May 25, 2020 • 34 mins
'Time famine' is when you just don't feel you have a spare moment... and it can make you miserable. It's a feeling Dr Laurie Santos knows only too well, so she seeks help from her time affluence hero, Idler author Tom Hodgkinson.
Tom lives life to the full, but he ensures he carves out time to wander around, think, chat with friends and even take naps. He argues that 'idling' is vital to leading a happy, creative and productive existence. Is he right? And if so, what can we all do to break free from the tyranny of time?
For an even deeper dive into the research we talk about in the show visit happinesslab.fm
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Looking back at my diary, Wednesday, February fifth, twenty
twenty was a fairly ordinary day. And by fairly ordinary,
I mean to say that my day was absolutely packed
to the brim, which makes sense because I don't just
(00:36):
have one amazing job. I have lots of them. I'm
a professor and a research scientist. I run one of
Yell's residential colleges, which means I have over four hundred
students to take care of all the time. I travel
a bunch for public lectures to spread the science of happiness.
I'm a manager to all my amazing staff, a colleague
to my science friends, and now I'm a podcaster too.
(00:57):
So how do I keep track of all these different roles.
My planner it's a small red notebook that I carry
with me everywhere. It's where I write out every single
commitment I have, including the time it starts and the
time it ends. My planner is like a precious friend.
It helps me keep track of what I need to
do every single day. And so I'm not looking in
(01:17):
my planner at the page for Wednesday, February fifth, twenty twenty,
which as usual, was completely packed. On that day, I
had some podcast, stuff to do at specific times, three
different student meetings, a staff meeting, and an important department talk,
after which I wrote, in very decisive all caps lettering
three forty five pm leave immediately. That was a note
(01:39):
to remind myself that I needed to get out of
that department talk a little early in order to make
it to the airport for my flight to DC that night.
That one was a very very hard stop. But on
this particular busy day, my morning got to begin with
a really exciting start. Eight am interview with Tom Hodgkinson,
one of my personal heroes. I'm here, but I can
only hear vea fenty I've admired Tom and his work
(02:02):
for years, very very quiet. I had scheduled Tom's interview
for a whole hour in my calendar, but with so
much to ask him, I was worried I wouldn't have
enough time. And by this point we were already ten
minutes into our time together and Tom couldn't hear me.
We tinkered with the mics and checked the phone connection.
I kept asking Tom, is my voice louder now? I'm
afraid not nay. As the time ticked away, I felt
(02:25):
my stress levels rising. It was already really difficult to
find a long enough slot for this interview, and so
I mean, should we push through and risk me being
late for all the rest of the stuff that day,
or should I try to reschedule for god knows when
I was starting to freak out, and then suddenly, yeah,
that's pretty good. Yeah Tom could finally hear me, which
(02:45):
meant the interview I was most looking forward to this
season could begin. So what was the topic I was
so anxious to jump into with Tom? So talk to
me about your history of becoming an idler, Like what
drove you to that? Talk about kind of why you
decided to become more idle. I think I was born
fairly idle. I always had a strong will towards idling.
(03:07):
Yep idling, it's a pretty foreign concept, at least for me.
I tend to fill my day to the brim, mostly
with meaningful and interesting things. I always thought that was
what I was supposed to do, But it's gotten to
the point where my calendar is now so packed that
I sometimes feel like I'm drowning and all the stuff
I have to do. Maybe you can relate, But as
(03:30):
we'll see in this episode, if we really want to
improve our happiness, we need to learn to do well
a lot less. Our minds are constantly telling us what
to do to be happy. But what if our minds
are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us,
leading us away from what will really make us happy.
(03:50):
The good news is that understanding the science of the
mind can point us all back in the right direction.
You're listening to the Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie Santras.
Alarm clock. What a horrible invention. I mean, it's a
horrible way just thought the day. Get out of bed.
(04:10):
Come on, you're lazy. You're never gonna get anywhere. Tom
is obsessed with clocks because he absolutely despises them. In
his book How to Be Idle, Tom tells his readers
that to be happier, they need to throw away their
alarm clocks. I'm not one of those people who sort
of leaps out of bed the moment my eyes open. Yeah,
I can't wait to get on with my day. You know,
there's quite a lovely in between each states, in between
(04:33):
wake and sleep, when you're sort of half conscious of
your dreams. I think that's a lovely state to be in,
and a slower transition from sleep to wake, I think
is civilized. These days, clocks are everywhere, from our nightstands
to our laptops to our wrists. It's easy to forget
that watching the minutes of the day tick by is
actually a new development. In medieval times, to an extent,
(04:54):
they were masters of their own time, so they can
sort of do a bit of weaving, have a nap,
go into the vegetable garden, do a bit more weaving,
go to church and someone. Life back then was sometimes brutal,
but Tom thinks our pre industrial ancestors enjoyed something that
we've given up, a complete disregard for what hour it is.
For most of human history, it was pretty hard to
(05:15):
know the precise time. All medieval folks had was the
position of the sun. While that end, the bell would
signal the end of the kind of the shift into
fields or whatever. The chimes from the church tower meant
that it was time to put down your tools, time
(05:36):
to assemble together for worship or a meal, time to
think of something other than work. That is, until the
Industrial Revolution kicked in, the system changed. You became a
factory worker. The capitalist bought huge a bounts of machinery
and invested a net, and they had to keep this
machinery going well twenty four seven. Ideally, so the people
(05:58):
were told large stot about working at home. When you
feel like it, you know, time kind of weirdly becomes
a sort of like a sort of a tyrant. Tom
is like a resistance fighter at war with this tyrannical
cons time, and his primary weapon in the struggle is idling.
Idoling is the act of loafing, taking time to do nothing,
in particular, think long lunches, midday naps, tea time, taking
(06:23):
the scenic route, getting lost for no reason at all, daydreaming,
hanging with friends at the pub, long happy conversations that
run well past the time we probably should have gone
to bed. Tom encourages all of these. His books are
manifestos against the cult of productivity that many of us
grew up with. When you're not working, when you're reflecting,
(06:44):
when you're walking around the graves with your friends and
talking about art and love and philosophy and ideas, that's
when you're really living. And if we overwork, then you
neglect that very important part of life. I first learned
of Tom's work back in the early two thousands when
I myself had just started to neglect all these important
parts of life. At the time, I was an untenured
assistant professor, working all hours to get papers out and
(07:07):
my lab up and running. I had fully subscribed to
the philosophy that my generation inherited back from the days
of the Industrial Revolution, that productivity is king. The idea
of spending long hours walking around a grove with friends
talking about art and philosophy. I mean, that seemed incredibly foreign,
almost unattainable, but if I was being honest, it also
(07:29):
sounded kind of amazing. I think it's one of the
reasons I was first drawn to Tom's books. To devote
a good portion of each day or each week to
idling is actually very very good for you, for your health,
for your mental health, your physical health, for the health
of your friends. That doesn't mean to say that you
don't work or you don't enjoy working. In fact, I
would probably like to find something that they would like
(07:49):
to do anyway and make it into their work. The problem,
according to Tom, is when the urge to work makes
us a slave to the clock, when we completely lose
any free time whatsoever, so we're all content looking at
our watches like The White Rabbit and Lewis Carroll's Alice
in Wonderland. Late late, I'm very late, completely unable to
live in the moment. You read these things on Twitter
(08:10):
saying hey guys, sorry, but you know, if you're twenty
six and you're not working crazy hours, you're not going
to get anywhere. I think that's so wrong. Work in
itself is not good. And that's one idea that I
want to fight, is this idea that because any kind
of hard work is morally good. Tom worries that our
modern ethos of productivity is turning all of us into
unfortunate workhorses, the kind that great literature has long warned
(08:32):
us about. In animal farm, we have the example of
the horse boxer, who, when faced with the problem, says,
work harder, work, harder, work until he works himself into
an early grave. He's taken off to the glue factory. Now,
that to me is a that's a warning overwork causes stress,
heart disease. It obviously is bad for family life, bad
(08:56):
for your relationships, and who is it good for for you?
For your ego, for your boss to make more money.
You know, when you start to analyze these concepts, like
the work ethic, they start to dissolve. So I'm trying
to look at things from a from point of view.
Tom tries to live his entire life in accordance with
these beliefs, but many people find his suggestions deeply challenging.
(09:17):
At times, his ideas can sound like a radical religious ideology.
It's not laziness to create free time for yourself. It's
actually a mark of nobility. It brings you closer to
the gods. Actually, because when you start to realize where
this stuff comes from, it comes from the people in power.
I don't want to sound two Marxists, but it comes
from the owners of capital. It comes from the owners
(09:39):
of the means of production. They want to enslave us.
We've got to break free of these chains, William Blake.
He talked about the mind forged manacles. Okay, we've created
a situation with our own minds, and we can use
our own minds to break free of these manacles. As
I talked to Tom for this interview and reflected on
how stressed I'd been about my schedule just minutes before,
(10:01):
I got really sad. It's now been over a decade
since I first encountered Tom's work, and I'm still not
listening to his advice. If anything, I've become even more
trapped in those mind forged manacles he talks about, that
ethos of productivity at all costs. I mean, don't get
me wrong, I'm really grateful for all the career opportunities
that keep me so busy, especially this podcast, which I
(10:24):
absolutely adore. But I'm also really really overworked. I don't
admit it much, but I feel overwhelmed all of time.
I can't remember the last time I took a real
vacation or had even a moment to just be idle
for the sake of being idle, let alone trapes across
a grove talking about philosophy. There's not a single entry
(10:45):
in my red planner that says just do nothing. And
all of this makes me feel incredibly guilty, because as
the host of this podcast, I'm supposed to know better.
Usually I'm pretty good at following the advice I share
with you, but this is one domain where I'm really
screwing things up. And honestly, I don't even know what
to do to make my schedule less hectic these days.
(11:06):
But as I always say, when all else fails, you
should turn to science. After the break, we'll do just that.
You'll hear what feeling this busy does to your mental
health and to your relationships, and we'll see that having
an extra bit of free time is more valuable for
our well being than our lying minds often think. Right,
(11:27):
gotta go. The happiness lab will be back in a moment.
Time affluence this feeling of whether or not we have
enough time to do all of the things that we
(11:48):
want to do or have to do. This is Ashley Willins,
a professor at Harvard Business School an author of the
upcoming book Time Smart, How to Reclaim your Time and
live a happier life. Ashley is another one of my heroes.
Instead of looking at whether we have objectively sort of
enough hours in a day, we're looking at subjectively whether
people feel like they have enough time. Time affluence is
(12:10):
one of my favorite scientific concepts because it's the opposite
of what I experience on a near daily basis. My
calendar never feels open. My subjective feeling is one of
extreme business. What researchers like Ashley have christened time famine.
People today are feeling increasingly pressed for time. Increasingly time
poor such that they feel like they have too many
(12:33):
things to do and not enough time in the day
to do it. And it's interesting because there's also this
data suggesting that we objectively have more time today than
we used to. So subjective feelings of time stress are
going up, while the objective amount of time that we
have is actually going up as well. So why do
we fail to notice the extra minutes we all have
(12:55):
each day? The reason, according to science is that nowadays
are free time tends to be broken up into tiny
chunks or time confetti, So we have more time confetti
now than we used to. That leisure time is or attic,
it's scattered because we're constantly connected to our phones. We're
trying to do many many different tasks, and our attention
(13:17):
is being pulled in many directions. So the feelings I'm
trying to pack in all of this stuff being pulled
in all these directions during our free time can make
us feel more pressed for time. I definitely get the
concept of time confetti in my own life because even
when I get a break, it never feels like a break.
I'll be lounging and watching TV, and I'll get a
stressful text about work, or I'll be in the middle
(13:39):
of an otherwise enjoyable dinner chat when I get this
anxious urge to do a quick email check. Even lunch,
a time my idol Tom says should be reserved for
conversation that often ends up being a time that I
spend alone trying to quickly scratch a few things off
that to do list. Sure, I wind up getting more done.
I mean, it feels like I'm being productive and clearing
(14:00):
things off my plate. But ashle these research has shown
that it's taking more of a toll on me than
I realize. These feelings of time stress as time comes
at a cost of happiness. In some Gallipold poll data
that we analyze with two point five million Americans, we
found that this feeling of time famine had a worse
impact on happiness than being unemployed. So it seems to
(14:24):
have dramatic consequences for our subjective well being. The problem, though,
is that people don't realize the consequences of time poverty
are so great, and so we constantly make individual choices
that make our time famine even worse. People who have
more job flexibility, more paid vacations in their workplace are
happier with their jobs, are more satisfied and less likely
(14:46):
to leave. But when you ask people would you rather
have job A and Job A makes more salary or
a job B and job B has more paid vacation
and less salary, people always go for job A. If
you've listened to other episodes of the Happiness Lab, you
know that many of us equate happiness with having more money,
which means that most of us want to work more
and more in order to earn more and more. But
(15:08):
that trade off of giving up time for money winds
up resulting in less and less time affluence, which often
means less and less happiness. It's a pretty stupid strategy,
but it's also one that Ashley has found many of
us employ all the time. We think that prioritizing money
and working lot is a status symbol, so we think
if we seem really busy, that's going to confer us
(15:30):
higher status, and it's one of the reasons that we
don't focus on time take paid vacation, and instead focus
a lot on working. The connection between business and status
means that even people who have the money to buy
a little free time often choose not to do so.
Even some of the wealthiest people We've studied, people with
two million dollars sitting in the bank are still focusing
(15:52):
on money at the expense of time. Ashley's also found
that as we feel our day is getting fuller and fuller,
we don't make time for activities that can reduce our stress,
like hanging out with friends or making new ones. We
have a paper showing that even just this general prioritization
of money over time means that we're less likely to
(16:13):
interact with a pier. So we spend eighteen percent less
time interacting, and we know that these small social moments
are some of the happiest in our day. These results
got me thinking about why I'm so busy. Ironically, it's
not because I'm focused on money or status. It's because
I'm focused on people. I wind up saying yes to
too many things because I don't want to disappoint anyone,
(16:34):
either my colleagues, or my students or even you, dear
podcast listener. But putting too much stuff on my plate
means becoming even more time famished. I'm seeing lots of people, sure,
but am I really spending any quality time with any
of them? I explain this jumble of feelings to Ashley,
I was surprised that my hero was experiencing pretty much
(16:54):
the same thing you're tunneling. You're just literally it feels
like survival. I'm having this day to day. I just
taught to classes and had two hours of office hours.
All I'm thinking about is when am I going to
drink water? When is my next nap? I don't have
the cognitive resources to also think about how am I
going to connect with a friend who hasn't been doing
very well. Back in the nineteen seventies, researchers John Darley
(17:19):
and Daniel Batson ran a test to see why people
help others. Was being nice a function of a person's
personality or did it depend on the situation. To test
these questions, they chose a population known for being do gooders,
students at the Princeton Theological Seminary. Darley and Batson figure
the students training to be priests were probably prone to
(17:41):
being nice to other people, and so the researchers told
these subjects that they needed to deliver a public sermon
about Jesus's story of the Good Samaritan. In this parable,
a man is beaten, robbed, and left unconscious on the street.
Several people, including a priest, passed by without stopping, but
one person, the Good Samaritan, took pity on the victim.
(18:02):
He helped a man up and even brought him to
an inn to eat and rest. The Samaritan, Jesus explains,
is the guy we're also post to Emily. He's the
one that's going to heaven. The seminary students all knew
the tale well, so having to give a sermon on
that topic should have been mildly stressful but relatively straightforward,
and that's when Darley and Batson up the stakes. All
(18:24):
of the students had to head a cross campus to
another building to give the talk. One group was told
that their sermon would happen later that day, so they
had plenty of time to get there. A second group
was told that they'd make it in time, but only
if they set off immediately. But a third group was
told that they were already late. They needed to sprint
over there right away, and that's when Darli and Batson
(18:46):
had a surprise for the men. They basically staged an
experimental version of the Good Samaritan story. They hired an
actor to pretend to be injured on the ground who
was blocking a narrow part of the route. The students
would literally have to physically step over the actor's writhing
body in order to make it past. So what did
a little time famine due to the student's willingness to help?
(19:08):
The results were really striking. Sixty three percent of the
students who had time to spare stop to help the
hurt stranger, which honestly is already pretty bad. That means
over a third of trainee priests basically stepped over a
guy lying hurt on the street. But what happened when
subjects were in a mad hurry. Only ten percent of
them stopped to help. Ninety percent of the subjects completely
(19:32):
ignored an obviously injured person on the street because they
were rushing to give a sermon about how Jesus said
you should stop to help injured people on the street.
When we're time famished, we become crappy people. When people
are thinking about the economic value of their time, when
they're thinking about being hyper efficient with every second, this
(19:52):
comes at a cost of our willingness to take time
out of our day to help others, to volunteer to
do something as simple as recycle a piece of scrap
paper in the lab, something that takes ten fifteen seconds
to do. Ashley actually has experimental data to back up
this last point. She had students cut up sheets of
paper for a construction project. She told them they could
(20:14):
either throw their scraps away in a nearby trash can
or walk a few feet outside the room to a
recycling bin. In this first control condition, forty one percent
of the students opted to recycle. But Ashley also tested
another experimental group in which she first had subjects write
down how many hours they expected to work after graduation
and then calculate their hourly pay rate. What happened to
(20:38):
recycling In this experimental group, only twelve percent made the
extra effort required. Policymakers should take note here. Have you
ever considered that giving people more time will help them
become better, greener citizens. What we really need to do
is to solve time poverty so that people can have
more cognitive resources and also just a more outward focus
(21:00):
so that we're not just simply trying to solve our
own time scarcity and get from point eight to point
be in our lives, or we're able to have these
self transcendent values and think about how can I use
my time to benefit others, which raises a big question,
how can we fight time poverty? What can people like
me do to feel a little more time affluent. We'll
tackle those important questions when the Happiness Lab returns in
(21:23):
a moment. I would get up at eight with the
kids or seven thirty. Then I would sit down in
my study at nine o'clock and I wouldn't leave until
one pm. So I would do four straight hours of
work and that was it. Welcome to the typical day
of time affluents Guru Tom Hodgkinson. I was struck that
(21:46):
Tom's day involved both less in more idoling than I'd expected,
if that makes sense. After lunch, I would go into
the garden, go for walk, sleep, my children would come
back from school, would do dinner. I'd have a couple
of beers and read books in the evening, go to
bed sort of fairly early ten or eleven. That was great,
And you know that was a four hour working down.
(22:08):
Often days off for trips and so on, so that
was lovely. Tom is super time affluent, but he isn't
some bum who never gets anything done. He's an incredibly
accomplished writer with six best selling books, and that doesn't
even include his ukulele handbook. The problem with being an
idol actually is that you can end up working quite hard.
I mean, I get a lot of cristicism from our
(22:29):
readers saying, well, you seem to work quite hard, Tom,
you because you're quite productive. And I think that's because
you know, you give yourself lots of thinking time, and
then you start having creative ideas and then you want
to carry them out, and you know it takes some
work to actually make them happen. And so I asked
Tom for some advice, practical tips that would actually work
with my busy professor. Lifestyle practical tips. Okay, please, you
(22:50):
take an hour off for lunch and talk to people.
I sheepishly admitted to Tom that I pretty rarely take
a lunch break that doesn't involve checking my email. Overwork
can drag you backwards. Take your lunch break a full,
uninterrupted meal break with proper conversation already was seeming like
the stuff of fantasy. But then Tom up the ante
with an even more indulgent afternoon activity. Ideally to have
(23:13):
a short nap after lunch. I mean I personally find
that time between two and four. I mean, I'm completely dead.
I could get quite depressed. I can't think, I'm so tired,
and then I wake up again at four a two
hour siesta. Yeah, that basically sounds kind of impossible for me.
Tom was horrified when he learned that I had a
flight later that day and that I planned to spend
most of that travel time working. Travel time is a gift.
(23:36):
In the old days, you couldn't work. We didn't have
Wi Fi and stuff, and so it was a lovely
opportunity just to gaze out of the window. But you
could still do that planes, trains, automobiles, you know, sit
in the back, star up the window, unplug, you know,
or read a book, a real actual book, and sleep
and days. Even walking along the road is supposed to
(23:56):
be a sort of self improving activity because you put
your headphones on and plug into some kind of inspirational podcast.
What I mean, Okay, this is a good podcast. Listen
to your one. Tom's point isn't to cancel your happiness
labs description like, seriously, don't do that. Tom's point is
just that we need to find some time when it
feels like we're not working or desperately trying to cramp
(24:18):
things in. Give a gift to yourself of that time.
It's completely free, it doesn't cost anything. It could really
have incalculable benefits feel mental health. I was so thankful
to hear Tom's suggestions, but realistically, I wasn't totally sure
his advice was going to work for my level of
time famine. I mean, I can shoot for longer email
free lunches, but napping for hours a day is not
(24:41):
really practical for my situation. And if I'm being honest,
it's also unlikely that I'll leave my laptop totally switched
off on my next flight. I started to worry that
Tom's recommendations were a bit too advance from my level
of time famine. I needed to start with some beginner tips,
sort of a time affluence for dummies kind of thing.
(25:01):
So I turned to my other hero, Ashley Willins. She's
an academic just like me, so I figured that she
might have some more applicable advice. As usual, I was
in a rush to get straight to the point. So
you're a super busy Harvard professors who teaches about time.
Feels a little bit ironic, But my life sometimes feels
very ironic. Yess, So, how are you actually putting this
(25:23):
stuff into effect in your own life. I'm trying and
sometimes failing. Yeah, I feel like I'm grasping at straws
sometimes to try to keep it all together. It wasn't
exactly the guru level of time mastery I was hoping for,
but I also admired Ashley's honesty. One thing that I
did structurally in my life as I cut my commute
time to basically zero, I pay a lot of money
(25:47):
and rent, but I can walk to the office. So
I'm not only buying myself time each and every day,
but I can also spend that time in ways that
are good for happiness, like walking, enjoying the scenery. I
take in a lot of sunrises walking across the bridge
to work, And I think that's one thing that I've
done that I've noticed has dramatically improved the quality of
(26:07):
my life. So Ashley exchanges in the form of rent
for less time wasted on adult commute. She also used
her other expenditures in the same way, like housecleaning, grocery delivery.
It turns out the allocating more of your available budget
to these services can substantially increase your time affluence. If
you spend money in a typical month to outsource dislike
(26:27):
task to others, therefore buying back some of your time
or at least buying more positive moments. We see that
that is a good predictor of happiness for people all
across the income spectrum. The richest people that we've studied
people living kind of at or even slightly below the
poverty line. Paying someone to do your dislike tasks can
also provide a much needed boost to your social life.
When you outsource something you don't like, you not only
(26:49):
get to spend more time with people you care about,
but you're less thinking about all these other things you
have to do while you're socializing, and so it buys
us out of some of this dread, this anticipation of
having to come home from a nice social event on
the weekend and have a million chores to do before
the workweek starts. And we've also started looking at the
effects of time saving services is housecleaning someone to mow
(27:11):
your lawn on relationship statisfaction, and we have some findings
suggesting that couples who make a concerted effort to outsource
in a typical month experience greater relationship satisfaction because they're
less negatively impacted by daily stressors, and that effect on
relationship satisfaction is just about as good as having a
(27:31):
partner who's a really good listener. All of this sounds great,
but I bet some of you are thinking the same
thing I was. Is this a strategy everyone can use?
Or is this just for wealthy Harvard professors who can
afford a housecleaner? I get this question a lot. Isn't
this just for rich people? Most of us listening at
least are lucky enough to have some discretionary income at
our disposal. So then we want to start thinking, well,
(27:53):
five one hundred dollars a month, two hundred dollars a month,
three hundred dollars a month, how can I start thinking
about spending that money in a way that might best
promote my happiness? And there are small things that we
can all do around the margins. One example might be
higher the neighbor's kid to mow your lawn. That might
not cost very much money. Getting takeout. Takeout can be
(28:14):
one way of saving time, but interestingly, we often don't
think about takeout in that way. So we show in
some of our studies that some of the happiness benefit
of these time saving purchases that we make on a
regular basis. Some of that benefit is actually from just
thinking that you're saving time and then spending that time
in a more deliberate way. So you could, even if
(28:35):
you don't want to change the way that you're spending
sit down and look at your purchases that you make
in a typical month and say, hey, when I made
that takeout purchase, I actually was saving time that I
wasn't spending on cooking. What did I do with that time?
And next week when I buy that fast food, could
I be spending that time I would have spent cooking
in a better way. So part of the benefit is
(28:56):
just removing negative tasks that you don't like. And part
of the benefit of time saving is being more deliberate
with the free time that you've gained. The idea of
being more deliberate with how we think about our time
is critical. Remember, time affluence isn't the objective amount of
free time you have, the actual number of open blocks
in your calendar. It's your subjective sense that you have
(29:18):
some free time, and that means you can do a
lot to boost your sense of time affluence, even if
in reality you can't really open up that much actual
free time. It's just the sense of giving yourself a
bit of a break that makes all the difference, even
if the amount of time you actually gain is small.
I saw this first hand in my Happiness class when
(29:38):
I first introduced my Yale students to the concept of
time affluence. With hard classes, demanding extracurriculars, and an intent
social life, Yale students feel incredibly time famished pretty much
all the time, so I decided to give them a
booster shot of time affluence by surprising them with a
canceled class one spring day. Students came to lecture expecting
(29:58):
to be in class for an hour and fifteen minutes,
but when they arrived, my teaching assistants were handing out
flyers explaining that I was giving students a bit of
time affluence by canceling class that day. The students were
ecstatic they finally had a bit of free time. Some
even started streaming and jumping up and down. Others just
seemed incredibly relieved. One woman even burst into tears, announcing
(30:21):
it was the first free hour she's had all semester.
But my student's joy demonstrates this important feature of time affluents.
It doesn't take all that much to feel incredibly good.
My yalies were only given an hour and fifteen minutes free,
but at the time it fell like years. Many of
them even used that free hour to do something really fun.
(30:42):
They hung out with friends over bubble teas or went
for a short hike, which shows one of the most
important features of using our time affluments well. In the
rare cases when we get free time, we need to
use it wisely. This is something I really struggle with
because I do get little blasts of free time confetti
here and there. There are lots of unexpected changes as
(31:02):
an academic meetings, canceled talks that wrap up earlier than predicted,
appointments with people who never show. I usually use those
free moments to do a quick social media check or
dig into my email, but actually argues that I should
plan to use those little time windfalls a lot more effectively.
How can we start claiming back some of these windfalls,
(31:22):
to really think about them in this more deliberate way,
so that these small pockets of time that we do
receive in our everyday lives feel more like a game
and therefore might be more likely to increase our happiness.
Have you done this in your own life? Are there
specific tips you use when you have a meeting canceled
or have a small time windfall? Yeah? So, I actually
(31:43):
have started to keep a time windfall list of if
I have small pockets of five minutes and ten minutes,
what are some life things, Not work things, not emails.
Those will always be there, But some small positive life
things that I can do with those windfalls. Send a
letter of gratitude, call my mom, reach out to a
(32:03):
friend from grad school I haven't talked to in a while.
And I write those in my agenda. And I don't
always get to all of them, but I do get
to some of them. And I think that doing this
research has made me a little bit more strategic about
not squandering the small moments that all of us find
ourselves with on a daily basis. Making this episode hasn't
completely cured my sense of time famine, but it has
(32:26):
helped a lot. I've started my own time winfall list.
I want to connect more with friends I haven't seen
in a while, and take more opportunities to express gratitude
to the people I care about. I also want to
take time to be more mindful, and so I'm going
to try to use some of those free fifteen minute
blocks for a quick meditation and some deep breaths. And
in honor of Tom, I promised to spend at least
(32:48):
a few minutes gazing out the window on my next flight.
But most of all, making this episode has caused me
to realize that I'm not helping the people I care
about by packing my schedule to the brim. Hearing the
science has caused me to reflect on the negative impact
my time famine is having on the people I care
about most. It also made me worry about the person
I could become if I don't carve out a bit
(33:09):
more free time. So, Happiness Lab listeners, I'm making a
public commitment to all of you that I plan to
prioritize my own time affluence, and I hope you will too.
As I said before, you don't need to unsubscribe from
your favorite podcast. Seriously, don't do that. Even just making
the most of small time windfalls can bump up your
mood and maybe, just maybe it might even make you
(33:32):
a better person. The Happiness Lab is co written and
produced by Ryan Dilley. Our original music was composed by
Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing and mastering by Evan Viola.
(33:55):
Pete Naton also helped with production. Joseph Friedman checked our
facts and our editing was done by Sophie Crane mckiven.
Special thanks to Meil the Belle, Carl mcgliori, Heather Fame,
Julia Barton, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig, Jacob Weisburg, and my agent,
Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by
Pushkin Industries and me Doctor Laurie Santos
Pushkin. Looking back at my diary, Wednesday, February fifth, twenty
twenty was a fairly ordinary day. And by fairly ordinary,
I mean to say that my day was absolutely packed
to the brim, which makes sense because I don't just
(00:36):
have one amazing job. I have lots of them. I'm
a professor and a research scientist. I run one of
Yell's residential colleges, which means I have over four hundred
students to take care of all the time. I travel
a bunch for public lectures to spread the science of happiness.
I'm a manager to all my amazing staff, a colleague
to my science friends, and now I'm a podcaster too.
(00:57):
So how do I keep track of all these different roles.
My planner it's a small red notebook that I carry
with me everywhere. It's where I write out every single
commitment I have, including the time it starts and the
time it ends. My planner is like a precious friend.
It helps me keep track of what I need to
do every single day. And so I'm not looking in
(01:17):
my planner at the page for Wednesday, February fifth, twenty twenty,
which as usual, was completely packed. On that day, I
had some podcast, stuff to do at specific times, three
different student meetings, a staff meeting, and an important department talk,
after which I wrote, in very decisive all caps lettering
three forty five pm leave immediately. That was a note
(01:39):
to remind myself that I needed to get out of
that department talk a little early in order to make
it to the airport for my flight to DC that night.
That one was a very very hard stop. But on
this particular busy day, my morning got to begin with
a really exciting start. Eight am interview with Tom Hodgkinson,
one of my personal heroes. I'm here, but I can
only hear vea fenty I've admired Tom and his work
(02:02):
for years, very very quiet. I had scheduled Tom's interview
for a whole hour in my calendar, but with so
much to ask him, I was worried I wouldn't have
enough time. And by this point we were already ten
minutes into our time together and Tom couldn't hear me.
We tinkered with the mics and checked the phone connection.
I kept asking Tom, is my voice louder now? I'm
afraid not nay. As the time ticked away, I felt
(02:25):
my stress levels rising. It was already really difficult to
find a long enough slot for this interview, and so
I mean, should we push through and risk me being
late for all the rest of the stuff that day,
or should I try to reschedule for god knows when
I was starting to freak out, and then suddenly, yeah,
that's pretty good. Yeah Tom could finally hear me, which
(02:45):
meant the interview I was most looking forward to this
season could begin. So what was the topic I was
so anxious to jump into with Tom? So talk to
me about your history of becoming an idler, Like what
drove you to that? Talk about kind of why you
decided to become more idle. I think I was born
fairly idle. I always had a strong will towards idling.
(03:07):
Yep idling, it's a pretty foreign concept, at least for me.
I tend to fill my day to the brim, mostly
with meaningful and interesting things. I always thought that was
what I was supposed to do, But it's gotten to
the point where my calendar is now so packed that
I sometimes feel like I'm drowning and all the stuff
I have to do. Maybe you can relate, But as
(03:30):
we'll see in this episode, if we really want to
improve our happiness, we need to learn to do well
a lot less. Our minds are constantly telling us what
to do to be happy. But what if our minds
are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us,
leading us away from what will really make us happy.
(03:50):
The good news is that understanding the science of the
mind can point us all back in the right direction.
You're listening to the Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie Santras.
Alarm clock. What a horrible invention. I mean, it's a
horrible way just thought the day. Get out of bed.
(04:10):
Come on, you're lazy. You're never gonna get anywhere. Tom
is obsessed with clocks because he absolutely despises them. In
his book How to Be Idle, Tom tells his readers
that to be happier, they need to throw away their
alarm clocks. I'm not one of those people who sort
of leaps out of bed the moment my eyes open. Yeah,
I can't wait to get on with my day. You know,
there's quite a lovely in between each states, in between
(04:33):
wake and sleep, when you're sort of half conscious of
your dreams. I think that's a lovely state to be in,
and a slower transition from sleep to wake, I think
is civilized. These days, clocks are everywhere, from our nightstands
to our laptops to our wrists. It's easy to forget
that watching the minutes of the day tick by is
actually a new development. In medieval times, to an extent,
(04:54):
they were masters of their own time, so they can
sort of do a bit of weaving, have a nap,
go into the vegetable garden, do a bit more weaving,
go to church and someone. Life back then was sometimes brutal,
but Tom thinks our pre industrial ancestors enjoyed something that
we've given up, a complete disregard for what hour it is.
For most of human history, it was pretty hard to
(05:15):
know the precise time. All medieval folks had was the
position of the sun. While that end, the bell would
signal the end of the kind of the shift into
fields or whatever. The chimes from the church tower meant
that it was time to put down your tools, time
(05:36):
to assemble together for worship or a meal, time to
think of something other than work. That is, until the
Industrial Revolution kicked in, the system changed. You became a
factory worker. The capitalist bought huge a bounts of machinery
and invested a net, and they had to keep this
machinery going well twenty four seven. Ideally, so the people
(05:58):
were told large stot about working at home. When you
feel like it, you know, time kind of weirdly becomes
a sort of like a sort of a tyrant. Tom
is like a resistance fighter at war with this tyrannical
cons time, and his primary weapon in the struggle is idling.
Idoling is the act of loafing, taking time to do nothing,
in particular, think long lunches, midday naps, tea time, taking
(06:23):
the scenic route, getting lost for no reason at all, daydreaming,
hanging with friends at the pub, long happy conversations that
run well past the time we probably should have gone
to bed. Tom encourages all of these. His books are
manifestos against the cult of productivity that many of us
grew up with. When you're not working, when you're reflecting,
(06:44):
when you're walking around the graves with your friends and
talking about art and love and philosophy and ideas, that's
when you're really living. And if we overwork, then you
neglect that very important part of life. I first learned
of Tom's work back in the early two thousands when
I myself had just started to neglect all these important
parts of life. At the time, I was an untenured
assistant professor, working all hours to get papers out and
(07:07):
my lab up and running. I had fully subscribed to
the philosophy that my generation inherited back from the days
of the Industrial Revolution, that productivity is king. The idea
of spending long hours walking around a grove with friends
talking about art and philosophy. I mean, that seemed incredibly foreign,
almost unattainable, but if I was being honest, it also
(07:29):
sounded kind of amazing. I think it's one of the
reasons I was first drawn to Tom's books. To devote
a good portion of each day or each week to
idling is actually very very good for you, for your health,
for your mental health, your physical health, for the health
of your friends. That doesn't mean to say that you
don't work or you don't enjoy working. In fact, I
would probably like to find something that they would like
(07:49):
to do anyway and make it into their work. The problem,
according to Tom, is when the urge to work makes
us a slave to the clock, when we completely lose
any free time whatsoever, so we're all content looking at
our watches like The White Rabbit and Lewis Carroll's Alice
in Wonderland. Late late, I'm very late, completely unable to
live in the moment. You read these things on Twitter
(08:10):
saying hey guys, sorry, but you know, if you're twenty
six and you're not working crazy hours, you're not going
to get anywhere. I think that's so wrong. Work in
itself is not good. And that's one idea that I
want to fight, is this idea that because any kind
of hard work is morally good. Tom worries that our
modern ethos of productivity is turning all of us into
unfortunate workhorses, the kind that great literature has long warned
(08:32):
us about. In animal farm, we have the example of
the horse boxer, who, when faced with the problem, says,
work harder, work, harder, work until he works himself into
an early grave. He's taken off to the glue factory. Now,
that to me is a that's a warning overwork causes stress,
heart disease. It obviously is bad for family life, bad
(08:56):
for your relationships, and who is it good for for you?
For your ego, for your boss to make more money.
You know, when you start to analyze these concepts, like
the work ethic, they start to dissolve. So I'm trying
to look at things from a from point of view.
Tom tries to live his entire life in accordance with
these beliefs, but many people find his suggestions deeply challenging.
(09:17):
At times, his ideas can sound like a radical religious ideology.
It's not laziness to create free time for yourself. It's
actually a mark of nobility. It brings you closer to
the gods. Actually, because when you start to realize where
this stuff comes from, it comes from the people in power.
I don't want to sound two Marxists, but it comes
from the owners of capital. It comes from the owners
(09:39):
of the means of production. They want to enslave us.
We've got to break free of these chains, William Blake.
He talked about the mind forged manacles. Okay, we've created
a situation with our own minds, and we can use
our own minds to break free of these manacles. As
I talked to Tom for this interview and reflected on
how stressed I'd been about my schedule just minutes before,
(10:01):
I got really sad. It's now been over a decade
since I first encountered Tom's work, and I'm still not
listening to his advice. If anything, I've become even more
trapped in those mind forged manacles he talks about, that
ethos of productivity at all costs. I mean, don't get
me wrong, I'm really grateful for all the career opportunities
that keep me so busy, especially this podcast, which I
(10:24):
absolutely adore. But I'm also really really overworked. I don't
admit it much, but I feel overwhelmed all of time.
I can't remember the last time I took a real
vacation or had even a moment to just be idle
for the sake of being idle, let alone trapes across
a grove talking about philosophy. There's not a single entry
(10:45):
in my red planner that says just do nothing. And
all of this makes me feel incredibly guilty, because as
the host of this podcast, I'm supposed to know better.
Usually I'm pretty good at following the advice I share
with you, but this is one domain where I'm really
screwing things up. And honestly, I don't even know what
to do to make my schedule less hectic these days.
(11:06):
But as I always say, when all else fails, you
should turn to science. After the break, we'll do just that.
You'll hear what feeling this busy does to your mental
health and to your relationships, and we'll see that having
an extra bit of free time is more valuable for
our well being than our lying minds often think. Right,
(11:27):
gotta go. The happiness lab will be back in a moment.
Time affluence this feeling of whether or not we have
enough time to do all of the things that we
(11:48):
want to do or have to do. This is Ashley Willins,
a professor at Harvard Business School an author of the
upcoming book Time Smart, How to Reclaim your Time and
live a happier life. Ashley is another one of my heroes.
Instead of looking at whether we have objectively sort of
enough hours in a day, we're looking at subjectively whether
people feel like they have enough time. Time affluence is
(12:10):
one of my favorite scientific concepts because it's the opposite
of what I experience on a near daily basis. My
calendar never feels open. My subjective feeling is one of
extreme business. What researchers like Ashley have christened time famine.
People today are feeling increasingly pressed for time. Increasingly time
poor such that they feel like they have too many
(12:33):
things to do and not enough time in the day
to do it. And it's interesting because there's also this
data suggesting that we objectively have more time today than
we used to. So subjective feelings of time stress are
going up, while the objective amount of time that we
have is actually going up as well. So why do
we fail to notice the extra minutes we all have
(12:55):
each day? The reason, according to science is that nowadays
are free time tends to be broken up into tiny
chunks or time confetti, So we have more time confetti
now than we used to. That leisure time is or attic,
it's scattered because we're constantly connected to our phones. We're
trying to do many many different tasks, and our attention
(13:17):
is being pulled in many directions. So the feelings I'm
trying to pack in all of this stuff being pulled
in all these directions during our free time can make
us feel more pressed for time. I definitely get the
concept of time confetti in my own life because even
when I get a break, it never feels like a break.
I'll be lounging and watching TV, and I'll get a
stressful text about work, or I'll be in the middle
(13:39):
of an otherwise enjoyable dinner chat when I get this
anxious urge to do a quick email check. Even lunch,
a time my idol Tom says should be reserved for
conversation that often ends up being a time that I
spend alone trying to quickly scratch a few things off
that to do list. Sure, I wind up getting more done.
I mean, it feels like I'm being productive and clearing
(14:00):
things off my plate. But ashle these research has shown
that it's taking more of a toll on me than
I realize. These feelings of time stress as time comes
at a cost of happiness. In some Gallipold poll data
that we analyze with two point five million Americans, we
found that this feeling of time famine had a worse
impact on happiness than being unemployed. So it seems to
(14:24):
have dramatic consequences for our subjective well being. The problem, though,
is that people don't realize the consequences of time poverty
are so great, and so we constantly make individual choices
that make our time famine even worse. People who have
more job flexibility, more paid vacations in their workplace are
happier with their jobs, are more satisfied and less likely
(14:46):
to leave. But when you ask people would you rather
have job A and Job A makes more salary or
a job B and job B has more paid vacation
and less salary, people always go for job A. If
you've listened to other episodes of the Happiness Lab, you
know that many of us equate happiness with having more money,
which means that most of us want to work more
and more in order to earn more and more. But
(15:08):
that trade off of giving up time for money winds
up resulting in less and less time affluence, which often
means less and less happiness. It's a pretty stupid strategy,
but it's also one that Ashley has found many of
us employ all the time. We think that prioritizing money
and working lot is a status symbol, so we think
if we seem really busy, that's going to confer us
(15:30):
higher status, and it's one of the reasons that we
don't focus on time take paid vacation, and instead focus
a lot on working. The connection between business and status
means that even people who have the money to buy
a little free time often choose not to do so.
Even some of the wealthiest people We've studied, people with
two million dollars sitting in the bank are still focusing
(15:52):
on money at the expense of time. Ashley's also found
that as we feel our day is getting fuller and fuller,
we don't make time for activities that can reduce our stress,
like hanging out with friends or making new ones. We
have a paper showing that even just this general prioritization
of money over time means that we're less likely to
(16:13):
interact with a pier. So we spend eighteen percent less
time interacting, and we know that these small social moments
are some of the happiest in our day. These results
got me thinking about why I'm so busy. Ironically, it's
not because I'm focused on money or status. It's because
I'm focused on people. I wind up saying yes to
too many things because I don't want to disappoint anyone,
(16:34):
either my colleagues, or my students or even you, dear
podcast listener. But putting too much stuff on my plate
means becoming even more time famished. I'm seeing lots of people, sure,
but am I really spending any quality time with any
of them? I explain this jumble of feelings to Ashley,
I was surprised that my hero was experiencing pretty much
(16:54):
the same thing you're tunneling. You're just literally it feels
like survival. I'm having this day to day. I just
taught to classes and had two hours of office hours.
All I'm thinking about is when am I going to
drink water? When is my next nap? I don't have
the cognitive resources to also think about how am I
going to connect with a friend who hasn't been doing
very well. Back in the nineteen seventies, researchers John Darley
(17:19):
and Daniel Batson ran a test to see why people
help others. Was being nice a function of a person's
personality or did it depend on the situation. To test
these questions, they chose a population known for being do gooders,
students at the Princeton Theological Seminary. Darley and Batson figure
the students training to be priests were probably prone to
(17:41):
being nice to other people, and so the researchers told
these subjects that they needed to deliver a public sermon
about Jesus's story of the Good Samaritan. In this parable,
a man is beaten, robbed, and left unconscious on the street.
Several people, including a priest, passed by without stopping, but
one person, the Good Samaritan, took pity on the victim.
(18:02):
He helped a man up and even brought him to
an inn to eat and rest. The Samaritan, Jesus explains,
is the guy we're also post to Emily. He's the
one that's going to heaven. The seminary students all knew
the tale well, so having to give a sermon on
that topic should have been mildly stressful but relatively straightforward,
and that's when Darley and Batson up the stakes. All
(18:24):
of the students had to head a cross campus to
another building to give the talk. One group was told
that their sermon would happen later that day, so they
had plenty of time to get there. A second group
was told that they'd make it in time, but only
if they set off immediately. But a third group was
told that they were already late. They needed to sprint
over there right away, and that's when Darli and Batson
(18:46):
had a surprise for the men. They basically staged an
experimental version of the Good Samaritan story. They hired an
actor to pretend to be injured on the ground who
was blocking a narrow part of the route. The students
would literally have to physically step over the actor's writhing
body in order to make it past. So what did
a little time famine due to the student's willingness to help?
(19:08):
The results were really striking. Sixty three percent of the
students who had time to spare stop to help the
hurt stranger, which honestly is already pretty bad. That means
over a third of trainee priests basically stepped over a
guy lying hurt on the street. But what happened when
subjects were in a mad hurry. Only ten percent of
them stopped to help. Ninety percent of the subjects completely
(19:32):
ignored an obviously injured person on the street because they
were rushing to give a sermon about how Jesus said
you should stop to help injured people on the street.
When we're time famished, we become crappy people. When people
are thinking about the economic value of their time, when
they're thinking about being hyper efficient with every second, this
(19:52):
comes at a cost of our willingness to take time
out of our day to help others, to volunteer to
do something as simple as recycle a piece of scrap
paper in the lab, something that takes ten fifteen seconds
to do. Ashley actually has experimental data to back up
this last point. She had students cut up sheets of
paper for a construction project. She told them they could
(20:14):
either throw their scraps away in a nearby trash can
or walk a few feet outside the room to a
recycling bin. In this first control condition, forty one percent
of the students opted to recycle. But Ashley also tested
another experimental group in which she first had subjects write
down how many hours they expected to work after graduation
and then calculate their hourly pay rate. What happened to
(20:38):
recycling In this experimental group, only twelve percent made the
extra effort required. Policymakers should take note here. Have you
ever considered that giving people more time will help them
become better, greener citizens. What we really need to do
is to solve time poverty so that people can have
more cognitive resources and also just a more outward focus
(21:00):
so that we're not just simply trying to solve our
own time scarcity and get from point eight to point
be in our lives, or we're able to have these
self transcendent values and think about how can I use
my time to benefit others, which raises a big question,
how can we fight time poverty? What can people like
me do to feel a little more time affluent. We'll
tackle those important questions when the Happiness Lab returns in
(21:23):
a moment. I would get up at eight with the
kids or seven thirty. Then I would sit down in
my study at nine o'clock and I wouldn't leave until
one pm. So I would do four straight hours of
work and that was it. Welcome to the typical day
of time affluents Guru Tom Hodgkinson. I was struck that
(21:46):
Tom's day involved both less in more idoling than I'd expected,
if that makes sense. After lunch, I would go into
the garden, go for walk, sleep, my children would come
back from school, would do dinner. I'd have a couple
of beers and read books in the evening, go to
bed sort of fairly early ten or eleven. That was great,
And you know that was a four hour working down.
(22:08):
Often days off for trips and so on, so that
was lovely. Tom is super time affluent, but he isn't
some bum who never gets anything done. He's an incredibly
accomplished writer with six best selling books, and that doesn't
even include his ukulele handbook. The problem with being an
idol actually is that you can end up working quite hard.
I mean, I get a lot of cristicism from our
(22:29):
readers saying, well, you seem to work quite hard, Tom,
you because you're quite productive. And I think that's because
you know, you give yourself lots of thinking time, and
then you start having creative ideas and then you want
to carry them out, and you know it takes some
work to actually make them happen. And so I asked
Tom for some advice, practical tips that would actually work
with my busy professor. Lifestyle practical tips. Okay, please, you
(22:50):
take an hour off for lunch and talk to people.
I sheepishly admitted to Tom that I pretty rarely take
a lunch break that doesn't involve checking my email. Overwork
can drag you backwards. Take your lunch break a full,
uninterrupted meal break with proper conversation already was seeming like
the stuff of fantasy. But then Tom up the ante
with an even more indulgent afternoon activity. Ideally to have
(23:13):
a short nap after lunch. I mean I personally find
that time between two and four. I mean, I'm completely dead.
I could get quite depressed. I can't think, I'm so tired,
and then I wake up again at four a two
hour siesta. Yeah, that basically sounds kind of impossible for me.
Tom was horrified when he learned that I had a
flight later that day and that I planned to spend
most of that travel time working. Travel time is a gift.
(23:36):
In the old days, you couldn't work. We didn't have
Wi Fi and stuff, and so it was a lovely
opportunity just to gaze out of the window. But you
could still do that planes, trains, automobiles, you know, sit
in the back, star up the window, unplug, you know,
or read a book, a real actual book, and sleep
and days. Even walking along the road is supposed to
(23:56):
be a sort of self improving activity because you put
your headphones on and plug into some kind of inspirational podcast.
What I mean, Okay, this is a good podcast. Listen
to your one. Tom's point isn't to cancel your happiness
labs description like, seriously, don't do that. Tom's point is
just that we need to find some time when it
feels like we're not working or desperately trying to cramp
(24:18):
things in. Give a gift to yourself of that time.
It's completely free, it doesn't cost anything. It could really
have incalculable benefits feel mental health. I was so thankful
to hear Tom's suggestions, but realistically, I wasn't totally sure
his advice was going to work for my level of
time famine. I mean, I can shoot for longer email
free lunches, but napping for hours a day is not
(24:41):
really practical for my situation. And if I'm being honest,
it's also unlikely that I'll leave my laptop totally switched
off on my next flight. I started to worry that
Tom's recommendations were a bit too advance from my level
of time famine. I needed to start with some beginner tips,
sort of a time affluence for dummies kind of thing.
(25:01):
So I turned to my other hero, Ashley Willins. She's
an academic just like me, so I figured that she
might have some more applicable advice. As usual, I was
in a rush to get straight to the point. So
you're a super busy Harvard professors who teaches about time.
Feels a little bit ironic, But my life sometimes feels
very ironic. Yess, So, how are you actually putting this
(25:23):
stuff into effect in your own life. I'm trying and
sometimes failing. Yeah, I feel like I'm grasping at straws
sometimes to try to keep it all together. It wasn't
exactly the guru level of time mastery I was hoping for,
but I also admired Ashley's honesty. One thing that I
did structurally in my life as I cut my commute
time to basically zero, I pay a lot of money
(25:47):
and rent, but I can walk to the office. So
I'm not only buying myself time each and every day,
but I can also spend that time in ways that
are good for happiness, like walking, enjoying the scenery. I
take in a lot of sunrises walking across the bridge
to work, And I think that's one thing that I've
done that I've noticed has dramatically improved the quality of
(26:07):
my life. So Ashley exchanges in the form of rent
for less time wasted on adult commute. She also used
her other expenditures in the same way, like housecleaning, grocery delivery.
It turns out the allocating more of your available budget
to these services can substantially increase your time affluence. If
you spend money in a typical month to outsource dislike
(26:27):
task to others, therefore buying back some of your time
or at least buying more positive moments. We see that
that is a good predictor of happiness for people all
across the income spectrum. The richest people that we've studied
people living kind of at or even slightly below the
poverty line. Paying someone to do your dislike tasks can
also provide a much needed boost to your social life.
When you outsource something you don't like, you not only
(26:49):
get to spend more time with people you care about,
but you're less thinking about all these other things you
have to do while you're socializing, and so it buys
us out of some of this dread, this anticipation of
having to come home from a nice social event on
the weekend and have a million chores to do before
the workweek starts. And we've also started looking at the
effects of time saving services is housecleaning someone to mow
(27:11):
your lawn on relationship statisfaction, and we have some findings
suggesting that couples who make a concerted effort to outsource
in a typical month experience greater relationship satisfaction because they're
less negatively impacted by daily stressors, and that effect on
relationship satisfaction is just about as good as having a
(27:31):
partner who's a really good listener. All of this sounds great,
but I bet some of you are thinking the same
thing I was. Is this a strategy everyone can use?
Or is this just for wealthy Harvard professors who can
afford a housecleaner? I get this question a lot. Isn't
this just for rich people? Most of us listening at
least are lucky enough to have some discretionary income at
our disposal. So then we want to start thinking, well,
(27:53):
five one hundred dollars a month, two hundred dollars a month,
three hundred dollars a month, how can I start thinking
about spending that money in a way that might best
promote my happiness? And there are small things that we
can all do around the margins. One example might be
higher the neighbor's kid to mow your lawn. That might
not cost very much money. Getting takeout. Takeout can be
(28:14):
one way of saving time, but interestingly, we often don't
think about takeout in that way. So we show in
some of our studies that some of the happiness benefit
of these time saving purchases that we make on a
regular basis. Some of that benefit is actually from just
thinking that you're saving time and then spending that time
in a more deliberate way. So you could, even if
(28:35):
you don't want to change the way that you're spending
sit down and look at your purchases that you make
in a typical month and say, hey, when I made
that takeout purchase, I actually was saving time that I
wasn't spending on cooking. What did I do with that time?
And next week when I buy that fast food, could
I be spending that time I would have spent cooking
in a better way. So part of the benefit is
(28:56):
just removing negative tasks that you don't like. And part
of the benefit of time saving is being more deliberate
with the free time that you've gained. The idea of
being more deliberate with how we think about our time
is critical. Remember, time affluence isn't the objective amount of
free time you have, the actual number of open blocks
in your calendar. It's your subjective sense that you have
(29:18):
some free time, and that means you can do a
lot to boost your sense of time affluence, even if
in reality you can't really open up that much actual
free time. It's just the sense of giving yourself a
bit of a break that makes all the difference, even
if the amount of time you actually gain is small.
I saw this first hand in my Happiness class when
(29:38):
I first introduced my Yale students to the concept of
time affluence. With hard classes, demanding extracurriculars, and an intent
social life, Yale students feel incredibly time famished pretty much
all the time, so I decided to give them a
booster shot of time affluence by surprising them with a
canceled class one spring day. Students came to lecture expecting
(29:58):
to be in class for an hour and fifteen minutes,
but when they arrived, my teaching assistants were handing out
flyers explaining that I was giving students a bit of
time affluence by canceling class that day. The students were
ecstatic they finally had a bit of free time. Some
even started streaming and jumping up and down. Others just
seemed incredibly relieved. One woman even burst into tears, announcing
(30:21):
it was the first free hour she's had all semester.
But my student's joy demonstrates this important feature of time affluents.
It doesn't take all that much to feel incredibly good.
My yalies were only given an hour and fifteen minutes free,
but at the time it fell like years. Many of
them even used that free hour to do something really fun.
(30:42):
They hung out with friends over bubble teas or went
for a short hike, which shows one of the most
important features of using our time affluments well. In the
rare cases when we get free time, we need to
use it wisely. This is something I really struggle with
because I do get little blasts of free time confetti
here and there. There are lots of unexpected changes as
(31:02):
an academic meetings, canceled talks that wrap up earlier than predicted,
appointments with people who never show. I usually use those
free moments to do a quick social media check or
dig into my email, but actually argues that I should
plan to use those little time windfalls a lot more effectively.
How can we start claiming back some of these windfalls,
(31:22):
to really think about them in this more deliberate way,
so that these small pockets of time that we do
receive in our everyday lives feel more like a game
and therefore might be more likely to increase our happiness.
Have you done this in your own life? Are there
specific tips you use when you have a meeting canceled
or have a small time windfall? Yeah? So, I actually
(31:43):
have started to keep a time windfall list of if
I have small pockets of five minutes and ten minutes,
what are some life things, Not work things, not emails.
Those will always be there, But some small positive life
things that I can do with those windfalls. Send a
letter of gratitude, call my mom, reach out to a
(32:03):
friend from grad school I haven't talked to in a while.
And I write those in my agenda. And I don't
always get to all of them, but I do get
to some of them. And I think that doing this
research has made me a little bit more strategic about
not squandering the small moments that all of us find
ourselves with on a daily basis. Making this episode hasn't
completely cured my sense of time famine, but it has
(32:26):
helped a lot. I've started my own time winfall list.
I want to connect more with friends I haven't seen
in a while, and take more opportunities to express gratitude
to the people I care about. I also want to
take time to be more mindful, and so I'm going
to try to use some of those free fifteen minute
blocks for a quick meditation and some deep breaths. And
in honor of Tom, I promised to spend at least
(32:48):
a few minutes gazing out the window on my next flight.
But most of all, making this episode has caused me
to realize that I'm not helping the people I care
about by packing my schedule to the brim. Hearing the
science has caused me to reflect on the negative impact
my time famine is having on the people I care
about most. It also made me worry about the person
I could become if I don't carve out a bit
(33:09):
more free time. So, Happiness Lab listeners, I'm making a
public commitment to all of you that I plan to
prioritize my own time affluence, and I hope you will too.
As I said before, you don't need to unsubscribe from
your favorite podcast. Seriously, don't do that. Even just making
the most of small time windfalls can bump up your
mood and maybe, just maybe it might even make you
(33:32):
a better person. The Happiness Lab is co written and
produced by Ryan Dilley. Our original music was composed by
Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing and mastering by Evan Viola.
(33:55):
Pete Naton also helped with production. Joseph Friedman checked our
facts and our editing was done by Sophie Crane mckiven.
Special thanks to Meil the Belle, Carl mcgliori, Heather Fame,
Julia Barton, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig, Jacob Weisburg, and my agent,
Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by
Pushkin Industries and me Doctor Laurie Santos
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