Best of “How To”: Spend Time on What You Value

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This new season of How To is a collection of our favorite episodes from past seasons—a best-of series focused on slowing down, making space, and finding meaning in our hectic lives. The first episode in this collection is from our third season, How to Build a Happy Life. The Harvard Business School professor Ashley Whillans talks with host Arthur Brooks about how to think differently about the time you crave and the time you actually have.

The following is a transcript of the episode:

[Music]

Megan Garber: Hey, it’s Megan Garber. I’m one of the co-hosts from How to Know What’s Real. This new season of the How To series is a special one. We’ve assembled some of our favorite episodes from past seasons: a best-of collection around the themes of slowing down, making space, and finding meaning in our hectic lives—things I know I can use some reminders about. Each week over the next six weeks, we’ll be sharing an episode from our archives. And here’s the first. It’s from our third season, How to Build a Happy Life, and it’s called “How to Spend Time on What You Value.” Take a listen as host Arthur Brooks and producer Becca Rashid explore what might be holding people back from finding and taking advantage of the free time we all seem to crave.

[Music]

Rebecca Rashid: Okay, Arthur, I have a question for you.

Arthur Brooks: Yeah?

Rashid: If you had one extra hour today, how would you use it?

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Brooks: How would I use it or how should I use it, Becca?

[Music]

Brooks: This is How to Build a Happy Life. I’m Arthur Brooks, Harvard professor and contributing writer at The Atlantic.

Rashid: And I’m Rebecca Rashid, a producer at The Atlantic.

Rashid: How would you use it first? And then I’ll ask you how you should use it.

Brooks: I’d use it to work.

Rashid: Oh, no.

Brooks: I would work more. Yeah. For sure. And look, it’s not that bad. I love my work. I’m crazy about my work. I dream about my work.

Rashid: Hm.

Brooks: It’s great. I, I—look, I’m working right now. Can you believe it?

Rashid: Right. [Laughs.]

Brooks: It’s the best thing ever.

Rashid: That’s true.

Brooks: But it doesn’t mean that endless hours of work are going to give me what I need, because it’s a well-established fact to any listener of How to Build a Happy Life that I’m kind of a work addict or a success addict or something like that, or whatever the pathology tends to be thinking back to the episode of Anna Lembke. What should I do with the hour? I should use it in communion to build love in my life. I should use it to pray, to read scripture, to spend time with my wife because now we live alone—now that we’re empty nesters—to talk to one of my kids, to call one of my dear friends on the phone. That’s what I should do with it. And, you know, maybe I would, actually. You know, come to think of it, when we’re done here, I’m gonna call a friend instead of going back to work.

Rashid: The “how you would use time” and “should use time” is the big struggle, right? I think, especially since the start of the pandemic, our relationship with time has changed so drastically. There is either too much time that you don’t use wisely or you feel crunched for time in a way that all the things you would want to do are no longer an option. There’s no right answer, but I’m curious, are you applying yourself in a way that’s useful in every waking moment?

Brooks: When you have a time problem, like the coronavirus pandemic gave us all, where we became incredibly unstructured, we could use our time much, much more according to our own desires than we were ever able to before. It sounds great, but it turns out that it separates people more or less into two groups. You can call them the strivers and the fritterers, and again, you can’t necessarily tell them apart in the workplace when there’s things that you have to get done and there’s an exoskeleton that’s called your workday in the office. You got to get your work done. And so you’re a responsible professional and you do it. You don’t just, like, waste all your time and not go to the meetings and people are waiting for you. You do those things, but when your time is yours, you figure out which is your vice. Now the world pats you on the back when you’re a striver. Congratulations. It’s unbelievable. So it’s a problem when relieved of the exoskeleton of the traditional workplace, your work sprawls across your entire schedule. That’s my problem. The fritterers are a little bit different when you’ve got that extra hour. It’s just too hard to get to the thing when you just have to get your work done. So a lot of people have found that they fall behind. They get a lot less done. They doomscroll a lot …

Rashid: Right.

Brooks: And if you waste it, woe be unto you because that’s the perfect pattern for actually frittering away the day.

Rashid: Mm.

[Music]

Brooks: Many of us are stuck in a kind of vicious cycle with time. Our expectation, our hope, is that time is in our control and we’ll use it wisely, whatever that means, but it doesn’t work that way. The reality is that many of us don’t really know how to use our time at all. How can we bridge the gap between how we use our time and how we want to use our time? Let’s dig into the research on why people like me overschedule themselves and become too disciplined, while others feel like the days, months, and years are kind of slipping away.

Whillans: My name is Ashley Whillans, and I’m an assistant professor of business administration at the Harvard Business School, and my research focuses on time, money, and happiness.

Brooks: Ashley Whillans is a colleague of mine at the Harvard Business School and the author of Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life.

Brooks: Ashley studies one side of the time problem, the one that busy strivers face—those who try to make the most out of every waking moment. And you know who you are. She’s a fellow happiness researcher whose work covers time poverty, a term she uses to describe the modern epidemic of people with too much to do and not enough time to do it. Ashley walked us through her concept of time traps: the traps that motivate us to spend almost all of our time on work and productivity. So I want to figure out what explains this. And what to do about it.

Whillans: So I had this partner of 10 years. We were going to move to Boston, start a new life together from Vancouver. And this person left me in Boston after three weeks because they said that I was spending all my time in work and that there was no relationship to be there for. And meanwhile, I was giving talks all over the country on the importance of valuing time. I was, inside, crying about this, like, dissolution of my most important relationship up to that point in my life, and then preaching about the importance of putting time first. Eighty percent of working adults report feeling “time-poor,” like they have too many things to do in a day and not enough time to do them. This affects our relationships, our physical health, our ability to feel like we’re making progress on personally important goals.

These are the time traps that can make us time-poor. One of them is this busyness as a status symbol, this cult of busyness that’s pervasive in the United States in particular, where if we feel like we have any time in our calendar, we feel like a failure. We feel lazy. When we see our colleagues having a lot of things in their calendar, we confer to those people high status. Wow. If they never have a spare moment, they must be really important and valuable to society.

My data suggests that the most time-poor among us are, in fact, those who are struggling to make ends meet. I’ve done research in Kenya, in India, in the U. S. among single-parent households. And we do see that individuals in those groups who make less money are more time-poor because the system is working against their time affluence. They live further away from their places of employment. They have shift schedules that are constantly changing. They have less reliable access to transportation and child care. So this is a whole other conversation, a whole line of work where I’m trying to move the policy conversation on not only thinking about reducing financial constraints, but also thinking about reducing time constraints to help those with less thrive as well.

Brooks: And it’s interesting, you know, here in the United States, you go to a party, you meet somebody and the icebreaker is, “What do you do?,” which means What do you do for a living? What do you do to spend your time? And it’s like, “Yeah, I’m a CEO; I work 80-hour weeks.” People think you’re a big shot. In Spain, the icebreaker question is “Where are you going on vacation?” It would be kind of odd, almost intrusive, maybe irrelevant to say, “How do you make your money?” Right? And yet, you’re suggesting that this is really not about money. It’s really about time. It’s really about the fact that we’re so busy, which is a way to show ourselves and others that we’re highly in demand. And so the root of this problem philosophically is—well, it is philosophical, isn’t it? Because it’s the philosophy of how we value ourselves, right? Isn’t that at the root of what we’re talking about here?

Whillans: Yeah. This doesn’t happen in European countries like Italy, where actually it’s the opposite. People who have more vacations seem to be doing something right in life. I’ve talked to so many colleagues about my findings, and they say things like, “Well, I thought, you know, when my kids moved out and went to college that I would finally get around to doing those hobbies that I always had wanted to do. And instead I just filled those additional hours with work. And I don’t know why.”

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

Brooks: For happiness reasons, is what you’re talking about.

Whillans: For happiness.

Brooks: Yeah, for happiness reasons. Let me get back to this really interesting question of you. So you were thinking about time and then you experienced the bitter fruit of not having enough time for your personal relationship. So, you know, no doubt it was more complicated than that. But did you make any life changes pursuant to that really terrible experience?

Whillans: Yeah, but I think my life changes don’t sound that dramatic. I’m just trying to adjust a little bit around the margins to make sure I have time for things that matter to me outside of productivity. So I don’t work on the weekends very much anymore. I have a kid who’s one year old. I have a husband that I love. I also don’t work for the first hour in the morning. I will use that time to invest in myself, read, meditate, go for a walk, exercise. That first hour is mine, not my employer’s. And as a function of those two rules, I have to be a lot more careful about what I say yes and no to. But I’ve tried to almost have a quota strategy. I’m not hard-and-fast about this, but I will work on one paper at a time where I’m really working on it every day, not 15 papers that I’m sort of working on, kind of all the time. So I think the experience of being at the lowest point in my life and trying to put some of these strategies into practice are about small things that I do every day that are nonnegotiable for my happiness.

Brooks: You’re clearly putting your work within boundaries, and this is a key point that you’re making, is that work is within boundaries because you’re setting up your budget and you’re living within your budget. Treat [time] like a scarce resource the way that you would if you were on a fixed income, because you’re really on a fixed income of time. So has it hurt your work or has it made your work better and made you more efficient? Is there a cost?

Whillans: So one thing that I learned early on—and there’s research to substantiate this—is that it is better to compare yourself to yourself, as opposed to compare yourself to others. So for me, I think something I did was really heavily guard my attentional resources as well. What am I going to pay attention to in terms of other people’s successes? Because in my field, there’s “no good enough.” Nothing you’re going to do is going to feel like enough, is going to be enough, is going to guarantee success and awards and accolades. In terms of net productivity, yes, I do get less done now. Absolutely. Especially since having a kid. No question, I am not as fast.

But I also don’t hold myself to those same standards as when I was working all the time, and I think that’s really key for my own feeling of satisfaction. My ideal self looks different now—there’s research on this too—my ideal self used to look like working all the time, being on a plane every week, and publishing as much as humanly possible. That was my ideal self, and my actual time use looked pretty close to that. And then I realized that might be good on one dimension of my life, productivity, and really hurt other dimensions of my life: well-being, social relationships that I know as a happiness researcher matter a lot for happiness.

So I changed my ideal. My ideal now looks like publishing a couple of impactful papers on projects I care about that I think are going to matter. Not traveling very much and making sure I have time to spend with my friends and family and investing in myself every day. So I also had to change the aspirational goal. I had to change what my ideal self looked like so that my time use now is matching a different ideal than what my ideal was before.

[Music]

Brooks: For my last book, I was interviewing this woman who was doing what you were doing five years ago at the beginning of your career, but never stopped. And she’s confessing to me that she’s got a cordial relationship at best with her husband. She doesn’t know her adult kids very well. She drinks too much. She hasn’t been to the gym in a long time. And furthermore, that her young colleagues don’t trust her decision making, because it’s not as crisp as it once was.

She’s like, “What do I do?” And I said, “You don’t need me to tell you what to do. You need to use your time differently, you know, than you are!” And I said, “Why don’t you do what you know you need to do?” And she kind of stops and says, “I guess I prefer to be special than happy.” How much of that is going around?

Whillans: At least she admitted it. I feel like something that’s very difficult is that to have this realization, right? You have to understand what you care about and want, like truly, what you value. Maybe for this woman that you talked to, she did truly value being the richest and having this productive life more than she valued gaining or improving in these other areas of life. And she seems like she’s actually somewhat self-aware about that, right?

My economist colleagues say: “Write down a model, Ashley. Write down a model of exactly how I should spend my time to be happy.” I say, “I can’t do that because I don’t know what you value.” So for us to be spending time in the so-called right ways, we have to know what we truly value. So we have to do that self-awareness, reflective component first. And then once we know what we truly value, research suggests that the more that our lives on a regular basis look like our ideal. So what your last seven days looked like in a time diary, and how close that is to your ideal time use, minimizing that discrepancy is hugely important for life satisfaction and for the amount, on average, of positive mood you experience on a regular basis.

Brooks: You know, for a lot of people—they might say they wish they had more free time and they could relax more and spend more time with their families, but they don’t actually know how to do that. Using your time in leisure is a very special thing. It’s, you know, you look at it philosophically: Aristotle made a big comparison, or made a big distinction, between work, recreation, and leisure. Now, work is productive activity. We all know what that is. Recreation is a break from work to make you ready to go back to work. Leisure is, in and of itself, something worth pursuing. Now, Josef Pieper, the great 20th-century philosopher said that leisure is the basis of culture. I mean, these are people who elevated leisure, and yet, you got to know how to do it.

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

What does having more leisure time even mean or look like? So when we’re trying to actively set ourselves up for success in these domains that are more abstract, like spending time with friends and family, we need to concretely write down what that means.

We like to maximize measured mediums. This is work by Chris Hsee at the University of Chicago. We go after the things that we can count and track. That is the way our brains are wired. So we do that for work, why can’t we do that for our leisure time, too? Setting a goal of one hour of exercise.

Active leisure is particularly good for positive mood. Active leisure is things like exercising, socializing, volunteering 15 to 30 minutes—mapping out what 30 minutes more of social-connection time looks like for you and being very specific about it and putting it in your calendar. We need to be a little bit careful with that suggestion, because as soon as we start counting our leisure, we enjoy it less.

Brooks: And now at the same time, of course, I mean, exactly the contrary: You can overschedule your leisure in such a way that it becomes a task. I was a CEO before, and it was just, it was a grind, man. I mean, it was. I missed a lot of my kids’ childhood. I just did. But at the same time, I made a commitment. So I get up in the morning. I exercise every morning for an hour. I go to Catholic Mass every morning with my wife, and I do travel most weeks. I travel about, you know— I make about 50 weekly trips a year and that’s a lot, but I’m never traveling on the weekends. I probably missed three weekends a year, and I don’t work at night. And part of the reason is because I learned all these things that you learned at 32—I learned at 55.

And so, you know, woe be on to me. Nonetheless, my quality of life has dramatically increased for exactly putting those boundaries in place. Now, when I schedule my leisure too rigidly, I find that I start to get stressed out when things start to impinge on it, which is one of your points as well. You got to stay flexible on these things. Part of the benefit that you’re getting cognitively and psychologically is more flexibility in your life and less rigidness in your life, right?

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

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

Brooks: How about, you know, we’ve touched on this a little bit, these semi-leisure activities. You know, there’s leisure and then there’s leisure. Remember, Aristotle says there’s work, there’s recreation, and there’s leisure. And recreation is to get you ready to work. And so, yeah, restorative to what? Restorative to life? No. Restorative to go back to work. And a lot of people will say, “Why do you work out so much?” They say, “You know, it’s just great for my work.” But what about people who are using work as a pretext for leisure? Are they sucking the life and happiness out of their leisure by turning it into just recreation?

Whillans: When you’re in the moment of a leisure experience, you will enjoy it less if you think you’re doing it for extrinsic reasons. And extrinsic motivation is, definitionally: You’re doing something because someone else told you, or you’re doing it for an external reason, like you think you should because it will be good for your productivity; you think you should because your mom wants you to—

Brooks: Are you going to make money? Are you going to get more fame? Are you going to get more power? Or whatever down the line. And a lot of the studies will assume that spending time with your family is intrinsic and going to work for money is extrinsic, but that might be exactly the opposite. Is there a difference in time scarcity and busyness and status between people my age and people, let’s say, in their early 20s today?

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

And research suggests that we undervalue our future time. So this can also make it difficult for us to choose time in the future when we’re planning our schedules. We know that the value of $500 is going to be as good as—well, okay, we might have to inflation adjust these days, but okay—the basic idea is that the value of $500 now is going to be the same now, three months, six months, a year from now, that’s how we think about money. We just know it’s going to have value across time. That’s pretty invariant. Now, when it comes to time, we’re like, Time right now really matters. I’m so busy, overwhelmed, a million things to do. Time in three months? Nah, I don’t really need more time then. Look at my calendar; it looks free compared to now. Six months, even freer. So the extent to which we value or give our lives meaning through work directly is correlated with how time-poor we feel and the extent to which we fill our calendars as a way to give our lives meaning.

Brooks: Now say something to our listeners here who might be saying, “I don’t know what I intrinsically enjoy. I can’t think of anything intrinsically enjoyable to me, because I’ve been so extrinsically motivated for so long. I’m a Homo economicus. I’m just, I’m a machine.” What do you tell that person on the voyage of discovery? It sounds like you had to go through this, Ashley.

Whillans: Yeah. do a time audit. At the end of the day, ask yourself: What things did you do across the day, and how did you feel while you were engaging those activities? And then look at which activities brought you the most positive mood. You could also do this through gratitude—so there’s research on this showing that people who take time to reflect on what they’re grateful for tend to be more self-aware.

So at the end of every day, just think of a few things that made you feel grateful. And in that day, maybe that was a quick conversation with the neighbor. Maybe that was, in my case, hanging out with my kid and thinking That was pretty great. Maybe it was listening to a really interesting podcast on a topic you hadn’t heard before. And then you’ll be like, Oh, it seems that I must enjoy those things. I should probably try to do more of them.

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

[Music]

Brooks: Thank you to our How To listeners who helped make this show what it is. We asked how you would spend one extra hour per day doing something intrinsically rewarding. And here’s what you said.

Brooks: If you look back in the old days before we were so unbelievably distracted by tech, we were doing something in those days too. You know, when I rode the subway in the 1980s in New York City, I always had something to do with me. I wasn’t just, I’m going to go on the subway and stand there doing nothing. I had a book. I had a newspaper. I was, you know, whatever—I was listening to my, to my Walkman. Remember those?

Rashid: Yes.

Brooks: And I have to say, I get the sentiment of the caller, which is, Here’s what I would do if I had an extra hour. Well, guess what? You have 10 minutes where you could do that and you probably aren’t. And that’s the difference between would and should. Would and should are very different when it comes to our time. So the question is, what’s the disconnect between what we feel like we should do and what we probably would do with that extra hour and that has everything to do with our expectations for ourselves. And this is one of the reasons that meditation is really hard for people who are beginning practitioners, people who are sitting in meditation and the only direction that they get is “think of nothing.” You know, “Empty your mind.” Well, you know, it’s hard to do.

Rashid: Why is it so hard?

Brooks: Because we’re not made for it. Humans are not wired to do nothing. My colleague and friend Marty Seligman, who teaches, who’s one of the pioneers in the science of happiness field. He teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. He says that we shouldn’t be called Homo sapiens; we should call ourselves Homo prospectus because our state of nature is for our brain to engage in all of this incredibly complex stuff about how to build a better future. “What am I going to eat for dinner? What am I going to do for a living next year? What am I going to say to my spouse?” And that occupies us so very, very much that even when we’re trying to do nothing, we’re not doing nothing.

Ashley Whillans told us about how to use our time in a smart way. That means scheduling these things that are ordinarily unscheduled. How funny we go through life and say, I’m going to treat my happiness as a nice-to-have. And if I have a little bit of extra time, I’ll think a little bit about it. No, no. [Laughs.] This is serious business. Put it in your schedule. Put it in your schedule. Absolutely. Every single day. Learn how the science works, and then take the serious time that it takes. Be time smart, as Ashley Whillans calls it, and take the time to do that work, because the payoff will be potentially greater than the payoff for anything else you could do in that time.

[Music]

Rashid: That’s all for this week’s episode of How to Build a Happy Life. This episode was produced by me, Rebecca Rashid, and hosted by Arthur Brooks. Editing by A. C. Valdez and Claudine Ebeid. Fact-check by Ena Alvarado. Our engineer is Matthew Simonson.

[Music]

Garber: If you enjoyed this episode, take a listen to season three, How to Build a Happy Life. You can find all seven episodes wherever you get your podcasts. Next up in our special best-of collection about how to slow down, we’ll look at what it means to really rest.