DOING TIME
How do we create more time? Professor Cassie Holmes tells Bella Evennett-watts there are enough hours in the day – you just need to know how to find them
Commuting, doctor’s appointments, laundry. These are just a few of the time-hungry vacuums in my life – and probably yours – that I feel I have absolutely no control over. Meanwhile, restorative weekend strolls, sun-soaked lunches with old friends, whole afternoons spent with an intoxicating book – these are the things I love to savour, but rarely do. When tasked with the question of when I last had time on my hands, perhaps it’s most telling that I’m struck more by the metaphor than the answer: an image of sand silently slipping through my fingers, me not quite knowing how to make it stop.
According to Cassie Holmes, award-winning professor at UCLA Anderson School of Management, there are tricks to managing our time well. Research says time efficacy is not as simple as adding hours together – it’s how they’re arranged that can have a significant impact on our happiness.
‘A useful exercise is to think of your time as an empty jar that you’re going to fill,’ she explains. ‘First you put in the golf balls, which represent the most precious things: family, friends, health, passions. Then you add the pebbles, which are also important: your job, your home. And finally, you fill the rest of the jar with sand: the small stuff that fills your time, like chores and checking emails. What would happen if you poured in the sand first? There wouldn’t be enough space for the golf balls. When you prioritise things that don’t matter, your time gets filled.’
Holmes herself knows the frustrations of feeling time-poor. In 2013, between trying to be a good parent and partner, the incessant pressure to publish and perform at work, and the never-ending pile of chores, she found herself sitting on a late-night train home from her job as a business school professor, contemplating quitting it all.
‘There just weren’t enough hours in the day to get it all done, let alone to do any of it well,’ she recalls. ‘I didn’t
want to speed through my life – I wanted more time, not just to get more done, but to slow down and fully experience the hours that I spent.’
Over the next few months, Holmes began researching time poverty, consulting studies and conducting experiments, so she could inform any future decisions about her life with what she knew best: data. The results, she says, were illuminating: having less than two hours of discretionary time in our day was detrimental to happiness, but having more than five hours – ‘too much’ time – wasn’t beneficial either.
Inspired to make a change, she set about doing a time audit of her own life, discovering patterns in how she spent her ‘happiest’ moments. ‘One of the things I noticed was that my cheery mood generally relied on being in a bright environment, preferably outdoors, and this partly drove my decision to move my job to California, where I could spend more time in sunshine,’ she says.
Now a professor at UCLA in Los Angeles, Holmes has switched her focus from teaching business to happiness, with her popular MBA course Applying the Science of Happiness to Life Design giving students the tools to craft their own time – not just in their day-to-day, but across their lives.
‘By spending more time on activities that deliver happiness and less on those that don’t, we can help ourselves to enjoy happier hours, which add up to brighter days and more fulfilling lives,’ she says. ‘It’s not so much a question of the time we have, but how we spend it and allocating the hours to achieve outcomes that actually matter.’
Here, Holmes reveals her tips and strategies for crafting your time better, so you can achieve your own happiness goals.
1 Increase your time affluence
Many of us live in a scarcity mindset, but we have all we need to be able to dedicate hours to what really matters. Time isn’t always about what’s efficient; it’s also about what’s worthwhile, and despite our tendency to be stingy with our time when we feel time-poor, spending time on others actually increases feelings of self-efficacy – an individual’s belief in their capacity to act in the ways that will help them reach specific goals. Utilising 30 minutes to call that friend to check in on her new job, or waiting those few seconds to hold open the door for someone can actually make us feel more time-rich. The same can be said for exercise: we might feel we don’t have enough time for it, but it can improve self-esteem and increase the time we feel we have. Research also shows that by engaging in what we call ‘awe-inspiring events’ – positive social interactions, nature, art – we can feel less hurried and increase the feeling of plenty.
Try this:
Exercise for at least 30 minutes every day for at least two weeks. Mark these times in your schedule to commit to. I always exercise first thing on a Monday morning, as that’s when I typically feel most in a hurry. Then, right after, leave yourself a voice message or written note communicating how you’re feeling. This will serve as a reminder: you can make the time and it’s worth it.
2 Identify your most and least happy times
We all have to participate in activities we don’t enjoy, but learning what they are is a step towards crafting a happier life. In identifying which activities promise the greatest happiness and which ways of spending aren’t worth your time, you can take stock of whether what you think will make you happy will actually deliver, and invest more wisely. The best way to do this is to track how you’re spending your time throughout each day for a week or two, as well as how you feel during that time. I call this the Time Tracking Exercise.
‘IT’S NOT SO MUCH A QUESTION OF THE TIME WE HAVE, BUT HOW WE SPEND IT’
Try this:
Sketch out a timetable that breaks up your waking hours into half-hour increments. For each 30-minute increment, jot down what you did and how you felt on a 10-point scale. Now skim through your data and find the three most highly rated activities. Follow the same steps for your least happy activities and jot down the following: what type of activity was it? Where did it take place? With whom? Finally, look across the common positives and negatives, and write these down. For example, from analysing my own tracked time, I was struck by two observations: all my happiest activities were either outside or in open space, and/or involved having one-on-one conversations.
3 Create ‘bundles’ of time
Now you’ve identified which investments are most fulfilling, are there clear places where you could buy yourself better time? While outsourcing chores is one option, you can also apply a ‘bundling’ strategy. This is the idea that you can make any activity you don’t enjoy more tempting by combining it with an activity that is – for example, you might listen to an audiobook while on the treadmill, or
call a friend while folding laundry. Commuting is typically onerous time, but by tying it to something else you value, you can invest this time in happier ways.
Try this:
If you can’t bundle, look at what you can outsource. It could be that you alternate turns with other parents to drop your children to clubs, spend £2.50 on having your supermarket shop delivered, or use a meal delivery service to speed up cooking. You can then reinvest the time you’ve saved in more fulfilling ways.
4 Work out your purpose
While work tends to feature lower on our happiness scale, it does hold meaning for most people, and it’s proven that greater happiness at work carries over into our satisfaction with life overall. Research has also shown that those who have a best friend at work are twice as likely to feel engaged in their jobs. With such a large chunk of our lives spent in the office, it’s wasteful to spend those hours feeling miserable, so it’s worth thinking about what makes your work worthwhile.
Try this:
Ask yourself: why do I do the work that I do? First answers typically involve making money. Then ask: why does my job matter to me? Keeping delving until you’ve answered five layers of ‘why’, and you’ll likely arrive at the heart of why you do your work. In my case, my job description is to conduct research, teach and do admin for the university. My initial answer to the question was that my purpose is to create and disseminate knowledge, but more honestly, what I really care about is happiness. I want my students to be smarter in making decisions that will affect the satisfaction they feel about their lives. Just knowing why you do what you do, and focusing on that, can help make your workdays more enjoyable, but also guide you to reconfigure those hours so they are happier.
5 Calculate the times you have left
Hedonic adaptation is our psychological tendency to get used to stuff over time. Doing the same thing or being with the same person again and again lowers its impact on our emotional experience. Four years after my awakening on the train, we’d moved back to California and were living the dream – which included walking my son Leo to preschool every morning. When we first started, I would notice the flowers along our route, but after walking the same path for months, I stopped noticing. One morning, as Leo was skipping along behind me and I was mentally cycling through my day’s to-do list, I felt the mounting panic of not being able to get it all done. Every few steps, I’d say: ‘Come on, please hurry.’ At one point, I turned around to see him burying his face in a bush of white roses. ‘Leo,’ I shouted over my shoulder, ‘we do not have time to stop and smell the roses!’ Looking back, it was so ridiculously on the nose. If I had I realised how few mornings I had left of walking Leo, I would have paid more attention, and I would have definitely smelled the roses.
Try this:
Work out how many times you’ve performed an activity you enjoy and how many opportunities you will have to do it in the future. For example, I classed walking Leo to preschool as an everyday activity, but after calculating, I realised we only had 20% of our times doing the walk left. The phrase ‘this too shall pass’ doesn’t only help get you through hard times; it also reminds you to pause so you don’t miss out on the good ones.
6 Turn the ordinary into something extraordinary
This is another way to offset hedonic adaptation. By the time Leo’s little sister, Lita, had started preschool on UCLA’S campus, I knew our commutes together wouldn’t last. That realisation prompted the Thursday Morning Coffee Date – a highly important occasion, fiercely protected in my calendar and well documented in photos on my phone. Every Thursday before school, we drive to the coffee shop, where we sip our warm drinks and cover the table with croissant flakes – an otherwise routine caffeine stop that we’ve turned into something special, to imbue the passage of time with greater meaning.
Try this:
Within your relationships, call out one piece of your shared routine as a weekly ritual. One couple I know kicks off every dinner out with a shot of tequila – not only is this fun, but it’s a simple reframing that makes the event more significant. Another strategy is to ‘treat your weekend like a vacation’. Every now and then, spend a weekend lingering under the covers a little longer, chatting over breakfast or sitting with the morning paper splayed out in front of you, making sure you have nowhere to get to and nothing pressing to be done.
7 Take a bird’seye view
Data shows that individuals who take a bird’s-eye view of their life tend to report greater satisfaction
and meaning. Zooming out in this way is helpful because it reminds us that even if we can’t do everything at once, we can accomplish a range of pursuits over the course of a lifetime. We can also shift time-spending decisions from questions of whether to questions of when (when might you devote more time to family, to vocation, to adventure, to yourself?). Looking across your years makes you realise that the concerns that feel pressing today aren’t the same as those that plagued us in our teens, and they won’t be the same as the challenges that keep us up at night in our twilight years, so you don’t have to spend your days in such a hurry.
Try this:
Draw out nine rows of 10 circles. If you lived until 90, this would be the visual depiction of your life. Next, imagine your life in months (1,080 smaller circles), weeks (4,680 even smaller circles) and finally days (32,850 dots). Seeing our life like this can help us to perceive that our days are numbered and our time is countable. My career may last 40 years, but I have another 25 years to allocate post-retirement. Similarly, my children will live with me for around 18 years of my career years – less than half.
HOW TO TIME CRAFT
Professor Cassie Holmes reveals how to design your weeks with purpose.
⚫ Start by creating a blank week schedule as your canvas (you can do this by hand or print one out from my website, cassiemholmes.com).
⚫ Pencil in the required activities you have each week with set times (but don’t block out times completely, as you may choose to bundle them).
Now place your most joyful activities. Dedicate
⚫ your best hours to your most meaningful activities, particularly those that involve social connection, and block out these times completely.
⚫ Look at where you can outsource chores, where you should protect times that really matter by making them a ‘no-phone zone’, and where you can establish meaningful regular ‘rituals’.
⚫ Now look at bundling: linking activities you want to do (eg talking to a friend) with ones you have to do (eg commuting). Even better, link two activities you want to do (eg talking to a friend and going outside for a run).
In your working hours, consider when
⚫ you have the most mental energy. For example, I know I’m more productive in the mornings, so I schedule ‘happy work’ (research and writing) then. In the afternoons, I schedule ‘worky work’ (meetings, emails, admin).
⚫ Leave portions of your week unfilled so you can rest, reflect and be spontaneous (you might want to actually schedule this time).
⚫ Now start editing. First, break up and spread out activities you enjoy (eg a five-hour TV session is better spaced out to five one-hour sittings a week, enhancing the enjoyment). For activities you don’t enjoy, bunch these into a single session (eg assign one evening for housework). Schedule positive activities directly after negative activities – knowing something good is waiting on the other side of the foreboding event will help motivate you to attend to and get through it.
⚫ Finally, look back at your plan. Consider what is missing, and ask yourself when you might be able to schedule that missing activity, rather than whether you can (it’s possible when you look across the weeks of your year, and the years of your life!).
‘WE CAN SHIFT TIMESPENDING DECISIONS FROM QUESTIONS OF WHETHER TO WHEN’