67. People Are Happier When They’re Busy

Consider this scenario: You’ve just landed at an airport and have to walk to the baggage claim to pick up your luggage. It takes you 12 minutes to walk there. When you arrive, your luggage is coming onto the carousel. How impatient do you feel?

Contrast that with this scenario: You’ve just landed at an airport, and the walk to the luggage carousel takes 2 minutes. But then you stand around waiting 10 minutes for your luggage to appear. How impatient do you feel now?

In both cases it took you 12 minutes to pick up your luggage, but chances are you are much more impatient, and much unhappier, in the second scenario where you have to stand around and wait.

People Want to Engage

Research by Christopher Hsee (2010) and his colleagues shows that people are happier when they’re busy. Doing nothing makes people impatient and unhappy.

Hsee’s team gave participants a choice between delivering a completed questionnaire to a location that was a 15-minute roundtrip walk, or delivering it just outside the room and then waiting 15 minutes. Some participants were offered the same snack bar regardless of which activity they chose, and others were offered a different type of snack bar for each of the two options. (Hsee had previously determined that both snack bars were considered equally desirable.)

When the same snack bar was offered at both locations, then most (68 percent) of the participants chose to deliver the questionnaire just outside the room (the “idle” condition). The students’ first reaction was to do less work, but when they were given an excuse for walking farther, most of them took the busy option. After the experiment, the students who’d taken the walk reported feeling significantly happier than the idle students. In a second version of the study, the students were assigned to either the “busy” or the “idle” option (in other words, they did not choose). The busier students, again, reported higher happiness scores.

In the next round of research, Hsee asked students to study a bracelet. Then he gave them the option of either spending 15 minutes waiting with nothing to do (they thought they were waiting for the next part of the experiment) or spending the same time taking the bracelet apart and rebuilding it while waiting. Some of the participants were given the option of rebuilding it into its original configuration, and others were given the option to reassemble the bracelet into a different design.

Participants who had the option of rebuilding the bracelet into its original configuration preferred to just sit idly. But the participants who were told they could reassemble the bracelet into a new design preferred to work on the bracelet rather than sit idle. As before, those who spent the 15 minutes busy with the bracelet reported feeling happier than those who sat idle.

Don’t be the Only Busy One

When you are the presenter, you feel very busy and it’s easy to forget that the experience of your audience is very different. You are talking excitedly about your topic and moving around in the front of the room. They are most likely sitting still and listening. It’s not exactly doing nothing, but it’s dangerously close to doing nothing. The likelihood of boredom is high, even if they like the topic and think you are a good presenter. You have to engage the audience in interaction if you want them to feel happy and busy. The following are some ideas that you can build into almost any presentation.

• Ask the audience a question. Even if all they have to do is think about the answer and raise their hands, that’s better than just sitting and listening.

• Divide the group into small teams and give them a question to answer together or a topic to discuss. Make sure they know that they will be asked to bring their answers or the results of their discussions to the rest of the group. That way they will feel that the discussion has purpose and that the discussion and their conclusions matter.

• Divide the group into teams and have them do an activity (for example, solve a problem, make something, or compete with each other). Friendly competition with other teams always energizes the room.