Ten Percent Happier with Dan Harris - 318: A New Way to Think About Your Time | Ashley Whillans

Episode Date: January 25, 2021

For many of us, in this pandemic, our relationship to time has become particularly fraught. You may be noticing that, with no limits on your work time, you are going into overdrive and feeling more crazed than ever. Or you may be feeling like you have too much time and are bored out of your mind. Or you may be feeling both. My guest, Ashley Whillans, is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Business School and author of the book Time Smart. She was recommended to us by a former guest, Laurie Santos, a professor from Yale and host of The Happiness Lab podcast. Ashley has a radical approach to managing your time -- or taking your time, to put a new spin on an old cliche. Her goal is to get you from a state of "time poverty" to "time affluence." In this conversation, we talk about: how to do a time audit; funding time, finding time, and reframing time; the surprising extent to which prioritizing time over money predicts happiness -- and what to do if you usually do the opposite; how to handle "time confetti"; and the value of canceling meetings. This is the first of a two-part series we are doing this week on time. On Wednesday, we’re going to talk to someone with a rather different approach. Her name is Jenny Odell and she wrote a bestseller called How To Do Nothing. Take a few minutes to help us out by answering a survey about your experience with this podcast! The team here is always looking for ways to improve, and we’d love to hear from all of you, but we’d particularly like to hear from those of you who listen to the podcast and do not use our companion app. Please visit https://www.tenpercent.com/survey to take the survey. Thank you.   Full Shownotes: https://www.tenpercent.com/podcast-episode/ashley-whillans-318 See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Before we jump into today's show, many of us want to live healthier lives, but keep bumping our heads up against the same obstacles over and over again. But what if there was a different way to relate to this gap between what you want to do and what you actually do? What if you could find intrinsic motivation for habit change that will make you happier instead of sending you into a shame spiral? Learn how to form healthy habits without kicking your own ass unnecessarily by taking our healthy habits course over on the 10% happier app. It's taught by the Stanford psychologist Kelly McGonical and the Great Meditation Teacher Alexis

Santos to access the course. Just download the 10% happier app wherever you get your apps or by visiting 10% calm. All one word spelled out. Okay on with the show. to Baby, this is Kiki Palmer on Amazon Music or wherever you get your podcast. For ABC, this is the 10% happier podcast. I'm Dan Harris. Hey, hey, for many of us in this pandemic, our relationship to time has become particularly fraught. For example, you may be noticing that with no limits on your work time, with your work and office becoming the same thing, you're going into overdrive and feeling more craze than ever. Or you may be feeling like you have too much time in our board out of your mind. Or you may be feeling both, depending on the day or the time of day.

My guest today, Ashley Willens, is an assistant professor at Harvard Business School and author of the book Time Smart. She was recommended to us by a former guest on this show, Laurie Santos, the professor from Yale, who is the host of the Happiness Lab podcast. Ashley has a pretty radical approach to managing your time or taking your time to put a new spin on an old cliche. Her goal is to get you from a state of time poverty to one of time affluence. In this conversation, we talk about how to do a time audit,

funding time, finding time, and reframing time, the surprising extent to which prioritizing time over money predicts your happiness and what to do if you're not that kind of person, how to handle time confetti and the value of canceling meetings. This is actually the first of a two-part series we're doing this week on the subject of time. On Wednesday, we're going to talk to somebody with a rather different approach to this issue. Her name is Jenny O'Dell and she wrote a best-selling book called How to Do Nothing. One last thing before we get into the episode, we would love it and

deeply appreciate it if you could take a few minutes to do us a solid by answering a survey about your experience with this podcast. We're always looking for ways to get better at what we do. We'd love to hear from you. In particular, we'd like to hear from anybody who listens to this show, but doesn't use the 10% happier app that said we really want to hear from everybody. Please go to 10%.com forward slash survey, 10%.com forward slash survey as always link in the show notes. Thank you for that. Here we go. Ashley Willens. Ashley Willens, thanks for coming on. Thanks for having me.

Yes, we both owe a debt of gratitude to Laurie Santos at Yale, who suggested that I chat with you, so shout out to Laurie. I'm interested in how you got interested in the subject of time. What was going on in your life that time achieved a level of salience that you decided to dedicate so much of your time to studying it and teaching people about it? Yeah, so studying it and teaching people about it happened at different times in my life. So to start on the first, just how did I get interested in the scientific study of time?

As I was working with Elizabeth Dunn at the University of British Columbia. She was my advisor in grad school. And she was doing all this really interesting research showing we're not very good at spending our money in ways that promote happiness. Spending as little as $5 or $20 and others can promote greater happiness

and spending that same $5 or $20 in ourselves. But we don't recognize this. And we get it wrong. We spend too much of material purchases and not enough on helping others. We spend too much on our furniture and not enough on vacations or experiential purchases. And this sort of got Liz and I thinking if we're so bad at spending one of our valuable resources money, we're probably not very good at spending our time and ways of promote happiness either. So we started to embark on a series of research projects really trying to understand how

to people navigate trade-offs between time and money, do people spend money to save time if not why not. And are there things that we can all do on an everyday basis to spend small moments of free time, five minutes, 30 minutes, and ways that are more likely to promote happiness? So that's how I became interested in the research side of things, just trying to understand how do people navigate trade-offs between time and money? And how can we help people spend their time, even small windfalls of time, and ways that are more likely to promote happiness. And then I became interested in applying my research in my own life and writing about it and communicating it beyond academic journals when I started on faculty at the Harvard Business

School, probably the most financially maximizing and time minimizing decision one could make as a junior faculty member working constantly, having no time off and essentially ruining my first serious relationship because even though I was studying the importance of putting time first, I was doing the exact opposite in my personal life. And this got me thinking, if I, someone who studies the importance of time for happiness and making all of these decisions on an everyday basis that prioritize work over everything else, if I'm struggling to put time first, I must not be alone. I was giving a talk at Cornell University on the importance of valuing time for romantic

relationships. Meanwhile, I was breaking up with a partner of 10 years, and I was like, oh, Ashley, what have you done with yourself? Here you are leading expert on time and happiness, and you just ruined your first serious relationship of 10 years by focusing too much on work and productivity. And that moment became why I decided to start writing about the importance of time so that we could go from moving from an abstract concept, yeah, yeah, we all know time matters,

but none of us are going to put it first. We're just going to put work first and start helping myself and others live a more time first, time focused life by making small decisions around the margins to have more and better time. So in short, to kind of summarize, I became first fascinated by the scientific study of time, money trade-offs and how those influence happiness. And then on a very personal level, I wanted to help others and myself put what we know from the scientific literature into practice in everyday life,

because knowing and doing are two very different things. Well, I'm sure if you've heard this question before, but if you couldn't do it, how are we supposed to do it? So I could do it, and I am doing it now. I just wasn't doing it at the time. And so there is hope for all of us. So, let's start with the biggest, most impactful moves we can make in this area, because whether we feel like we have too much or too little time, it's going to be an issue for every single human being, where do we start?

I think we have to start by first noticing how we make decisions between time and money. So in my empirical research, I posed a simple question to probably about 50,000 people all over the world. And the question is, do you value time over money or money over time? So you're more like Taylor, you're more like Morgan. Taylor, value time more than money is willing to give up money to have more free time, such as by working fewer hours. And Morgan values money more than time, Morgan is willing to sacrifice leisure in order to work additional hours at the office, for example. And when I ask people this

about 50% say they're Taylor, 50% say they're Morgan. And critically, people who say they're more like Taylor are happier and spend their time in ways that are more likely to produce greater gains in happiness, like volunteering or spending more time socializing. But it's not a misery sentence. Someone who focuses more on money and work and success at the expense of leisure. you just have to start to cultivate an awareness as the first step of whether you're someone who values time or someone who values money. The way that we make trade-offs around time and money happen kind of subtly across days and even over the course of our lives.

The example I was talking about, the personal example of me taking a job that made a lot of salary, but also led me to work around the clock. That's an obvious example of sacrificing time in order to make more money. You're making a career choice. I personally was faced with the decision to work a government job on the west coast of Canada, make less money, have more leisure, or to take a job at the Harvard Business School where I'd have no free time, but I'd make more money and potentially advance in my career faster. I chose this more money-focused decision.

That's a more obvious kind of time-money trade-off. However, we also make small trade-offs on everyday basis, where we're sometimes sacrificing a lot of our time for a little bit of financial reward, like researching for the best deal online over and over for many hours, or deciding to live very far away from our place of employment, to have a slightly bigger house that's a little bit cheaper when we could live closer to where we work. Maybe that's less relevant currently in the moment, but definitely it'll become more relevant again across time. And so the first thing I advocate for is doing a time audit and becoming mindful of the ways that we spend time and waste time.

And the trade-offs that we're making on an everyday basis and over the course of our lives that might make us feel time poor. And then thinking to yourself, well, is there any trade-offs I could start making that would allow me to make different decisions and have more time and greater happiness? For me, people ask me, well, what is the one consistent thing that you put into practice in your own life? And because I am more of a money and work focused person overall, I'm more of a Morgan, less vatailer, I'm very deliberate with how I spend time in my personal life. I put in time into my calendar for leisure, and I don't move that time, no matter what work deadline I'm working under. So I've become a lot more thoughtful and deliberate about protecting my leisure as if it was

important as work, because it is, in fact, more important than my work projects as I've learned the hard way. And then, of course, we can get into this more, but there are other strategies we can take in addition to doing a time audit, like funding time, finding time, and reframing time that can help all of us feel a greater sense of control of our time on an everyday basis and to gain greater happiness and feel less stressed. One thing I've learned that is if I get

to this point in the interview and I have a million questions, it's a good interview and I have a million questions, okay. So where to start? I'm assuming Taylor and Morgan are made up. People not like Taylor Swift and Morgan Fairchild or whatever, like these are just like avatars you've created.

Yes, they're avatars because T is like time and M is like money and Taylor and Morgan are gender neutral. Yeah, so totally made up. But we didn't want to ask people what they valued. I didn't want to say do you value money? I didn't want to say, do you value money? People will be like, no, I don't value money. But then meanwhile, they'll go work 80 hours and never see their family.

So we had to make these hypothetical characters to encourage honest responding. People are more likely to say, yeah, I'm a little more like Morgan, a little less like Taylor. If you make it about a hypothetical fictional character than about them, because if I ask you what do you value people feel like they're being judged by the psychologist that studies happiness? I'm just wondering though, does this Taylor Morgan dichotomy really capture all of the nuance? Because just take you, for example, you had this,

and I don't know all the details obviously because we've never met in this, her first interaction, but you had what sounds to me like a choice between a government job on the west coast of Canada and going to HBS. And you portrayed it, your decision to go to Harvard Business School as sort of Morgan or money focused, but it could be because this is the opportunity of a lifetime. You care so much about what you do. You love what you do. And I would argue that the vast majority of the hours you're working, you're not thinking

about whatever the financial ramifications are, it's because you're obsessed with what it is you study. And so I don't know, does this dichotomy really hold in the real world? It does predict people's time and money trade-offs. You write it's an imperfect measure. So there's other things that people value that are going on too. But in general, a lot of our decisions

do involve sacrifices of time to have more money or sacrifices of money to have more time. And if you tell me you're more of a tailor or more of a Morgan, this predicts career decisions, this predicts daily decisions on an everyday basis, how much you're going to spend time researching for the best deal or not, whether you're going to spend more in a direct flight or not. And it reliably predicts how much you're going to spend interacting with someone that you've never met before. So how much you're willing to socialize,

even if it might not pay off for your financial success or your career satisfaction. So it's not everything, but it does reliably predict time and money trade-offs across days over the course of people's lives. And importantly, it predicts people's happiness, the extent to which people prioritize time over money, predicts happiness more than materialism,

more than just liking stuff, more than the amount of money that they make, more than personality characteristics like extroversion, more than financial insecurity and how financially set people feel in the future. So it's not the only things that matter for happiness or for these decisions. It's not all that's going on in people's minds, but it is capturing a framework for thinking about how you might want to be making decisions or at least recognizing that some of your decisions about money are also having a time implication. And people who are better able to recognize those kinds of trade-offs that decisions about our finances

are often implicating our time, do seem to report good or happiness less stress and better social relationships. Are the tailors happier or is it really just about understanding yourself and that's what dictates the happiness? So tailors are happier, but in part, I think they are happier because of what you're saying. So people who are more time-focused, do spend more of their time in ways that promote happiness for them. So we see in some of our research papers that we published on this topic, tailors, are more likely to choose jobs for intrinsically motivating as opposed to extrinsically motivating reasons, which predicts their happiness

and career satisfaction years after graduation. People who are more time focused are also more likely to spend more time socializing, volunteering, interacting with colleagues, all of these constellation of activities that are good for happiness. So you might be on to something here when you're saying, well, maybe time people know what makes them happy and are better allocating their time toward those meaningful and happiness-producing activities. Since we do find evidence in our data that that is the case.

And so this is why the first step of becoming time affluent is to become mindful of how you're spending time to do a time audit, if you will, where you think about what activities bring me meaning, what activities bring me meaning, what activities bring me joy, and to think about how much time you typically spend in activities that are meaningful and satisfying, and maximize the amount of time you spend on those activities, and minimize the amount of time you spend in unpleasant or stressful activities. Labor economists call this maximizing your UNDEX. My book editor calls this

Summary condo method of time. Pick it up. Look at the way you spent time yesterday in the morning, the afternoon and the evening. Did the activity bring you meaning? Was it attached to some higher goal you have in life? If no, should you keep doing it? Maybe you should get rid of it.

And so you can go through this activity and think about allocating the way that you spend your time in a way that matches ideally how you would like to spend your time and on the activities that bring you more meaning and more satisfaction. So there is something in this idea that people who are broadly tailors, broadly time focused might be better able to have the skills and understanding this awareness of what activities bring the meaning and satisfaction, and they're more clearly allocating their time to those activities as opposed to others

that they might be pursuing more for extrinsically motivated reasons as opposed to intrinsically. Are meaning and enjoyment directly correlated for, I'll give you two examples. Okay. Yeah. So I teach this. I'm HBS, I teach a two by two grid, right? So you can have an activity that's high in meaning, low on satisfaction, maybe taking care of your kid or staying up all night with a newborn high in meaning. Does it feel good in the moment? Maybe not. Does it feel good the next day?

No, you're probably exhausted and then still trying to do a million other things. But it's high on meaning, low on pleasure. So it's not just simply about maximizing pleasure. You also have to maximize meaning as well. But maybe you had a different example. So. Well, no, no, no, I was actually going to think I was just going to talk about every night after dinner, my son who's six or about to turn six wants to play this game where he jumps

in the bed and I throw pillows at him which is a stereotypical male kid's desire, you know, something semi-aggressive. And it's high on meaning because often in that context he'll like share things about his day that he otherwise wouldn't, but it's incredibly boring most of the time. So I prioritize it. And yet it's not like I walk away, you know, like I would from a massage. Yeah, so massage is a perfect, not very meaningful or purposeful, very pleasant activity. And so you want to be thinking about time as diversifying your portfolio, just as you would your financial investments.

You want some activities that are high in meaning, like taking care of your kids, hanging out with them, just as you would your financial investments, you want some activities that are high in meaning, like taking care of your kids, hanging out with them, but not necessarily super pleasant in the moment. You need some activities that are high in pleasure, but not necessarily high in meaning. And then, of course, you want activities that are both, like engaging in purposeful work or volunteering,

engaging in civic engagement with your family or your friends. And then what we talk about in the book and what research supports is you also want to minimize the amount of time that you spend in unpleasant and stressful activities like dooms growing on social media or other ways that we waste time on an everyday basis constantly checking our email that get in the way of these more purposeful and pleasant activities. And even household chores might fit into this bucket. And this is where the strategy that I alluded to earlier

comes from this idea of funding time. You can use money to outsource some of these activities that fall into this lower left-hand quadrant of, if you kind of think about unpleasant, non-meaningful activities, you can think about spending money to get rid of some of the activities that make you stressed, that aren't bringing you joy, that don't have a higher meaning in life, both at work and in your personal life. I suspect, I'm going to ask a question now, I suspect listeners have been wanting me to

ask for a couple of minutes, which is, can you say more about how exactly we would do a time audit? Yes. So you can think back to a typical work day. So you want to think about a normal day where you would experience the typical strains of everyday life, not a weekend where your schedule might look different than it does usually. And then think about the activities that you engaged in in the morning, the afternoon, and the evening, right down with the major episodes were. And then you just wanna write out,

was the activity meaningful, was it pleasant, was it not meaningful, was it unpleasant, did it make you feel stressed out? And then you can think about for all the activities that were not meaningful and not enjoyable, could you get rid of it? Could you either stop doing the activity? Could you pay someone else to do the activity? Could you delegate it to someone if it's a work task? And maybe the answer is no, in which case, you can think about reframing that activity and we can talk a little bit more about

that. Or if you can outsource, maybe you could pay to get rid of it. This is the strategy of funding time. Or you could delegate it to someone else who might see it as more of an opportunity than you do. But really, the point of this exercise is to begin to cultivate awareness about what activities you find meaningful and pleasurable, what activities you find stressful,

what activities are you engaging in perhaps mindlessly, and to cultivate a greater awareness around how you spend time on an everyday basis in order to start spending moments, minutes, and time in everyday life on activities that bring you joy and satisfaction. One thing that emerges from my data so clearly is that we often think we need to have a lot of free time to spend more time in ways that bring us joy and satisfaction, like helping others, like exercising, like socializing, however, even spending 30 more minutes a day engaged in active leisure can have powerful benefits for our mood. So, active leisure, socializing, exercising, volunteering, spending time actively engaged in social activities with our friends and family.

And so, the whole purpose of a time audit is to see where your time goes missing on a everyday basis, and then to think about how you might be able to imbue some of time that you spent in otherwise unpleasant activities in more positive and pleasant ways. So this doesn't require clearing out seven more hours of your day to do the thing that's in the upper right quadrant of the, I'm bad at that quadrants, but the most meaningful, the most pleasurable stuff, it sounds like you can do this kind of on the margins. Yeah, and that's really the whole point of this exercise is to find places where you might spend half an hour passively scrolling on social media and trying to substitute

that time with an activity that you want to do more of, like exercise or going outdoors or spending time with your kids. Just to go back to that basic blocking and tackling on doing a time audit. I believe you said but it's possible that I had some sort of brain glitch at the moment and didn't hear you correctly but I believe you said sort of pick a day and map it out but wouldn't you want for the sake of more holistic accuracy to pick like a month. Sure, if you pick a typical day, you want for the sake of more holistic accuracy to pick like a month? Sure. If you pick a typical day, that'll be a pretty representative of most of your typical days. The scientific literature says Tuesday is a perfectly average day. So you should pick a

Tuesday that isn't a weird Tuesday, just the regular work Tuesday and pick that day and do a time on it there. If you really want to get into it, sure, for reliability, do it every Tuesday of next month. But again, we're talking to time poor people here might not have time to do it every Tuesday. Pick a Tuesday, start there. It might not be perfect, but at least it's got you thinking. So pick a Tuesday and just really pick a microscope to it and say, how did I use every, say, 15 minute increment of this day?

I feel like you're an A-type person maybe you're like every 15 minutes, but I don't even want it to feel like that much of a list at all. You know, I really resent you diagnosing me so accurately. Well, I'm the one that used to, my parents come down on me. They're like, yeah, we always knew you'd end up a time management junkie. You used to keep lists that were so detailed about all of the things you wanted to do and map out my day to the hour when I was eight years old or something. So it's okay.

It's from one a time to another. We can't, we can't give a raise, but it can be as simple as at the end of the day, think to yourself What activities do I do in the morning that afternoon and the evening? What was a joyful moment for me? What was a meaningful activity for me? What was a stressful unpleasant activity for me? And is there anything I can do about that? Can I spend less time engaging that activity? Can I get rid of it? Can I delegate it? What here that is unpleasant andposit and unproductive

is under my own control? And really start identifying those activities as a first place to start. And let's make sure that makes a ton of sense. And you can, listeners can apply this advice with whatever level of compulsion suits their personality type. But you talked about funding time, finding time, reframing time. And I think we all understand what funding time is But you talked about funding time, finding time, reframing time.

And I think we all understand what funding time is because you talked about it at some length. But you know, you can, if you have the funds, can you pay somebody to do the more sort of innovating, less meaningful, lower left hand quadrant of the matrix stuff? What about finding time and reframing time? Yeah, so finding time comes from this deliberation, right?

So you've just kind of thought about where your time goes missing on an everyday basis. I love talking about this. This is one of the major time traps I talk about in the book around why we all feel so time poor, is we often waste time or we let our technology take up too much time than it should. And so finding time is this idea of noticing where we get sucked into a trap like technology, like email, where we're engaging in unpleasant, unproductive activities, but we're maybe not

conscious about how much time goes missing in those activities. For me, it's my inbox. When I should be working on something important or should be spending quality time with my partner, I get sucked into my inbox. And so for me, finding time looks like becoming mindful of when I do that and trying to substitute that time use activity for something else. So part of the reason I'm feeling so stressed is because I'm constantly connected.

Can I set times in my day from five to six, or from seven to eight, where I'm gonna actively disengage in those activities for me, that's social media, and do something more proactive with that time instead. Go for a walk, have a conversation with my spouse, call my mom. And so finding time is finding those pockets in the day that go missing and trying to be proactive

and schedule time that is more positive over top of those blocks that tend to go missing. When we are commuting, we talk about this example. You can also think about finding time as imbuing some of the negative moments in your day with something more positive. If you like listening to music, but are not able to engage in as much of that activity as you would like, you can think about trying to listen to a podcast

while doing errands around the house or while exercising. So that's another way in which you can find more time for the activities you like by connecting an activity you like with something you don't like. Bundling time, if you will. And have you said all there is to say about reframing time? No, so reframing time is something I really like. Obviously, we can't always outsource tasks we don't like, or maybe we don't want to. One of my colleagues read my research on buying time promotes happiness,

and was like, I'm never going to hire a house cleaner. I know I could. I have four kids, but I want my kids to see that their parents care about doing the chores, and I want to instill good values with my kids. So I'm never going to outsource. I get why it produces stress and promotes happiness, but I'm never going to do it. And that's totally fine. But a lot of what time poverty is created by is this feeling of goal conflict, of having too many things to do,

not enough time to do them, feeling pulled by many directions in our life. So one thing we can do to mitigate against some of this goal conflict is to reframe some of the negative activities that we have to do, that we can't outsource, that we don't love, that feel a little bit stressful, but might be helpful for our broader goals in life, if you will. So one reframing strategy we can take at work related to finances is based on science. Is this idea of thinking about how a drudgery

in the workplace can help our colleagues get their work done. So simply seeing the connection between our tasks and other people's tasks is one way you can reframe negative experiences at work as something more positive. Another way you can put this strategy into practice in your own life around reframing time is actually can help you get greater joy out of your weekends. I think something we've all been experiencing in this forced experiment and working from

home and not having the same social and leisure opportunities as we used to is weekends don't feel as special so we might work through them. Reframing time that's supported by empirical evidence suggests that we should be reframing our weekends like a vacation, simply telling ourselves that the upcoming leisure that we have is special or different and trying to treat it like a vacation can help us save or more and feel less goal-conflict. So we don't even feel like we should be working. We feel like we should be present in the moment enjoying our leisure. So that's a couple of simple strategies we can put into practice in our everyday life

to reframe our time spent at work and our time spent in leisure to better promote our happiness. Let me just pick up on the leisure. So it sounds like, and this certainly sounds familiar to me, but it sounds like you're saying is a big problem that many people experience is, especially now in the pandemic, what is at least nominally leisure time can put us in a state of what you call goal conflict because we think, well, I could be getting stuff done right now, but I'm not. And so to think of it, instead, as not a humdrum regular weekend comes around once a week, but in fact special vacation time, then we can savor it in ways we otherwise might not.

Yes, exactly. It reminds me of some advice that I got from a very wise person, unfortunately, is no longer with us, but a young woman who was helping, named Grace, who was helping me with a book that I'm writing right now. And she was hired as a book researcher, but her job kind of morphed into what she called book therapist. It's a memoir, so it's a very personal book. And we would talk about a lot about the content of the book, which is obviously very personal content.

And a lot of the things we would talk about are directly related to what you and I are talking about. And, you know, how am I using my time, et cetera, et cetera. And what's making me happy, what's making me miserable, what's making me less pleasant to other people, et cetera, et cetera. And before I went on a vacation once, which I rarely do, and I know we're gonna talk about vacations, I went on a family vacation to Disney World.

And I'm employed by Disney. So unless you're tempted to say something, snarky about Disney, they say the place. So I went to Disney World and I'm employed by Disney. So unless you're tempted to say something, snarky about Disney, they say the place. So I went to Disney World and actually you can say whatever you want, I'm kidding. I went to Disney World. And Canadian, so I don't say much snarky stuff about anything. Okay, yeah.

Fine, fine. So I went to Disney World and there's not much at Disney World, it's personally interesting to me, but my son was there and he was so excited and dancing most of the time because he was so happy and we're with some really good friends and their kids and so there was a lot sort of emotionally to appreciate as much as I might not like savor the widway people mover as much as a four year old would. And she grace gave me this thing, this little,

this is a little cheesy the idea of intentions, but I found them to be very helpful. Just to, she asked me before I went on the vacation, and I was like, what's your goal? Just what's your goal for the vacation? I said, yeah, to disconnect from work and to enjoy spending time with my family. And she said, well, just, you know, try to bring those two up in your mind as much as possible. And I did like a little mantra as I was going through the day, disconnect. So I put my phone and my wife's bag and enjoy all of the sights

and sounds of my friends and family having a good time. And those reminders were really helpful. And I just wonder whether that feeds into what you're talking about spending a weekend like a vacation. Yeah, I love this story because I think it does emphasize so much of what our data suggests as well. And so the study that shows that treating an upcoming weekend like a vacation

shows that it has happiness benefits exactly because it helps people be more present in the moment and Saver everyday experiences to a greater extent and I see this in my data as well people who feel time affluent and Who feel like they have control over their time and have better social relationships and all that are better able to saver and get more satisfaction from otherwise seemingly mundane activities. We see this in cross-cultural data, which is so fun.

We see that the French spend more time eating than Americans who spend more time choosing their food than actually enjoying it. The time that French spend enjoying their meals directly translates into how much happiness they experience over the course of their lives. And I think we are taught at US, North American cultural context, to maximize, to have the best of an experience. I remember moving to the States and feeling so overwhelmed by choice here. I know Shin-i-yang-gar and others have done some great research on this where we spend so much time choosing what we're going to eat in this example that we fail to realize the

broader purpose is to enjoy meal with our colleagues or with our family members. And so we spend the limited amount of time that we might have had in a lunch break or at dinner thinking about what are we going to eat as opposed to enjoying each other's company. So anything we can do to remind ourselves to be present in the moment, to savor the positive opportunities that we have in our everyday life, to connect with those that we care about in your example, your friends and family, that will go a long way for time affluence and happiness, these reminders to savor the present moment.

I talk about this in some of my writing. We need to keep our big Y in mind and actually make physical reminders in our environment to stop and save our everyday experiences. So I advocate for this idea of a time-ath once to do less. So if you find yourself with a canceled meeting or half an hour break in the middle of the day day you weren't expecting instead of working over that time. Think, can I go for a walk around the block? Can I call a friend? Can I do something that's more socially connected as opposed to more work focused? I also have a tattoo on my wrist as a physical reminder about the importance of family and the limited nature of time. You don't need to go as far as getting a tattoo,

but you should put something in your physical environment that helps you live with your intentions and goals in mind, so that you can capitalize on the free time that we do have available, even if the amount of time that you have is rather limited. Can you tell everybody what your tattoo is? Yeah, so that my tattoo is an olive branch, which I realized it was an olive branch later,

which is great, but I picked it in line while I was with my friend on vacation at Disneyland, actually. So there we go, another Disney reference. We were sitting on Instagram waiting in a long line for a ride and we both got sort of matching tattoos. Mine's an olive branch and has the initials of my cousin's mark and paw. My cousins both had Dushen's muskered dystrophy

and passed away before the age of 30. Meanwhile, this was all happening as I was breaking up with a partner of 10 years and reflecting a lot on what really matters in life and getting a tattoo on my wrist with their initials reminds me every day of the fleeting nature of life, the preciousness of time, and the importance of savoring the small, simple moments with

the people that we care about. Because we never know when a conversation is going to be the last one we ever have with someone. And again, I think putting a physical reminder in your space just to help you center and realize the most important things in life is a useful exercise especially because our work is demanding. Even if we love it, we need to disconnect sometimes and it can be hard. Technology sucks our attention in, our work can be really fulfilling and can focus our attention. And it's really important to have physical reminders to focus your attention back outward. Beyond the technology that we're all using to communicate and to our social environment.

You said you want people to be in touch with their, I believe the term was big why? Yeah. W-H-Y. Yeah. So to be mindful of what is your purpose, your goal, your intention, what do you truly care about in life? If you had one day remaining, what would you spend that time doing and living, knowing the answer to that question and then trying to live every single day so that the way you spend time on an everyday basis is closer to how you would spend time

in an ideal day, or if it was your last day remaining. I think those reminders are so important. Yeah, I mean, I've mentioned this on the show before, but it maybe bears repeating because it's directly relevant to this. I said a few moments ago that this idea of setting an intention, something that you're repeating in your own mind, it can be at least to me as somebody who's irassable, pretty

cheesy, but I found it to be really helpful. So I actually took me a long time to be able to remember to do this, but now what I wake up in the morning, most days I will remember to actually state in my mind what my aspiration or intention is, which is not very catchy. It's basically to make awesome stuff that helps people do their life better while making sure that my relationships are strong, including with myself. And I find that it's actually quite useful

and I try to come back to it throughout the day. That's my big why. And I do find that it imbues everything I'm doing even the endervating stuff, because you know as somebody who's written a book, I'm in the process of writing a book right now, it's all horrible in my experience. And so it's very helpful to bring myself back to the big why. Yeah, and I think what I love about the example you just gave to is when you remind yourself

of your intention, one thing that I've done since writing this book and being on this time affluent journey, if you will, is I try to disrupt that habit that I have of rolling out of bed and going straight to my computer as if my inbox is the most central important thing in my life. And I notice on days where I go directly to my inbox and start working even before I'm awake, those are the days where that's all I do. I'm just focused on my desk. I don't focus on anything else. I don't reflect on where I'm at and sort of head down,

working on things that feel urgent, but not might not be important. But when I take a step back and I take half an hour before going to my desk and I'm much more deliberate in the morning and desk and I'm much more deliberate in the morning and color my whole upcoming day with a sense of intentionality. My day is more full, I'm more deliberate, I'm engaging in more mindful activities around time. So combining what we're talking about and some of the research, I would say trying to disrupt your habits and making it a mindful exercise to think about your purpose, your why every day, right when you get up, or when you find yourself slipping into doom scrolling or some of these habits

we all have when we're feeling anxious or frustrated, checking emails mindlessly, whatever it is for us, to remind ourselves in those moments of what our purpose is, what our meaning is, what our intentionality is. I think that's really important for helping all of us live our days with more intentionality and spend our time in ways that are more closely aligned with the meaning and values that we have in life. Much more of my conversation with Ashley Willens right after this. Celebrity feuds are high stakes. willing right after this.

And I'm Sydney Battle, and we're the host of Wonder E's new podcast, Dis and Tell, where each episode we unpack a different iconic celebrity feud. From the buildup, why it happened, and the repercussions. What does our obsession with these feuds say about us? The first season is packed with some pretty messy pop culture drama, but none is drawn out in personal as Brittany and Jamie Lin Spears. When Brittany's fans form the free Brittany movement dedicated to fraying her from the infamous conservatorship,

Jamie Lin's lack of public support, it angered some fans, a lot of them. It's a story of two young women who had their choices taken away from them by their controlling parents, but took their anger out on each other, and it's about a movement to save a superstar, which set its sights upon anyone who failed to fight for Brittany. Follow Dissentel wherever you get your podcast. You can listen ad-free on an ad free on Amazon Music or the Wondering app. And we're back just to note here in the second half of the conversation there may be a few moments where you might hear a little bit of background traffic noise while Ashley is speaking. It's okay.

You'll still be able to hear her. That said, let's dive back in now with Ashley Willins. You may have covered this, but I suspected more to say about this, but I believe the phrase of yours that the aforementioned Lori Santos used when she came on the show was Time Confetti. So can you say more about that? Listen, I just may remember what Lori said,

but I think it's better to hear it straight from you. Yeah. So, time confetti is one of these time traps that makes us feel time poor. It's a term from Bridget Schulte, but has also come out of the organizational behavior literature. And it's this idea that although we objectively have more time for leisure than we did in the 1950s and thanks in part to modern conveniences, we now feel more time for leisure than we did in the 1950s and thanks in part to modern conveniences. We now feel more pressed for time than ever.

In my data, regardless of how much money you have or where you live, 80% of working Americans report feeling time poor. Like they have too many things to do and not enough time in the day to do them. And these feelings of time, poverty, as we've been discussing so much contribute negatively to happiness, undermine our social relationships, our associate with greater risk for cardiovascular disease. We are less likely to eat healthy or exercise when we're feeling overwhelmed by the demands of work in life. And time confetti plays a central role in these feelings of time, poverty. Again, as we've talked about a little bit, not only does time confetti cause by our technology,

leave us with objectively less leisure time because every time we check an alert, we're being pulled out of the present and into other things we could or should be doing. But importantly, it creates these feelings of goal conflict. When we're trying to have a conversation with our partner or engage in a meaningful conversation with a colleague, our mind is constantly running to other things that might be on our phone or calling our attention. This creates goal conflict and creates these feelings of time stress. My colleague at Georgetown has a great set of research studies showing that parents enjoy spending time with their kids less. They derive less meaning and satisfaction from going to

a museum with their kid when they have the alerts on their phone on. Because all of a sudden they're thinking about all the other things they could or should be doing and the opportunity cost of their leisure somehow feels higher. And so time confetti creates all of this goal conflict. And it's also undermining the amount of leisure we have. It chips away at it in small moments. And I think this is why I talk a lot about technology is because how much control we feel like we have over our time is dictated in large part by how we use and how proactive we are using our technology.

So it's time can fettie then little shards of time throughout the day that we tend to revert to tech, sleepwalking, tech, automaton, doomscrolling stuff that we could instead use to make ourselves feel much more alive. Am I saying that correctly? Yeah, so we used to before technology, if we had an hour off, we had that full hour off. We were not being pulled in multiple directions.

Now, because of all of the ways we get alerts, our Slack, our email, our text messages, our WhatsApps, we're now breaking up that leisure into small bite-sized moments of time that easily go missing. Some of our leisure time is getting sucked away into our technology. And on top of that, not only are we objectively losing Some of our leisure time is getting sucked away into our technology.

And on top of that, not only are we objectively losing some of our leisure to constantly switching between whatever we're doing and our technology, this is also creating feelings of goal conflict where we think we should be doing other things than whatever it is we're doing in the moment. And so this is where having the time affluence to do list could be useful. So the, oh, one of my favorite things that ever happens to me is a meeting gets canceled. And so at least gotta be in my top 10 favorite things in the world right now. So a meeting gets canceled.

And instead of just checking Twitter for an hour, I could look at my to do list of, oh yeah, I need to call my friend Willie or my friend Joe or you know, maybe this is the time I'm going to meditate. Things that I know that are sorry to be a little sort of cheesy here, but like nourishing to me psychologically. Yeah, absolutely. That's exactly what I would advocate for and I would say not in addition to being reactive when we're afforded with a glorious windfall of time because a meeting gets cancelled. Also love cancelled meetings for the record and for anyone who wants to cancel a meeting, feel free. I think this is we have research suggesting that people worry about canceling and worrying about asking for deadline extension requests and this conversation between you and I is indicating that the receiver of that canceled meeting might be happier than you would expect. So that's a small plug for

canceling meetings if you feel like you don't have anything to meet about. But so in addition to being reactive, I think it's also important and we have research suggesting it's critical to be proactive. So not just waiting for a meeting to get canceled, but proactively putting blocks of time into your calendar where you're not going to allow technology to disrupt you, these proactive blocks of time where you're going to work on those important goals and not be disrupted or distracted by meetings

and holding to those blocks as if they were your most important meeting with a colleague or a supervisor. And so we've run experiments where we ask busy executives to put these proactive blocks of time into their calendar twice a week for two hours. This significantly reduces burnout and stress. And you also have a planning block of time for 30 minutes a week before your two proactive blocks where you plan out what exactly you're going to do with those blocks of proactive time.

Because by putting a planning block in your calendar, you're holding yourself accountable to following through and you're not going to get to those blocks of time and wonder what you should be doing. So the planning is also a really important part of maximizing the benefit of those proactive time blocks. So I do this. I, you know, again, I keep referencing that. I'm writing a book because I'm obsessed with getting this thing done. And it's not anywhere near done. So I block off

from nine to 11 noon, one or two every day, unless it's a really bad day where my calendar has been swallowed by other people's priorities to write. So I don't need to plan. I know what needs to be done. What I do do that seems to violate your guidance is I do allow myself to occasionally like clean out my inbox while I'm doing that, usually as a procrastination method because the writing is so painful. But it sounds like I should drop that.

I would say if you're going to do that, make sure you're not doing it for more than five minutes. As someone who just wrote a book, I can tell you that sometimes there are a thousand tasks that could fill your writing block time. So you don't want to get into a habit of, oh, just five more emails or just this one other thing. I think if you allow yourself a little bit of buffer, but are pretty rigid with yourself otherwise, it shouldn't be too much of a problem. I know I even sometimes ease into my work day.

We're getting to kind of fundamental needs here of autonomy and competence, but it can be important to start with a few low level tasks because that's building up your confidence, your feeling of confidence to get things done before taking on a task that sounds like right seven pages or read 50 journal articles, which sounds pretty onerous and difficult to do.

So you can build up some of your competence along the way by checking a couple of emails or even what I do as I will kind of structure my tasks into two sections. So the first, they're both, say they're both related to book writing or chapter writing or case writing, whatever it is, I'm writing, I'm always writing something. But the first thing I will put on my kind of agenda for that writing block is something that's sort of easy. Like, oh, fix the references or edit this paragraph

you wrote yesterday and I'll start with that. It'll lead me to feel like I'm making progress and then I'll proceed to ease into whatever is the harder or more substantial thing I have to get done that day. It's so funny, I was just thinking about this. You know, I'm not comparing myself to Hemingway. Trust me, but Hemingway famously ended every writing day in the middle of a sentence, or he knew exactly

what he was gonna do next. So the next morning when he started again, probably hung over, that competence was there because he knew what he had to do. And I actually have been starting to experiment with something like that, or if I'm not actually writing him in more of a research mode on a chapter, just having something pretty easy

Left on the table for me to start with the next day said it kind of gets the juices flowing Let's drill down for a second on the pandemic. How would you tailor your advice to the current suboptible circumstances in which we're all living? So so much of my research obviously was conducted pre-pandemic but it's still really relevant now. So what we're finding is that employees are actually working more now that they're working from home as opposed to less. So an average objective data from 3 million global employees suggests that work days have become about 49 minutes longer. Employees in my global surveys are reporting more time stress.

In part, because now they're both simultaneously being professionals and parents in the same place. So these breaks, boundaries, and transitions that we used to take for granted when we went to an office have gone missing in the virtual environment and are creating a lot of time stress, goal conflict, and unhappiness. And so what I've been advocating for because I've been seeing this in my data, you know, we cut a joke that none of us are commuting, so we should all feel like we have an additional hour free time every day.

But in fact, the opposite is true. We're just scheduling meetings over that time where we used to commute. We're having sending way more emails. We're making way more phone calls. We're feeling more stressed and less in control of our time. So my colleagues and I have been advocating for building in breaks, boundaries and transitions deliberately into our schedules, given that they've gone missing. Microsoft recently put our suggestions into practice,

and they have virtual commutes now, where employees are not able to schedule meetings between eight and nine, and instead cannot be logged in until they've taken a virtual commute. Whatever that means for them, maybe it's breakfast with their family. We've also been advocating for starting meetings later and ending meetings earlier to allow employees to have these informal social interactions

that have completely gone missing in the virtual environment and to not schedule forable social interaction time because that's simply adding another obligation onto employees already very overwhelmed schedules. We know, we've been hearing so much in our interviews and in our research that people say, well, I feel like even though I could exercise during the day, what if my boss needs me? So they've been running in 10 minute intervals around their house. So their apartments in the middle, they're running five minutes or 10 minutes in every direction, just in case they're needed.

And so there's a lot of uncertainty and ambiguity and employees' lives right now. We are in an economic recession. That makes people work harder and focus more on money and productivity and even less on time off in leisure. We also are feeling a little bit underwhelmed by the options of our leisure. Like I'll just work all weekend. What else am I supposed to be doing anyway or I'm gonna forego my vacation time

because it's not exactly like I can take my tropical vacation that I usually take every year anyway. And so what we're observing actually is people are more stressed, feel more time poor, less in control of their time. They have more demands on their time than they did before. And they're taking less of their paid vacation or even unpaid vacation than they were pre-pandemic. And so I think this is where we're starting to advocate for small, simple changes in the workday, but also more organizational level and leader led changes to help employees

take time off. So that this work from home environment where all in is more sustainable going for it. Again, I think we've been spending a lot of time over the last year in reactive mode. And going forward into the new year, we have to start being more proactive in order to make work from home more sustainable for a broader swath of the population. There was a couple of things in there, I think, at least in my opinion, would be worth saying more about the sort of improvisational, unscripted interactions that I know I miss desperately. Although I do get a little bit of it because I get to go into an office on Saturdays and Sundays because I host a show, the weekend editions of Good Morning America. So I get to see my colleagues who are also my friends, which I consider to be, and I know we all feel this way

that this is like a massive, massive stroke of good luck for us that we get to see each other and have those unscripted interactions. But I miss it with my other colleagues, so many colleagues that I don't get to see and I know so many people feel this way. So you're saying, don't, if you're an employer or a team leader, don't schedule an hour for that because it's just going to feel like more work instead,

make meetings shorter, and then clear up room on the front or back end of those meetings so that you can shoot the breeze. Yeah, exactly. I think leaving time for unscripted social interactions is so critical right now because so many of the employees were talking to feel like every conversation has an agenda. And as a result, they're not surfacing questions or receiving informal mentorship or sharing as many jokes with their colleagues as they used to all of these small interactions that make work and life enjoyable have kind of gone missing. I think one thing that's also really important is that we get spontaneity in our social interactions, that we chat with people that we don't always chat with. And this random bump in in the hallway is very difficult right now in the work from home environment.

So one thing I've been seeing and advocating for within organizations is to have random coffee chats. So you're randomly putting people into small breakout online zooms together. And it sounds a little bit silly, but is a really great way to mirror these casual, spontaneous conversations that are a source of a lot of joy. Research suggests that these casual conversations are even acknowledged by people that we don't interact with on a regular basis, bring as much happiness in an average day than a longer conversation with a close friend or a close colleague. So we're missing out on

joy, but we're also missing out on opportunities for creativity. These spontaneous informal conversations are the source of a lot of great ideas, new project opportunities, and that has really gone missing in the virtual environment. So finding ways like random coffee chats or leaving space in a day to run into each other online is really important, especially as this goes on for longer. We've been doing that, so I have two employers. One is ABC News, which is owned by Disney, and the other is 10% happier. And at 10% happier, we've been doing this some program called Donut that runs through Slack, and it sets you up with some a random, I think it's called Coffee Roulette. It's like you get set up with somebody in the company,

and so I really enjoy it, and it's like a 30-minute thing. It's very casual, and it's often people that I don't know very well, but doesn't that violate your rule or your injunction against employers scheduling time for unscheduled time? I think as long as it feels optional and spontaneous, I'm okay with violating that rule. Got it. Makes sense. All right, time off. You said we're not getting our tropical vacation. That made me really sad because I want to go to the beach. I know me too. We're not getting

our vacation. So why, why take it? Why is it so important to take time off? So we show over and over again in our data that employees who take time off come to work happier, more engaged, more satisfied, that employees who are the most productive employees are the ones who take a break from their workplace so they can come back to work being more fully engaged. their workplace so they can come back to work being more fully engaged. And yet so many of us leave our vacation time on the table in one survey that we ran pre-pandemic, 75% of working Americans did not take all of their paid or unpaid vacation. And what I'm hearing with the organizations I've been consulting for now is that virtually no one is taking vacation or paid vacation at the moment.

It's not often until we stop to check in, do we realize how tired we truly are? And I think it's really important for workplaces to be encouraging employees to take time off, given that burnout is high, teams are running hot. There's a lot of challenges we're all faced with, economically, from a health perspective. This is a very unprecedented time, and most of us, the ideal worker norm is to push past any personal concerns and be a great employee, no matter what, but I think organizations to retain their best talent are going to need to encourage those who would be the least likely to take time off to take a few days and research suggests that the most relaxing vacations are the ones that aren't very log, taking a few days off,

three to five days can be more relaxing than taking a couple of weeks off, in part because of all the work you have to do once you get back to the office, if you've taken a longer vacation, and partially because we habituate to the benefits of vacations pretty quickly anyway, so you might as well take a couple of short vacations or take a couple of longer weekends to recharge and recover and to really reframe that weekend

like a vacation and do the best you can within the circumstances to enjoy it. So everything we've been discussing as far as building toward this goal of allowing us to go from time, starved, or time and provers to feeling like we have time, affluence. I got an interesting bit of feedback from a listener recently.

The letters were read it to you because it kind of woke me up a little bit. Here it is. It says, hi, it seems to me that whenever Dan does talks on the subject of work, the issue he seeks slash offers help with is being too busy and how to find calm when you've got 100 things tugging at you.

Would that I had such problems? I used to be quite successful and quote unquote, talented in a creative field that slumped for many years and has finally died. I feel enormous disappointment with myself for not finding a way to become self-directed, productive and creatively fulfilled on my own. I also feel blocked.

I don't know if this is something you can help me with that arises in my daily meditations and so far goes nowhere. Or maybe Dan can do some podcast talks with people who understand the listeners who are out of work. So any thoughts on the foregoing? Yeah, so this is a great question and it relates to some of the data that myself

and my colleagues have been collecting. It is true that time is a balance and time affluence has to do with feeling in control over the ways that you spend time on an everyday basis. That means that people who have too much time can also have a sense of unhappiness or as this reader is

talking about maybe not as much fulfillment in the ways that they're spending time as they wished. There's a great new paper that's coming out suggesting that people who feel the most happiness are those that feel like their talents are being used, but not stretched, but that all of us can become

happier and more time affluent or hit this optimal amount of time affluence. So this is a real issue that's going on right now in society, there's under employment and unemployment. And research suggests that that can also lead to these feelings of incompetence and dissatisfaction. However, we can also reframe our free time as a way to experience greater competence

and to engage in productive activities. So in this research, they found that people who were under employed who said they wished they worked more hours did not experience lower satisfaction if they spent their free time engaged in activities that they felt were making a positive difference in society or that were to them productive. So my very concrete recommendation to this listener and to other listeners who might be facing this situation

is to find ways where you can spend some of the discretionary time that you have to make a positive contribution to society in whatever way that means to you by filling your time with productive activities and activities that allow you to help those around you. That's gonna help you feel like that free time that you have is more productive, and as a result, you'll be able to enjoy that free time more.

There is some interesting research and economics showing that when we're under-employed and unemployed, even though we have more discretionary time available to us, this can make us feel not very good, we might feel ashamed being under employed and unemployed is stigmatizing in our society in particular. So even if we have more time to volunteer or to socialize or to vote and become civically engaged,

we're less likely to engage in those kinds of activities. So it might feel counter to our feelings, if we're unemployed right now or under employed, where of course need to focus on putting food in the table and paying bills. We feel counter to our feelings if we're unemployed right now or under-employed. Of course, we need to focus on putting food in the table and paying bills. But we should also think about allocating some of our temporal resources to helping those in our community. Because that can help us feel a greater sense of control over our time and greater happiness and meaning as a result. Vivek Morte was the former certain general now working for Joe Biden on COVID issues and

wrote a book on loneliness and has come on the show before and has recommended for people who feel lonely, which is a separate but maybe related issue from what the listener who wrote to me is experiencing should also consider engaging in acts of service because it reminds you of what you're good at, what your use is. By the way, it also puts you in contact with other people. Just to wrap things up here, I'm thinking a lot as we're talking about a conversation I had, I don't know, a year or more, I think, ago, the great guest, Jocelyn Kay Gly, she has a podcast called Hurry Slowly and

it's all about what she calls, I don't love this term, but I like where she's going with it, heart-centered productivity. And I hear a lot of the same kind of notes from you, although there's a much more research back to it, where it feels to me, and maybe you'll tell me I'm wrong here, that you're kind of counter-programming against the dime store productivity hacks that so many of us imbibed from one source or another. Does that feel on to you? Yeah, so I do think I'm advocating, from a research perspective, to try to take our time off the clock. We've been so trained to think about our

time as a mechanism of productivity and of making money. And so much of my research says, we need to undo some of that cultural learning, some of that organizational learning that we've done in our modern workforce today, we've been told that the ideal worker is one who never disconnects from their devices. That is constantly available, that the best worker is the most responsive worker, especially as it's become harder and harder in knowledge worker professions to understand what objectively good performance means anyway. We've been rewarded for constant responsibility and workaholic nature and constantly putting work at the center of our lives. And so much of my research suggests that we'd be happier as individuals and as a society I've data on this too. If we moved work and productivity and economic success less from

the front and center of our minds and more to the periphery, I have researched showing that countries with a higher proportion of citizens who value leisure over work are countries that are happier, and there are also countries that are better able to navigate economic recessions. When the 2008 recession hit countries that had a greater percentage of citizens who valued family and friends as opposed to work showed less of a negative mental health dip. Time poverty isn't our fault. We're a time poor in part because our organizations incentivize us to work constantly.

So in order to live a happier and more meaningful life, we need to take back control of our time, at least the time that we do have available and to begin to recognize when work is truly important versus when we're responding in an urgent way, in a way that's putting work front and center as opposed to other goals and values that we might have in an urgent way, in a way that's putting work front and center as opposed to other goals and values that we might have in life.

So, I think I'm advocating for, again, small, simple changes around the margins that help us at least take ownership over our leisure time, and to be checking in and fully engaged and ensuring that we are living our lives in a way that's consistent with our values and not just our economic goals, but other goals that we might have in life as well. Let me see if I can restate some of that back to you from a very selfish standpoint. As you began that paragraph, I started to feel guilty because you were talking about putting leisure over work and I was thinking, well, you and I are both

recovering Morgan's maybe that's even charitable. I can feel myself getting a little defensive. Well, you know, my work I think, the story I tell myself is that my work is impactful in the world and is important and I would definitely make that case about your work. And I do spend a lot of time trying to balance with, you know, my wife and son and extent other family members and friends, etc. I think a lot about that. But I don't know that I'm still thinking maybe I'm a Morgan.

But then at the end of the answer, you got into what seemed to be territory that felt a little more like terra firma for me, which is, okay, so you are what you are. You are sort of constituted how you're constituted, but there are many ways to take stock of how your priorities are actually playing out on your calendar and try to tilt the balance toward the things that you truly do believe are most meaningful both in your work and in your non-work. Am I in the ballpark? Yeah, exactly. I think people ask me, well, is it easy to make these changes? And I say, no, it's not easy to change

whether you're a tailor or a Morgan. Like I said, a Morgan, it's very difficult to change my value system in life at this point in my life. But there are small, simple changes I can make around the margins to make sure that I'm spending the time, I'm spending at work in ways that are going to be the most impactful, and that I'm spending the time in my personal life in a way that allows me to show up and be present in the moment and be the best version of myself to the people I care about.

And I think that's what I'm trying to do in my research is to help people make small changes around the margins, both at work and outside of it, to live with more intention and purpose and impact hopefully, because what I see and sometimes what people push back on is, oh, I'll become a tailor when I win the lottery. Like, nice one, HBS professor.

And what I see in my data is that people who are tailors are better able to serve others because they're less overwhelmed by the demands of work in life. So I'm always trying to make the argument that we could all be a little bit more time-focused or at least more time conscious, conscious over how we're spending time on an everyday basis, and that doing so is not selfish. In fact, becoming more time-focused and time-affluent is pro-social because we are then going to be

able to better show up at our work and in our personal lives and contribute back to society. And of course, doing that makes you happier, which is more likely to make you successful and healthy and all that others just a virtuous cycle. Is there anything I should have asked but failed to ask? I think one thing that I get pushed back on sometimes and I want to just underscore, it's come up in our conversation is just the focusing on time and being deliberate about how we spend time on an everyday basis is not only for the affluent. We can reframe time.

We can find time regardless of whether or not we can fund time. So we can think about the way that we're spending time on an everyday basis. And we can reframe the way we spend time to enjoy it more, regardless of how much money we have in the bank. And I have so much data showing that people who are the most materially constrained also tend to be the most time poor because they might be single parents, they might commute to multiple jobs all over the city and live very far away from their place of employment. So what I see in my data actually is that the most time poor among us are the most financially constrained typically and that services that alleviate time poverty among the working poor can be very beneficial for

well-being to a similar extent as alleviating financial constraints. And so the broader takeaways that no matter who you are, how much money you have in the bank or what your financial priorities are, all of us can think about putting leisure and our social relationships more in the forefront of our schedules and that people who are financially constrained might stand to benefit the most from doing so. Bottom line, this is not just for the wealthy. Yeah. And I know you've done a lot of work on the working poor. That's a big aspect of your research. Speaking of your research and your writing for people who want to get more of it, how can they do so? They can go to my website, a. Wellens, a.w.h.i.l.l.ans.com. All of my HBR articles, links to my research papers, my live's research is all there. And the book, Timesmart.

Yes, they could also read my book, Timesmart. And it's a very economical 185 pages plus toolkits. So shouldn't take up too much time. I think it's a good investment. What a pleasure. You've done a great job with this. Thank you so much. Yeah, thank you for the conversation

and the great questions that's been a pleasure to speak to you today. Big thanks again to Ashley, really appreciate her coming on. Also want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show a reality. Samuel Johns, our fearless leader, our senior producer, DJ Cashmere is our producer, Jules Dodson is our AP, our sound designer is Matt Boynton from Ultraviolet Audio, Maria Wartel is our production coordinator. We get an enormous amount of

really helpful input from TPH colleagues such as Jen Poient, Liz Levin, Ben Rubin, Nate Toby. As always, a big hearty salute to my ABC News colleagues, Ryan Kessler and Josh Cohan. We'll see you all on Wednesday with Jenny O'Dell, the second part of our series on time. Jenny is the author of How to Do Nothing. It's a fascinating conversation. We'll see you all on Wednesday for that. Hey, hey, prime members. You can listen to 10% happier early and ad free on Amazon Music.

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