If I only had time

Time poverty is the feeling of having too many things to do and not enough time in the day to do them, and it’s making us unhappy, finds Jack van Beynen.

Here’s some bad news: you are dying. Every second that ticks by brings you closer to the hour when your eyes will roll back into your skull. Each breath brings you closer to your last.

We all understand on some level that our time is a limited resource, but we don’t always act like it. We spend more of the week with our workmates than our families. We interrupt our weekends to answer emails or phone calls that really could wait until Monday. We lose countless hours scrolling through social media feeds that make us feel anxious or, at best, pleasantly numb.

Dr Ashley Whillans, behavioural psychologist and assistant professor at Harvard Business School, and author of Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life, would like to see people value their time more.

She says the majority of working adults in the United States feel time-poor, and data suggests that’s true for most of the world.

Time poverty is the feeling of having too many things to do and not enough time in the day to do them; of not having enough control over our time.

It’s making us unhappy. One study Whillans cites suggests feeling time poor has the same effect on happiness as unemployment.

The irony, in the developed world at least, is that we actually have slightly more free time than previous generations, thanks to modern conveniences like dishwashers, online shopping and Uber Eats. So why do so many of us feel like there just aren’t enough hours in the day?

Whillans puts it down to – at least partially – the changing nature of work. In the days when most of us made stuff, measuring productivity was easy: you could just look for whoever was making the greatest number of car parts or shoes.

In a modern office environment, outputs are less tangible. Many workplaces now use responsiveness to measure performance: always replying to emails and phone calls is viewed as a kind of proxy for hard work.

This in turn puts pressure on workers who want to succeed to be ‘‘always on’’. It doesn’t help that we all carry around devices that keep us plugged in to whatever’s going on at the office.

For many of us, busy-ness has become a kind of status symbol.

The root of the problem lies in an old phrase attributed to Benjamin Franklin: ‘‘Time is money.’’

‘‘We’ve been taught in our societies that the purpose of having time is work, or making money,’’ Whillans says. ‘‘That mindset can create a lot of problems.’’

Becoming too money- or productivity-focused with our time means we don’t undertake activities that make us happy, Whillans says. It also undercuts the happiness benefits of any leisure we do undertake.

‘‘There’s research showing that if you think about the economic value of your time, like how much time each hour is worth, then you’re actually less likely to enjoy the leisure time that you have available.’’

But while Whillans would like to see more of us change our priorities and value our time over money, she realises that’s easier said than done.

Time Smart came about because, despite having spent most of her career studying the relationships between time, money and happiness, Whillans realises she was making suboptimal decisions about her own time.

The penny dropped after she split with her partner of 10 years.

‘‘I was constantly travelling and not putting any energy and attention into my social relationships,’’ she says.

‘‘So of course I had this moment where I’m giving some talk with all my data on the importance of valuing time over money for social relationships, and meanwhile my most serious relationship was in shambles.

‘‘I thought, ‘OK, if I’m having such a hard time with this, I’m probably not alone in that.’ This is a difficult thing to figure out, how to navigate between time and money, how to prioritise time so you have enough of it, not just to spend on work but to spend in other important areas of your life too.’’

Time Smart contains three key strategies for combating time poverty. The first is ‘‘finding time’’. The idea is to first identify where your time is going missing. Technology is a common culprit.

‘‘Even when we’re trying to enjoy quality time with our friends and family, we’ll check our phone, and that will remind us of all the things we have to do and then we’ll be pulled out of the present moment and won’t be able to enjoy that free time,’’ Whillans says.

Whillans suggests getting out a calculator and adding up the amount of time you spend on an everyday task over a year. Our brains are wired so we don’t really feel the loss of 20 minutes, but adding those 20-minute blocks together is a good way to drive home just how much time is going missing, she says.

This leads to the second strategy, ‘‘buying time’’. Could you acquire more free time by paying someone else to do tasks you find unpleasant? Whillans says the benefits of outsourcing some tasks can vastly outweigh the costs. To explain this, she and her book’s editor devised a new currency called ‘‘happiness dollars’’.

Research suggests a US$10,000 raise produces, on average, a .5 change in happiness on a 10-point scale. By flipping that around, Whillans is able to say a .5 increase in happiness is worth $10,000 ‘‘happiness dollars’’.

She says outsourcing your most disliked task can create a happiness equivalent of earning $12,000 more a year. Socialising more can earn you between 20 and 30,000 happiness dollars.

Most of us can’t afford to outsource everything we find unpleasant, however, which leads to the third and final strategy, ‘‘reframing time’’, which is about changing the way we think about the activities we don’t enjoy. Thinking about a particularly onerous task at work as a way to help our colleagues get their work done can make us feel less stressed, Whillans says.

Whillans admits she still hasn’t perfected living a time-first life – but she is getting better.

‘‘Managing the anxiety and stress of feeling like you need to be constantly responding is something that I’ve tried to disconnect from and it has gone a long way.

‘‘And it really is just practice, like when you get an email, resist the need to respond to it right away. Just don’t respond. See it, have the thought, feel your impulse to want to do it, and just let it go, because it’s probably not important and then you can go and do other stuff with all the time that you’re not instantaneously responding to other people’s requests.’’

She suggests starting small: pick a habit and disrupt it.

‘‘If you’re someone who doesn’t really disconnect at the end of the day, try to force yourself to turn off your computer at 6pm and not pick up your email until the next day when you’re supposed to be back at the office. Maybe even just turn off your phone or your inbox for an hour every evening. Starting small is really important.’’

And here’s the good news. Even in the absence of any behavioural change, just focusing on what you do with your time creates the happiness benefits of making about US$4,000 more a year.

So what are you waiting for? You’re not getting any younger.

‘‘When you get an email, resist the need to respond to it right away. Just don’t respond. See it, have the thought, feel your impulse to want to do it, and just let it go.’’ Ashley Whillans