Modern Wisdom - #127 - Koen Smets - The Behavioural Economics Of How We Spend Our Time

Episode Date: December 16, 2019

Koen Smets is a behavioural economist and professor. We've been told "time is money" for all our lives, but how does time RELATE to money? We can't save time the same way we can save money, so what are the implications for how we should conduct our lives? Today Koen digs deep into the relationship between time, money, life satisfaction and much more. Extra Stuff: Check out Koen's Medium - https://medium.com/@koenfucius Follow Koen on Twitter - https://twitter.com/koenfucius Take a break from alcohol and upgrade your life - https://6monthssober.com/podcast Check out everything I recommend from books to products - https://www.amazon.co.uk/shop/modernwisdom - Get in touch. Join the discussion with me and other like minded listeners in the episode comments on the MW YouTube Channel or message me... Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/chriswillx Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/chriswillx YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/ModernWisdomPodcast Email: https://www.chriswillx.com/contact Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Oh yes, hello humans, welcome back. My guest today is Koon Smet, who is a behavioral economist. Now the last few episodes with behavioral economists, including Rory Sutherland and Richard Shotton, are two of the most highly played episodes of all time. So I've got quite high hopes for this episode today. However we're not just talking about behavioral economics. We are talking about time and principally how we spend our time and how we relate it to money. Think about the language that I'm using, spending time. We talk about it as if it is a currency, but the difference is that

time is going to be spent no matter how we choose to spend it. So what does that mean? What are the implications for how we should spend our days? And how should we give up our time for money? How should we exchange the brief minutes that we have on this earth for value of currency which allows us to spend some of those minutes doing other things. And where's the inflection point? I really enjoyed this episode. Koon is a very insightful and interesting guy with some great examples, including one from the Estonian Police Service. I bet you didn't think that you'd be learning about that today, but you are.

In other news, upcoming episodes have already mentioned it, but Kamal Rava-Kant, Naval's brother, is coming on to talk about his new book, Love Yourself, Like Your Life, depends on it. I've also got Michaela Peterson, John Peterson's daughter lined up, James Altature, who else? Charlotte Foxweber, Head of Psychotherapy, at the School of Life. There is an awful lot. And before I go, if you are thinking about making the most of your time in 2020, my advice would be to consider going sober for a period and focusing on your personal development. And the best way to do that is with the 6 months sober 28 day, 90 day or 6 month challenge. Head to 6 months sober dot com, that's a number six monthsoba.com slash podcast and you'll be able to find out

all of the information about my new course. Hope you enjoy it and now it's time for the Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back. I'm joined by Koon Smetz, who I've been fighting to pronounce that name, but I think I've managed to nail it. Welcome to the show. Thanks for your much, Chris. You did it proud. I think I've heard numerous strange mispronunciations, mispronunciations of my name all the way from a keen to co-ent to cone and anything in between. So I think you passed with flying commas. Fantastic. Well, you've got over the first hurdle. To the listeners at home, I'm starting to calm down a little bit now. You might not know, Koon, but I was away in Bali and while I was away, it meant I couldn't record. And you do not know true fear

until you have a twice a week podcast publishing schedule and no podcasts left to publish. And that is that is where I've been over the last couple of weeks. But very fortunately for the people that are listening, I have this episode with you, self, which I'm sure is going to be fantastic behavioral economics and all sorts of decision-making theory that we're going to go into, which I can't wait to do. Also coming up, Naval Ravakant's brother Kamal Ravakant talking about, love yourself like your life depends on it, his brand new book, and a bunch of other people that are really, really interesting over the next couple of weeks.

But today, we're going to get to talk about some behavioral economics and some classical working strategies for organizations, human behavior, decision-making, and motivation. That's right. That's the kind of stuff I do, yes. I love it. So what have you been thinking about recently? The world is our oyster, the world of whatever you've been working on is our oyster. Okay.

Well, one of the themes I've been thinking of recently is time. As you may know, economic is about scarce resources. It's about allocating scarce resources, it's about weighing up costs and benefits. And this is in the economy, as we know, it is usually to do with money or with some kind of equivalent of money, some resource that you need to manage.

But of course, another very important scarce resource we all experience is time. We get every midnight, we get 24 hours to the next day, so to speak, and once that's gone, it's gone. And of course, then there is another 24 hours, but we can just like we can spend a pound or a euro or a dollar or any other currency only once, so we can only spend a minute or an hour or a second once. And we if we spend it on one thing, we can't spend it on another. And so our general use of time follows similar patterns to the way we use money in the sense that we are confronted with the fact that we don't have unlimited amounts of it. And so we need to be careful in how

we use it up. And I think that is a fascinating topic for me because in many particularly also behavioral economics experiments and economics experiments, you get people in a lab, you give them some tokens, you get them a little bit of money, sometimes you see people go to developing countries to India, for instance, where a man's in dollar go much further so it can really intervene in people's lives on the scale of magnitude That is like comparable to a month's wages for instance and still be affordable for research But the problem is with whatever experiments you do with with Tokens or money is that it's usually in much more quantities than really impact us in real life so my thinking is that if we

look more at how we could we use time where we all have the same amount of time whether you're rich or the poor you get 24 hours a day and it's not because you're in you get 36 hours a day we all have exactly the same amount of time and I think how we would respond to having to weigh up gaining or losing time might reveal things or clarify things that perhaps are unclear or ambiguous when you work with, you give people 10 pounds or 10 dollars and you make them bet on something or you make them pay for something, it doesn't work the same way, I think. And I think there is some mileage to be had out of using time in research, on economics and on the economics and on human behavior.

Well, time and money intrinsically linked, aren't they? They are, as you know, the old age goes, time is money, but is it really that equivalent? Is time really always money? And I think if you think about it, not every minute has got the same worth to you, and to me or to anybody else. If you are in the middle of something that's really important, then your time will be much more valuable than if you're just lazy about on the city, watching Simpsons.

And so, I think you see it as well in overtime, for instance, people demand to be paid more when they go over a certain limit in terms of working for an employer for a boss. So the concept is self of being paid 50% more or double time for overtime. People are being paid more for working in a weekend. Reflects immediately that time doesn't have an intrinsic stable, unique value. And I think that in itself is an interesting and important observation that affects the way we behave and we handle and we manage our time. Absolutely. There's a

short blog post I remember reading quite a while ago that was talking about how as a child you'd happily give up your day for a dollar and as an old man you'd happily give up your fortune for a minute. Yes, very true. I think it's quite kind of extreme. As a child, of course, you have no idea of the fine-iteness of life. You're a man of five years old, eight years old. Remember, when school broke up at the end of the spring earlier summer, you had an Belgium. We had two full months of holiday of July and August. Well, the first of July, it's like you can't even see as far as the 31st of August. So it's like an unlimited amount of holiday, obviously, by the time mid-August came and then

let's go and buy out new books and pencils and everything else. We'll all school the starting again. So you get a sense of time, but yes, you have no idea of the finance, whereas if you're an old person, then yes, you're counting down and you know, well, maybe, I mean, my dad is 92. Wow, that is a testament to some good genetics that you've got there. Well, I hope I inherited his, I didn't inherit his hair jeans, in a sense, he's quite bold and I still have a few of them. Most of the time. For the list, there's a home, it's a fantastic head of hair. It's a good bargain.

But yeah, he's 92, he's still in good health, but of course, he knows that he's likely to live another 20 years, or maybe in other 10 years or maybe five years so you're really looking at time in a very different way. That said it's interesting that we sort of go down this particular rabbit hole. He lives on his own and he hasn't got much to do. Most of his friends and his relatives except for his children's on, but his siblings and peers and all that. They've all died, so there's very few people left of his generation. And so he lost, perp is a little bit.

And so he's gotten lots of time and doesn't really quite know what to do with it. He loves gardening and all that, but obviously, it being winter, it's not a good time to spend too much time with the garden. he loves gardening and all that, but obviously it being winter and it's not a good time to spend too much time with the garden. So he struggles to fill his days with with something. So I think if you look at time as something that you would you would analyze in terms of willingness to pay or willingness to accept, he would be willing to pay for something to do rather than having to be paid to do this something in a sense. But yes, I think these are all examples of how we look up time

with different eyes depending on how old we are, depending on what day and week it is, depending on what time of day it is, depending whether or not, all of that matters and makes us look at time differently. Same at work as well, at work. Basically what we do, we give our employer an hour of time and we get money in return.

And somehow we tend to view that time as sunk. We've sold it. So it's now our employer is in a sense. So we are less concerned with wasting our time. And we're certainly less concerned with wasting other people's time. I did exercise once with a client of mine where we had a workshop with about 50 people of search joining and one of the things we had to look at was sort of budgets and knowledge when he was being spent and I made them do the exercise of what's this workshop costing and I even revealed my fee.

So, they could take that into account and then they looked, okay, well, the higher of the venue and the meal and this and that. What they didn't take into account at first was their own time. When they get 50 people earning what between say 60,000 and 120,000 euros a year, when I get these that amount of people together for two days, that is a huge amount of money or time equivalent of money that you devote into something. But we don't really think about it in those terms. We don't, we think the time, we work, so now it's work time, we don't really worry about what we do with that time, whether we are using it well, whether we're using other people's time well. And that's why you get so many complaints about meetings, being a waste of time and

water wall meetings and all day and looking back and say, well, I have no idea what I've done today, but it's not very much. Yeah, that's supposed to. So I think time really is a fascinating topic that is, I think, understudied and under and the research. I've had a couple of conversations. The listeners may be familiar with Laura van der Kamz episode, it was a time management expert, that was more from the productivity side.

Nair A.L. as well, also, to do with task prioritisation. As a sympathy card that I'll throw out to some of the people that will be listening, many of whom will be knowledge workers, I sympathise wholeheartedly with the fact that your days are messy and you haven't got a clue what you did with them. And when you look back at your day and you think, how did I spend my time? You know, we even use that language linguistically. We're talking about it like it's money. How did I spend my time today?

This allocated number of units of temporal tokens. How did I decide to spend my time today? And I feel for you because it is, as you say, you've got, I went into a meeting, then I sat down, I had a coffee, I did a this, and it just frit is away. But yeah, you bring up in a couple of your recent blog posts talking about opportunity cost. And

obviously how that relates to what I'll tell you, what do you explain to the listens what opportunity cost is? Yeah, opportunity cost is really is what you do not do, what you cannot do when you do something else. So to give a simple example, take a taxi driver, you take a taxi somewhere and you ask the guy to wait for 20 minutes. And then because you're going to do something and then you come out again and you still want the taxi to be there waiting for you to take you back home or something. So he is not going to say, it's not going to do that for free. To the taxi driver, the 20 minutes he's standing there is 20 minutes he could not be carrying somebody else, another paying customer. So he's going to have to charge you enough to compensate that and that's the opportunity cost. So he, the cost to him is not sitting there because

he could be looking at his Facebook account or reading a paper or just looking at a window or having his sleep. But that's neither here nor there. It could be working as well and that's how we will measure the cost of sitting there for 20 minutes. So that is what opportunity cost is. And that applies to time as well as to money, of course. It also applies to money. If you spend money on a meal, then that money is, you cannot use that money for something else. So there is an opportunity cost expressed in what else you could buy with the money that you spend on going out for a meal. Let's try and dig down into the nuance of the difference between opportunity cost for money and for time, because I think this is really fascinating. You can't not spend time.

Is that a fair statement to make? Yes, absolutely. But time goes by. Time does not spend money. Yes, absolutely. You can still say, I'm not going to spend it. I'll keep it for something else. You can't do that with time or not easily, at least, in the same way.

You can't bank time. Maybe if you play television, quiz, then sometimes you can bank money and time, but you can practice. Yes, the second I just got on is gone. We cannot reuse this at all. Of course, you can say, I'm going to bring certain activities forward and do them now, and that is a good way of managing time over a long period of time, as it were. When you say, well, for instance, what people do when they travel, they do something useful while they're traveling or while they're waiting. And so they can make

time that otherwise be wasted as in time spent without anything tangible, anything meaningful getting gotten in return, you can change that. And you can say, well, I may be waiting for the plane, maybe 30 minutes delayed, but actually I can start writing my report. And so you actually make good use of your time. But it requires a degree of awareness and deliberation to do that. And we don't always do that.

And also, we are worse on the other hand as well. We waste time as well. We are not always consciously using our time in the best possible way. I want to get you to elaborate on awareness and deliberation in a second, but I'm thinking as you're talking through that, I'm hoping that some of the people that are listening might be in a situation like that. They might be in this sort of little pending waiting room of hell in between one like that. There might be in this sort of little pending waiting room of hell in between one thing that they gotta do and another thing they gotta do

and this thing would have sucked. And maybe me and you, Chris and Kona making this this afternoon or this little waiting thing a little bit easier, maybe we're in there ears right now. We've got the headphones in, listening away. Perhaps that's the way that they're doing it. So if that is the case, I hope that we are, I hope that we're making you, you're day a little bit better. But yeah, let's, let's talk about, what was it that

you said, deliberation and awareness awareness awareness in deliberation. Yes. I think it's, there are the panels with money still go a long way here as well. I think we often spend money a little impulsively. We don't really... I mean, we are not what economists use to call and some still do home-to-economics, the sort of rational, you'd say, it's maximizing self-interested individual. So, in other words, if you spend a tenor on some gadget or a sandwich and a drink or something,

you're not considering what else could I spend this tenor on? Can I just bring to mind everything else I could possibly spend this tenor on? And then sort of rank them and say, well, the very best way I can spend this is this, not the sandwich industry, so I'm not going to buy this, I'll buy something cheaper. We don't do that. We sometimes spend money totally and plausibly, but we also have sort of preset limits, we think, oh, well, for a tenor, I'm not going to spend half an hour cogitating about where else could I spend this even better than here. But we don't always weigh up the opportunity cost of spending money.

If you go in holiday, it means you can't buy a new car, for instance. That's the kind of thing that some people are aware of and other people are not aware of. And so this same applies to time in a sense. If you, to give an example from when I was little, I was maybe 12, 13 years old. And this is the time when self-service petrol stations started popping up. Before that it was all full service, so you drove up and the guy in the uniform came along and said, I opened your filler flap and

filled up your tank with petrol and then you could start doing it yourself. And these petrol stations gave you discount. And of course some gave a little discount or this gave a big discount. And I remember my dad that we hadn't had a car for a long time. We went, we drove like 20 minutes to get some discount of one franca liter or something, not particularly. And I realize even then that there was no calculation being done. So there was no awareness of how much time let alone the distance driven, but how much time

are we spending to drive 10 miles, 15 miles to get pedals that is just a little bit cheaper. And I think we often do not think about that. And we think about it even less when it's about time. We don't really think about how much time something takes. We think we need to go to a meeting. That meeting is like, do you know how I was driving away? So we would just say, well, there's some traveling time. We, that's just part of the equation. We don't, especially because time is not even as tangible as money. There is salience.

Time is not salient in the same way. You just take it as a given that, okay, I'll have to drive for two and a half hours and get there. When we're stuck in traffic, we don't really calculate how much time we waste stuck in traffic. I mean, I try to avoid driving as much as I can. But occasionally, I have to take the car and after drive during rush hour.

And I see these people, I don't know, I'm all sitting there and sort of bumper to bumper. And for me, it's just once. And so I said, well, yeah, I had no choice. I really had to do this. It was now the way. So I rationalize it. But I then think of these other people

sitting left of me and right to me and in front of behind me. And they experience this every day. Do they have they ever worked out what this is costing them in time? How much time this is this is wasted for them? Multiply by five days a week. The cumulative 35 35 weeks a year. So we don't think about it. And that's what I meant by awareness. And I think by being deliberate is once you're aware of the time you spend, you can't sort of account for time more easily, then you can begin to be deliberate about what you do. For instance, you mentioned where people might be listening to this podcast.

I don't particularly like driving, but I see driving as something a great opportunity to listen to podcasts. Sometimes I listen to the radio, but most of the time I accumulate lots of podcasts, and then when I need to drive and I often drive from here to the continent, so these are long trips, that means I can listen back to back to several episodes of Freakonomics or of your podcast or of Ecom talk, or you name it, I mean there's a whole raft of things I tend to listen to. And I think to me that is like good management in the way, in the same way that you use your manager money well, good money management, this is good time management. Time management is not

just about dire management, it's about being aware of where there is a sort of downtime, a time that is otherwise not very well spent, because as you mentioned earlier, we can't bottle up time, we just go spy. And so we are to use it or we lose it, and that awareness can attune you better to use it better. There is a concept in Aeopl economics called mental accounting. I don't know whether you've heard of it, maybe some of your earlier Aeopl economics guests may have mentioned it, but I'll quickly, I'll briefly explain it. Mental accounting is like having multiple virtual bank accounts and you have one account for the rents and one account for you for the bills and one account for going out for a meal and one account for food and clothing or whatever. So you cut it up

It's basically it's all the same money because money is as they say it's fungible You a dollar is a dollar. Whatever you spend it on is exactly the same dollar but by dividing it up into virtual pots or accounts, you can manage it better. You can have a savings account where you save up for Christmas, for holiday, and basically it's there, it's earmarked, there's a label on it, and it means that you're not really supposed to take money out of that for something else. And there's an anecdote. I think it's, I forget, one of them is dusting offment.

Offment and the other one is, I forget, two actors who used to live together in Hollywood when they were young and in big unions. And one of them goes back home and wants to borrow some money because they've run out of money to food or something. And they actually literally have jars on the kitchen counter. And there is money for something else in another jar, but they are unwilling to take the money from that jar to pay for whatever they need to pay. So that is mental accounting. And we can do the same thing with our own time. We can dedicate time to a certain activity and not use it for something else. All too often we begin a task and we just carry on. And we keep on going. It's like throwing good money after that because it may not be the

best use of our time at a particular moment. And so if we're deliberate about how are we going to be using our time and say, right, I'm going to be working on this for this amount of time. And then I'm going to be doing something else that is also important at that moment in time It's that kind of deliberate nest that I was alluding to earlier on. I understand the listeners will be familiar with Parkinson's law as well, which is work Expands to fill the time given for it It's one of the reasons that time boxing your tasks throughout the day is an important

way because everyone will be familiar from when they were at school. What if you're like me, you might be familiar of leaving your assignment until the last minute and the handing it in. You've actually got some students of yours submitting assignments ready for midnight tonight, so I guess you'll be suffering with the 11.59 PM submission deadlines and all that sort of stuff. There are other issues that have asked for extension. Well, I've been there. They're just leaving it until 11.58, aren't they? And then they can ask for one. But yeah, I totally understand.

One of the examples that you used in one of your blog posts, I thought was hilarious and fascinating. Can we talk about the Estonian police speeding fines, please? Oh, yes. Yes, that's a fantastic idea, I think. The Estonian police in a bit a few months ago, I think, tried out on a particular piece of roads and alternative way of penalizing people who are speeding. In most countries when you get caught speeding you get a ticket and in some situations the fight can be quite extensive depending on how much you exceed the speed limit but here in Finland they come up with a different idea and so they stop people speeding and they gave them a choice between paying, I think, for sort of an average excessive speed, the fine would be something like 400 euros or just like a good 350 pounds, or they could wait for an hour. Just stay there for an hour and then they could

be, they could go good. They didn't have to pay anything, but they just had to wait by the roadside for an hour. About half of the people they stopped opted to wait, about half didn't, so you can imagine from that how much these people value their time because effectively they paid 400 euros for an hour. I don't think even, I think there are very few people who get paid that amount of money. So stopping by and saving £100 for some

people, that was not enough, so to speak, so they went off. But the others did stay. Now I sort of use on that little bit because I think if you look at some common behavioral economics principles, one of them, which comes from an acronym that was put forward by the people of the behavioral insights team here in the UK, the former Nudge units, and they have a simple, very clear framework for behavioral interventions going by the name of East, acronym, Sanskrit, easy, attractive, social, and timely. So any intervention should score highly on those four things. So it should make life easier. It should be appealing. So people would want to do it, to be social, other people do it, should be timely. An intervention that is done at the moment that it matters has more effect on

intervention that is happening at some unrelated time. When you think about it, when you get fined, well, even worse, so you drive along, you get flashed, you get flashed in your rear rim, I've been called. Okay, so if you get about it for, you drive it more slowly for a little while and then you forget about it and then a fortnight later the the You get the notes that you you go caught and you got a little sort of payment slip Maybe to pay a 100 pounds or something So I'm really on pants, but the connection between the behavior that incurred the fine and the find itself is really very very Loose and up point. It's such a long time ago that you don't make the connection.

So in this particular case with the finished police, the connection is immediate. These people, most of the time, will have been speeding because they were late. They left late. This is another aspect of poor time management. It's leaving things too late. So they try to make up for lost time by speeding

and get through this nation on time. And then they get stopped, and they tried to make up for lost time by speeding and get through the destination on time and then they get stopped and have to wait for an hour. So all the benefits they would have had is gone. So they made the effort to try and get their time by breaking the speed limit and yet they didn't get their own time. So this is kind of reinforcing mechanism applied at the right time that might, I don't know, they didn't really properly research it, but I think this is one of the things that I would like to see researched more, to see whether the effectiveness in terms of recurring speeding of this kind of penalty would be superior to the conventional penalty of just basically finding people.

It makes me think about when people buy things on a credit card as well, or when people use contactless. There was a study, I think, Rory Sutherland sites it. People walking out of a supermarket and they're being asked, how much do you think your receipts were? And the people that paid cash were within, you know, 10%, 15%, people that paid chip and pin were sort of within 30.

And people that paid contactless, like, they might as well have just guessed. They might as well have guessed what the person next to them's receipt was. And it's that detachment, isn't it? It's not only the timely detachment, but also the detachment from something that's sufficiently visceral in our sensations to actually make us feel like we were experiencing what is happening. Absolutely. And I think because at the point, people are being called speeding, time is very important to them, otherwise they probably wouldn't be speeding. So at that time being delayed even further is extra painful and is therefore more likely to have the effect

than something that happens two weeks later when they're forgotten, perhaps even where they were when they got caught. So yeah, I think that's, it's an interesting experiment that I think merits further investigations on this peak. I agree. You also had a look at the relative judgments from people who were offering to do charity work about whether or not they were going to spend money to contribute to a particular cause or whether they were going to spend their

time. And this gets on to a point as well that I'd love to move on to, which is talking about outsourcing tasks to other people based on your own value for your time. So let's get into that. Can you tell us about that study? Yeah, yes, that's an interesting study. I forget who is done by somebody at the University of Cardiff. And they looked at how people value people donating to charity, depending on whether they volunteer or whether they donate money. And they normalised it so that the value of the donation was similar to the value of a week's work so to speak. So it was entirely equivalent. And what they found is that in the eyes in the eyes of others, the donation of time is seen as much more valuable. That's 70% wasn't it? Yes. Yes. Yeah. So that's interesting in itself. So, whereas if you take the

old time as money equivalence, that is clearly not true, because people feel that people who volunteer and the time are more praiseworthy than people who simply dip in their pocket and give some money. Why do you think that? The interesting... I can theorize, and my theory is that we all experience time in a much more similar way than we experience money. Our experience to money is very much dependent on our point of reference, and therefore how well think we are. So to an economist, a dollar is a dollar, but to somebody who's a millionaire, dollar will be worth less than to a homeless person who has no money at all. But time is much more equal for multiple people. And so we are, it's easier for us to put ourselves

in a position of somebody who gives up a whole week of their time, of their personal time to do something for somebody else than for somebody to give up $1,000. Yeah. I wonder how much of that as well is effortful signaling about the fact that I know I can tell you people who have donated chunks of money to charity, but I don't know many people that have donated a week. Yes, exactly. Well, that is because we only have 52 weeks in a year. We have basically, there is no limit to the amount of money we only have 52 weeks in a year. We have, basically, we are as limited in the amount of money we can have.

Now, of course, we will not give away half our wealth. I have very few people do that. I mean, let's build guys. Be very likely, we're in Buffett and Bill Gates out of the equation. But generally, the amount of money we give is relatively modest compared to our total wealth. Even though it may, in absolute figures, be quite substantial, it's really something that will make a difference

to our lifestyle. Very few people donate amounts that make a difference to how they will live their life after they've made the donation. But we all have limited time, so we can, we find it much easier to imagine what it's like to give up our week. We have limited amount of holidays, so there's four or five weeks of holiday year, so that's 20 or 25% of your holiday time you're giving up to do something for somebody else. Let me help, that's, that's quite significant. Now there is definitely the likelihood that some of that is signalling. With donations of money, we can donate anonymously and some people too. Not many,

the proportion of anonymous donations is very, very small. So people really want others to be able to see that they gave a certain amount of money because it gives them a warm feeling, but it also gives them a bit of status in the eyes of others, but it can't donate time anonymously. So there, that is, it's pretty obvious that you're donating the time. And so this is something where you can, even if you're a modest, humble kind of person, you can still say and say, look, see what I did here. I sort of went over there for a whole week.

And just going back to the study, what's interesting is that even if the participants to the study were told that if they had given money to this charity, the charity could have bought much more time with that money from local people than the one week that they were giving up and the equivalent amount of money they gave up all the time. And still, the third party, the other people viewed the donation of time as more praiseworthy than the donation of money. So the utility of giving time may be less, but the status it gets you is still more. And so time and I think there are some interesting implications to that, both in our private lives and at work, I think. I think we should be more aware and make other people aware of the value of our time at work. So when we, when people

come in and ask for our time, when we go and ask somebody else for some of that time, we should be more appreciative of that time and understand that this is a precious scarce resource they are making available to us. And so likewise, the other way around. And it's the same thing at home. At home we sometimes treat the time of other people as if it has no value. Will you just go and do this? Can you just go to the post office of this or that? Can you just go to the post office or this or that? And okay, what's the opportunity cost for the person concerned? Is that the best they could be doing with the time? I mean, it's 20 minutes walk, either way to the post office. I could be doing something else.

So why are you asking me this? Because you forgot yesterday to go to the post office. So it's very easy for you to forget if you can then ask me today to go to the post office. So I think, again, more awareness of the value of time can lead to not only a better use of time, but also better relationship, because if I can waste your time, if for whatever reason I have some power over you, and I can instruct you to go to the post office for me because I've got to post the letter or to send this package off yesterday then be a resentment.

You will think well bloody how I could be doing it, it could be interesting something nice, something useful for me but now I need to go to the post office and wait 25 minutes half an hour or so to make up for some something you forgot to do yesterday. Isn't it interesting that with that, we've identified that as being something that people might be quite cognizant of at home. But if you were at work in a job and your boss said, hey, I forgot to take this to take this to post office, you fancy going, you might actually think, oh, I'm getting. I've got 40 minutes off work.

I get to go and have a walk. Despite the fact that your time at work could also be spent doing something. True, but as I said in beginning, one of the things that we tend to do when we're at work is we treat it as sunk time in a sense. We've sold our time to our boss already. So if our boss wants to use that time,

because it's his or her time now, so if they think that time is best spent by me, best sending me to the post office, who cares? I'm at the either way. I suppose this is exactly where, it's literally the tip of the spear of where the inefficiencies in wasting time come from within a business, don't they? That people are like, it's eight o'clock, I'm here, it's five o'clock, I'm gone, whatever we do during that time.

And it takes a very, it either takes a very particular type of mindset or a special sort of remuneration package for people to start to bring that in because you are right. Some people hate meetings. They don't want to spend their time in a Valrava Kant famously. He doesn't do meetings. I don't do meetings. And you're like, well, you know, there's a lot of businesses. And he's on the board of all of these like angel investment companies and stuff like, how do you not do meetings? And that's because that is how much he values not only his time, but the time of everyone that's around him, all the other companies that I know that their meeting rooms are deskless and seatless. So they are simply a room in which everybody can stand

and it just totally reduces down. It increases the effortful friction of someone wanting to call a meeting. It's like, okay, cool, you can call a meeting, but everyone's got to stand, and everyone's got to hold their laptop like a waiter in front of them while they're here. So, I mean,

it is so interesting, especially for me as someone who's never worked in a typical salaryed job that's never been my industry. I've always worked for myself, but I know that that's non-typical. And, you know, I really do hope that some of the people that are listening can start to, if you are in a more typical sort of salaryed job, you can start to assess your time while you are at work and think, well, hang on. Now, where can I make my experience either more productive or more enjoyable for me or whatever it might be?

Well, yes, yeah, absolutely. And I think your panel is quite interesting. I think if you're self-employed, then you are really the owner of both your money and your time and you will treat them with more respect, I think, under time that you spend at work because you've already sold it. It's not yours anymore. I think the comparison is with, imagine that you're going on a business trip and you get some cash from work, you get, I know, 150 pounds to spend on hotel and meal or whatever. Will you be worried

about how much you spend? Probably not. You can't keep anything, so you can't keep the balance, you have to give back, you have to receipts for a certain amount and a balance you need to give back, but you can spend up to 150 pounds. So you're not going to be too concerned about how you spend that money. Well, I think it's very much the same with the time you spend at work. You've given it to your employer. So, if, if, if, for whatever reason, you need to go and sit in meetings five hours in a day, that's what you're going to be doing. Now, of course, it's not true for everybody, not to 100% of the time.

But too much of the time, we, we really treat that time as if it's not true for everybody, not to 100% of the time. But too much of the time, we really treat that time as if it has no particular value to us. We just do whatever comes along and we don't, we're not deliberate enough with it. I understand. I think that's such a brilliant example. The people that do have a company card, that are listening will know that if you've got 150 pounds to spend it, 249 pounds, 50 pounds, that goes on the stake.

And you've bought a milkshake that you don't even want to have and this, that, and the other. I think you're right. There's something probably a little bit more worrying or a little bit more sort of malicious going on. It feels to me a lot when I speak to people, some people who have these sorts of roles, there's almost an adversarial relationship between the employer and the employee or the employee and the employer that it's like, they will drag their feet, slash spend the money, slash do whatever

they can as much as possible sometimes, especially in a job, perhaps, that you might be not too enamored by. And I don't really know either from an employer or an employee's standpoint, if there's not a passion to sort of make the most of every minute as Ben Burjorn would say I Don't know what the solution would be for that. I don't know the reason. Yeah, yeah, I think I think it's it's it's not normally Malice I think it's just No appreciation for something that has no value. I mean even in social policy there is a case can be made for making people pay for much of the services they get, because once you pay for something, you actually move value to it,

and you start caring for it more. So I'm not even remotely suggesting that at work, we should pay our colleagues for their time, although as a principle, it's probably not bad. And I think there have been experiments even at Google where there was a virtual Google dollar being used that you could use to buy a colleague's time. But I think another concept that I use in my work as well as the economics concept of externalities, where this is where a transaction between two parties involves a third party or actually does not involve the third party, there are the consequences of it.

So a good example of externalities in society is pollution. So you take plastic pollution, for instance. The plastic that is now filling up our rivers and oceans, so you go down to Tesco's or St. Breese and you get some plastic bags because you can't be bothered to take your own bags. You get out of full of free bags, you get home, you unload them and then you just throw them away

and they blow out of your waste bin on the outside and they blow into the local river and they find their way to the sea. So the seas are being polluted whereas the transaction was just between you and St. Bruce. You got some some free bags and so somebody else is suffering the consequences likewise polluting industries that pollute the, or the water and so on. The same can happen within organizations where, I mean, to give you an example, where finance tells procurement,

you need to squeeze down our suppliers. We want to pay less because we have price erosion, we need to compensate for that, so we're gonna pay less for our raw materials next year and this year. So they're going to negotiate and they get a better price. What they don't at that moment realize is that the supplier is saying, right, okay, if we are getting less money for our product, we're not going to give as much support anymore. So if there is a problem with our supplies, they're going to step within half an hour.

We might give them some telephone support, but obviously it's not part of the official written contract, it is part of the unwritten total agreement. And so the people, somewhere else in the organization, who need the help of the supplier, will certainly find that they don't get the help anymore. So that's an externality. The finance and procurement were happy because finance said you must shade 5% of the bill of materials and procurement shades of 6% are saying, look at us, we did really well. And then somebody else is suffering the consequences. Operations and logistics are fucked. Yes, those kinds of things precisely. So but I think there are so many situations at work where what we do on our own or what we

do with another colleague affects third parties and we don't know in what way and it may well waste their time. But if we don't know, we'll happily waste the time because we don't pay for it. It's not even visible. So that's why, again, I keep on hammering on this notion of awareness. We need to be aware of the consequences of what we do on other people, including of their time. And it may not, it may, I mean, we could do it this way or that way.

It doesn't make much difference to us. But if we did this way, it's going to waste somebody's time, maybe half a day, if we do that way, in one way, it's any time at all. But if we don't know, we can't do the right thing. And this is because within an organization, you don't have a market mechanism to show the expense of something that is a specific burden to a colleague, if you see what I mean. Absolutely. I've got a question that I want to finish on, but before I get onto that, is there anything else

do you want to book and the discussion on time or are you happy with everything we've covered so far? Well, I think maybe one final thing and I wrote about it recently is deadlines. The use of deadlines are particularly self-imposed deadlines. We sometimes set deadlines. Yeah, I mean, we must get this done by then. And it can be a very good mechanism for making the limited amount of time we have salient and we have a countdown clock mentally or we can have a real countdown clock. So we okay this much time left and we can plan and we know that we as we get close we really need to get it done.

Whether that's at work or whether it's at home and we can do this. But we should be careful not to be too dogmatic about using deadlines like this because there's always a tradeoff to be too dogmatic about using deadlines like this, because there's always a trade-off to be made. And so sometimes time not spent, but because a deadline is basically saying no time spent beyond this moment of time. And if you don't go beyond that, then presumably, there is some kind of value of finishing whatever you have by then.

I mean, you gave the example of my students and their final assignment for this course. So they need to submit it by midnight to night. It's midnight central time, so they've got another 11 hours, they've got a little while to go. But so some of them have asked for an extension and they got it because they were in time. If they asked for one now then they won't get it and they will get penalized. But so they need to think about should I submit my assignment on time and meet the deadline or should I submit it late, get a penalty but have a better assignment. And I think that's the kind of trade off that we don't always make.

We can become obsessed by a deadline and not really work out what the true cost would be of exceeding a deadline. Or meeting the deadline as well as... Well, both, indeed. So we can... We can set a self-imposed deadline which forces you to make a suboptimal decision, one that potentially, given only a small increase of the deadline, would have increased the quality of the decision by a significant margin.

Correct. And I think, I mean, to give another sort of practical example, you need to catch your train. And it's really quite important you get that train, but how important is it? Are you going to be leaving the house without checking that you've actually closed the windows and the doors? Because yeah, I really need to get the train, or are you going to say, well, I'd rather check the house and I'll take the next train. Okay, there's going to be some cost involved with that, but at least I know my house will be secure. And the iron will be unplugged and I'll have sort of switch off the gas stove and everything

so my house is not burning down. So when you put it so extreme, then clearly nobody is going to say I'm going to rush out of the house, leave windows indoors open and the iron on the ironing board, because I need to catch my train, Nobody is going to do that. But if it's not that extreme, we don't always think about it, about what it is we would gain by catching the train and meeting our deadline. And what we would lose by not meeting that deadline,

or what we would gain in terms of the benefit of our house being secure on the equivalent. So I think deadlines can be useful, but we should be careful not to treat them as something that then begins to dictate us. I think we need to be willing to look at compromising either way and what the cost and the benefit of of going out of the side would be. It's interesting that I love thinking about where the rubber meets the road with these sorts of discussions. Exactly what would you be prepared to have one window half open?

Would you be prepared to have one window fully open but it's an upstairs window? Would you be like, so we do, we always do this and it's ruined. We used to have a big section on the prop in fitness podcast, which I was a guest on before I started this one. We used to have a big section called Woodie Rather and it was Woodie Rather submitted by listeners and there would always be something which had a value that was negotiable and we would find a value that someone would accept. And then the ruin, it completely ruined the segment and we got rid of it because we just kept playing the same game, which was we would pick the value someone would accept and then take it down by unit

and then take it down by unit and then take it down by, it was also you do it for 50 grand. Okay, so would you do it for 499, 999? Would you do it for 499? And you just go, oh, well, like you just, I don't know, I don't know exactly where, but where the Rubber meets the road with those sorts of discussions, I think,

is really, really interesting. And you of discussions, I think, is really, really interesting. And you spoke about, I'll tell you what, before I ask the question, I've been really excited to ask you, you mentioned that one of the ways that people can insulate, slash protect themselves from this is through planning. Can you just explain how you think planning sort of ties into the deadline and sacrifice sort of? Well, I think, yeah, yes, yes, I can.

I think I treat planning somewhat fuzzy, I'd say. I'm not the person who's got, I mean sometimes when I work with people, I see they open their outlet diary and it's got all these nice colored boxes I don't have that many boxes But I do it I did mentally in a sense. So I think about What I need to do I think about when I'm roughly going to be doing it To me, it's about this awareness and being deliberate about the time So for me that is planning and I I think what's important also is what is my purpose.

If I'm going to finish my blog post for Friday, then that's what's going to be my main focus. But it doesn't mean that I'm going to be doing this until midnight and I'll drop. No. This is where the mental accounting comes in. I'm aware that I need to take a break. I'm going to have a cup of tea. I'm going to maybe watch something on the television and then I'll carry on working on it. So it's, it really is, I think it's probably a parallel with mindfulness as well.

It's a lot of time, mindfulness that is in volunteer. Being conscious of time, being conscious of the fact that it's valuable and that you need to use it well, but also that you, I mean, interestingly, I just tweeted a story earlier today about the value of doing nothing. So I actually sometimes literally do nothing. And I think it's very valuable doing nothing. So there is, I don't look at my phone, don't look at anything, don't even think about anything, just basically float can be very useful. And so making time for that is the case of being aware of the need and being deliberate about creating that time. It's not necessarily I'm going to be doing nothing between 1144 and 1205 tomorrow lunchtime, but it's about being, basically, being in control of your time. To me, that is what

planning is. If you need your diary to do that, then fine, but you don't necessarily need a diary. It's the sense of being control of what you do when. Yeah, the tool doesn't really matter, but the deliberateness does. It's, I can't remember. I read the quote earlier on today, so I'm kicking myself and not being able to remember it, but many of the problems of man

due to the fact that he can't sit alone with himself in a room for half an hour. Yes. And, you know, it sounds like you are also interestingly, if my meditation coach Brian is listening, he will know that my particular pathway of meditation at the moment is do nothing meditation by shins and young. And that specifically for anybody that's interested is what he calls completely taking the hands off the wheel. And it is the practice of no practice.

So my meditation on the morning doesn't even have me clearing my mind of thoughts. If thoughts arise, they're allowed to, there's no fixation or suppression, but the only thing that I do is drop an intention to control. So it's like, the thought about putting my hands back on the wheel gets, that's the only thing I'm allowed to think about thinking about. And it's like, the thought about putting my hands back on the wheel gets, that's the only thing I'm allowed to think about thinking about, and that's it, which is doing that,

like learning to let go of controlling thoughts, even in a meditative practice, is because meditation in itself in some forms, especially some of the ones that I've been doing, is still about, we're bringing the focus back to the breath, we're bringing the focus back to the somatic sensations in the body or the self talk or the my the mental imagery or whatever it might be and Yeah, the power of literally doing nothing is Is an interesting one. I think it was really really good to go through that, but I have a final It was really, really good to go through that. But I have a final question for you, which I asked Richard Schotton, I'm gonna ask you the same thing as well.

So you stranded on a desert island, stranded on a desert island on your own, and you're only allowed to have three mental models with you. You can take three mental models onto the island with you. So they can be either the most novel or the most interesting, they can be either the most novel or the most interesting. They can be a bias, heuristic, whatever it is that you want.

But you're going to choose three. And you're going to take them with you. Which three you're going to choose? I'm going to be on my own there. Yep. I'll tell you what, you can imagine that there might be other people there as well, because that will probably broaden it. But you've got to choose three, you've got to choose a favorite three.

I'm quite sure what you mean by mental illness. Any bias, any heuristic, so you could have some cost fallacy, opportunity cost, you could have the platform effect, you could have anchoring, you could have self-serving bias. Well, I think one thing I would definitely take with me is cost-benefit analysis. Okay. That's the, it's the way you make deliberate decisions. So it's sort of considering what the cost-benefit are of the multiple options that are in front of you. I think that would serve me well, even if I'm totally on my own on a desert island. I think what I would also take is optimism bias, because I think life can get a bit depressing

if you're not optimistic. Optimism might be, well, God knows, maybe it should might appear on the horizon and take me away from the silent, or I might discover important things that helped me make my life more comfortable on the island. What would be the third one that would serve me well? Well, maybe I don't know whether you treat as a mental model, but I would take mindfulness. I find, even when I'm driving occasionally, and it's probably the right side of doing nothing, but just sort of taking in the site, taking in the landscape, taking in the way the trees look, maybe there's a bit of frost on the trees and being really conscious of that, I think that's also something that would serve me well on a desert island. That is the ability to experience my environment

to the full, being mindful in that way, even if I have nothing else, if I haven't got any of my accoutrements that make my life interesting and pleasant these days, if I could be mindful in whatever the nature would be in my desert island, I think that would certainly well. I think it would stop you from getting bored as well. The resolution that you're looking at some, if you're on this small desert island, you see the same trees every day, you need to be able to look at them with optimism, you need to be able to be able to see them freshly. There's a couple of mental models that come to mind. So George McGill, who I did a mental models podcast with, there's Hanlon's razor and Occam's razor. And he made McGill's razor. And McGill's razor was when offered two choices, choose the one

which suggests which offers the most look or adventure. And that actually, interestingly, the look or adventure side might be how you ended up on the desert island. You might have thought I'm going to take, I mean, this, this sounds like a great adventure. And now your ship wrecked and now you're stranded on a desert island. Yeah. Well, the question is, will it take you off the island again? Ah, yeah, exactly. A lucky create get Wilson, the volleyball on there, strap some blue shoots to a raft.

Yeah. Cohen, today's been fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on. If the listeners want to find out more, if they want to see some of your work, where should they head? Well, I should probably head to my medium site. I mean, I published both on WordPress there my addresses, Confucius. I'll spell that. It's K-O-Y-N as in my first name, Fucius,

as in my illustrious ancestor, Confucius.net. Or on Medium, I'm Medium slash at Confucius on Medium. I can always follow me on Twitter as well. I'm a prolific Twitterer, tweets, not least my own stories, but also other interesting stuff to do with human behavior that I discovered on the Net left-right in Centre. I can agree, more massive, massive appreciation for you for coming on. And you're publishing weekly at the moment on your...

Every week, yeah. That's a serious schedule. A piece every week, yes, that's right. And I try to stick to it. To the point, actually, I publish in English and Dutch as well. So it's published on a Dutch, Belgian Dutch language news website. So I translated usually in the early hours of Friday morning. Oh wow.

Two. Yeah, I know that feeling of completing my show notes a couple of hours. There's been a few interesting times because of the publishing, the time that these episodes go live is 6am in the UK. And there's been a couple of times where I've been away in Bali,

which is 13 hours ahead, or I've been in Boston, which is eight hours, like six hours behind. And I'm thinking like, it's shit, like I've got half an hour to get this episode up because it's actually, don't need one a.m. here, but it's 6am at home and blah, blah. Well, it's saying for me,

even though it's a self-imposed deadline, because nobody tells me to publish by 10 o'clock on a Friday morning, but it helps. I'm totally convinced if I didn't set myself that deadline, I would long have given up posting a post every week. And that discipline, I think, it's a very good discipline to think as well. I mean, writing is the best way to learn to think better. I couldn't agree more and I think as well that what we've both got is a level of accountability. You know, there will be people that are waiting for your blog post and if the blog post doesn't go

up, maybe no one will actually say something, but you know, they'll probably think it. They'll be at a higher in a second. Where's Kun's article from today and that social fear, that social pressure, it's enough of a motivation to keep us both going each week, I suppose. It is. Even if it's totally imagined and is actually nobody's reading my piece, it still works. Koon, thank you so much for your time.

Right. Everything that we've talked about today will be linked in the show notes below, including the medium page for yourself and your Twitter You know what to do if you enjoyed this episode feel free to comment below like share and subscribe. I would really appreciate it But for now, Koon, thank you so much Chris, thanks very much. It's been very very enjoyable. Thank you Offends, get offends