Prioritizing Time in Our Everyday Lives

This chapter and chapter 4 are designed to help you internalize the good practices I’ve laid out in previous chapters and build a time-affluence regimen that you can live by. These strategies are designed to help you walk the talk when it comes to treating time as the valuable, precious resource it is.

To make your time-affluent mindset stick, you take three steps:

1. Convince yourself that time is at least as important as money.¹⁰
2. Remind yourself of your values when faced with critical decisions.¹¹
3. Make deliberate and strategic decisions that allow you to have more time across days, weeks, months, and years.¹²

Implementing each of these steps depends on two activities that will become part of your time-affluent life:

1. Reflection to create self-awareness about what you’re doing and why you’re doing it. This seems easy: it’s only thinking. But as any behavioral scientist can tell you, we humans are capable of twisting our thinking into Escherian stairwells to avoid uncomfortable or hard-to-accept truths. Your reflection must be intentional and honest.
2. Documentation to create a record of your hopes, observations, calculations, and plans for time affluence. Plenty of research confirms the efficacy of writing things down, and it’s essential here because of the forces conspiring to make you focus on cash.¹³

Below are specific strategies based on these steps, along with activities for building your time-smart regimen.

Strategy 1: Address Your Why

How much time do you spend playing Candy Crush or using some other app on your phone? You probably don’t know, but it’s a habit you’ve developed in the in-between moments to kill time. For me, it’s scrolling through Instagram. Often, I do it when I’m procrastinating on work that’s important but not urgent. I see my partner playing games on his phone, too, and I call him on it. He tells me he doesn’t realize he’s doing it, and, truthfully, I don’t realize I’m doing it either. We’ve both lost many, many hours to idle moments and mindless screen time.

All of us have our own personal Candy Crush behavior, an activity we compulsively, somewhat thoughtlessly engage in. And it’s OK. Disconnecting our brains from anxiety and stress can help refresh us, like a sweet snack now and again.¹⁴ But when “now and again” becomes a habit, the activity becomes an unhealthy time suck, disconnecting us from human connection or from better, more time-affluent activities.¹⁵

Strategy 2: Allow (or Schedule) Slack Time

I’ve discovered that when people begin their effort to find and fund time, they are often so overzealous about replacing bad time with good that they pack their schedules tight with time-affluent activities.

Connie—one of my type A friends—learned a bit about the science of happiness and started to meticulously schedule her leisure time to make sure she wasn’t missing out. She would wake up at 6 a.m. on Saturday, try a new recipe, go for a jog while her treats were baking, invite one friend over to try the recipe, and proceed to schedule a packed afternoon of walking, volunteering, reading, and podcasts—often in locations all over the city. Just looking at her social media posts made me feel exhausted.

While I do advocate for spending more time in active and enjoyable ways, my advice doesn’t mean you should add so many activities that you spend your Saturday mornings rushing around. In fact, when we stack personal (and professional) appointments back-to-back, we enjoy them less.¹⁸ They begin to feel like obligations, and our stress increases as we try to keep to the schedule. Even putting leisure activities in our calendar can make them less enjoyable.¹⁹ Instead of enjoying a pint with our neighbor, we ignore their story, thinking about whether we’ll make the train on time for our next event. We pull ourselves out of the present and into the future, and our worries about what’s next start to steal our time.²⁰

One way to prevent this is to allow for, or even plan, slack time, which is extra time left between appointments that can be used as a buffer or as downtime. Some researchers advocate rough scheduling, under which you don’t schedule time with friends for 7 p.m., instead planning to meet “after work.” Or you’ll do gardening “sometime Sunday morning” instead of “from 8 until 10.”

Slack time removes the stress of making sure we fulfill all of our plans and allows for spontaneity. This spontaneity matters, because overefficiency carries negative consequences: when we are overly efficient in conversations, we enjoy them less.²¹ And prioritizing efficiency makes us more likely to miss opportunities to connect with weak ties: people who are likely to bring us creative ideas and new opportunities.²²

When someone I interviewed named Michael took a few paid days off (to decompress from his overly stressful job), he broke his usual pattern: he didn’t try to sneak in work calls or work on reports or be hyperefficient with daily activities like shopping. Instead, he focused on using his time in a leisurely fashion. He was casually grocery shopping on one of these days (he likes shopping) and engaged in the time-affluent activity of chatting up an acquaintance he bumped into there. The chat led to a new job opportunity in a role he felt was perfect for him. The conversation wouldn’t have happened if Michael were being hyperefficient and trying to rush through shopping to get to his next work-related task, as usual. Michael attributes this serendipity to being open to using and enjoying slack time.

Strategy 3: Know Your Calendar Mindset

True rough scheduling isn’t for everybody. When conscientious types like me hear, “Let’s meet after work,” their anxiety levels rise. How can plans be so vague?! Doesn’t this mean you may never get together with your friends after work? Honestly, yes. And that might be OK. The stress of missing out on roughly scheduled plans is less intense than the stress created by making sure you are perfectly on time for all of your tightly scheduled plans. Even if you can’t commit to something as loose as “later in the week,” try building in extra time around the activities you’re doing. If work ends at 3 p.m. and you’re a half hour from where you’re meeting friends, schedule the meetup for 4:30 and don’t schedule anything in between.

If you are still stuck about how much slack time to schedule, you can use your calendar mindset to decide how much to schedule.

There are two calendar mindsets:

1. Clock-time people
2. Event-time people

(You can identify your calendar mindset using a questionnaire in the toolkit at the end of this chapter.)

Clock-time people use schedules that are defined by the hours of the day—the clock.²³ They don’t move on from an activity merely because it feels like the “right” thing to do; rather, they move on because it’s 1:30 and that’s when they’re slated to move on. They are more likely to stick to a routine and set time-dependent goals for their work and leisure (I will exercise between 5 and 6 every morning). They make detailed plans for phone calls and dinner dates. (Our reservation is for 8:15. We will meet at the bar for one drink beforehand at 7:40.)

In contrast, event-time people allow events to shape their schedule. They might set up a meeting, but it will last as long as it lasts; it may run fifteen minutes or ninety, regardless of the scheduled time. Event-timers don’t call you at 1:30; they call “when I’m finished with lunch.” They’re not as concerned about making reservations. They will say, “Let’s meet for dinner Saturday night” or “Let’s walk home from work when we wrap up for the day.”

Most of us can operate in both styles—thankfully, lest workplaces implode.²⁴ But we all default toward one style or the other, and in our personal planning we need to think carefully about how our default calendar mindset can shape whether and how we account for time and our time affluence.²⁵

By scheduling activities in a way that is consistent with your calendar mindset, you will feel more comfortable and will be more likely to follow through on your plans. Maria—a clock-time person—explained how she scheduled her leisure time.

I love planning and tracking my leisure time to make sure I get the greatest happiness from it. After starting fourteen years ago (after my first son was born), I still do it. I can’t imagine not. Tracking my time has enabled my family and I to have uninterrupted dinners, road trips, and spend minimal time watching TV; we complete arts and crafts in the shed (without a TV) instead. Tracking makes sure I don’t spend time engaged in mindless activities without intention.

Maria makes perfect sense to you if you’re a clock-time person. You will be happiest with defined limits, and you will schedule time-affluent activities into your day—including slack time. (Remember, don’t overschedule.)

To event-time people, though, Maria’s clock-time approach seems almost oxymoronic (schedule leisure?). Troy—an event-time person—explained how he planned his leisure.

For me, it wasn’t about restricting my time in some authoritarian way to be more “responsible” or “less wasteful” with how I spent my time. It was about understanding how I was spending my time in a guilt- and stress-free way. I was able to cut the amount of time I spent scrolling on my phone and watching TV by nearly five hours a week, saving twenty hours a month without having to write it down. My awareness alone allowed me to rein in wasteful [time] spending in a way that felt natural and easy. I could then put this time into things that were important to me—my goals, the goals of my family—and my overall happiness. Those twenty hours quickly added up to giving me the time I needed to start to learn how to ride a motorcycle. I had always wanted to do that but never felt that I had time for it! Being more efficient with my time meant that I was happier overall, saving more time each week, and feeling less stressed about spending time on things that did not bring me joy.

One approach to time affluence isn’t better than the other; the better system is the one that matches your mindset. In either case, you need to follow through on your best-laid plans, whether those plans are set by the clock or by the event. Know who you are, and start planning (or roughly sketching out) your approach.

Strategy 4: Create Intentions

Intentions are deliberate actions that force us to think about how we’re using our time and to commit to making positive use of it. Subtraction and substitution lists are intentions, in a way. Choosing to read this book is another.

Intentions become powerful when we tie them to daily actions that take our time away. For example, if you want to enjoy more books, you might state your intention as listen to books on tape. But an even better one would be to use my commute to listen to books on tape. In this way, you’ve found time and replaced the time-impoverishing activity with an intention for a time-affluent activity. If you want to start writing a book, make the intention to spend three lunch breaks a week eating and writing by myself. To increase your chances of following through, put an interesting reminder, such as a bright sticker, on your lunch box.²⁶ Tying intentions to activities you must complete each day (shopping, commuting, eating) also makes it more likely you’ll follow through, because every time you sit down to have lunch, you are reminded of the fact that you could be working on your book.

It will also help to write down your intentions at the beginning of the week and then check them off at the end. If you didn’t follow through, write down why you didn’t. If you’re a clock-timer, you could schedule one hour on Sunday to document and plan the activities you are going to do, and one hour the next Saturday to review whether you followed through. If you’re an event-time person, you could plan to use part of Sunday afternoon to think about the high-level goals you want to accomplish with your time for the upcoming week, and also roughly schedule, say, the next Saturday morning, to consider whether you were able to follow through on these goals.²⁷

If you’re having trouble following through in any of the categories discussed in chapter 2 (finding time, funding time, reframing time), reflect on why you haven’t met these goals. Sometimes we don’t reach our time-use goals because we are faced with objective constraints: our boss gave us extra work; our dad needed help fixing his computer. At other times, however, we simply don’t do what we intended, just as sometimes we don’t exercise when we planned to. If you failed to follow through on tracking your time and intentions, a good next step is to employ behavioral strategies to motivate yourself to follow through.

It’s time for rewards and punishments.

Strategy 5: Implement Rewards and Punishments

If your time regimen is going well, plan a reward for yourself. In one extreme case of this, a new initiative—the four-day workweek—rewards employees with Fridays off if they complete their work between Monday and Thursday. Getting to skip work with full pay is, of course, an effective motivational tool. While we don’t usually have the ability to give ourselves an entire day off, you could treat yourself to thirty minutes of additional sleep-in time or fancy wine this weekend if you’ve effectively managed your priorities.²⁸

If you’re going to reward yourself for following through on your time goals, it’s worth remembering a few things about rewards. First, we tend to value rewards earned through effort even when they have no cash value.²⁹ Badges for hitting certain daily fitness milestones in your fitness app, for example, have proven to be somewhat effective, even though they obviously have no monetary value.

Static rewards—such as always treating yourself with the same restaurant meal each week for hitting fitness goals—will become demotivating over time. It’s better to choose uncertain or surprising rewards. One way to do this is to let a friend give you the reward; it could even be a dinner together (thereby adding to your good use of time!). You could also create a lottery-based reward. Suppose you avoid checking email until 5 p.m. three days in a row. Give yourself a 50-50 chance of winning either one fancy coffee or two by flipping a coin. Research suggests that building in a bit of uncertainty about winning smaller versus larger prizes can boost personal commitment.³⁰

An even more powerful motivator than earning rewards for good behavior is losing them for bad. Losing has a larger impact on our actions than winning, even when the stakes are low. In one study, people were more likely to cheat when given $30 and told they could lose it than when provided with the chance to win $30.³¹ That is, the prospect of losing made cheating more likely than the prospect of winning.

If you are serious about changing your time-use behavior, you may try a strategy that incurs critical costs when you fail.³² Beyond obvious penalties (no dessert after dinner), technology is here to help you punish yourself more creatively. The application Beeminder takes $5 from your credit card for every goal you don’t meet. Another, Forest, provides you with the chance to grow a beautiful animated tree or watch it slowly wither and die, depending on whether you meet your time-use goals. The stickK app lets you set your goals and, if you don’t achieve them, allows you to punish yourself by, for example, donating to your least favorite political candidate (a potentially highly effective tactic).³³

Punishment and reward can take the form of publicity, too. You can share your performance on social media to hold yourself accountable. Public commitment to goals is highly motivating, as is public shaming. Capitalizing on social motivations, such as the need to fit in, can encourage persistent behavior change, which is what we’re after—a change that sticks.

Strategy 6: Engineer Defaults

Engaging in self-control and exerting willpower are hard (and, as it turns out, somewhat overrated). You can get more assertive with your time-affluence regimen by setting defaults that produce time affluence. In this way, you don’t choose time affluence; it’s your default. This means that making a decision means opting out of time affluence.

Strategy 7: Recognize and Fight Mere Urgency

Sometimes when we are procrastinating on harder, more important activities, such as preparing for an interview, we will waste our time with simpler, less important activities, such as answering email.³⁴

It happens to all of us. When we have a busy week at work, with important deadlines, we find ourselves with an inbox at zero. When we feel busy or stressed for time, we also feel an increased sense of pressure to get things done right now. Sadly, this is when we also suffer from a decreased ability to think through the importance of the task we have decided to work on. As a result, we default to thinking about whether or not a task is urgent, as opposed to whether or not it is important. This behavior is called the mere urgency effect. The matrix in figure 3-1 helpfully summarizes the trap of mere urgency and shows what to do when you face it.

FIGURE 3-1

One of the first ways you can begin to stave off the mere urgency effect is to map your activities (something you may already be recording from chapter 2) onto this matrix. Take special care in documenting tasks that, in retrospect, were merely urgent or not important, and try to avoid those tasks in the future when they come up.

You may also recognize patterns. Do you take on merely urgent activities around a deadline, for example, as an avoidance mechanism? Do you succumb to mere urgency when you’re tired? Is there one person constantly asking you for favors that are urgent to them but aren’t important to you?

Strategy 8: Make Leisure Leisurely

It isn’t enough to build in more time for leisure. You also must make sure you do everything you can to enjoy the leisure time you have cultivated.

With their kids finally off to college, Miguel and his wife, Alejandra, decided they would take their dream trip. They would tour central and southern Italy for three weeks. It cost a lot of money, a fact they were painfully aware of as they paid up front.

It didn’t go perfectly, and, given how much they paid, it was disappointing. Miguel got heatstroke, and they missed a tour of the Vatican. It rained for two straight days along the scenic Amalfi Coast. Alejandra and Miguel fought so much about why they chose this tour in the first place that at one point Miguel threatened to take the next flight home.

Back in America, Miguel and Alejandra looked at their photos—eating squid ink pasta in Venice, walking on beaches along blue oceans, and olive oil tasting in Tuscany. The stress they felt on the trip wasn’t there. The missed opportunities somehow seemed smaller in retrospect. They were happy to have gone on the trip. Now their only regret was that they spent too much of the trip worrying about how much it cost versus what they were getting out of it.

You may have had a similar experience. It’s not uncommon. Researchers find that thinking about the economic value of our leisure time can undermine our enjoyment of it, because we are constantly comparing the experience against some perceived expected value or ideal.³⁶ This has been shown in many types of activities: when we track the distance of a morning nature walk, we enjoy the scenery less. When we track the number of calories we’re burning during a run, we don’t derive as much joy from the experience as we do if we’re running to feel good. When we count the number of pages we’ve read of our latest book, we lose track of the story, worrying whether or not we have hit our reading target.³⁷ Whenever we “track” our leisure or think about the amount of money our leisure time has cost us, we’re like Miguel and Alejandra: we become hyperfocused on time efficiency. Instead of savoring our time, we worry about getting our money’s worth from our leisure time.

To enjoy the activities in your schedule, disconnect the value from money and other metrics that don’t explicitly measure the value of what you’re doing. Turn your thoughts away from, How efficient was this investment? to the present moment. Anything that takes us out of our present enjoyment of leisure time destroys its value and makes us less likely to want to engage in the behavior again in the future.³⁸

In short, do not think about how much the vacation cost or whether the house cleaner was worth the financial investment. Instead, think about how nice it is to spend extra time with your friends and family—or curled up on the futon enjoying a movie with your significant other.

Make It Stick

These strategies will provide the foundation for a good time-affluence regimen. You will find more time, and you will enjoy the time more.

I know it’s not easy. As someone who continues to struggle to prioritize time over money, I’ve experienced the battle. I’ve been caught typing on my computer or taking work calls while (dangerously) crossing the street, eating in restaurants, and at the summit of Mount Kenya (4,500 meters above sea level). I worked for ninety minutes during my best friend’s wedding day. I skipped two of my close family members’ funerals because I chose to work instead.

Cultivating time affluence requires you to do what I failed to do in those situations: hold yourself accountable. Human nature being what it is, you’ll want to take shortcuts, even after reading this chapter and even after coming up with a seemingly airtight time-affluence strategic plan. We are rationalization machines, capable of explaining away bad behavior in a myriad of “creative” ways: Today was an unusual day, so I don’t have to write down the tasks that I completed. Or I actually don’t mind waiting in line or commuting. It’s really not that bad. One person told me that they would find it “awkward” to have someone clean their house while they were home—even though they hated cleaning, could afford to outsource it, and could schedule the housecleaning service when they were out. Another time-pressed person (a twenty-five-year-old professional) recently told me they could “never” spend money on services that made their life easier, but had “no problem spending a hundred dollars for a new pair of jeans” or $200 a month for a fitness club membership—even if they never used it.

The marginal cost of cheating “only once” seems alluringly low. And these rationalizations are especially likely to intrude in easy moments, when we don’t feel great time pressure.³⁹ On Saturday morning relaxing on the sofa, it’s easy to dismiss the notion we won’t have time to clean the house later, even though our calendars tell a much different story. The pain of bumper-to-bumper traffic feels less miserable than it is when it’s only a topic of discussion during a night out with friends. But the pain will be there for us when we have to clean house or drive to work, and it’s massively damaging to our happiness and health.

Even people who are making positive changes in their time use will feel tempted to congratulate themselves too soon and fall back into old habits: Now that I have gotten the hang of this time and money trade-off thing, I don’t need to keep tracking how I spend my time, or, Maybe I’ll just check a few emails on my phone during my upcoming family vacation; it won’t be too disruptive, I’m sure. As with trying to eat healthy, a few good days makes us feel entitled to treat ourselves.⁴⁰ So we get the burger and the milk shake. And the fries. And when we make excuses once, we’re more likely to do it again, and we fall back into bad habits.

Throughout this chapter we’ve used the metaphors of exercise and healthy eating to describe the kind of commitment it takes to escape your time poverty and live a time-affluent, happier life. The comparison is perfectly apt, but here, at the end, it breaks down a bit.

I’d love to tell you that sticking to a time-affluence regimen creates results you and others can see. Exercise leads to a fitter you, and friends notice a positive change. With your time, it’s harder to immediately notice the change. Still, it’s there. I’ve seen it. There’s more smiling and laughing, fewer exhausted raccoon eyes, and less fighting with partners and colleagues and kids.

And no matter what you or others see, I promise that if you get into the habit of making time-affluent decisions, you will feel it.⁴¹

chapter 3 toolkit

Time-Smart Regimen Checklist

Review the eight strategies for getting into the habit of living a time-smart life.

1. Address your why. When you catch yourself wasting small moments of free time, ask yourself why you are engaging in this activity. Do you enjoy it, or are you procrastinating on doing something else?
2. Schedule slack time. Do not become overzealous after reading this book and try to schedule all the leisure time possible so that not a moment is free. Research suggests that overly scheduling leisure could backfire, because it will feel like work. Make sure to allow for or schedule empty slack time between your leisure activities and meetings.
3. Know your calendar mindset. People generally think about time either in terms of clock time (highly specific and set to hours in the day, such as “1 to 2:15 p.m.”) or event time (less specific and set to general ranges of time such as “midafternoon”). Knowing your time typology (see the questionnaire later in this toolkit) can help you schedule your time in a way that is most likely to promote affluence and joy.
4. Create intentions. To follow through on any new goal, engage in strategies that will help you follow through. Create intentions—figure out who, what, where, when, and how you will increase time affluence—and document your intentions.
5. Implement rewards and punishments. Reward yourself when you follow through on your intentions, and punish yourself when you fail. Remember that uncertain rewards are more motivating than static ones and that losses often loom larger than gains, so threatening yourself with a punishment if you don’t follow through might help you most.
6. Engineer time-smart defaults. Make it easier to engage in time-smart behavior by setting up technology so that it no longer sends immediate notifications or constantly interrupts. Set “analog” decisions to default to time-smart behavior, too, by, for example, limiting the number of business trips you agree to each year.
7. Recognize and fight mere urgency. Recognize the difference between merely urgent tasks and important tasks. Try to focus on the important over the merely urgent.
8. Make leisure leisurely. Focus on enjoying leisure moments rather than whether you think you’re getting your money’s worth from your leisure activities.

Know Your Calendar Mindset

There are two types of people when it comes to how we think about our time: clock-time types and event-time types. One is not better than the other, but knowing which you are will help you know how to plan your time regimen. To find out if you’re a clock type or event type, rate your agreement with each of the following items on a scale ranging from 1 = Not at all, to 7 = Extremely.

Your score on each of the clock-time and event-time dimensions determines what your inclinations are and how strongly they skew that way. If your scores are roughly equal, reflect on when you act more like one type than the other, and ask yourself whether there are opportunities for you to more optimally schedule your time at work and outside work.

The Small Why Worksheet

Use the following template for tracking your activities and having honest conversations with yourself about your time use. Think critically about yourself and your time. And think about the future a little bit. Even if an activity is making you happy right this moment, are you borrowing against future time when you know you’ll be more stressed because of what you’re doing now? Finally, consider adding the activity to a subtraction list if it’s something you decide doesn’t bring you value, and write down a substitute, time-affluent activity you can replace it with.

WHEN: (TIME I NOTICED THE ACTIVITY)

WHAT: (ACTIVITY)

WHY: (REASON I’M DOING THIS ACTIVITY)

KEEP DOING? (YES OR NO; IF YES, FOR HOW LONG)

REPLACE WITH? (NEW ACTIVITY)

Create Intentions

Intentions are assignments to yourself to fill your days with time-affluent activities. Think of writing down your intentions as creating a time-smart day planner. Set aside time every couple of weeks (clock-time people, set a specific time; event-time people, block off a range of time), and insert activities into your upcoming schedule that will support your effort to improve your time use. At your next check-in with yourself, note whether you were able to do the tasks you wanted to and, if not, why not. Look for patterns that would explain why you did not engage in the behaviors you didn’t follow through on, and come up with a game plan for following through on these activities.

PLANNING TIME:

NUMBER OF ACTIVITIES PLANNED:

NUMBER OF ACTIVITIES DONE:

WHICH ONES DID I NOT DO? WHY NOT?

PLAN FOR FOLLOWING THROUGH: