Time Smart

Ashley Whillans: I think this is a great place to start, and it's often one of the first questions I get asked. I thought that this might be the case, but as it turns out in all of my research that I've conducted over the last five years, with hundreds of thousands of working adults from all over the world, all of us, regardless of how much money we make, can benefit from at least shifting some of our decisions more from a "money first" mindset to a "time first" mindset.

So, to answer your question directly – no. All of us who have at least some discretionary income to spend, can think about prioritizing time more than money.

Rachel Salaman: Now in your book you mention quite a famous study that showed that once you earn about 60,000 U.S. dollars, money doesn't increase happiness. Which does suggest that, until you earn that much, money might increase happiness – is that the case?

Ashley Whillans: So, it is the case that money does produce small benefits for subjective well-being, but it's actually an amount much higher than the $60,000 that this original study was indicating.

So, the best data suggests... In a paper that came out in 2019 [it] shows that the inflection points are actually much higher than $60,000 – somewhere around $100,000 is where you start to see this flattening off of money-on-life satisfaction. So, it is the case that earning more money will buy you some of this greater overall life satisfaction.

But this doesn't take into account the fact that focusing on time can have similar, if not stronger, effects on happiness than making more money. So, a good strategy for many of us isn't necessarily to chase money until we get to a certain inflection point, but rather think about how we were spending our time on an everyday basis, since that is an equally, if not more, profitable strategy to gaining greater happiness than simply chasing more money.

Rachel Salaman: The concept of "time affluence," as a goal, runs throughout your book. Can you just talk about what that is?

Ashley Whillans: Yes. I define time affluence, via many other organizational psychologists, which is the feeling of having enough time to do all of the things that you both want to do and have to do. So, you can see inherent in this definition is the subjective feeling that your life is under your own control, that you have enough time to do all of the things that you want to do and have to do.

And I define time affluence in this way because, very interestingly, there's been this disassociation over the last couple of decades where we're actually working fewer hours as compared to the 1950s or 60s – and that's true for both men and women, and kind of regardless of profession – but we feel more time stressed than we ever have before.

So that's why I look at time affluence, which is really focused on the psychological feeling of having enough time, because it's such a powerful predictor of happiness, even above and beyond how much time people actually have available to them.

Rachel Salaman: Right, and I was going to ask that actually: how much is time affluence a state of mind, vs. actually having more time?

Ashley Whillans: In all of my data that I've analyzed, what I find so fascinating is there is a disassociation between the amount of hours that people work and how much income they have – so these more objective markers of time affluence and material affluence – and the subjective feeling of having enough time.

So it really is this state of mind, which is great from a psychological perspective, and, as I outline in the book, because it is something that is really in our minds – this feeling of having enough control over our lives, that we can do everything we want to do – it also means that a lot of the solutions for these feelings of time poverty, or the strategies by which we can gain time affluence, are under our own personal control.

Rachel Salaman: And your book is very practical in that regard, gives lots of helpful tips. In it you say the first step towards time affluence is to recognize various time traps, like technology. Now some people might be thinking, "But technology saves me time!" So how does the opposite happen?

Ashley Whillans: So, technology was offered as this promise to free ourselves from the nine-to-five and to offer us complete freedom – and instead technology has in fact become a trap.

So instead of being in our offices nine to five, we carry our offices with us 24 hours a day, seven days a week. And I talk about many strategies in the book. I think technology and how ubiquitous constant connection to our smartphones is – or our technology, our laptops, our iPhones – is one of the largest drivers of time poverty, because it fragments our leisure into small, almost unusable bits of free time. I call this "time confetti."

So, we used to have an hour of uninterrupted leisure and now we are constantly connected to our devices, which pull us out of the present, undermine our ability to enjoy our leisure, and then also remind us of all of the things we could or should be doing.

This sense of goal conflict – this idea that I feel like I should be working when I'm hanging out with my family, or I should be hanging out with my family when I'm working – these feelings of goal conflict are one of the drivers of time poverty. And our phones, our iPads, our tablets, really facilitate these feelings of goal conflict.

Rachel Salaman: Well, some people might be curious as to how you manage your phone, for example. What do you do, do you turn it off sometimes?

Ashley Whillans: Yes, absolutely. So, I sit at the beginning of a week – usually I do this on the weekend because I have open-ended time to plan what I want to get done during the upcoming week – and I will then set periods of time in my calendar where I exit out of Outlook, I turn off my cell phone, and I work on whatever important but not necessarily urgent or reactive work that I have planned for that week.

I feel this way, and I've shown this in my data, that scheduling in proactive time makes me feel more in control of my time: more time affluent, more productive, happier. And we've shown this with busy executives, busy salespeople, that we've studied – just simply treating these moments or these blocks of time, where we can't be interrupted, where we turn off our phone, where we turn off our email, that this is a really simple but powerful strategy for reclaiming our time and feeling more time affluent. Again because time poverty is created by this feeling of not having enough time to do all the things you really want to do or really have to do.

I do this not only with work but also with personal. I've gotten better, I'm not perfect; I definitely sometimes am caught emailing while on a jog, and my colleagues point this out and call me out on it, of course, because I'm like, "I study this!" And so they're especially curious when they get emails from my phone if I was on a jog, or I was doing that, and I am guilty of it.

I think this is why another strategy that's really important is to not always rely on willpower. So not only is this time blocking – this pro-time intervention that I just told you about – helpful, even more helpful is downloading an app on your phone that will not let you check your email, not let you go to certain social media sites at key hours of the day. That's going to help you more than relying on willpower, but we're often reticent to give up control of progress towards our personally important goals, although behavioral science says that we should.

Rachel Salaman: Well, that's definitely something to think about. In your book you offer tips on finding time and funding time. Could you give examples of those two things?

Ashley Whillans: Yeah. So, a really simple strategy for finding time is to document all the ways in which you spend time on an everyday basis. And my book editor and I call this the "Marie Kondo method of time use," and labor economists call this "maximizing your you index" – so, it's based on science but it's easier to kind of think about it in terms of this more simple way, the Marie Kondo method of time use, where you document everything that you did in a typical workday and then you ask yourself, "Did I find this activity pleasurable or did I find it meaningful? I can see why I'm engaging in this activity, because it contributes to a higher goal that I have in my professional and my personal life."

If you kind of hold up each activity and it doesn't bring you pleasure and it doesn't bring you meaning, you have to think to yourself, "Can I get rid of it? Should I get rid of it? Could I have a better and happier time if I delegated that work task to someone else, if I made a decision in my life to not engage in that particular activity so that I could spend more time engaged in activities that do bring me pleasure and meaning, like hanging out with my family more?"

So, one very simple strategy for finding time is to be more intentional about the way that we're using time.

So, not only looking at our day holistically and thinking, "Does my actual time use map on to my ideal time use, if I had a perfect 24 hour of a workday?" – so, within the constraints of your actual life, not just a hypothetical, fantastical 24 hours, but a perfect day within the current context of your life, what would that look like and does your current day map on to that ideal day? And if not, why not, and how do you get there? – but also being more deliberate about small moments of free time that we often waste, the gaps in between meetings where we'll just answer emails as if they were urgent but maybe not pick up the phone and call a friend.

Building in intentionality around these small moments of free time that we often waste, is a really important way to find time without changing anything about how we spend money.

Another strategy I do talk about in the book is "funding time." So, you know, you go through this exercise and you think, "Do I get any joy out of this activity or any meaning, and if not, can I get rid of it?" One way of getting rid of it is to outsource it. Could you hire someone to do that task, can you cook fewer days of the week by ordering takeout? So that strategy is a little bit more straightforward – one way of getting rid of some activities that don't bring us pleasure or meaning is by paying someone else to do them.

Rachel Salaman: And how can we decide which is better in any given situation, finding time or funding time?

Ashley Whillans: I don't think that there's necessarily a better strategy, it's sort of whatever works best for you. And ideally, you'll be using these strategies in some combination.

Some people don't want to fund time, they don't want to hire a house cleaner because they're trying to set a positive example for their kids, so maybe for that person funding time isn't the right strategy, finding time is. We will all have different reactions and responses to these strategies, and what I advocate for is trying all of them on and seeing what works best.

So, one strategy that we haven't talked about but that I also advocate for in the book is this idea of reframing time.

You might go through this exercise of thinking about the last 24 hours of a typical work day, and there's some activities that are making you miserable but you can't get out of them, like I'm not going to be able to get out of doing the dishes or doing laundry! That's just... some of those things are day-to-day chores and I'm not going to be able to get out of them. But I can reframe them.

I can either bundle them together with another activity that I get a lot of pleasure from, for me, listening to new music that I haven't listened to before. So I will make sure to actively put on my favorite playlist, or a new playlist, so I can discover new songs while I'm doing some of those tasks. I didn't used to, but now that I wrote this book, I'm more deliberate about how I'm spending my time. I used to just complain about those activities but now I try to actively make them better and more enjoyable.

You can also reframe them. There's been some great research by Alia Crum at Stanford University showing that if we reframe manual labor as part of our jobs as physical activity, as a way to meet our physical health goals, we actually gain better health as a result of this mental reframing exercise.

So, she did this with hotel attendants, cleaners of hotel rooms. They were just asked to think about their jobs as a way to meet their physical health requirements, and they showed significant reductions in body mass index, lower blood pressure, they felt less stressed at work.

So, we can also, in the absence of being able to bundle these activities with some other activity – for me I can't necessarily listen to an interesting podcast while also trying to do my budget every year or my budget will be wrong, [but] I can think about that budget in a different way. For me, I can recapitulate that budget as a way to make sure I'm spending my financial resources responsibly so that I can make sure I have enough money to have all my students work on as many research projects as will get them a job.

So, there's things that you can do: there's ways of reframing these negative activities, or activities that don't bring you a lot of pleasure, like crunching budget spreadsheets for me, that you can change around in your minds, that they're less stressful and more enjoyable. There's a lot we can do with what I call "mental gymnastics," that will get us a long way to greater time affluence and happiness.

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Rachel Salaman: One of the most intriguing aspects of your book I found is the section on accounting for time, where you present happiness dollars as a new metric. Can you tell us about that?

Ashley Whillans: Yes. So, this again goes with this idea of mental gymnastics. One thing that we're really bad at is we're bad at valuing our time as much as money because time is very abstract. So, I came up with this idea of accounting for time and happiness dollars to help people think about the concrete value of their time-use decisions.

So, this relates to a point we were discussing earlier in the conversation, where I was making the argument that chasing money isn't really necessarily a great path to happiness. So, in this accounting for time section, we know that changes in income produce pretty reliable changes in life satisfaction. And so, what I did is I said, "Well changing your mindset, from focusing on money to focusing on time." I worked out the math and basically showed people that just simply changing your mindset, even in the absence of changing any behaviors, produces a happiness increase that's similar in magnitude to making $2,200 or more of household income per year.

I do this with all of these different activities that I advocate for in the book: outsourcing or funding time produces the happiness equivalent of making $16,000 more of household income per year, and then you have to subtract the service cost, and it still gives you about $12,000 of happiness each year.

So, this really hammers home the point that, to get greater happiness, money is not the only path. Definitely, time gives us a lot of happiness, and often more happiness than we could expect from trying to seek the next promotion in our jobs, for example.

Rachel Salaman: And how would you expect people to use the happiness dollars idea when they're reading your book?

Ashley Whillans: Yeah. So if you buy the book you will also get a toolkit that comes along with the book. And there people can have an interactive tool: they can enter their household income, the activities they're deciding to include in their lives as a result of reading the book – like socializing somewhat more than they socialize now, exercising somewhat more, not going on social media quite as much – and that spreadsheet will automatically calculate the equivalent happiness increase and put it into a dollar metric, so people will know approximately how much happiness dollars' worth they're getting from any of the time-use decisions that they're making.

Rachel Salaman: Great. Now becoming time affluent is one thing, using that affluence well is another. And you do address this at several points in your book and you've touched on it already. Could you tell us about your time smart regimen checklist, because that's one of the useful tools in your book?

Ashley Whillans: Yeah. So, this idea of this time smart regimen checklist is that we all need a time affluence to-do list. If we really take time affluence seriously – we make major life changes that enable us to have more and better time, we find time, fund time, reframe time – we're going to end up with, unsurprisingly, more time! And we need to make sure that we are using it in ways that are most likely to promote happiness.

So, I advocate for everyone beside their computer, since that's where we often waste time during a day, if you find yourself with an extra five minutes, thirty minutes, one hour, or an extra two hours that you weren't planning, is there something that you can do with those moments of time that will enable you to gain greater time affluence or more happiness?

So, for example, if you find yourself with five minutes, instead of answering an email could you text a colleague and check in on them? Could you, if you find yourself with thirty minutes or an hour, could you go for a walk instead of, again, maybe doing something more mindless?

So, it's really about creating a list of things that you want to build more time in your life for, and then, when you find yourself with windfalls of free time, or even planned free time off, you look to that list and say, "What are the things on this list that I would rather be doing other than binge-watching my favorite TV show?" That's good in small doses, don't get me wrong, I definitely binge-watch television – but sometimes we do it mindlessly, as opposed to purposely, and that's where this list comes in handy.

Rachel Salaman: Yes, that sounds great, and that's one of your tips to help us with our day-to-day. You also offer some advice for the long view. What are the best time affluence habits for long-term happiness, would you say?

Ashley Whillans: Yes. So, I've done quite a bit of research on this and I find that people who value time over money and carry that value with them through major life decisions, show significant improvement in happiness, over the long-term.

So, we tracked college students. we asked them whether they valued money more than time or time more than money, and then we tracked their happiness two to three years after graduation. Students who valued time reported greater increases in happiness over that two-to-three-year period because they chose jobs that were more intrinsically motivating – they were jobs that they wanted to do vs. they felt like they had to do.

So, as we're approaching major decisions in our lives – what career to choose, whether to go back to school or not, whether to change careers – we really need to keep time in mind. We often make these decisions – and there's great research showing this – when we're on the outside of a decision looking into it, we focus on the extrinsic, we focus on money and prestige, and we fail to recognize the intrinsic value of a decision, like, "How much quality time will I get with my friends and family if I make this decision?" Or, "How enjoyable is the job?"

And those intrinsic qualities of any major life decision matter a lot more when you're in the moment than the extrinsic. Sure, prestige might get you in the door, but when you're there you actually still have to do the job and do the commute and sacrifice a lot of your time in order to maintain that prestige, and we often fail to recognize this.

So, when we're making long-term decisions around career and relationships, school, moves, we need to ask ourselves not only how much money will this get us, but how much time will this cost us.

Rachel Salaman: Now one of these time affluence habits for long-term happiness is "say no," and you point out that a lack of time is not a good enough reason to say no to a request. In the book, you point out that, "I'm too busy," sounds a bit lame and creates bad feeling, so what are some good reasons to say no?

Ashley Whillans: Yes. So, this is a really important strategy, saying no now is an investment of time in the future: you get more time in the future the more that you say no now. And it is a really important strategy for having greater time affluence, and I do talk about the strategy in the book.

But interestingly we have a working paper showing that, although we really want to say, "We don't have time," when we don't – well, most of us don't – to say no to things, that actually that strategy backfires. It makes people not trust us. They think that if we say no to whatever it is they're asking, we just don't like them or don't like their proposition. They take it really personally when you mention time.

So, in our research we found better strategies to saying no include providing no excuse whatsoever – simply saying, "No, sorry, I can't." Is more well received. You could also say, "No, sorry, I don't have the energy to do that right now." People don't take that as personally. Or you could say, "Sorry, I don't have the money." If that is the reason why you can't go and commute to a friend's wedding, for example. That is also more positively received.

And the reason that a money excuse is more positively received than a time excuse when declining social invitations, is because a money excuse is seen as more external to you – it's seen as something you can't control or can't help.

So, a broader takeaway then from that too is, if you have to provide a reason, make sure that that reason is something that seems outside of your control. The reason why time excuses are negatively perceived is because that person thinks time is something that you personally control, we all have 24 hours in a day, and now you're saying you don't want to do something because it's not worth your time. That's what people hear when they hear, "No, sorry, I don't have time." They hear it as, "You're not worth my time. I don't think that you're worth my time."

Rachel Salaman: Yes, yes, exactly. A good tip there for people if they want a no to be accepted, I think. So, part of your book looks at this issue from an organizational point of view. According to your research, how well is the time/money trade-off handled in today's business world?

Ashley Whillans: Oh, not well! No. This will be like the topic of my next book, I'm doing a lot more research in organizational context now.

As our work has changed from more rigid, more objective output-oriented, to more subjectively oriented, more knowledge work – that's harder to define what quality is. Workplaces have started to rely more on hours as a proxy for quality, because it's harder to measure productivity today, in today's workplace. And this has created really perverse norms in the workplace – the ideal worker being someone who responds all the time, that uses their technology to work 24/7.

I think we're in a really important moment, where the COVID pandemic has caused a lot of people to engage in self-reflection, both individuals and organizations. Both out of necessity because the economy is changing, but also because this has been a really difficult time for people.

I think the pendulum is starting to shift more towards recognizing the whole person. To recognizing that to really maintain a diverse and skilled workplace, you need to not only focus on work commitment, but you need to make sure that you're empowering people to have a life outside of work.

So, I think we're at this critical inflection point and workplaces both recognize the importance of time, but also lack the clear strategy and implementation tools necessary to help their workforce truly focus on time.

So, in the book I outline some simple strategies that HR managers and leaders and CEOs can take. But really it involves a lot around modeling norms – if you want your employees to take paid vacation you have to take paid vacation, not answer email, and celebrate your time off if you expect your employees to do the same. So a lot is around challenging existing norms, setting new ones, and rewarding employees with time – like paid days off or time-saving services – to really help make this idea that time is important stick, in the workplace.

Rachel Salaman: Yes, and in the book, you also suggest that people should lobby their employers to prioritize time over money. What are some practical ways to speak up about this without being seen as a slacker or anti-growth?

Ashley Whillans: So, something really simple... A really simple strategy that I've even employed since I've been starting to study this topic, is to advocate for time just like you might advocate for salary. So treating time as the important resource that it is and standing up for yourself, not out of selfishness but actually out of benefits to the work being done.

So what we find across a series of studies, 10 or 12 that we run in a diverse set of contexts, is that people feel uncomfortable asking for more time on adjustable deadlines at work, even when they know that the quality of their work would go up if they asked for more time. Yet managers who have employees who ask for more time before the deadline is up, actually see employees who ask for more time to work on projects at work as more committed and more pro-social, because they know the quality of the work will go up.

So, to start advocating for more time, just as you would more money or more other resources at work, it's about focusing on what you can do with that time. It's about focusing on the fact that research suggests that employees who take more paid vacation are more committed and are more productive. So, framing it as something where, if you are not stressed, if you are time affluent, then you will be a better employee, you're going to turn in higher-quality work, and at the end of the day that's going to benefit the firm.

I think most employers recognize this now. And if they don't, maybe that's not an employer you want to work for! They clearly don't prioritize efficiency or employee well-being. So, I think starting small, starting with your direct manager, and then building momentum around the idea that it's OK to take time off and ask for more time when you need it, are two simple strategies that employees can take to start lobbying for time affluence in the workplace.

Rachel Salaman: Great. So finally, stepping back a little bit, what are one or two first steps someone can take today to build a more time affluent life, at home and at work?

Ashley Whillans: I think that time affluence is much like exercise, in that you're not going to have a time affluent life overnight.

I think when most people think about getting happier or becoming more time affluent and less stressed, they think about the need to make major life decisions, like going on sabbatical or quitting your job or moving or uprooting your family to have that more time affluent life that feels more in control.

And my research over the past several years has shown quite the opposite – that it's small decisions around the margins, even small mindset shifts, that can have huge downstream consequences for our time use and our happiness.

So, my concrete suggestions are, first, to become more aware of the ways in which you waste time or engage in unpleasurable activities on an everyday basis. And then enquire – why do you engage in those activities? Is this something you can change? How might you change it?

Then committing to changing your behavior in five-minute, ten-minute, thirty-minute, one-hour increments, and then scaffolding up from there.

So, first, awareness, then small implementation. And then maybe you can consider making more major life decisions, once you feel like you've got time affluence more under your control.

Rachel Salaman: Ashley Whillans, thanks very much for joining us today.

Ashley Whillans: Thanks so much for having me.

Rachel Salaman: The name of Ashley's book again is, "Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life."

I'll be back in a few weeks with another Mind Tools Expert Interview from Emerald Works. Until then, goodbye.