How to Talk to People - How To Build a Happy Life: Spend Time on What You Value

Episode Date: October 24, 2022

We try to use our time wisely—both at work and in leisure—but we often waste it. We may blame work for stripping us of recreation, but when valuable free time comes around, we can often revert back to more work. What explains the gap between how we use our time and how we want to use our time? A conversation with Harvard Business School professor Ashley Whillans helps us analyze our complex relationship with time and how to orient our time use around what we value.  This episode was produced by Rebecca Rashid and is hosted by Arthur Brooks. Editing by A.C. Valdez and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Engineering by Matthew Simonson.   Be part of How to Build a Happy Life. Write to us at [e-mail]. To support this podcast, and get unlimited access to all of The Atlantic’s journalism, become a subscriber. Music by the Fix (“Saturdays”), Mindme (“Anxiety”), Gregory David (“Under the Tides”), and Yomoti ("Nebula"). Click here to listen to more full-length episodes in The Atlantic’s How To series. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I'm Ann Applebaum. Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered, don't he and his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals? Well, maybe they are afraid. And maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions, even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year, to make sure their opponents can't win. Ultimately, destroying trust is the currency of autocrats. We could win, but we are very, very, very likely to lose

if we keep treating this as business as usual. Reporting on the sweeping changes unfolding in our country and preparing you to think about what might happen next. The new season of Autocracy in America, available now. Okay, Arthur, I have a question. for you. Yeah? If you had one extra hour today, how would you use it? How would I use it or how should I use it? Becca. If I had an extra hour a day, I would spend it sitting somewhere in nature. Wow, I find time to FaceTime my mother.

If I had one extra hour every day, I would spend it walking around my city aimlessly. For me, sometimes my commute requires me to leave when it's dark and then to get home when it's dark. But if I had an extra hour, it would be beautiful to walk down, you know, light, sunlit, drenched paths with my wife. This is How to Build a Happy Life. I'm Arthur Brooks, Harvard professor and contributing writer at the Atlantic. And I'm Rebecca Rish. A Producer at the Atlantic. How would you use it first?

And then I'll ask you how you should use it. I'd use it to work. Oh, no. Yeah, for sure. And look, it's not that bad. I love my work. I'm crazy about my work. I dream about my work.

It's great. Look, I'm working right now. Can you believe it? Right. It's the best thing ever. That's true. But it doesn't mean that endless hours of work are going to give me what I need

because it's a well-established fact to any listener of how to build a happy life that I'm kind of a work addict or a success addict or something like that or whatever the pathology tends to be, thinking back to the episode of Dona Lemke. What should I do with the hour? I should use it in communion to build love in my life. I should use it to pray, to read scripture, to spend time with my wife, because now we live alone now that we're empty nesters to talk to one of my kids to call one of my dear friends on the phone that's what I should do with it and maybe I would actually come to think of it when we're done here

I'm going to call a friend instead of going back to work the how you would use time and should use time is the big struggle right I think especially since the start of the pandemic our relationship with time has changed so drastically there is either too much time that you don't use wisely or you feel crunch for time in a way that

all the things you would want to do are no longer an option. There's no right answer. But I'm curious, are you applying yourself in a way that's useful in every waking moment? When you have a time problem like the coronavirus epidemic gave us all, where we became incredibly unstructured. We could use our time much, much more according to our own desires than we were ever able to before. It sounds great, but it turns out that it separates people more or less into two groups. You can call them the strivers and the fritterers. And again, you can't necessarily tell them apart in the workplace when there's things that you have to get done. And there's an exoskeleton that's called your work day in the office. You got to get your work done. And so you're responsible professional and you do it.

You don't just waste all your time and not go to the meetings and people are waiting for you. You do those things. But when your time is yours, you figure out which is your vice. Now, the world pats you on the back when you're a striber. Congratulations. It's unbelievable. So it's a problem. When relieved of the exoskeleton of the traditional workplace, your work sprawls

across your entire schedule, that's my problem. The fritterers are a little bit different. When you've got that extra hour, it's just too hard to get to the thing when you just have to get your work done. So a lot of people have found that they fall behind. they get a lot less done, they doom scroll a lot. And if you waste it, we'll be unto you, because that's the perfect pattern for actually frittering away the day. Many of us are stuck in a kind of vicious cycle with time.

Our expectation, our hope, is that time is in our control and we'll use it wisely. Whatever that means, but it doesn't work that way. The reality is that many of us don't really know how to use our time at all. How can we bridge the gap between how we use our time and how we want to use our time? Let's dig into the research on why people like me over-scheduled themselves and become too disciplined, while others feel like the days, months, and years are kind of slipping away. I think everyone should go to therapy. I don't want to. I'm not a millennial.

I am. My name is Ashley Willans, and I'm an assistant professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School, and my research focuses on time, money, and happiness. Ashley Willens is a colleague of mine at the Harvard Business School and the author of Time Smart, How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life. You know, a lot of research is me-search, and we study the things that we struggle with.

And as a happiness researcher, I was doing all of this academic research when I started my job five years ago on the importance of prioritizing time for happiness, for personal relationships. Meanwhile, my relationship was totally, totally falling apart. Ashley studies one side of the time problem,

the one that busy strivers face, those who try to make the most out of every waking moment, and you know who you are. She's a fellow happiness researcher whose work covers time poverty, a term she uses to describe the modern epidemic of people with too much to do and not enough time to do it. Ashley walked us through her concept of time traps,

the traps that motivate us to spend almost all of our time, on work and productivity. So I want to figure out what explains this and what to do about it. So I had this partner of 10 years. We were going to move to Boston, start a new life together from Vancouver. And this person left me in Boston after three weeks because they said that I was spending all my time in work and that there was no relationship to be there for. And meanwhile, I was giving talks all over the country on the importance of value.

time. I was inside crying about this dissolution of my most important relationship up to that point in my life and then preaching about the importance of putting time first. 80% of working adults are part feeling time poor. Like they have too many things to do in a day and not enough time to do them. This affects our relationships, our physical health, our ability to feel like we're making progress and personally important goals. These are the time traps that can make us time poor. One of them is this busyness as a status symbol, this cult of busyness that's pervasive in the United States in particular, where if we feel like we have any time in our calendar, we feel like a failure. We feel lazy. When we see

our colleagues having a lot of things in their calendar, we confer to those people high status. Wow, if they never have a spare moment, they must be really important and valuable to society. My data suggests that the most time poor among us are, in fact, those who are struggling to make ends meet. I've done research in Kenya, in India, in the U.S., among single-parent households. And we do see that individuals in those groups who make less money are more time poor because the system is working against their time affluence. They live further away from their places of employment. They have shift schedules that are constantly changing. They have less reliable access to transportation and child care.

So this is a whole other conversation, a whole line of work where I'm trying to move the policy conversation on not only thinking about reducing financial constraints, but also thinking about reducing time constraints to help those with less thrive as well. And it's interesting, you know, here in the United States, you go to a party, you meet somebody in the icebreaker is, what do you do? Which means what do you do for a living? What do you do to spend your time? And it was like, yeah, CEO, I work 80 hour weeks. People think you're a big shot. In Spain, the icebreaker question is, where are you going on vacation? It would be kind of odd, almost intrusive, maybe irrelevant, to say, how do you make your money?

Right. And yet, you're suggesting that this is really not about money. It's really about time. It's really about the fact that we're so busy, which is a way to show ourselves and others that we're highly in demand. And so the root of this problem philosophically, well, is philosophical, isn't it? Because it's the philosophy of how we value ourselves, right? Isn't that the root of what we're talking about here? Yeah, this doesn't happen in European countries like Italy,

where actually it's the opposite. People who have more vacations seem to be doing something right in life. I've talked to so many colleagues about my findings, and they say things like, well, I thought, you know, when my kids moved out and went to college, that I would finally get around to doing those hobbies that I always had wanted to do. And instead, I just feel.

those additional hours with work. And I don't know why. And then we would have these conversations about how productivity has become our habit. And we don't even know how to enjoy our free time. We've lost this habit. And they ask me, how do I start to pursue a passion so that I don't fill every spare moment I have with work? Because that's all. all I've been doing. And it is like we have to almost retrain ourselves to have leisure as a habit so that our defaults are not work emails, work meetings. But instead, our defaults are family, friends, exercise, active leisure activities. And we really, especially in North American culture, need to be pushing against work as our default mode of operating. For happiness reasons.

for happiness. Yeah, for happiness reasons. Let me get back to this really interesting question of you. So you were thinking about time and then you experienced the bitter fruit of not having enough time for your personal relationships. No doubt it was more complicated than that. But did you make any life changes pursuant to that really terrible experience? Yeah, but I think my life changes don't sound that dramatic. I'm just trying to adjust a little bit around the margins. to make sure I have time for things that matter to me outside of productivity. So I don't work on the weekends very much anymore. I have a kid who's one years old. I have a husband that I love.

I also don't work for the first hour in the morning. I will use that time to invest in myself, read, meditate, go for a walk, exercise. That first hour is mine, not my employers. And as a function of those two rules, I have to be a lot more careful about what I say yes and no to. But I've tried to almost have a quota strategy. I'm not hard and fast about this. But I will work on one paper at a time where I'm really working on it every day, not 15 papers that I'm sort of working on kind of all the time. So I think the experience of being at the lowest point in my life and trying to put some of these strategies into practice. are about small things that I do every day that are non-negotiables for my happiness.

You're clearly putting your work within boundaries. And this is the key point that you're making is that work is within boundaries because you're setting up your budget and you're living within your budget. Treat it like a scarce resource the way that you would if you were on a fixed income because you're really on a fixed income of time. So has it hurt your work or has it made your work better, made you more efficient? Is there a cost? So one thing that I learned early on, and there's research to substantiate this, is that it is better to compare yourself to yourself as opposed to compare yourself to others.

So for me, I think something I did was really heavily guard my attentional resources as well. What am I going to pay attention to in terms of other people's successes? because in my field, there's no good enough. Nothing you're going to do is going to feel like enough. It's going to be enough. It's going to guarantee success and awards and accolades. In terms of net productivity, yes, I do get less done now. Absolutely, especially since having a kid.

No question. I am not as fast. But I also don't hold myself to those same standards as when I was working all the time. And I think that's really key for my own feeling of satisfaction. My ideal self looks different now. There's research on this too. My ideal self used to look like working all the time being on a plane every week and publishing as much as humanly possible. That was my ideal self and my actual time use looked pretty close to that.

And then I realized that might be good on one dimension of my life, productivity and really hurt other dimensions of my life, well-being, social relationships that I know as a happiness researcher that you know, matter a lot for happiness. So I changed my ideal. My ideal now looks like publishing a couple of impactful papers on projects I care about that I think are going to matter, not traveling very much, and making sure I have time to spend with my friends and family and investing myself every day. So I also had to change the aspirational goal.

I had to change what my ideal self looked like so that. that my time use now is matching a different ideal than what my ideal was before. I'm Ann Applebaum. Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered, don't he and his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals? Well, maybe they are afraid.

And maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change our institutions even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year to make sure their opponents can't win. Ultimately, destroying trust is the currency of autocrats. We could win, but we are very, very, very likely to lose if we keep treating this as business as usual. Reporting on the sweeping changes unfolding in our country and preparing you to think about what might happen next.

the new season of Autocracy in America, available now. For my last book, I was interviewing this woman who was doing what you were doing five years ago to being in her career, but never stopped. And she's confessing to me that she's got a cordial relationship with best with her husband. You know, she doesn't know her adult kids very well. She drinks too much. She hasn't been to the gym in a long time. And furthermore, that her young colleagues don't trust her decision-making because it's not

crisp as at once. So she's like, what do I do? And I said, you don't need to tell me. what to do. You need to use your time differently, you know, than you are. And I said, why don't you do what you know you need to do? And she kind of stops and says, I guess I prefer to be special than happy. How much of that is going around? At least she admitted it. I feel like something that's very difficult is that to have this realization, right, you have to understand what you care about and want, like truly what you value. Maybe for this woman that you talk to, she did truly value being

the richest and having this productive life more than she valued gaining or improving in these other areas of life. And she seems like she's actually somewhat self-aware about that, right? My economist colleagues say, write down a model, Ashley, write down a model of exactly how I should spend my time to be happy. I say, I can't do that because I don't know what you value. So for us to be spending time in the so-called right ways, we have to know what we truly value. So we have to do that self-awareness, reflective component first. And then once we know what we truly value, research suggests that the more that our lives on a regular basis look like our ideal. So what your last seven days looked like in a time diary and how close that is to your ideal time use, minimizing. that discrepancy is hugely important for life satisfaction and for the amount on average of positive mood you experience on a regular basis. Now, for a lot of people, they might say they wish they had more free time and they could relax more and spend more time with their families,

but they don't actually know how to do that. Using your time in leisure is a very special thing. You know, you look at it philosophically, Aristotle made a big comparison or made a big distinction between work, recreation, and leisure. Now, work is productive activity. we all know what that is. Recreation is a break from work to make you ready to go back to work. Leisure is in and of itself something worth pursuing. Now, Yosef Piper, the great 20th century philosopher, said that leisure is the basis of culture. I mean, these are people who elevated leisure. And yet, you got to know how to do it.

Yeah, absolutely. So I think it's something that we do have to build a habit around. And that's where trying to change 10, 15 minutes. 30 minutes seems a lot more possible and achievable. Going back to behavioral science literature, you want to be thinking about setting a concrete goal. And part of the reason in my research, we often trade money for time. So we'll go after money instead of going after time is money's concrete. We like know the value of $1,000. And we know how to count or track three hours, five hours, 10 hours, and turn that into productivity in our minds. What does it mean?

to have more free time. That is an abstract concept. What does having more leisure time even mean or look like? So when we're trying to actively set ourselves up for success in these domains that are more abstract, like spending time with friends and family, we need to concretely write down what that means. We like to maximize measured mediums. This is work by Chris Shee at the University of Chicago. We go after the things that we can count and track. That is the way our brains are wired. So we do that for work. Why can't we do that for our leisure time too, setting a goal of one hour of exercise. Active leisure is particularly good for positive mood. Active leisure is things like exercising, socializing, volunteering, 15 to 30 minutes, mapping out what 30 minutes more of social connection time looks like for you and being very specific about it and putting it in your calendar. We need to be a little bit careful with that suggestion because soon as we start counting our leisure, we enjoy it less. And now at the same time, Of course, I mean, exactly the contrary.

You can over-schedule your leisure in such a way that it becomes a task. You know, I was a CEO before. And it was just, there's a grind, man. I mean, it was, I missed a lot of my kids' childhood. I just did. But at the same time, I made a commitment. So I get up in the morning. I exercise every morning for an hour.

I go to Catholic Mass every morning with my wife. And I do travel most weeks. I travel about, you know, I make about 50 weekly trips a year. And that's a lot. But I'm never traveling on the weekends. I probably missed three weekends a year, and I don't work at night. And part of the reason is because I learned all these things that you learned at 32. I learned at 55.

And so, you know, we'll be unto me. Nonetheless, my quality of life has dramatically increased for exactly putting those boundaries in place. Now, when I schedule my leisure too rigidly, I find that I start to get stressed out when things start to impinge on it, which is one of your points as well. You've got to stay flexible on these things. part of the benefit that you're getting cognitively and psychologically is more flexibility in your life and less rigidness in your life, right? Yeah. I love the research that shows that if you schedule too many leisure activities in a day,

it literally feels like work and it sucks you out of the present. And then you worry if you have enough time to drive across town and meet your friend for brunch after you've had coffee with another friend or family member. And so you want to actually exactly capitalize on this idea of building and flexibility. So if we start to be too rigid with our personal goals, that makes them feel like work. And basically what my research shows is that when you're in the experience of doing something, you have some free time. You want to do activities that you say are intrinsically motivating, that you feel like you're doing because you enjoy it. That's how you're going to capitalize on leisure.

It doesn't matter as much what the activity is. And there are some leisure activities which generally are better for well-being, like exercise, socializing, volunteering, tend to be better on average than things like passive leisure activities, like watching TV, resting, relaxing, which aren't as enjoyable, don't produce the same gains in mood. But it also matters how you feel about that activity. So really what matters is whether you feel like you're doing the leisure experience. because you want to, or you feel like you're doing it for some other reason. So these people who are walking around convincing themselves to go to church because it's good for their productivity are not going to enjoy the experience of church to the same extent as someone who's going because they truly enjoy it. How about, you know, we've touched on this a little bit, these semi-leisure activities, you know, there's leisure and then there's leisure. Remember, Aristotle says there's work, there's recreation and there's leisure.

and recreation is to get you ready to work. And so, yeah, restorative to what? Restorative to life, no, restorative to go back to work. And a lot of people, you know, I'll say, why do you work out so much? They say it's just great for my work. But what about people who are using work as a pretext for leisure? Are they sucking the life and happiness out of their leisure by turning it into just recreation? When you're in the moment of a leisure experience, you will enjoy it less if you think you're doing it for extrinsent.

reasons. And extrinsic motivation is definitionally you're doing something because someone else told you or you're doing it for an external reason. Like you think you should because it will be good for your productivity. You think you should because you're going to make money. Or you get more fame. You get more power or whatever, down the down the line. And a lot of the studies will assume that spending time with your family is intrinsic and going to work for money is extrinsic. But that might be exactly the opposite. Is there a difference in time scarcity and busyness and status between people my age and people, what's say, on their early 20s today? My data suggests that we get better with time as we age. So this is also consistent with Laura Carsonson's work on socioselectivity theory. We start to gravitate

toward things that are meaningful as we get older and we're less likely to seek out do this novelty seeking exercise. And so in my data, reliably, people who are older tend to be more likely to value time over money and happier as a result. And part of what's driving that isn't simply the realization of what matters to us. It's also that we're typically more financially secure. So there is this very real component in my data whereby financial insecurity, not feeling optimistic about our financial futures, drives this need to fill every single moment with productivity. And that is more common among younger people with school debt trying to move up the career ladder.

And research suggests that we undervalue our future time. So this can also make it difficult for us to choose time in the future when we're planning our schedules. We know that the value of $500 is going to be as good now. Well, okay, we might have to inflation adjust these days. But, okay, the basic idea is that the value of $500 now is going to be the same now, three months, six months a year from now. That's how we think about money. We just know it's going to have value across time. That's pretty invariant. Now, when it comes to time, we're like, time right now really matters. I'm so busy, over a million things to do. Time in three months. Nah, I don't really

need more time then. Look at my calendar looks free compared to now. Six months, even freer. So the extent to which we value or give our lives meaning through work directly is correlated with how time poor we feel and the extent to which we fill our calendars as a way to give our lives meaning. Now, say something to our listeners here who might be saying, I don't know what I intrinsically enjoy. I can't think of anything intrinsically enjoyable to me because I've been so extrinsically motivated for so long. I'm a homo-economicus. I'm just, I'm a machine. What do you tell that person on the voyage of discovery? It sounds like you had to go through this, Ashley. Yeah, do a time audit. At the end of the day, ask yourself, what things did you do across the day?

And how did you feel while you were engaging those activities? And then look at which activities brought you the most positive mood. You could also do this through a gratitude. So there's research on this, showing that people who are, take time to reflect them what they're grateful for, tend to be more self-aware. So at the end of every day, just think of a few things that made you feel grateful in that day. Maybe that was a quick conversation with the neighbor. Maybe that was, in my case, hanging out with my kid and thinking that was pretty great. Maybe it was listening to a really interesting podcast on a topic you hadn't heard before. And then you'll be like, oh, it seems that I must enjoy those things. I should probably

try to do more of them. It seems simple, but honestly, it wasn't really until I started to create some separation in my life such that I wasn't just getting up every single day working and then trying to decompress at the end of the day by drinking, because let's be real, that's what happens. There was no space in that schedule that I used to have of work, work, work, drink, go to bed, work, work, work, drink, go to bed, to even have a thought about what in that day did I enjoy because I wasn't even taking a second to pause, reflect and think about what was bringing me joy and satisfaction on any one particular day. And this is also good for work, right? Because it's going to give you a sense of the things at work that you love and enjoy. And maybe you

should try to do more of those and less of all the other stuff. Thank you to our how to listeners who help make this show what it is. We ask how you would spend one extra hour per day doing something intrinsically rewarding. And here's what you said. If I had an extra hour each day, I would go home to my studio apartment. I would close the door, put on the little bolt lock to make sure I'm safe, and then I would just sit in that silence and do absolutely nothing. But I think just that within life, there are all these things you need to do just to survive and maintain some level of relative sanity. like eat, which means you have to cook food and sleeping and connecting with people,

which means driving your car to see friends and calling your parents and doing all these things that I guess we tell ourselves we want to do it because we have to. And in a way, it creates happiness, whatever that is. But like, I feel like all of that keeps us from actually like sitting in the moment and thinking, like, what is happening? Why are we here? If you look back in the old days before, we were so unbelievably, distracted by tech, we were doing something in those days too. You know, when I rode the subway in the

1980s in New York City, I always had something to do with me. I wasn't just, I'm going to go on the subway and stand there doing nothing. I had a book. I had a newspaper. I was, you know, whatever, I was listening to my to my walkman. Remember those? Yes. And I have to say, I get the sentiment to the caller, which is, here's what I would do have had an extra hour. Well, guess what? You have 10 minutes where you could do that and you probably aren't and that's the difference between wood and should. Wood and should are very different when it comes to our time. So the question is, what's the disconnect between what we feel like we should do and what we probably would do with that extra hour? And that has everything to do with our expectations for ourselves. And this is

one of the reasons that meditation is really hard for people who are beginning practitioners. People or sitting in meditation and the only direction that they get is think of nothing, you know, empty your mind. Well, it's hard to do. Why is it so hard? Because we're not made for it. Humans are not wired to do nothing. My colleague and friend Marty Seligman, who teaches, who's one of the pioneers in the

Science of Happiness field, he teaches the University of Pennsylvania. He says that we shouldn't be called homo sapiens. We should be called ourselves homo prospectus because our state of nature is for our brain to engage and all of this incredibly complex stuff about how to build a better future. What am I going to eat for dinner? What am I going to do for a living next year? What am I going to say to my spouse? And that occupies us so very, very much that even when we're trying to do nothing, we're not doing nothing. Ashley Willens told us about how to use our time in a smart way. That means scheduling these things that are ordinarily unscheduled. How funny we go through life

and say, I'm going to treat my happiness as a nice to have. And if I have a little bit of extra time, I'll think a little bit about it. No, no, this is serious business. Put it into your schedule. Put it into your schedule absolutely every single day. Learn how the science works and then take the serious time that it takes. Be time smart, as Ashley Willens calls it, and take the time to do that work because the payoff will be potentially greater than

the payoff for anything else you could do in that time. That's all for this week's episode of How to, to build a happy life. This episode was produced by me, Rebecca Rashid, and hosted by Arthur Brooks, editing by A.C. Valdez and Claudine Ibabe. Fact check by Anna Alvarado. Our engineer is Matthew Simonson. I'm Ann Applebaum. Over the past year, as I watched Donald Trump demand unprecedented new powers, I wondered, don't he and his team fear that these same powers could one day be used by a different administration and a different president to achieve very different goals? Well, maybe they are afraid. And maybe that's why they're using their new tools to change

our institutions, even to alter the playing field in advance of midterm elections later this year, to make sure their opponents can't win. Ultimately, destroying trust is the currency of autocrats. We could win, but we are very, very, very likely to. to lose if we keep treating this as business as usual. Reporting on the sweeping changes unfolding in our country and preparing you to think about what might happen next. The new season of Autocracy in America, available now.