We’ve all been told countless times that money can’t buy happiness. But that’s not entirely true. There is one commodity on the market that can promote a deep sense of well-being. That commodity is time.
Ashley V. Whillans, an assistant professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, has done a lot of research into what social scientists call “time famine.” As the lead author in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America in 2017, Whillans wrote that “people around the world are feeling increasingly pressed for time, undermining well-being.” Despite rising incomes across many parts of the globe, she writes, “increases in wealth have produced an unintended consequence: a rising sense of time scarcity.”
Whillans and her colleagues surveyed a diverse sample of more than 6,000 subjects from the U.S., Canada, Denmark and the Netherlands, and found that “the time famine of modern life can be reduced by using money to buy time.” The survey was augmented by a field experiment that, the authors claim, “provides causal evidence that working adults report greater happiness after spending money on a time-saving purchase [such as for cleaning, cooking or shopping] than on a material purchase. Together, these results suggest that using money to buy time can protect people from the detrimental effects of time pressure on life satisfaction.”
[See: 6 Proven Ways to Bring Happiness to Your Life.]
And this is not just a First World problem. Whillans spent this summer in Africa, studying the effects of buying time to save people from doing their chores. “People assume that those below the poverty line are not time-poor,” she said via Skype from Kenya. “We are trying to see if aid would be more effective if it helps these people manage time more effectively.” Whillans suspects that it will add more to their sense of well-being than other forms of aid, such as cash or personal supplies, just as it does to those in developed nations.
Time: a Valuable Commodity
As a researcher, Whillans has wondered how people spend their time and how it shapes well-being — “maybe because I’m bad at it myself,” she says with a laugh. She has found that, while most people believe they are rushing about more than ever, time diary data suggest that we are not busier than we were 50 years ago. “If anything, we have more leisure time now,” she says.
A 2007 study in the Quarterly Journal of Economics backs that up, revealing that leisure for men increased by roughly six to nine hours per week and for women by roughly four to eight hours per week between 1965 and 2003. However, many people, especially in the U.S. have a natural bias to work and earn more than they need, even though making more money after basic needs are met does not make people happier. “We live in a culture that works too much and actually feels stressed out by the idea of leisure time,” Whillans says.
Her research attempts to figure out how people can be more deliberate in how they spend time, as opposed to money, in ways that promote happiness. “I look at how to help people focus more on time, and to use any discretionary income to buy back some of the time we lose to commuting, sending emails and things like that,” she says. “There is consistent evidence, at least in a European and North American context, that people who prioritize more free time, even at the expense of less money, report more joy in life.”
[Read: Money Can Actually Buy Some Happiness. But How Much?]
Laurie Santos, a professor of psychology and cognitive science and head of Silliman College at Yale University, says that time “is a commodity that’s more valuable than we think. We need time to engage in other activities known to promote well-being — for example, sleep, exercise, spending time with others — and feeling like we have lots of time sometimes allows us the luxury of being in the moment, which is also known to increase well-being.”
Santos, who teaches a popular course at Yale called the Science of Well Being, says, “My students are pretty time-famished.” To teach them about the importance of time, she gives her students more of it. “One day I surprised my students by canceling class so students would have an unexpected free hour — they would feel flush with time. Many students responded to this extra hour with sheer joy, and used it to catch up on sleep with a nap or to take time to be in the moment. It was a short exercise, but it showed the power of simply having some unscheduled time,” she says.
The Economic Value of Time
Here in the U.S., we set ourselves up for time famines. “Being busy is actually something of a status symbol in America,” Whillans says. “If you go to Italy, they associate more leisure time with higher status. Some cultures seemingly do better than others.” She stresses that these cultural factors have a heavy hand in shaping how we think about time. Productivity bonuses, piece work and hourly wages prioritize working more and more. “Think about those strategies that make us focus too much on work,” she says.
To shift those priorities, it helps to think of the economic value of time. “Realizing that time is a valuable commodity in and of itself can be the first step to protecting it,” Santos says. Many people believe they will have more time in the future to do the things they love. “We published a paper showing that was not true,” Whillans says. “Chances are, you will be as busy tomorrow as you are today, so reminding yourself of this can encourage giving away some money for more time.”
[Read: Are Friends the Key to Happiness?]
When we decide between two options, where one is slightly cheaper, we forget that the money we save could be spent in different, perhaps better, ways. “We fail to recognize that any decision we make comes at the cost of other decisions. Doing household chores yourself comes at the expense of doing literally anything else, like going to the gym or reading. Reminding people that time can be spent doing something else makes them more likely to give up money for more free time.”
In other words, rather than buying the latest smartphone or a new pair of shoes, consider hiring someone to clean the bathroom so you have time to go for a walk.
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Buying Time Can Make You Happier Than Buying Things originally appeared on usnews.com
