Where Are You Investing Your Time?

"Forget what you are doing with your money for a second, where are you investing your time?"
(from my tweets, 2015)

Money came up in my tweets a lot, usually to say it mattered less than people think. I wrote that I never had more than $1,000 at once when I was starting out, that "it is the time that you put in, not the money, that really matters in the long run," and that I would rather spend my time making less money doing my own thing than make more money doing someone else's.

Back then I was talking about building a career. But the same question turns out to be one of the most useful ones you can ask about happiness. We track money carefully. We rarely track time the same way, even though it is the one thing we can never earn back.

People who value time are happier

Psychologist Ashley Whillans and her colleagues asked thousands of people a simple question: would you rather have more time or more money? In their 2016 studies, slightly more than half chose money. But the people who chose time reported being happier, and that held even after the researchers accounted for how much time and money people actually had.

Valuing time didn't mean people were lazy or unambitious. It seemed to reflect a way of seeing life where hours are precious, not just a resource to be converted into income.

Buying time buys happiness

In a 2017 study, Whillans, Elizabeth Dunn, Michael Norton and colleagues surveyed more than 6,000 people in the United States, Canada, Denmark and the Netherlands. People who spent money to save time, for example by paying someone to clean or run errands, reported greater life satisfaction. This was true across income levels, not only for the wealthy.

The team then ran a small experiment. On one weekend, working adults spent $40 on something that saved them time. On another, they spent $40 on a material purchase. They felt better on the day they bought time, mainly because they felt less time pressure.

So money can make us happier, but often by giving us back our hours.

Just thinking about time changes what we do

Cassie Mogilner, then at the Wharton School, found something even simpler. In 2010 experiments, she had people unscramble sentences with words related either to time or to money. Then she asked about their plans or observed what they did.

People nudged to think about money planned to work more and socialize less. People nudged to think about time planned to spend more time with friends and family, and less time working. Those who thought about time also ended up happier, and the social time seemed to explain much of the effect.

When we think about money, we think about earning. When we think about time, we think about living.

Your time, your choice

My tweet about doing "my own thing" points to another finding. Edward Deci and Richard Ryan's self-determination theory, one of the most tested theories in psychology, holds that people need autonomy: the sense that what they do comes from their own choices. When people feel in control of how they spend their time, they tend to be more motivated and more satisfied, even when the work is hard.

What the philosophers said

Aristotle saw the trap clearly over two thousand years ago. In the Nicomachean Ethics, he wrote that the life of money-making is lived under a kind of compulsion, and that wealth is clearly not the good we are seeking, because it is only useful for the sake of something else. Money is a tool. The question is always what it is for.

Henry David Thoreau made the same point in Walden (1854) with an unusual way of counting. "The cost of a thing," he wrote, "is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run." Every purchase, in other words, is paid for in hours of your life. Thoreau went to live at Walden Pond partly to see how few of those hours he really needed to trade away.

Some honest caveats

Most of these studies are correlational or involve small, short experiments, so they show patterns more than iron laws. Money also matters a great deal when you don't have enough of it. Whillans herself has noted that people under real financial strain may reasonably focus on money first. And valuing time is easier for people who have some financial security.

Still, the idea holds up across many studies: once your basic needs are covered, how you spend your hours shapes your happiness as much as how many dollars you have.

How to invest your time better

• Audit a week. Write down where your hours actually go, the way you might review a bank statement.
• Buy back an hour. If you can afford it, pay for one chore you dread and use that hour for something you love.
• Think in hours, not dollars. Before a big purchase, ask Thoreau's question: how much of my life will this cost?
• Protect time with people. Mogilner's work suggests social time is one of the best investments you can make.
• Choose some of your own projects. Even a small block of time spent on something you chose yourself feeds your need for autonomy.

Today's reflection

If someone looked only at your calendar, not your bank account, what would they say you value most? Is that what you want them to see?

Sources

• Aristotle. (ca. 350 BCE). Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, Chapter 5.
• Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The "what" and "why" of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 11(4), 227–268.
• Mogilner, C. (2010). The pursuit of happiness: Time, money, and social connection. Psychological Science, 21(9), 1348–1354.
• Thoreau, H. D. (1854). Walden; or, Life in the Woods. Chapter 1, "Economy."
• Whillans, A. V., Dunn, E. W., Smeets, P., Bekkers, R., & Norton, M. I. (2017). Buying time promotes happiness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(32), 8523–8527.
• Whillans, A. V., Weidman, A. C., & Dunn, E. W. (2016). Valuing time over money is associated with greater happiness. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 7(3), 213–222.