Instant Genius - How to get more time in your day, with Dr Ashley Whillans

Episode Date: February 13, 2023

Constantly feeling like you never have enough hours in your day? Then you’re actually experiencing what psychologists call ‘time famine’. And it could be having major implications on your health, happiness and even productivity. So, how do you get more time? Social psychologist Ashley Whillans, author of Time Smart, unpacks key strategies that could help you reframe your time and feel more in control of your day. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the Unreal College deal, everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 premium and a year of Xbox GamePass Ultimate

with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th, turns at AKA.m.m.S. College PC. You said this place was steps from the water. We just haven't found the steps yet. How much did we save?

Enough. Enough to get lost. Or you could book a stay with Hilton. Welcome to your oceanfront room. Just steps from the water. The Hilton sale is on now. Book on Hilton.com or the Hilton app and save up to 20% to get the stay you expected.

When you want savings, not surprises. It matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications, and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit at Indeed.com slash podcast. That's Indeed.com slash podcast. Terms

and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs. This podcast is sponsored by name, audio and focal. Streaming has made music more accessible than ever, but true listening is about more than ease. It's about quality. British audio experts name audio, alongside French acoustic specialist focal, combine handcrafted tradition with cutting-edge innovation and high-end materials,

delivering digital precision with analogue warmth. So you can experience exceptional sound at home. Music just as the artist intended. Visit name audio.com to learn more. Oh, and welcome to Instant Genius, the Bitesize Masterclass in podcast form. I'm Thomas Ling, digital editor at BBC's Science Focus magazine. Do you often feel like you don't have enough hours in your day to get everything you need done? If so, you're probably experiencing something called time starvation.

And worryingly, research has suggested that people who feel chronically time famished will have lower overall levels of happiness, physical health and productivity. So, what can you do about it? What are the main culprit of time starvation? And how can you get more time in your day? To answer these questions and much more, I'm joined by social psychologist Ashley Willens. She's assistant professor at Harvard Business School

and author of the book Time Smart, How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life. Hello, Ashley. Thank you very much for joining me. Thanks for having me. Fantastic. So, I'll start up with a big question. Can you explain what time famine is? Yeah, so I'm a social psychologist and I focus on the subjective experience of time. Time famine is the feeling of having too many things to do in a day and not enough time to do them. If this feels familiar, it's because 80% of employed absolutely. adults report feeling a sense of time famine or time poverty. So what sort of causes this time famine then? Why do people feel this way? There are many reasons people feel time poor. One of the biggest culprits is our constant connection to technology. So feelings of time poverty are driven by feeling like you have many things to do in the same amount of time. So say you have one hour. You feel like you

have to do work, check in with your partner, you're getting pings and you're being constantly distracted in that one hour by colleagues, by friends and family. So our constant connection to technology is one reason that we feel time for. And it's also something that's increased since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. So we've observed in our data with almost 40,000 employees all over the world that these feelings of time poverty have increased coming out of the COVID-19 pandemic, in part because the nature of work for many of us has changed. So we're maybe working in a more distributed way. Our colleagues and collaborators are in different locations or on working on different schedules. And this results in even more constant connectivity,

more emails and more meetings and can increase our feelings of time poverty and decrease our feelings of control over time. So how can being time poor impact a person and their will being? We did some analysis of the Gallup World Poll data, which is a representative survey of working adults living all over the world in over 100 countries. And we found that time poverty, in this data set it was a little bit more loosely defined, but we'll just call it time poverty for the sake of our conversation, that these increases in time poverty, so people who felt like they didn't have enough time, that this was a stronger negative predictor. of happiness than being unemployed. The way that we feel about our time in the status set of

three million adults matters more for happiness than even how much money we have or our ability to work. And I'm guessing here that time famine isn't good for employers either. So if a group of people are feeling quite time famished, then it's not going to be good for their company overall. That's absolutely right. So we did a survey of knowledge workers about a year ago and found that one of the top three predictors of intentions to quit were employees feeling like their employer didn't care about protecting their time. So when employees feel like employers are wasting their time, this can matter more for employees' willingness to stay than other established factors like psychological safety, how much you like your boss, or even how much you feel like your pay is fair.

So what are the most common traps that make somebody time poor? Yeah. And I think we should should definitely talk about both individual traps and also societal traps. It's not all our fault that we feel time for. There are social structures that are pushing on us that make us feel overwhelmed by the demands of work and life that are really important from a policy perspective, from a workplace perspective to try to resolve. But at the individual level, there's a few time traps that we have under our controlled effects that can make us feel time for. So the first, as I already mentioned, is our constant connection to technology. So not only can allowing ourselves to be constantly interrupted by our inbox,

get in the way of the amount of leisure we have, because it shrinks the amount of leisure we have after dinner from 6 to 7 to maybe 6 to 6.50 because we've spent 10 minutes of that time doom scrolling on social media or checking our work email. So we actually, it eats into the objective amount of leisure that we have available. But importantly, technology also creates a sub-examined. objective feeling of time stress because it reminds us of all the other things we could or should be doing and creates feelings of goal conflict and guilt. So when we're trying to enjoy a leisure experience

with our family and we get a work email, we are then faced with this tension. Do I continue to try to be present in the moment with my family or do I respond to a colleague? And doesn't matter what we choose, we then feel guilty. So if we feel like we just want to be present in the moment with our kid, knowing that our calling needs something makes us feel like a bad employee. But then if we check that work email, we might feel like a bad parent or a bad partner because we're checking that work email over spending quality time with our friends and family. So this constant connection to technology creates goal conflict, which is responsible for these subjective or psychological feelings of time poverty. Another trap that can make us time poor is our aversion to idleness. So there are some

great studies conducted by my colleagues at Harvard where they show our aversion to idleness in such a nice way. So they bring college students into a lab, take their phone away and give them a choice. You can blast yourself with mild electric shocks or you can be left alone in a room with only your thoughts. Students would rather be blast themselves with mild electric shocks than be left alone in a room with only their thoughts. So we're really averse to doing nothing. This is true of working parents who are some of the most time for among us. Working parents, the majority of working parents, admit to foregoing vacation days because they don't know what they would do with that time other than work. And so we often will fill our calendars full also because of this aversion to idleness and overcomit our future time. time tomorrow looks very open, whereas we know we have a million things to do today. So when we look to

the future, we heavily discount the value of our future time. The value of our time right now, so valuable. Who wouldn't want an hour more time right now today? Because we know how busy our schedule is. But when we look to our calendars, we're like, oh, we look so free three months from now. But the secret is if you can't do it today, you probably can't do it in three months. If anything, you're going to be busier tomorrow because you're going to overcomit your calendar. than you are today, which maybe you canceled a few things so that you could get a bit of free time today. So we need to overcome this aversion to idleness and not overcomit our future schedules to help ourselves break out of this time poverty trap. One of the time traps that you've written

about is how we think that we have more time tomorrow than we actually do. I know I'm guilty of this. Why does this happen and how can I change? So we, this is related to the planning fallacy. We're overly optimistic. So there's a couple of things going on. First, we think we're going to have more time tomorrow than we do in the present because the value of our future time is less valuable tomorrow than it is today. So when it comes to money, 100 bucks is as valuable today as it is tomorrow in our minds. Maybe inflation means that that's not actually true. But in our minds, we think that the value of $100 today is the same. It's going to be in, you know, three weeks, three months from now.

But the value of 30 minutes is really valuable today, but in our minds isn't that valuable in three months from now because our calendars look free. And so as a function of this kind of undervaluation of time, we overcomit our future calendars. There's also some interpersonal reasons that we overcomit our future calendars. We don't like saying no to people. We like to be good colleagues.

We also look at our calendars. they objectively look freer in three months than they do today. So it feels like we can't really say no because our calendars look really free at that point. But this is where I want to remind you and me and all of us that anything that you say yes to has an opportunity cost. So if you say yes to something now, you might miss out on the opportunity to just say yes to something better in the future. So every yes is a no to something else. Maybe that's spending time. with friends and family, maybe that's exercising or doing something else that's really valuable to you. So you always want to be asking yourself, would I say yes to it if someone asked me to do it today?

And if the answer is no, you shouldn't commit to doing it in three months, six months a year from now. And then in terms of thinking about how to say no, people don't actually negatively judge us as much as we think they do, but we have to say no in the right ways. So we have some research suggesting. and you don't want to say you don't have time to do something that someone is asking you to do because we all have 24 hours in a day. And so when we say we can't do something because we don't have enough time, the other person interprets that as we don't want to do whatever it is that they're asking. We don't value their request. So it's better not to provide any excuse at all or to provide a money-related excuse or an energy-related excuse or an externally attributed excuse.

sorry, I can't do that. I have other project-related responsibilities. That seems like a really exciting possibility, though. So let's discuss whether we could do that sometime in the future, but that timeline doesn't work for me. So you always want to say no by validating the other person's perspective and then not saying that you don't want to do it because you don't have enough time. A concept that comes up again and again when you read about time famine is a concept called time confetti. It'd be really great to hear a new one. exactly what that is? Yeah, so time confetti is another reason that we often feel time poor,

and it's a term that was coined by Bridget Schult, who writes a lot about time management. And so this idea of time confetti is that our constant connection to technology shreds our leisure into small, distractible units of free time that easily go missing. So it was the example I was providing earlier. every time that you're trying to engage in a leisure activity, you're trying to enjoy something, and you get a ping, a Slack notification, your email goes off, a friend messages you

that pulls you out of the present moment and reminds you of all the other things that you could or should be doing. So technology is constantly shredding our time into these smaller, undigestible moments that easily get squandered, go missing and get lost. I guess what people really want to know is how do I get more time? It's a big question, but what's normally the first piece of advice that you give? So the first piece of advice I give is something similar to what you might hear in a financial well-being podcast, which is if you want to have more money, you first need to know where you're spending your money. Similarly, when it comes to time, if you want to have more time, you need

to do an audit and think about where you might be wasting time or not spending time in the most efficient or valuable way on a regular basis. So I like to encourage people to do a time audit. Take a typical day, a Tuesday. We're talking on a Tuesday. Tuesday is the most emotionally normal day of the week where we just sort of have on average the most regular day that we're going to have over the course of the week. So taking a typical Tuesday is great. That's sort of your average workday. And ask yourself, what activities did you do in the morning, in the afternoon, and in the evening. Then I want you to think about how you felt during each of those activities. Was it pleasurable? Was the activity meaningful? Did it make you stressed out? Did it feel unproductive?

And then what you want to do to, quote, find more time, quote, is to maximize your personal you index. This is a fancy labor economics way of thinking about maximizing the amount of time that you spend in pleasurable, productive, and meaningful activities, and minimizing the amount of time that you spend in unproductive and not meaningful activities. So things that are like doom scrolling, like going on social media, like checking non-urgent email all the time with all of the small moments of time that you find yourself throughout the day. So you really want to be thinking of minimizing the amount of time that you spend in unproductive and unpleasant activities. Can you commute to the office one less day a week? Can you say no to a colleague's request that doesn't help you achieve a

personally important goal or professionally important goal at work. Can you stop saying yes to helping a neighbor so that you can spend that time exercising or socializing instead? So that's really the first place to start in terms of finding time is really asking yourself, how are you spending time on an everyday basis on a typical day? And what can you do to make that typical day look more like your ideal day? So if you're going to do a time audit, so you're saying, first of all, do it on a Tuesday. Is that sort of research back to say that a Tuesday is a sort of average day? Yes, yeah. That is a research-based fact that we have the most emotionally normal, emotionally consistent days as compared to our average on a Tuesday.

And then should we be writing down, say, every 30 minutes, what we're doing and how we're feeling? I would do it at the end of the day. Don't get too detailed. That's going to stress you out and defeat the purpose of this exercise to make us feel less stressed out. So, What I like to suggest is really do this reflection exercise at the end of the day and write down the three major episodes. This is also research-based suggestions. So this is related to Daniel Kahneman's Day Reconstruction method of how to get people to think about how they spent their time over the course of a day.

He's a science paper on this from 2006. And so what you want to do is think about what you did in the morning. And morning is going to be different for everyone depending on when you get up. But I'm a morning person. So I got up at 6 a.m. today and we're talking at 11 a.m. my time. So we could actually define that whole period of time as the morning. And then I can think about, well, what did I do already today? Well, I had this nice period of time for a couple of hours in the morning where I was reading and thinking. Then I went into meetings and I could even write down, well, what were my first couple of

meetings? And now we're chatting. So that whole block or that whole, that whole block would be the morning, and then I might have three episodes kind of reading and thinking, meeting block one, doing this podcast. And then you can kind of continue and try to think about having three episodes in the afternoon and three episodes in the evening and just do this rough kind of calculation of how did I feel about that second block of meetings that I had? Chatting on this podcast is great, feels really meaningful, it's very pleasant, don't want to get rid of that. But the meetings I had right before this podcast, only one of the two were useful. So then I can think to myself, should I have been part of that meeting? What could I have done to not have had to have had that

meeting? And that would be classified as something that wasn't productive and therefore not a good use of my time and something in this audit process that I might want to try to get out of doing in the future. Ambition comes in all shapes and sizes. At First Citizens Bank, we roll with your goals because we're built for what you're building. Fit for your ambition for citizens back. It's peak pollination season, and my business is scaling fast. To keep the nectar flowing,

I need a phone plan with top priority data speed. That's why I chose GoogleFi wireless. My connections stay strong even when the hive is buzzing. Plus, unlimited plans started $35 a month. Now that's a deal that doesn't stay. Explore GoogleFi wireless plans today. Plus taxes and government fees. GoogleFi Wireless is not subject to data traffic deprioritization during times of high network usage.

This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. With over 100 years of combined expertise, Name and Focal have been bringing music to listeners just as the artist intended. Since day one, this mantra has shaped every innovation in high-fi design, technology and acoustic engineering, balancing craftsmanship and tradition with pioneering thinking. Name Audio pushes cutting-edge technology to ensure digital precision whilst sustaining Pratt, pace, rhythm and timing, the elusive quality that makes music feel alive and gives it emotional texture. Today, in partnership with French Acoustic Specialist Focal,

Name Audio creates systems that deliver exceptional sound and unforgettable listening experiences at home. Try it for yourself at a focal powered by Name Boutique. visit vocal powered by name.com for more information. Are there quite common things that get in the way of someone's free time outside of work? So what are the things that people should be looking out for in their time audit once the 95 job is finished, for instance? Yes, so this is getting into the second strategy that I write and talk a lot about, which is how can we fund time?

So we spend a lot of our time outside of work engaging in activities that are not pleasant but are necessities. So that's mowing your lawn. If you have one of those that's commuting to and from the office, that's cleaning your house. And the way you want to think about necessities and buying your way out of them is you want to take the chores that you like doing the least and ask yourself whether you might be able to spend some money against outsourcing those activities that are the greatest source of stress. So take, in the first. some of my studies, even spending as little as $40 on time-saving purchases is enough to feel more in control of your time, less time poor, and happier because you're able to spend that time

engaging in positive and productive activities like socializing. If you're going to buy yourself out of a chore, you want to think about doing it on the weekend when you have the opportunity to translate that additional free time into a beneficial activity like socializing or spending quality time with your romantic partner. So we see that the benefits of time-saving purchases are even higher on the weekend because we're able to be more present with those that we care about. We're not ruminating over all of the chores that we have to do when we get home. And so even as a personal example, my husband and I don't mind cleaning the house and doing

regular maintenance, but we definitely don't like and do not have time for washing the windows or cleaning the gutters or even sometimes mowing the lawn. And so we'll outsource those bigger, more time-consuming and less enjoyable tasks. And we think about that as part of a happier way of spending money budget. We might take out some material purchases that don't do much for happiness like buying a new shower curtain and substitute that money for time-saving purchases because we know that we're really going to benefit from the stress alleviation that comes with saving time by outsourcing our most dislike task to others. So in these studies, was there a certain household chore that

outsource would lead to better happiness? Or does it vary person by person? It's really person dependent. So again, you really want to be thinking about outsourcing the chore that you dislike the most, that causes you the most stress, that causes you and your partner the most stress and unhappiness. And so it's really interesting, but that's going to vary depending on the person. So some people don't like cooking. Some people like cooking. Some people don't like grocery shopping. So if you don't like grocery shopping, but you like cooking, you should outsource the grocery shopping. And then to one of these like grocery deliveries because you don't like finding a parking spot. And then cook. But for some people, you should just outsource the whole thing in order take up

more than the average person because you don't like cooking or shopping. So it really depends on you and your partner and also how much discretionary time you have available. So there's some really interesting new research that listeners might be interested in hearing about that. And you might be wondering this. Like is there such thing as too much time? And there is actually. So there's a new paper by one of my colleagues showing that if you have too much discretionary time, that feels bad. And if you have too little discretionary time, that feels bad.

but sort of being somewhere in the middle, feeling like you have some control of your time, but your schedule's not too empty is the best for happiness. So you might also, if you do find yourself working part-time or not working as much or in-between jobs, you then might want to calibrate your spending so that you're actually taking on more of the chores that feel productive to you to offset some of the happiness costs of having a lot of free time available. So why would having too much time be a bad thing? Because it feels not productive.

So this goes back to why do we all feel time poor? Well, society rewards long work hours. And so part of the reason we feel tethered to our email, tethered to our colleagues, is often our workplaces reward that with promotions and accolades if you seem like you're just committed only to work. And so people who have more time available are almost doing something that's in contrast to what we've been taught society values. And as a result of that we feel like we're not productive when we have more time available. So if we do find ourselves in between jobs, we want to make sure that we're filling that time with activities that make us feel productive. Otherwise, we could feel unhappy even if we found ourselves with more time. So what are some of the best strategies in organizing your day to feel less time famished? Yeah, so you want to make sure when organizing your day that you leave time for breaks, boundaries, and transitions. So this is good advice for anyone, regardless of where or how you work, but you want to be thinking of giving yourself breaks between the major activities in your day.

There's some research by one of my colleagues showing that if you have meetings stacked back to back to back, again, when we're planning our day, that seems like a good idea. When we're actually in our day, having so many meetings back to back to back makes us feel really stressed out, overwhelmed, and like we don't have control over our time. It also makes us less efficient employees. So in the workplace, if we have meetings back to back to back, when we start to get to the end of one meeting, which is right before the beginning of the next, we're no longer paying attention to the meeting we're in. We're only thinking about the meeting that we're about to go to. And so we're not present. We're not good contributors.

We don't remember as many details. So that's a productivity-related reason why we might want to spread our calendars out a little bit. When it comes to leisure, if we schedule activities too close together, that can start to feel like work. So it might seem like a good idea after listening to our conversation to be really deliberate with the way we spend our leisure and schedule time in two-hour increments or two-hour episodes to bake, to spend time with our kids, to see one neighbor, to see another friend to volunteer and do that all in the same day. Research suggests that if you put all of those activities on one leisure day, it's going to feel like work and it's going to undermine your enjoyment. Also doing too much variety of activities within a day can make us feel stressed out.

So we want to try to maximize a variety of activities that we have across a day and not do too many activities that are different within the same day because that can also make us feel stressed out. So I would say when you're trying to think about constructing a happy day, you want to think about having breaks, boundaries, and transitions, leaving time to spend time on active leisure activities, that are good for happiness, like socializing and exercising, even 30 minutes is enough to boost mood. And try to not spend too much time connected to your technology, only really respond to urgent requests,

and then try to batch your emails all at once at the end of the day. Research suggests that that lowers stress as compared to trying to be constantly on top of your inbox all day, every day. So how much should we be planning our breaks? You're talking about these sort of activities which make us happy. How can we remember to do those things? So what I like to suggest is keeping a time affluence to-do list as a physical reminder in the space that you work. So it can be very natural for all of us, myself included, to find ourselves with a windfall of time of half an hour in between meetings, maybe someone canceled a meeting,

and to gravitate toward unenjoyable, unproductive tasks like going through our inbox instead of doing activities that might bring us more joy like connecting with a loved one. So I recommend actually keeping a time affluence to do list on a sticky note in your office. And these are activities that are maybe five minutes,

10 minutes, 20 minutes in length that are good for happiness and will distract us from just going to the bottom of our inbox so you could remind yourself to text a friend, you haven't cut up within a while. Look for ways that you and your partner could volunteer on the upcoming weekend, start to plan an upcoming trip. Do 20 jumping jacks. Jump on your exercise bike for 30 minutes if you find yourself with a break in between meetings. That's something I've been doing a lot. It's very difficult to try to fit in exercise time when you're a busy working

professional with young kids at home. And so something I've started to do is if I find myself with 20 minutes in the middle of the day, and I have that reminder on my desk, I'll just go jump on my exercise bike or go for a quick walk around the block in between meetings as opposed to mindlessly checking social media. So how else can we reframe our rest? So I love the idea of reframing rest as another strategy to overcome these feelings of time poverty. There are some activities that we can't get out of that we really don't like, like commutes. And so this is an activity where you might be listening like, sounds nice for those that can work from home, but I don't work from home. So I have to commute to the office every day or to my place of employment every single day.

And that activity isn't enjoyable and it's stressful, but I can't get out of it. For those activities, you want to think about reframing them. Research suggests that reframing our commute as a way to think about the goals we want to achieve that day at work and outside of it can make commutes less stressful, can reduce the burnout costs associated with long commutes. Similarly, when we're in our leisure, I've been talking a lot about how technology can get in the way of us enjoying our leisure. So what can we do to reframe rest and see it as an enjoyable activity in and of itself? What can we do to make ourselves feel present in the moment when we do find ourselves

with those small moments of leisure time, like on the weekends or in the evenings? Research suggests we want to think about our leisure as a vacation. So the more that we can think about our time off as a holiday, the more we enjoy. it. So researchers randomly assigned working adults to think about an upcoming weekend like a weekend or to think about it like a vacation and found that those in a vacation mindset enjoyed it more and went back to the work week more well rested. You might be thinking, well, maybe they just spent a lot of money that weekend and didn't do any of their chores and that's accounting for the happiness benefits. But that's not what the researchers found. So there was no difference in the amount of money

that people spent across conditions. There's no difference in how people spent their time. But when you're thinking about your weekend like a vacation, you feel more present in the moment and you're really trying to savor the leisure that you're having in front of you. You don't feel this pull to go to your inbox to the same extent or you're willing to ignore it to really get the happiness benefits out of the leisure experiences that you're having. And so this leisure as vacation mindset that helps to put you squarely present in the moment and enjoying time with people that you care about. Do you have any tips about how to build up that mindset towards the weekend?

I don't know exactly. I think research is to be determined on this, but I think it goes back to scheduling. So you want to, something that I advocate for and write about in my book is this idea of rough scheduling or leisure. So maybe just sort of think to yourself, what would be a really nice way to spend the upcoming weekend?

as opposed to thinking about here's all the things I have to do and here's how I need to, you know, get all the productivity value, all the chores off my to-do list with this weekend and being in this productivity mindset when it comes to the weekend. Try to ask yourself in a very kind of like, you know, open-ended way, what would make me feel really happy this weekend? Like what would I really enjoy? What would my family and I really enjoy? And then try to roughly schedule that. those activities into your calendar. So not saying that, you know, going to the park with your daughter has to happen from 1 to 1.30 on Saturday because you're trying to fit it in against every single other obligation that you have. But instead saying that would be a nice activity to complete. I'm going to try to complete that activity when it feels right this weekend. So I think kind of taking our leisure off the hook, if you will, to kind of fit in at a certain time or be as productive or

as efficient as it could be, and instead really coming from this place of what would be a really nice and enjoyable way of spending time this weekend that would really feel restful and relaxing. And where might that fit in my weekend plans? Do you have any more strategies that someone could use to make them feel less time poor that we haven't mentioned yet? We've mentioned a lot. Let me give it a little. So just to summarize what we have talked about,

So the strategies that we've talked about so far are doing a time audit and trying to ask yourself, how does your typical Tuesday look different or the same from your ideal Tuesday and how might you sort of make your actual way that you spend time look more similar to your ideal way of spending time during the work week? We've talked about funding time. So buying ourselves out of the activities that we don't like is a way to have more time to spend activities, more time to spend on activities that we do like. And we've also talked about reframing time. So some psychologically based strategies that we can use to feel more positive about the activities that aren't productive or that are stressful that we can't get out of or that we can't

delegate our outsource to someone else. I will say related to work, I think there are a couple of other strategies that we can use to find more time. So we need to be not afraid to delegate tasks to other people and to try to do that in a way that provides a learning opportunity for more junior people that we might work with, that we shouldn't be afraid of saying no or asking for more time on adjustable deadlines at work. We often will set internal deadlines for ourselves with our teams as a forcing function to get work done, but often those deadlines are flexible. And so we are feeling like our work would be higher quality or our stress levels would be lower if we were able to adjust our deadlines. We should ask for an extension. And we shouldn't feel so worried about responding to

people instantaneously when they send us an email. There's some nice recent research showing that we overestimate how important it is to respond back to someone urgently. They actually aren't thinking about us as much as we think that they're thinking about us. So we think that they're thinking we need an immediate response to whatever it is the email request was. But that other person is just going about their life, emailing and trying to get through their to do list. So we need to remind ourselves that we don't usually need to respond urgently, even to clients because clients are people too and have a lot going on. So I think just really trying to take everyone that yourself and, you know, your colleagues off the hook for being constantly

responsive, at least as a work-related strategy, can be really effective for reducing this sense of urgency that dovetails with time poverty that we often experience. In your time poverty research, what's been the most surprising find? I think for me, just the most surprising, really. The most surprising data that I've come across is just how strongly linked time poverty is to feelings of happiness. And I think that's because when we feel like we don't have enough time, our lives feel out of control. And these feelings of control really matter for happiness. So anything you can do to help feel more in control of your time goes a long way for potentially improving happiness.

I will also say related to that, there's some research on how we, when you are feeling overwhelmed, one of the best things that you can do to improve feelings of time control and happiness is give away your time. And this is really counterintuitive, but makes sense, given the logic we're talking about,

when you feel overwhelmed and you give some time away to help a colleague or to help a family member, that sends a signal that you actually have maybe more control over your time than you think, which in turn promotes greater happiness. So I really like that as a reminder that when we're feeling overwhelmed,

sometimes doing the thing that we think we don't have time for, like exercising or volunteering, can actually make us feel more in control over time and happier. So really pushing ourselves to get outside our comfort zone and not only focus on work when we're feeling overwhelmed at work is a nice and kind of counterintuitive strategy to becoming more happy and feel a greater sense of control over time in our lives. Speaking there was Ashley Willens,

assistant professor at Harvard Business School and author of the book Time Smart, How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you by the team behind BBC Science Focus magazine, which you can find on sale now in supermarkets and newsagents as well as your preferred app store. You can, of course, also find us online

at sciencefocus.com. This podcast is sponsored by Name, Audio and Focal. The texture and emotional depth of music can be lost through digital sources or poor signal. Name Audio believes you can have digital precision with analogue warmth. Alongside French acoustic specialist focal, name creates high-end audio systems

combining innovation with craftsmanship so you can listen to music, just as the artist intended. Discover more at name audio.com. Enjoy more ways to save at Ralph's, like low prices in every aisle. And when you download the Ralph's app, you can clip and save more with digital coupons every week. Plus, you can earn fuel points to save up to $1 per gallon at the pump. At Ralph's, you can enjoy more ways to save and more rewards every time you shop.

So it's always easy to save big every day with savings and rewards. Ralph's SoCal for over 150 years. Savings may vary by state. Fuel restrictions apply. See site for details. You can't reason with the sun. Trust us. We've tried. This summer, it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute.

Columbia's Omnyshade technology is engineered to protect you from the sun's harsh rays that can burn and damage your skin. The sun is relentless. But so is our gear. Level up your summer at Columbia.com to spend more time outside and less time slathering on allotion. You're welcome. Columbia, engineered for whatever.