Speaker 1: Pushkin. Looking back at my diary, Wednesday, February fifth, twenty
Speaker 1: twenty was a fairly ordinary day. And by fairly ordinary,
Speaker 1: I mean to say that my day was absolutely packed
Speaker 1: to the brim, which makes sense because I don't just
Speaker 1: have one amazing job. I have lots of them. I'm
Speaker 1: a professor and a research scientist. I run one of
Speaker 1: Yell's residential colleges, which means I have over four hundred
Speaker 1: students to take care of all the time. I travel
Speaker 1: a bunch for public lectures to spread the science of happiness.
Speaker 1: I'm a manager to all my amazing staff, a colleague
Speaker 1: to my science friends, and now I'm a podcaster too.
Speaker 1: So how do I keep track of all these different roles.
Speaker 1: My planner it's a small red notebook that I carry
Speaker 1: with me everywhere. It's where I write out every single
Speaker 1: commitment I have, including the time it starts and the
Speaker 1: time it ends. My planner is like a precious friend.
Speaker 1: It helps me keep track of what I need to
Speaker 1: do every single day. And so I'm not looking in
Speaker 1: my planner at the page for Wednesday, February fifth, twenty twenty,
Speaker 1: which as usual, was completely packed. On that day, I
Speaker 1: had some podcast, stuff to do at specific times, three
Speaker 1: different student meetings, a staff meeting, and an important department talk,
Speaker 1: after which I wrote, in very decisive all caps lettering
Speaker 1: three forty five pm leave immediately. That was a note
Speaker 1: to remind myself that I needed to get out of
Speaker 1: that department talk a little early in order to make
Speaker 1: it to the airport for my flight to DC that night.
Speaker 1: That one was a very very hard stop. But on
Speaker 1: this particular busy day, my morning got to begin with
Speaker 1: a really exciting start. Eight am interview with Tom Hodgkinson,
Speaker 1: one of my personal heroes. I'm here, but I can
Speaker 1: only hear vea fenty I've admired Tom and his work
Speaker 1: for years, very very quiet. I had scheduled Tom's interview
Speaker 1: for a whole hour in my calendar, but with so
Speaker 1: much to ask him, I was worried I wouldn't have
Speaker 1: enough time. And by this point we were already ten
Speaker 1: minutes into our time together and Tom couldn't hear me.
Speaker 1: We tinkered with the mics and checked the phone connection.
Speaker 1: I kept asking Tom, is my voice louder now? I'm
Speaker 1: afraid not nay. As the time ticked away, I felt
Speaker 1: my stress levels rising. It was already really difficult to
Speaker 1: find a long enough slot for this interview, and so
Speaker 1: I mean, should we push through and risk me being
Speaker 1: late for all the rest of the stuff that day,
Speaker 1: or should I try to reschedule for god knows when
Speaker 1: I was starting to freak out, and then suddenly, yeah,
Speaker 1: that's pretty good. Yeah Tom could finally hear me, which
Speaker 1: meant the interview I was most looking forward to this
Speaker 1: season could begin. So what was the topic I was
Speaker 1: so anxious to jump into with Tom? So talk to
Speaker 1: me about your history of becoming an idler, Like what
Speaker 1: drove you to that? Talk about kind of why you
Speaker 1: decided to become more idle. I think I was born
Speaker 1: fairly idle. I always had a strong will towards idling.
Speaker 1: Yep idling, it's a pretty foreign concept, at least for me.
Speaker 1: I tend to fill my day to the brim, mostly
Speaker 1: with meaningful and interesting things. I always thought that was
Speaker 1: what I was supposed to do, But it's gotten to
Speaker 1: the point where my calendar is now so packed that
Speaker 1: I sometimes feel like I'm drowning and all the stuff
Speaker 1: I have to do. Maybe you can relate, But as
Speaker 1: we'll see in this episode, if we really want to
Speaker 1: improve our happiness, we need to learn to do well
Speaker 1: a lot less. Our minds are constantly telling us what
Speaker 1: to do to be happy. But what if our minds
Speaker 1: are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us,
Speaker 1: leading us away from what will really make us happy.
Speaker 1: The good news is that understanding the science of the
Speaker 1: mind can point us all back in the right direction.
Speaker 1: You're listening to the Happiness Lab with doctor Laurie Santras.
Speaker 1: Alarm clock. What a horrible invention. I mean, it's a
Speaker 1: horrible way just thought the day. Get out of bed.
Speaker 1: Come on, you're lazy. You're never gonna get anywhere. Tom
Speaker 1: is obsessed with clocks because he absolutely despises them. In
Speaker 1: his book How to Be Idle, Tom tells his readers
Speaker 1: that to be happier, they need to throw away their
Speaker 1: alarm clocks. I'm not one of those people who sort
Speaker 1: of leaps out of bed the moment my eyes open. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I can't wait to get on with my day. You know,
Speaker 1: there's quite a lovely in between each states, in between
Speaker 1: wake and sleep, when you're sort of half conscious of
Speaker 1: your dreams. I think that's a lovely state to be in,
Speaker 1: and a slower transition from sleep to wake, I think
Speaker 1: is civilized. These days, clocks are everywhere, from our nightstands
Speaker 1: to our laptops to our wrists. It's easy to forget
Speaker 1: that watching the minutes of the day tick by is
Speaker 1: actually a new development. In medieval times, to an extent,
Speaker 1: they were masters of their own time, so they can
Speaker 1: sort of do a bit of weaving, have a nap,
Speaker 1: go into the vegetable garden, do a bit more weaving,
Speaker 1: go to church and someone. Life back then was sometimes brutal,
Speaker 1: but Tom thinks our pre industrial ancestors enjoyed something that
Speaker 1: we've given up, a complete disregard for what hour it is.
Speaker 1: For most of human history, it was pretty hard to
Speaker 1: know the precise time. All medieval folks had was the
Speaker 1: position of the sun. While that end, the bell would
Speaker 1: signal the end of the kind of the shift into
Speaker 1: fields or whatever. The chimes from the church tower meant
Speaker 1: that it was time to put down your tools, time
Speaker 1: to assemble together for worship or a meal, time to
Speaker 1: think of something other than work. That is, until the
Speaker 1: Industrial Revolution kicked in, the system changed. You became a
Speaker 1: factory worker. The capitalist bought huge a bounts of machinery
Speaker 1: and invested a net, and they had to keep this
Speaker 1: machinery going well twenty four seven. Ideally, so the people
Speaker 1: were told large stot about working at home. When you
Speaker 1: feel like it, you know, time kind of weirdly becomes
Speaker 1: a sort of like a sort of a tyrant. Tom
Speaker 1: is like a resistance fighter at war with this tyrannical
Speaker 1: cons time, and his primary weapon in the struggle is idling.
Speaker 1: Idoling is the act of loafing, taking time to do nothing,
Speaker 1: in particular, think long lunches, midday naps, tea time, taking
Speaker 1: the scenic route, getting lost for no reason at all, daydreaming,
Speaker 1: hanging with friends at the pub, long happy conversations that
Speaker 1: run well past the time we probably should have gone
Speaker 1: to bed. Tom encourages all of these. His books are
Speaker 1: manifestos against the cult of productivity that many of us
Speaker 1: grew up with. When you're not working, when you're reflecting,
Speaker 1: when you're walking around the graves with your friends and
Speaker 1: talking about art and love and philosophy and ideas, that's
Speaker 1: when you're really living. And if we overwork, then you
Speaker 1: neglect that very important part of life. I first learned
Speaker 1: of Tom's work back in the early two thousands when
Speaker 1: I myself had just started to neglect all these important
Speaker 1: parts of life. At the time, I was an untenured
Speaker 1: assistant professor, working all hours to get papers out and
Speaker 1: my lab up and running. I had fully subscribed to
Speaker 1: the philosophy that my generation inherited back from the days
Speaker 1: of the Industrial Revolution, that productivity is king. The idea
Speaker 1: of spending long hours walking around a grove with friends
Speaker 1: talking about art and philosophy. I mean, that seemed incredibly foreign,
Speaker 1: almost unattainable, but if I was being honest, it also
Speaker 1: sounded kind of amazing. I think it's one of the
Speaker 1: reasons I was first drawn to Tom's books. To devote
Speaker 1: a good portion of each day or each week to
Speaker 1: idling is actually very very good for you, for your health,
Speaker 1: for your mental health, your physical health, for the health
Speaker 1: of your friends. That doesn't mean to say that you
Speaker 1: don't work or you don't enjoy working. In fact, I
Speaker 1: would probably like to find something that they would like
Speaker 1: to do anyway and make it into their work. The problem,
Speaker 1: according to Tom, is when the urge to work makes
Speaker 1: us a slave to the clock, when we completely lose
Speaker 1: any free time whatsoever, so we're all content looking at
Speaker 1: our watches like The White Rabbit and Lewis Carroll's Alice
Speaker 1: in Wonderland. Late late, I'm very late, completely unable to
Speaker 1: live in the moment. You read these things on Twitter
Speaker 1: saying hey guys, sorry, but you know, if you're twenty
Speaker 1: six and you're not working crazy hours, you're not going
Speaker 1: to get anywhere. I think that's so wrong. Work in
Speaker 1: itself is not good. And that's one idea that I
Speaker 1: want to fight, is this idea that because any kind
Speaker 1: of hard work is morally good. Tom worries that our
Speaker 1: modern ethos of productivity is turning all of us into
Speaker 1: unfortunate workhorses, the kind that great literature has long warned
Speaker 1: us about. In animal farm, we have the example of
Speaker 1: the horse boxer, who, when faced with the problem, says,
Speaker 1: work harder, work, harder, work until he works himself into
Speaker 1: an early grave. He's taken off to the glue factory. Now,
Speaker 1: that to me is a that's a warning overwork causes stress,
Speaker 1: heart disease. It obviously is bad for family life, bad
Speaker 1: for your relationships, and who is it good for for you?
Speaker 1: For your ego, for your boss to make more money.
Speaker 1: You know, when you start to analyze these concepts, like
Speaker 1: the work ethic, they start to dissolve. So I'm trying
Speaker 1: to look at things from a from point of view.
Speaker 1: Tom tries to live his entire life in accordance with
Speaker 1: these beliefs, but many people find his suggestions deeply challenging.
Speaker 1: At times, his ideas can sound like a radical religious ideology.
Speaker 1: It's not laziness to create free time for yourself. It's
Speaker 1: actually a mark of nobility. It brings you closer to
Speaker 1: the gods. Actually, because when you start to realize where
Speaker 1: this stuff comes from, it comes from the people in power.
Speaker 1: I don't want to sound two Marxists, but it comes
Speaker 1: from the owners of capital. It comes from the owners
Speaker 1: of the means of production. They want to enslave us.
Speaker 1: We've got to break free of these chains, William Blake.
Speaker 1: He talked about the mind forged manacles. Okay, we've created
Speaker 1: a situation with our own minds, and we can use
Speaker 1: our own minds to break free of these manacles. As
Speaker 1: I talked to Tom for this interview and reflected on
Speaker 1: how stressed I'd been about my schedule just minutes before,
Speaker 1: I got really sad. It's now been over a decade
Speaker 1: since I first encountered Tom's work, and I'm still not
Speaker 1: listening to his advice. If anything, I've become even more
Speaker 1: trapped in those mind forged manacles he talks about, that
Speaker 1: ethos of productivity at all costs. I mean, don't get
Speaker 1: me wrong, I'm really grateful for all the career opportunities
Speaker 1: that keep me so busy, especially this podcast, which I
Speaker 1: absolutely adore. But I'm also really really overworked. I don't
Speaker 1: admit it much, but I feel overwhelmed all of time.
Speaker 1: I can't remember the last time I took a real
Speaker 1: vacation or had even a moment to just be idle
Speaker 1: for the sake of being idle, let alone trapes across
Speaker 1: a grove talking about philosophy. There's not a single entry
Speaker 1: in my red planner that says just do nothing. And
Speaker 1: all of this makes me feel incredibly guilty, because as
Speaker 1: the host of this podcast, I'm supposed to know better.
Speaker 1: Usually I'm pretty good at following the advice I share
Speaker 1: with you, but this is one domain where I'm really
Speaker 1: screwing things up. And honestly, I don't even know what
Speaker 1: to do to make my schedule less hectic these days.
Speaker 1: But as I always say, when all else fails, you
Speaker 1: should turn to science. After the break, we'll do just that.
Speaker 1: You'll hear what feeling this busy does to your mental
Speaker 1: health and to your relationships, and we'll see that having
Speaker 1: an extra bit of free time is more valuable for
Speaker 1: our well being than our lying minds often think. Right,
Speaker 1: gotta go. The happiness lab will be back in a moment.
Speaker 1: Time affluence this feeling of whether or not we have
Speaker 1: enough time to do all of the things that we
Speaker 1: want to do or have to do. This is Ashley Willins,
Speaker 1: a professor at Harvard Business School an author of the
Speaker 1: upcoming book Time Smart, How to Reclaim your Time and
Speaker 1: live a happier life. Ashley is another one of my heroes.
Speaker 1: Instead of looking at whether we have objectively sort of
Speaker 1: enough hours in a day, we're looking at subjectively whether
Speaker 1: people feel like they have enough time. Time affluence is
Speaker 1: one of my favorite scientific concepts because it's the opposite
Speaker 1: of what I experience on a near daily basis. My
Speaker 1: calendar never feels open. My subjective feeling is one of
Speaker 1: extreme business. What researchers like Ashley have christened time famine.
Speaker 1: People today are feeling increasingly pressed for time. Increasingly time
Speaker 1: poor such that they feel like they have too many
Speaker 1: things to do and not enough time in the day
Speaker 1: to do it. And it's interesting because there's also this
Speaker 1: data suggesting that we objectively have more time today than
Speaker 1: we used to. So subjective feelings of time stress are
Speaker 1: going up, while the objective amount of time that we
Speaker 1: have is actually going up as well. So why do
Speaker 1: we fail to notice the extra minutes we all have
Speaker 1: each day? The reason, according to science is that nowadays
Speaker 1: are free time tends to be broken up into tiny
Speaker 1: chunks or time confetti, So we have more time confetti
Speaker 1: now than we used to. That leisure time is or attic,
Speaker 1: it's scattered because we're constantly connected to our phones. We're
Speaker 1: trying to do many many different tasks, and our attention
Speaker 1: is being pulled in many directions. So the feelings I'm
Speaker 1: trying to pack in all of this stuff being pulled
Speaker 1: in all these directions during our free time can make
Speaker 1: us feel more pressed for time. I definitely get the
Speaker 1: concept of time confetti in my own life because even
Speaker 1: when I get a break, it never feels like a break.
Speaker 1: I'll be lounging and watching TV, and I'll get a
Speaker 1: stressful text about work, or I'll be in the middle
Speaker 1: of an otherwise enjoyable dinner chat when I get this
Speaker 1: anxious urge to do a quick email check. Even lunch,
Speaker 1: a time my idol Tom says should be reserved for
Speaker 1: conversation that often ends up being a time that I
Speaker 1: spend alone trying to quickly scratch a few things off
Speaker 1: that to do list. Sure, I wind up getting more done.
Speaker 1: I mean, it feels like I'm being productive and clearing
Speaker 1: things off my plate. But ashle these research has shown
Speaker 1: that it's taking more of a toll on me than
Speaker 1: I realize. These feelings of time stress as time comes
Speaker 1: at a cost of happiness. In some Gallipold poll data
Speaker 1: that we analyze with two point five million Americans, we
Speaker 1: found that this feeling of time famine had a worse
Speaker 1: impact on happiness than being unemployed. So it seems to
Speaker 1: have dramatic consequences for our subjective well being. The problem, though,
Speaker 1: is that people don't realize the consequences of time poverty
Speaker 1: are so great, and so we constantly make individual choices
Speaker 1: that make our time famine even worse. People who have
Speaker 1: more job flexibility, more paid vacations in their workplace are
Speaker 1: happier with their jobs, are more satisfied and less likely
Speaker 1: to leave. But when you ask people would you rather
Speaker 1: have job A and Job A makes more salary or
Speaker 1: a job B and job B has more paid vacation
Speaker 1: and less salary, people always go for job A. If
Speaker 1: you've listened to other episodes of the Happiness Lab, you
Speaker 1: know that many of us equate happiness with having more money,
Speaker 1: which means that most of us want to work more
Speaker 1: and more in order to earn more and more. But
Speaker 1: that trade off of giving up time for money winds
Speaker 1: up resulting in less and less time affluence, which often
Speaker 1: means less and less happiness. It's a pretty stupid strategy,
Speaker 1: but it's also one that Ashley has found many of
Speaker 1: us employ all the time. We think that prioritizing money
Speaker 1: and working lot is a status symbol, so we think
Speaker 1: if we seem really busy, that's going to confer us
Speaker 1: higher status, and it's one of the reasons that we
Speaker 1: don't focus on time take paid vacation, and instead focus
Speaker 1: a lot on working. The connection between business and status
Speaker 1: means that even people who have the money to buy
Speaker 1: a little free time often choose not to do so.
Speaker 1: Even some of the wealthiest people We've studied, people with
Speaker 1: two million dollars sitting in the bank are still focusing
Speaker 1: on money at the expense of time. Ashley's also found
Speaker 1: that as we feel our day is getting fuller and fuller,
Speaker 1: we don't make time for activities that can reduce our stress,
Speaker 1: like hanging out with friends or making new ones. We
Speaker 1: have a paper showing that even just this general prioritization
Speaker 1: of money over time means that we're less likely to
Speaker 1: interact with a pier. So we spend eighteen percent less
Speaker 1: time interacting, and we know that these small social moments
Speaker 1: are some of the happiest in our day. These results
Speaker 1: got me thinking about why I'm so busy. Ironically, it's
Speaker 1: not because I'm focused on money or status. It's because
Speaker 1: I'm focused on people. I wind up saying yes to
Speaker 1: too many things because I don't want to disappoint anyone,
Speaker 1: either my colleagues, or my students or even you, dear
Speaker 1: podcast listener. But putting too much stuff on my plate
Speaker 1: means becoming even more time famished. I'm seeing lots of people, sure,
Speaker 1: but am I really spending any quality time with any
Speaker 1: of them? I explain this jumble of feelings to Ashley,
Speaker 1: I was surprised that my hero was experiencing pretty much
Speaker 1: the same thing you're tunneling. You're just literally it feels
Speaker 1: like survival. I'm having this day to day. I just
Speaker 1: taught to classes and had two hours of office hours.
Speaker 1: All I'm thinking about is when am I going to
Speaker 1: drink water? When is my next nap? I don't have
Speaker 1: the cognitive resources to also think about how am I
Speaker 1: going to connect with a friend who hasn't been doing
Speaker 1: very well. Back in the nineteen seventies, researchers John Darley
Speaker 1: and Daniel Batson ran a test to see why people
Speaker 1: help others. Was being nice a function of a person's
Speaker 1: personality or did it depend on the situation. To test
Speaker 1: these questions, they chose a population known for being do gooders,
Speaker 1: students at the Princeton Theological Seminary. Darley and Batson figure
Speaker 1: the students training to be priests were probably prone to
Speaker 1: being nice to other people, and so the researchers told
Speaker 1: these subjects that they needed to deliver a public sermon
Speaker 1: about Jesus's story of the Good Samaritan. In this parable,
Speaker 1: a man is beaten, robbed, and left unconscious on the street.
Speaker 1: Several people, including a priest, passed by without stopping, but
Speaker 1: one person, the Good Samaritan, took pity on the victim.
Speaker 1: He helped a man up and even brought him to
Speaker 1: an inn to eat and rest. The Samaritan, Jesus explains,
Speaker 1: is the guy we're also post to Emily. He's the
Speaker 1: one that's going to heaven. The seminary students all knew
Speaker 1: the tale well, so having to give a sermon on
Speaker 1: that topic should have been mildly stressful but relatively straightforward,
Speaker 1: and that's when Darley and Batson up the stakes. All
Speaker 1: of the students had to head a cross campus to
Speaker 1: another building to give the talk. One group was told
Speaker 1: that their sermon would happen later that day, so they
Speaker 1: had plenty of time to get there. A second group
Speaker 1: was told that they'd make it in time, but only
Speaker 1: if they set off immediately. But a third group was
Speaker 1: told that they were already late. They needed to sprint
Speaker 1: over there right away, and that's when Darli and Batson
Speaker 1: had a surprise for the men. They basically staged an
Speaker 1: experimental version of the Good Samaritan story. They hired an
Speaker 1: actor to pretend to be injured on the ground who
Speaker 1: was blocking a narrow part of the route. The students
Speaker 1: would literally have to physically step over the actor's writhing
Speaker 1: body in order to make it past. So what did
Speaker 1: a little time famine due to the student's willingness to help?
Speaker 1: The results were really striking. Sixty three percent of the
Speaker 1: students who had time to spare stop to help the
Speaker 1: hurt stranger, which honestly is already pretty bad. That means
Speaker 1: over a third of trainee priests basically stepped over a
Speaker 1: guy lying hurt on the street. But what happened when
Speaker 1: subjects were in a mad hurry. Only ten percent of
Speaker 1: them stopped to help. Ninety percent of the subjects completely
Speaker 1: ignored an obviously injured person on the street because they
Speaker 1: were rushing to give a sermon about how Jesus said
Speaker 1: you should stop to help injured people on the street.
Speaker 1: When we're time famished, we become crappy people. When people
Speaker 1: are thinking about the economic value of their time, when
Speaker 1: they're thinking about being hyper efficient with every second, this
Speaker 1: comes at a cost of our willingness to take time
Speaker 1: out of our day to help others, to volunteer to
Speaker 1: do something as simple as recycle a piece of scrap
Speaker 1: paper in the lab, something that takes ten fifteen seconds
Speaker 1: to do. Ashley actually has experimental data to back up
Speaker 1: this last point. She had students cut up sheets of
Speaker 1: paper for a construction project. She told them they could
Speaker 1: either throw their scraps away in a nearby trash can
Speaker 1: or walk a few feet outside the room to a
Speaker 1: recycling bin. In this first control condition, forty one percent
Speaker 1: of the students opted to recycle. But Ashley also tested
Speaker 1: another experimental group in which she first had subjects write
Speaker 1: down how many hours they expected to work after graduation
Speaker 1: and then calculate their hourly pay rate. What happened to
Speaker 1: recycling In this experimental group, only twelve percent made the
Speaker 1: extra effort required. Policymakers should take note here. Have you
Speaker 1: ever considered that giving people more time will help them
Speaker 1: become better, greener citizens. What we really need to do
Speaker 1: is to solve time poverty so that people can have
Speaker 1: more cognitive resources and also just a more outward focus
Speaker 1: so that we're not just simply trying to solve our
Speaker 1: own time scarcity and get from point eight to point
Speaker 1: be in our lives, or we're able to have these
Speaker 1: self transcendent values and think about how can I use
Speaker 1: my time to benefit others, which raises a big question,
Speaker 1: how can we fight time poverty? What can people like
Speaker 1: me do to feel a little more time affluent. We'll
Speaker 1: tackle those important questions when the Happiness Lab returns in
Speaker 1: a moment. I would get up at eight with the
Speaker 1: kids or seven thirty. Then I would sit down in
Speaker 1: my study at nine o'clock and I wouldn't leave until
Speaker 1: one pm. So I would do four straight hours of
Speaker 1: work and that was it. Welcome to the typical day
Speaker 1: of time affluents Guru Tom Hodgkinson. I was struck that
Speaker 1: Tom's day involved both less in more idoling than I'd expected,
Speaker 1: if that makes sense. After lunch, I would go into
Speaker 1: the garden, go for walk, sleep, my children would come
Speaker 1: back from school, would do dinner. I'd have a couple
Speaker 1: of beers and read books in the evening, go to
Speaker 1: bed sort of fairly early ten or eleven. That was great,
Speaker 1: And you know that was a four hour working down.
Speaker 1: Often days off for trips and so on, so that
Speaker 1: was lovely. Tom is super time affluent, but he isn't
Speaker 1: some bum who never gets anything done. He's an incredibly
Speaker 1: accomplished writer with six best selling books, and that doesn't
Speaker 1: even include his ukulele handbook. The problem with being an
Speaker 1: idol actually is that you can end up working quite hard.
Speaker 1: I mean, I get a lot of cristicism from our
Speaker 1: readers saying, well, you seem to work quite hard, Tom,
Speaker 1: you because you're quite productive. And I think that's because
Speaker 1: you know, you give yourself lots of thinking time, and
Speaker 1: then you start having creative ideas and then you want
Speaker 1: to carry them out, and you know it takes some
Speaker 1: work to actually make them happen. And so I asked
Speaker 1: Tom for some advice, practical tips that would actually work
Speaker 1: with my busy professor. Lifestyle practical tips. Okay, please, you
Speaker 1: take an hour off for lunch and talk to people.
Speaker 1: I sheepishly admitted to Tom that I pretty rarely take
Speaker 1: a lunch break that doesn't involve checking my email. Overwork
Speaker 1: can drag you backwards. Take your lunch break a full,
Speaker 1: uninterrupted meal break with proper conversation already was seeming like
Speaker 1: the stuff of fantasy. But then Tom up the ante
Speaker 1: with an even more indulgent afternoon activity. Ideally to have
Speaker 1: a short nap after lunch. I mean I personally find
Speaker 1: that time between two and four. I mean, I'm completely dead.
Speaker 1: I could get quite depressed. I can't think, I'm so tired,
Speaker 1: and then I wake up again at four a two
Speaker 1: hour siesta. Yeah, that basically sounds kind of impossible for me.
Speaker 1: Tom was horrified when he learned that I had a
Speaker 1: flight later that day and that I planned to spend
Speaker 1: most of that travel time working. Travel time is a gift.
Speaker 1: In the old days, you couldn't work. We didn't have
Speaker 1: Wi Fi and stuff, and so it was a lovely
Speaker 1: opportunity just to gaze out of the window. But you
Speaker 1: could still do that planes, trains, automobiles, you know, sit
Speaker 1: in the back, star up the window, unplug, you know,
Speaker 1: or read a book, a real actual book, and sleep
Speaker 1: and days. Even walking along the road is supposed to
Speaker 1: be a sort of self improving activity because you put
Speaker 1: your headphones on and plug into some kind of inspirational podcast.
Speaker 1: What I mean, Okay, this is a good podcast. Listen
Speaker 1: to your one. Tom's point isn't to cancel your happiness
Speaker 1: labs description like, seriously, don't do that. Tom's point is
Speaker 1: just that we need to find some time when it
Speaker 1: feels like we're not working or desperately trying to cramp
Speaker 1: things in. Give a gift to yourself of that time.
Speaker 1: It's completely free, it doesn't cost anything. It could really
Speaker 1: have incalculable benefits feel mental health. I was so thankful
Speaker 1: to hear Tom's suggestions, but realistically, I wasn't totally sure
Speaker 1: his advice was going to work for my level of
Speaker 1: time famine. I mean, I can shoot for longer email
Speaker 1: free lunches, but napping for hours a day is not
Speaker 1: really practical for my situation. And if I'm being honest,
Speaker 1: it's also unlikely that I'll leave my laptop totally switched
Speaker 1: off on my next flight. I started to worry that
Speaker 1: Tom's recommendations were a bit too advance from my level
Speaker 1: of time famine. I needed to start with some beginner tips,
Speaker 1: sort of a time affluence for dummies kind of thing.
Speaker 1: So I turned to my other hero, Ashley Willins. She's
Speaker 1: an academic just like me, so I figured that she
Speaker 1: might have some more applicable advice. As usual, I was
Speaker 1: in a rush to get straight to the point. So
Speaker 1: you're a super busy Harvard professors who teaches about time.
Speaker 1: Feels a little bit ironic, But my life sometimes feels
Speaker 1: very ironic. Yess, So, how are you actually putting this
Speaker 1: stuff into effect in your own life. I'm trying and
Speaker 1: sometimes failing. Yeah, I feel like I'm grasping at straws
Speaker 1: sometimes to try to keep it all together. It wasn't
Speaker 1: exactly the guru level of time mastery I was hoping for,
Speaker 1: but I also admired Ashley's honesty. One thing that I
Speaker 1: did structurally in my life as I cut my commute
Speaker 1: time to basically zero, I pay a lot of money
Speaker 1: and rent, but I can walk to the office. So
Speaker 1: I'm not only buying myself time each and every day,
Speaker 1: but I can also spend that time in ways that
Speaker 1: are good for happiness, like walking, enjoying the scenery. I
Speaker 1: take in a lot of sunrises walking across the bridge
Speaker 1: to work, And I think that's one thing that I've
Speaker 1: done that I've noticed has dramatically improved the quality of
Speaker 1: my life. So Ashley exchanges in the form of rent
Speaker 1: for less time wasted on adult commute. She also used
Speaker 1: her other expenditures in the same way, like housecleaning, grocery delivery.
Speaker 1: It turns out the allocating more of your available budget
Speaker 1: to these services can substantially increase your time affluence. If
Speaker 1: you spend money in a typical month to outsource dislike
Speaker 1: task to others, therefore buying back some of your time
Speaker 1: or at least buying more positive moments. We see that
Speaker 1: that is a good predictor of happiness for people all
Speaker 1: across the income spectrum. The richest people that we've studied
Speaker 1: people living kind of at or even slightly below the
Speaker 1: poverty line. Paying someone to do your dislike tasks can
Speaker 1: also provide a much needed boost to your social life.
Speaker 1: When you outsource something you don't like, you not only
Speaker 1: get to spend more time with people you care about,
Speaker 1: but you're less thinking about all these other things you
Speaker 1: have to do while you're socializing, and so it buys
Speaker 1: us out of some of this dread, this anticipation of
Speaker 1: having to come home from a nice social event on
Speaker 1: the weekend and have a million chores to do before
Speaker 1: the workweek starts. And we've also started looking at the
Speaker 1: effects of time saving services is housecleaning someone to mow
Speaker 1: your lawn on relationship statisfaction, and we have some findings
Speaker 1: suggesting that couples who make a concerted effort to outsource
Speaker 1: in a typical month experience greater relationship satisfaction because they're
Speaker 1: less negatively impacted by daily stressors, and that effect on
Speaker 1: relationship satisfaction is just about as good as having a
Speaker 1: partner who's a really good listener. All of this sounds great,
Speaker 1: but I bet some of you are thinking the same
Speaker 1: thing I was. Is this a strategy everyone can use?
Speaker 1: Or is this just for wealthy Harvard professors who can
Speaker 1: afford a housecleaner? I get this question a lot. Isn't
Speaker 1: this just for rich people? Most of us listening at
Speaker 1: least are lucky enough to have some discretionary income at
Speaker 1: our disposal. So then we want to start thinking, well,
Speaker 1: five one hundred dollars a month, two hundred dollars a month,
Speaker 1: three hundred dollars a month, how can I start thinking
Speaker 1: about spending that money in a way that might best
Speaker 1: promote my happiness? And there are small things that we
Speaker 1: can all do around the margins. One example might be
Speaker 1: higher the neighbor's kid to mow your lawn. That might
Speaker 1: not cost very much money. Getting takeout. Takeout can be
Speaker 1: one way of saving time, but interestingly, we often don't
Speaker 1: think about takeout in that way. So we show in
Speaker 1: some of our studies that some of the happiness benefit
Speaker 1: of these time saving purchases that we make on a
Speaker 1: regular basis. Some of that benefit is actually from just
Speaker 1: thinking that you're saving time and then spending that time
Speaker 1: in a more deliberate way. So you could, even if
Speaker 1: you don't want to change the way that you're spending
Speaker 1: sit down and look at your purchases that you make
Speaker 1: in a typical month and say, hey, when I made
Speaker 1: that takeout purchase, I actually was saving time that I
Speaker 1: wasn't spending on cooking. What did I do with that time?
Speaker 1: And next week when I buy that fast food, could
Speaker 1: I be spending that time I would have spent cooking
Speaker 1: in a better way. So part of the benefit is
Speaker 1: just removing negative tasks that you don't like. And part
Speaker 1: of the benefit of time saving is being more deliberate
Speaker 1: with the free time that you've gained. The idea of
Speaker 1: being more deliberate with how we think about our time
Speaker 1: is critical. Remember, time affluence isn't the objective amount of
Speaker 1: free time you have, the actual number of open blocks
Speaker 1: in your calendar. It's your subjective sense that you have
Speaker 1: some free time, and that means you can do a
Speaker 1: lot to boost your sense of time affluence, even if
Speaker 1: in reality you can't really open up that much actual
Speaker 1: free time. It's just the sense of giving yourself a
Speaker 1: bit of a break that makes all the difference, even
Speaker 1: if the amount of time you actually gain is small.
Speaker 1: I saw this first hand in my Happiness class when
Speaker 1: I first introduced my Yale students to the concept of
Speaker 1: time affluence. With hard classes, demanding extracurriculars, and an intent
Speaker 1: social life, Yale students feel incredibly time famished pretty much
Speaker 1: all the time, so I decided to give them a
Speaker 1: booster shot of time affluence by surprising them with a
Speaker 1: canceled class one spring day. Students came to lecture expecting
Speaker 1: to be in class for an hour and fifteen minutes,
Speaker 1: but when they arrived, my teaching assistants were handing out
Speaker 1: flyers explaining that I was giving students a bit of
Speaker 1: time affluence by canceling class that day. The students were
Speaker 1: ecstatic they finally had a bit of free time. Some
Speaker 1: even started streaming and jumping up and down. Others just
Speaker 1: seemed incredibly relieved. One woman even burst into tears, announcing
Speaker 1: it was the first free hour she's had all semester.
Speaker 1: But my student's joy demonstrates this important feature of time affluents.
Speaker 1: It doesn't take all that much to feel incredibly good.
Speaker 1: My yalies were only given an hour and fifteen minutes free,
Speaker 1: but at the time it fell like years. Many of
Speaker 1: them even used that free hour to do something really fun.
Speaker 1: They hung out with friends over bubble teas or went
Speaker 1: for a short hike, which shows one of the most
Speaker 1: important features of using our time affluments well. In the
Speaker 1: rare cases when we get free time, we need to
Speaker 1: use it wisely. This is something I really struggle with
Speaker 1: because I do get little blasts of free time confetti
Speaker 1: here and there. There are lots of unexpected changes as
Speaker 1: an academic meetings, canceled talks that wrap up earlier than predicted,
Speaker 1: appointments with people who never show. I usually use those
Speaker 1: free moments to do a quick social media check or
Speaker 1: dig into my email, but actually argues that I should
Speaker 1: plan to use those little time windfalls a lot more effectively.
Speaker 1: How can we start claiming back some of these windfalls,
Speaker 1: to really think about them in this more deliberate way,
Speaker 1: so that these small pockets of time that we do
Speaker 1: receive in our everyday lives feel more like a game
Speaker 1: and therefore might be more likely to increase our happiness.
Speaker 1: Have you done this in your own life? Are there
Speaker 1: specific tips you use when you have a meeting canceled
Speaker 1: or have a small time windfall? Yeah? So, I actually
Speaker 1: have started to keep a time windfall list of if
Speaker 1: I have small pockets of five minutes and ten minutes,
Speaker 1: what are some life things, Not work things, not emails.
Speaker 1: Those will always be there, But some small positive life
Speaker 1: things that I can do with those windfalls. Send a
Speaker 1: letter of gratitude, call my mom, reach out to a
Speaker 1: friend from grad school I haven't talked to in a while.
Speaker 1: And I write those in my agenda. And I don't
Speaker 1: always get to all of them, but I do get
Speaker 1: to some of them. And I think that doing this
Speaker 1: research has made me a little bit more strategic about
Speaker 1: not squandering the small moments that all of us find
Speaker 1: ourselves with on a daily basis. Making this episode hasn't
Speaker 1: completely cured my sense of time famine, but it has
Speaker 1: helped a lot. I've started my own time winfall list.
Speaker 1: I want to connect more with friends I haven't seen
Speaker 1: in a while, and take more opportunities to express gratitude
Speaker 1: to the people I care about. I also want to
Speaker 1: take time to be more mindful, and so I'm going
Speaker 1: to try to use some of those free fifteen minute
Speaker 1: blocks for a quick meditation and some deep breaths. And
Speaker 1: in honor of Tom, I promised to spend at least
Speaker 1: a few minutes gazing out the window on my next flight.
Speaker 1: But most of all, making this episode has caused me
Speaker 1: to realize that I'm not helping the people I care
Speaker 1: about by packing my schedule to the brim. Hearing the
Speaker 1: science has caused me to reflect on the negative impact
Speaker 1: my time famine is having on the people I care
Speaker 1: about most. It also made me worry about the person
Speaker 1: I could become if I don't carve out a bit
Speaker 1: more free time. So, Happiness Lab listeners, I'm making a
Speaker 1: public commitment to all of you that I plan to
Speaker 1: prioritize my own time affluence, and I hope you will too.
Speaker 1: As I said before, you don't need to unsubscribe from
Speaker 1: your favorite podcast. Seriously, don't do that. Even just making
Speaker 1: the most of small time windfalls can bump up your
Speaker 1: mood and maybe, just maybe it might even make you
Speaker 1: a better person. The Happiness Lab is co written and
Speaker 1: produced by Ryan Dilley. Our original music was composed by
Speaker 1: Zachary Silver, with additional scoring, mixing and mastering by Evan Viola.
Speaker 1: Pete Naton also helped with production. Joseph Friedman checked our
Speaker 1: facts and our editing was done by Sophie Crane mckiven.
Speaker 1: Special thanks to Meil the Belle, Carl mcgliori, Heather Fame,
Speaker 1: Julia Barton, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig, Jacob Weisburg, and my agent,
Speaker 1: Ben Davis. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by
Speaker 1: Pushkin Industries and me Doctor Laurie Santos