, or they don't know when they're going to work next. They have to work multiple jobs and try to create this patchwork of hours. High-income, or white collar jobs, or really, the expectation is you'll be working all the time, anytime I need you and at the cost of your personal health and your leisure, because I trust you to work wherever I'm going to also force you to work, whenever and all the time.

What if you love your job? Or is that just people talking themselves into that? If you love your job, do you perceive less poverty?

We do still see the effects of time stress, even for people who enjoy their work. This is consistent with some evidence, suggesting that even for people who love their jobs, when you start working 60 or 70 hours a week, it's still coming at the cost of other things that are important for happiness. Work is one facet of our lives and there's many other factors that you need; proper sleep, health, social relationships, leisure that are critical for happiness.

Even if you love your job, if you're only focusing on that one element of your life, then it's unlikely you're going to reach your maximum happiness and meaning potential, because you're only allocating all of your energy to one aspect of your life. Usually, that's coming at the expense of others.

Wow. You mentioned time stress increasing with income. Are people good at valuing their time? Because it sounds like, in that case, income increasing time stress, because people recognize that their time is more valuable. But are people good at valuing their time?

People might recognize their time is more valuable, but they also don't realize that time is something that you can give yourself more of. There is a bit of a disconnect in the data. This is an interesting point. We don't see, for example, in our nationally representative samples in the US, that people who are at the top end of the distribution are more likely to outsource, or spend money to save themselves time, for example. Once we start getting out to people with 2 or 3 million dollars of net worth, then you start seeing rates of outsourcing somewhat higher, so people spending more money on paid help and chores.

Still, it’s not 100%. Even though, people in our survey say 99% of them can think of something they'd like to spend money to not have to do anymore. Even in our very wealthy samples, only about 58%, 60% say they actually spend money in that way in a typical month. No, we do systematically undervalue our time, over-value our money. There's also been some great studies by Dilip Soman and others showing that, whereas when we lose financial resources, because money is very concrete and tangible, this feels viscerally bad. You get double-charged for your favorite latte at a coffee shop. You get very upset about it, even if it's really only a $5 loss.

When it comes to small losses of time, 30 minutes or an hour, we don't track time in the same way. We're not as careful with it. It's not until we start losing 10 months of work on a project, do we become equally as upset as getting double charged for a $5 latte. I mean, some of the examples aren't quite as stark as the one I just presented, but I think it gives a good illustration, because time is hard to track, it's more of this abstract concept. Because psychologically, we think we're going to have more time tomorrow than we do today. Whereas, the value of our money is relatively constant across time.

A $1,000 is good to us now and we think it's going to be equally good to us in two weeks, or three months from now. 30 minutes of time is basically only good for me today, because I'm in the middle of a busy work day. 30 minutes in two weeks from now doesn't seem that important. There are a lot of psychological barriers that get in the way of us trading money for time, for example, or being better about protecting our future time, in part because we always think we're going to have more tomorrow and we don't track it as carefully as we do our finances.

You made the point in the book, that that is even true at lower income levels, correct? Where at lower income levels, it can be even more worthwhile to trade money for time.

Yeah. I mean, that's a little bit more of a tricky area, right? Is it really up to an individual to spend some of their discretionary income, to spend money to save time, if the reason why they're so time-poor is a systemic problem? I've started to move more — the last chapter of my book gets into this in some of my interventions that I've been running since starting on faculty at HBS — have been focused more on this policy question. If we know that individuals are struggling to make ends meet are not just financially constrained, but also time-poor, can government services reduce paperwork burdens? Cass Sunstein talks a lot about this.

I've been running experiments in Kenya, in India, where my research dollars go a lot further and I can award large amounts of cash, large amounts of time savings. In a recent experiment that we ran, I recruited 1,500 working women living in an informal settlement in Kenya, making about 10 US dollars a day, struggling to make ends meet. Work full-time, have kids at home. We randomly assigned them to either receive cash, time, or to show up fee-only, where they just get paid for their surveys.

The value of the time-saving and the cash was about three days of labor for them. What we observed is cash and time performed similarly. So they both significantly improved well-being, significantly reduced stress, significantly improved relationship satisfaction. There was actually more of what we see as a “hangover effect” after the time saving ended, suggesting that women maybe were getting some additional utility from the time saving. Because when we took it away, their satisfaction dropped more.

This is just one study of many that I hope to conduct that makes the point that policymakers, when we ask them, “What would you reward these women with? What would be effective at improving happiness?” In this context, they always say money. We're not saying, no, don't give them money. We're saying, but also, think about potentially removing time burdens. I think we neglect time burdens in our own life. We are time-poor and we make bad decisions sometimes, or fail to alleviate our own time poverty. Yet policymakers, managers, decision-makers, are also neglecting time on behalf of their constituents.

I think in the case of lower-income individuals and how we can best serve them, it's about thinking, again, more broadly about the fundamental needs we have. Not just financial, but also temporal.

It sounds like this, a lot of it, I mean, we were just talking about maybe more structural economic issues, but a lot of it sounds like, maybe more in the developed world, I guess, more of a psychological issue than an economic issue. Are some people more predisposed to feel time-poor than others?

Yeah. We have a lot of data on this question, because I've been looking generally at this question of; are there people who are walking around the world who are more oriented toward time, as opposed to money and productivity? We ask people really simple question, are you more like Taylor? Are you more like Morgan? Taylor who values time more than money, is willing to give up money to have more time? Morgan values money more than time, is willing to give up time to have more money? It's just a really rough way. We use many versions of this question across studies.

What we observed is that people who are more like Taylor, and they're very focused on prioritizing time in their lives, report greater happiness, less stress, they spend more time socially connected with others, even if that means a brief interaction with a colleague in a hall. People who are time first, time focused are more likely to do that.

Then what demographic factors predict that? Well, personality doesn't seem to predict whether you're more time focused or more money focused. Interestingly, materialism, just how much you like stuff, nice things, fancy cars, status, enhancing goods, that slightly predicts money focus. But the relationship is really weak. What does predict money focus more than a lot of the demographic variables in these data sets that we've collected is this feeling of financial uncertainty. We tend to see that people who are older, or more established in their careers are more likely to say that they prioritize time over money.

We don't see cohort differences. I sometimes get asked, “Were younger people more time focused?” No, because they're earlier on in their careers, and they've got debt to worry about and pay off. Actually, no. We don't see any striking cohort differences that align with this idea that millennials and younger generations care more about time. They care about purpose, but they also are very practical, because the economic situation they're in is quite challenging. We do see that people who feel more confident about their financial futures are the ones that are more likely, more willing to prioritize time, as opposed to money or productivity.

We also see country level differences, which are super fascinating. My post-doc and I published a paper last year. We've just plotted, there's this question in the World Values Survey, which is a pretty globally representative. Not perfect, but a pretty good representative survey of 90 countries. This data set had what proportion of respondents value, leisure overwork? We just looked at that as a predictor for the subjective well-being of nations in these data, which was really fun. We plotted all these countries on this map.

Basically, what you see is that countries with better social security and social safety nets, like Scandinavian countries and Nordic countries, they're all clustered up at the top. They have the highest proportion of respondents that are able to say and do report valuing leisure over work. They also tend to be happiest. This was regardless of country-level GDP. It doesn't matter how rich the countries are. It seems to be more about feeling, like, you can take time, because there's the social support in the community that you need for childcare. Or if you take a break from the workforce, to get re-entered into the workforce, that does seem to enable people to feel they can prioritize time and as a result, be less time stressed.

One other point, sorry, that I'll mention really quickly is the way we're paid also influences our time stress. We bill by the hour, we become more mindful of what our leisure costs us. We engage in leisure and are more stressed out and less happy as a result.

Wow. There was no other causality you could find between preference for time versus money, like where you were brought up, where you went to school, family situations?

The country level data is the closest thing about geographics. We have a little bit of data now from a US representative sample. Actually, quite a lot of evidence. I think it's six studies. That's half a million people, showing that in areas where there are stronger work norms in the US, so that's historically Protestant areas, or areas where your average person that's similar to you is working a lot of hours, we do see stronger work norms there. We also see, so people have a preference to prioritize work at the expense of leisure. We also see in those data that people in high work norm areas drive less satisfaction from leisure activities.

It's not that they're necessarily engaging, unless they just get less enjoyment out of it, maybe because of these guilt factors, because the opportunity costs of them taking a break are higher. We're still trying to understand the mechanisms there. We do see some geographic variability.

One other point that we have a little bit of data on is if you grew up under high-income inequality, regardless of how much money your parents made, this uncertainty in the environment before the age of 12, where you just saw a lot of really rich, a lot of really poor people. That does predict your money preference well into adulthood. People who grew up with seeing a lot of income inequality in their neighborhoods were more likely to prioritize money. Even if it came at the expense of social relationships 10 or 15 years later. Even controlling for their current social status. There is some upbringing factor that does seem to play into these data as well. It's multifaceted. There's many predictors of whether or not people are going to prioritize time or money.

Is there causality going between preference for time or money and well-being, all else equal?

Yes. We have pretty close to causal evidence for this general preference. It is more of a stable personality characteristic that we observe in the data. At least, people's responses to be more time-focused, or more money-focused is relatively stable over even two to three-year testing intervals. It's a pretty stable value that people have in life. We do see that in longitudinal data, that people who value time when they're making a major life decision — so college students graduating in their senior year who value time, choose jobs for more intrinsically motivated reasons. So they focus less on money. They focus more on enjoyment.

That actually increases their happiness over the course of a two to three-year period. Controlling for baseline levels of happiness, people who value time, that guides their decision after graduation. That puts them on an upward trajectory for happiness over the course of two to three years. That's pretty close to causal. It's not perfect. Obviously, it's not a randomized control experiment, because it's really hard to randomly assign people that have different values, or mindsets.

I've tried that before. It was a failed grad school project. I'll never try it again. It does provide pretty close to causal evidence. Then we do of course, have experimental data showing that randomly assigning people to spend money on a time-saving purchase versus a material purchase causally reduces stress and improves happiness. Spending money to save time does causally promote happiness and reduce time stress.

Wow. How do you determine, as it was interesting in your recent interview with Dan Harris, where you talked about how people want to ask, well, typically say that they're more a Taylor than a Morgan? It's perceived to be better to be time-focused than money-focused. How do you ask questions in such a way that you get an honest answer?

The whole reason that I devised these scenario studies where I'm like, “Are you more like Taylor, or more like Morgan?” Like, these fictional characters, is so that it doesn't feel judgmental. So people are less likely to engage in social desirable responding when they're thinking about other people and who they're more like, than when they're thinking about themselves. If I asked you, what do you value? Do you value money or people? People are like, “No. I like other things. I don’t value money. Why would I —” They feel a little bit defensive.

We also ask a series of scenario questions. We asked this overall evaluation. “In general, how do you make your decisions, more with time in mind, more with money in mind?” Then, we're also asking and one way that you can try to identify for yourself is look to your decisions. How do you usually make a decision? If you make a small consumer decision, like buying your next set of essential household items, do you spend hours researching for the best deal on Amazon? When you're buying gas, do you drive for 10, 15 minutes out of your way to find the cheapest deal at the pump?

If so, you're probably a little bit more money-focused when it comes to consumer decisions. It's not necessarily a bad thing. I don't make prescriptive normative judgments about what people should do. Everyone has different preferences. Everyone has different goals that they're prioritizing, but it's important to be mindful of the decisions that you make that involve time and money trade-offs and ask yourself, “Did that really save me enough money to be worth the time cost?”

For example, researching things on the internet. The average American spends, I think the statistic is two hours researching a consumer purchase worth $100 or less. It can even be more. Some people are spending two or three hours, four hours researching a consumer purchase of $100 or less.

If you're making some difference between the $2 and the $3 toothpaste and you spend an hour, economically, that wasn't worth your time. If it's coming at the cost of you spending quality time with your partner, then the opportunity costs of that time is even higher. It definitely makes it definitely not worth the dollar you save. You want to be thinking about making decisions in your life that are in-line with what you care about. That's really the main exercise.

Sure, maybe you do care more about convenience when it comes to flights, for example. That might be a good decision, right? Who wants to sit in an airport for two to three hours, especially right now, if you're traveling? Hopefully, you're not. But if you are for an essential emergency, you probably just want to take a direct flight. That's probably perfectly okay, but you have to ask yourself, if you take the indirect flight, what is that coming at the cost of and is that worth the financial savings?

You touched on some consumer purchase examples just now. What are some of the other best places to systematically look for time?

Yeah. I would definitely say, thinking about chores that you do at home that you could outsource. Maybe you could get a meal prep kit, or grocery delivery, that would save time in a particularly busy week. You can also think about major life decisions, like where you're going to live. Obviously, a lot of people maximize on square footage. Right now, we're not traveling as much. If you think about it, maybe many of us will end up commuting, or are already still commuting. Even if you work from home, you still have to run errands and many of us go for the biggest house we can get for the cheapest cost, regardless of the location. And of course, that's going to come at the cost of your time in the long run. Where you live is another major factor to consider.

In terms of the chores and the division of labor at home, I think it's actually not only something that you can throw money at, but can also have a concerted conversation with your partner about. Many couples that I talk to don't even have conversations about who likes which chores. I used to teach negotiations at HBS. We would always say, “Well, with a negotiation partner, you want to trade on differences.” So you want to be giving up something you don't like, and giving them something they like more. We can also apply this to our personal lives. I just this week, tax season, I took on doing some of the taxes and the spreadsheet management, because I like data and numbers. That stuff is more satisfying to me. My husband took on cooking, and we had an explicit conversation about it. We weren't just splitting the chores, but we were maximizing our utility, because we were trying to trade on things that I liked more and he didn't like.

If we had never had that conversation, we might have never realized that, “Hey, he was going to do that. Actually, I'm more satisfied doing that than he is. I was going to help with cooking, but I'm not as good of a cook as he is. It's more beneficial for him to cook and me to do the Excel spreadsheets.”

If the goal is to increase happiness, do you have some tips on the best way to use your time?

Yeah. We want to be thinking about, and I have a chapter devoted in the book to this, around finding time. Just like, if we were going to try to maximize our budget and think about saving more, or spending in different ways, we would do a financial audit. Similarly, when it comes to time, we should also be more mindful about how we're spending time on an everyday basis. From a labor economics standpoint, you can think about maximizing your ‘you’ index.

My book editor is a fan of Marie Kondo. He says, this is the Marie Kondo method of time use. Look at your activities in a typical workday. Think about what you did in the morning, the afternoon and the evening and categorize the activities in terms of how meaningful they were, how productive they were, how enjoyable, unenjoyable they were. You want to be maximizing the amount of time that you spend in meaningful and happy activities and minimizing the amount of time that you spend in stressful and unproductive activities.

That on average, we see that people feel pretty satisfied with more active leisure activities, exercising, socializing, helping others, that's a big one. Whereas, passive leisure activities don't do as much for our happiness. That's relaxing, looking at social media, sitting on the couch and resting. Those things are not as good for our happiness as being more actively engaged. Of course, in order to have the energy to be active and engaged, you also need to be efficient at work and make sure that you're creating good boundaries between work and home. There's a new paper showing that.

We have some data showing, one reason that wealthier people are happier is because they engage in more active leisure activities, as opposed to passive. Time use seems to explain some of the happiness differences that you can see. This is a hotly contested topic of whether rich people are happier or whatever. In some data that we have, we do see that millionaires report greater life satisfaction than a representative sample, at least in the Netherlands. A lot of that difference is explained by time use on an everyday basis.

Wealthier people are able and have more energy to engage in active, as opposed to passive leisure, because they also have more autonomy over their schedule. In our data set, I think the wealthier sample, the millionaires said that they spend about 85%, 90% of their time each day doing whatever they wanted, when they want it. They're all entrepreneurs or something, or maybe had inherited wealth. That is allowing them to then have the energy to spend in these more active ways.

In order to get yourself to have more free time, to engage in more active leisure activities, you also have to be minimizing the negative experiences in your work day, so you feel you have enough energy at the end of the day to really engage in activities that might take some more deliberation.

Is it possible to decrease time poverty just by changing the way that we think about time, as opposed to how we're actually using the time that we have?

I do think that it's possible. Although, behavior is a good way to change how we think. I think what we've seen in our data is that some of the simplest interventions that can reduce time poverty are things that are fairly straightforward. Spending a bit of money to save time, and then thinking about what you want to do with that time, that's a win. Also, reframing the way that you think about the upcoming weekend. If you think about the upcoming weekend, like a vacation; maybe this is an example that fits within your reframing bucket. Then my colleagues, I'm not on this paper, but I love this paper. I wish I was on this paper. My colleagues have data showing that just a simple reframing exercise of treating your upcoming weekend like a vacation makes you happier, more satisfied with your leisure experience.

That isn't because you just didn't do the chores that weekend, so there's no time, these differences across condition. It's just that you're able to be more present in the moment. You're less distracted, and so you enjoy your daily activities to a greater extent. That's pretty good evidence of just changing the way you think about time, can actually, fundamentally alter whether you feel stressed out or not. There's also structural things we can do. In addition to putting proactive blocks of time in your calendar, where you mark time to work on important, but not necessarily urgent tasks, you can also make sure that your meetings are not too back to back.

What happens when we have really back to back meetings is that we start worrying about what the next meeting is going to be about. We start thinking into the future and that pulls us out of the present and makes us feel stressed out in the moment. This even happens with our leisure. When we try to schedule too many leisure activities in one day, it starts to feel like work and actually, undermines our enjoyment. When we are trying to engage in some leisure time, we really want to take our time off the clock and really be focused on the present moment to reap the satisfaction benefits and reduce our stress during that time.

Can someone be too time focused and be too far that way that they may have money problems?

I think it's possible, although I've yet to come across anyone in our society that is really focused in that way. I mean, I guess, you could think a little bit about, there was a simplicity movement. It was more popular 20 years ago. Tim Kasser wrote a lot about it, where people were giving up, maybe even stable jobs and all of their material purchases to live a more simplistic life. I've seen a little bit of evidence from a New York Times article, suggesting there's cohorts or groups, communes that will come together and relinquish material pursuits in order to focus on time.

It's interesting, because they're still putting food on the table. I think one thing that most of us do wrong is that we anchor too much on money as a metric of success. So these groups of people who are focused on living a simple life, there has been some research showing they're happier. Well, why? Well, they're less materially driven, so they're not in this rat race that so many of us are in. They are focused on the simple things, the things they can control, their social relationships, or volunteering. Many of them, they’re community organizers, many of them, they all make their own food and they're really slowing down and taking the time to do that. So it's no wonder that they feel a greater sense of happiness.

Again, going back to an earlier part of our conversation, there's so much more to happiness than money. Yet, we see money as a path to happiness more than we should. What we observe in the data, so there's been some great papers recently, showing globally representatives. I know there's a recent paper that came out, showing that richer people are happier. This was in the US context and used experience sampling methodology.

So the paper I'm going to describe is globally representative, looking at life satisfaction. They actually find inflection points. So money does produce greater gains in life satisfaction and positive effect, up and to a point. Then, actually our happiness dips, because we then start comparing ourselves. Likely, this is their explanation that's well founded on lots of research. We start comparing ourselves to people who have even more money than we do. Even if we achieve our financial goals, our reference points are going to shift. If we're seeing money as a path to greater happiness, all we're going to do once we hit our promotion, or our financial goal of having X amount of savings, or X amount of property that we own, we're just going to compare ourselves to be — even more than we do. That is the trap that I'm trying to get us out of. Because a lot of my students, executives, they say, “Well, if this promotion, then I will focus on time.” That is not the right way to think.

I think we should be all a little bit less black and white when it comes to happiness. Actually, you can pursue both at the same time. If you can't spend 30 minutes on a happiness-producing activity today, you're probably not going to spend 30 minutes, even once you've reached that milestone. If you get to a point where you can be financially independent, you might not even know what to do with yourself, and you might just keep working.

I started to talk to some high-net worth groups, which has been really fascinating. This is a story I've heard a few times. “I'm an entrepreneur. I worked super hard. I just sold my company. I don't really have to work now. I also don't have any passions or hobbies. And I don't know how to get any, because basically, all I've done for my whole life is work.” My recommendation is spend 30 minutes trying to cultivate a passion every day, because all of a sudden, even if you reach financial freedom, that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to know what to do with your free time, especially if you've allocated all of your energy and attention to work and making money over the last couple of decades. 

It's really important that we make room in our lives for time and happiness now, even if it feels impossible. Because if we don't do it now, we're definitely probably not going to do it tomorrow either.

Are there habits that you think people should try to intentionally form to incorporate all this information into their lives?

Yeah. I would start with one small change. I often advocate for the idea of disrupting an ingrained habit that reminds you to focus on time. The concrete example I usually present is, I have a strong tendency, especially in the work from home environment, to want to get up, come straight to my computer. I've purposely disrupted that habit. I get up, I make a leisurely breakfast, maybe I'll read, maybe I'll look at the news, maybe I'll go for a walk when there's no blizzards in Boston — which has not been very often lately, or go for a run. Then I go to work. Even that small, simple change puts me in a different mindset for the rest of the day, because I've had clear demarcation between my personal and work life. It gives me more distance, more separation between my personal and professional. 

For me, I find when I get up, go straight to my computer, I'm in intense work mode all day and I don't even check in and remember I’m a person. It's just agenda, agenda, agenda, agenda. I think, anything we can do, just small, simple things around the margins to help remind ourselves about the importance of time is really an important place to start.

Again, it doesn't have to be major life decisions. Really, can just be spending a 30-minute break in the middle of the day differently. Not just using it to check email, but doing something active, checking with a partner or a friend instead.

You mentioned work from home. How has this affected our time poverty situation?

Yeah. Work from home is a perfect example of Parkinson's Law, that work expands to fill the time we give it. The best objective data using Microsoft analytics, so the back-end of all of our Outlook inboxes in companies all over the world, that is a data set that one of my colleagues has a paper on. They find that the workday has increased by about an hour, which is the amount of time that most workers used to spend commuting to the office.

Again, Parkinson's Law, we've just substituted our commute time with more work. They also have data showing from that globally representative objective data set, that the workday has gotten longer, that people are in more meetings, or having more email check ins. That makes sense, because in the virtual environment, there's no other way to communicate with people. You can't just pop by their office. Every conversation has to be a meeting, rather. People are just being overwhelmed on digital communication all the time.

We have subjective self-report data, suggesting that people are also feeling more distracted. They're completing more chores and necessities now than prior to the pandemic. They're doing less active leisure. It's no surprise that these results are stronger for people with kids under the age of 17, living at home and they're disproportionately affecting working women in our globally representative data.

We weren't trying to find gender effects. We were just surveying remote workers and seeing what was going on for them in terms of time use and happiness. The most reliable, consistent effect in the data, globally representative data set is that working mothers all over the world are doing about what will amount to 12 more calendar days of chores in 2021, as compared to working men. That this chore provision is what's driving lower levels of happiness for working women. It's not spending time with children, that's not having a negative effect on happiness, but it is this increased chore demand that's creating this increased feelings of stress and also, distraction, but all workers everywhere, regardless of whether they have kids, are feeling more distracted, less productive now than they did prior to the pandemic.

You touched earlier on financial independence. In the context of retirement planning, how would you suggest people think about the trade-off between retiring from a 9 to 5 job earlier, but with less money, versus continuing to work longer to have more money when they eventually do retire?

Yeah. We have a paper that's under review right now with one of my postdocs and one of my colleagues. It speaks a little bit to this point. What my postdoc did very cleverly, because it's really hard to obviously run an experiment on this question, right? She uses social security pension cut-offs as an instrumental variable. Looking at who complied. Who retired in response to this financial incentive to retire, when your social security benefits start to kick in? Then, how did that shape time use meeting satisfaction immediately and four years later?

So she finds that people who complies, so who retired in response to these financial incentives are generally people who make less money and don't like their job as much. They experienced significant increases in meaning and life satisfaction after retirement, because they're spending more time engaged in activities that make them happy, like spending time with their grandkids and socializing.

I think it depends, based on these data, a little bit on how much you enjoy your job currently and what other things you have planned for post-retirement. Why our findings are striking is because most research in this area shows that there's significant declines in meaning after retirement. But is using a correlational approach that’s lumping everyone in together. So for people who like their jobs have focused so much on work that they don't really have other ways to spend their time once they're done working, that transition in life is likely to be much more abrupt than someone who wasn't really keen on their job in the first place. And also, has a lot of family or civic engagement activities to look forward to.

I would say, if you are someone who likes your job but maybe still wants to retire on the earlier side so that you have more time to travel when we go back to doing that, that really start cultivating your interests and have a clear path for how you're going to spend time in retirement. Because this links back to something that we talked about earlier in the conversation. If you feel you have too much time available, that's also negative for happiness and makes us feel unproductive. We need to be making sure in retirement that we have something productive to focus our energy and attention on. If we do, then by all means, I would definitely sacrifice a little bit more years of earning to put forward and having more free time and flexibility to spend on meaningful and satisfying pursuits.

Interesting. I guess, it assumes that you can afford to pursue the pursuits too?

Yeah. A lot of leisure pursuits that our participants engaged in this representative sample of lower income earners are free, like church participation, civic engagement, these kinds of helping others and volunteering, they're the most persistent kinds of ways to spend time to have reliable effects on happiness and mood on that regular basis.

They're not very subject to hedonic adaptation. Meaning, you don't really get used to them, because they're always social and different, you're always helping others. So the hedonic benefits of helping others don't really wear off. Not only is it economical, but it's a good set of activities to engage in if you want to consistently have higher happiness — now and in retirement.

That's really interesting. Someone who's expecting to retire later, save a bunch more money, so that they can do some expensive thing like, I don't know, travel or something like that, may not be on a path to happiness.

They'll get more extreme happiness, but they might not get consistent happiness. The thing with experiential purchases is you get satisfaction in anticipation. You're planning the trip, you're getting excited about it. You get satisfaction during the experience, while you're hanging out on the trip. You get some utility, some satisfaction looking backwards. Sharing memories with other people of this trip. 

However, the experiences tend to have a huge boost on happiness, but then dissipate really quickly in anticipation, experienced, and recollected. Whereas, the civic engagement, volunteering, helping others, spending time socially, those are going to produce rises in happiness that are very consistent across time. Less of this huge spike and more of this consistent increase in happiness that stabilizes.

One of my prof’s at Booth, Christopher Hsee, amazing scholar. Totally awesome research. He gave us advice and seminar once about how we should be happy during our retirement. A group of us grad students should plan our retirement based on these data, based on happiness utility stuff. He was like, “You should go on one trip around the world when you're retired. Then you'll get anticipation, you'll get to experience it. Then, you'll also get to recall it and live those memories in your older age with your friends and family. Then he said, you should plan a second one and die right before you take it. Because you weren't going to get as much happiness the second time around, because you'd be more used to it, but you'd still get the anticipation effects on satisfaction.” That was his advice to us as grad students.

For someone providing financial advice as Cameron and I do, what are some of the ways that we can help people who are obviously struggling with time poverty, despite having significant financial wealth?

Yeah. I would say, just start including it in the conversation as part of their discretionary income portfolio. When you're thinking about how you want to spend your discretionary income, usually most people will think about charity, they think about homes, real estate, improvements, renovations, maybe experiences, although it's slightly harder to do now in this COVID era. People do not think categorically about including time as a category. I would just encourage this conversation about; “How could you think about spending money to save yourself time?”

Maybe that's outsourcing in the context of the business you run. One thing I also hear is people getting an EA for the first time, an executive assistant and wondering why they didn't do it 10 years ago. There's also ways not only of optimizing in our personal lives, which are more obvious, like childcare, housecleaning, help with the demands of everyday life. There's a lot of efficiency gain in the context of our work that we often don't realize as well, either via delegating, or via outsourcing.

The first place I would start is asking people to reflect on whether they could make any purchases that are time saving related, that wouldn't help free up their happiness. Also, I would just implore people to think whether they're spending money in ways that align with their personal values, and do that values-expenditure mapping to make sure people are really optimizing the happiness, or utility of their discretionary purchases.

It seems like, demand for this information is exploding. I'm curious, Ashley. How did you get so interested in this subject?

Well, I did work in a happiness lab in undergrad. My path started in college. I used to be a professional actor and realized, I really like the research part, didn’t like the performing part. The study of acting is basically the study of human psychology, or trying to figure out your character's motivation, what's going on in a scene. After I left theater school, I read Dan Gilbert's book, Stumbling on Happiness, and found out that one of his grad students had gone on to become a professor at the University of British Columbia. I was like, “I want to go there and I want to study that. I think it's so interesting.”

It's nice to talk about this stuff. I was reading a lot of pop psych books at the time, but they weren't based on science. They were manifester dreams, or something. I was like, “There's something unsatisfying about that.” Yes, positive thinking helps, but can we bring some data to the conversation? I was really interested in bringing data together with some of this positive intervention work.

I started working in Liz's lab. She was studying how people don't spend enough money on others and that's a hidden path to greater happiness. We were like, “Well, if people are so bad at spending money. Surely, they must be terrible at spending time too.” Of course, they are. That's really how the program of research started. We were just naturally interested in how people manage and think about value and make decisions about two fundamental resources, time and money, how those decisions intersect, how we can make better decisions, and how these decisions ultimately shape our happiness.

I've always been really interested in this topic, and really just came at it from a purely academic curiosity perspective. It's not until later in my career, almost in my fourth year of faculty at HBS, that I've been doing more of this, how do we think about putting the science into practice in organizations for individuals? Really starting to think about the practical limitations and applications of this work. That's been a more recent endeavor for me.

That leads to our final question. How do you define success in your life?

I define success in a way that I often think that people in general should think about this question, and there's data to support it, is this idea that the way I'm spending time on an everyday basis is ideally how I would want to live my life. Looking back, can you say, “I spent time on the things that truly matter to me as a person, that are aligned with my personal goals and values?”

I define success, for me, as spending most of my time in a way that would look like, if I could, being mapped onto the ideal way I would spend time on an everyday basis. Then if I'm getting really philosophical, then I map how my ideal time matches to how I want to say I've lived my life.

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