Time and Money in Daily Life

Several stories from my research stick with me as prototypical of those facing time and money decisions.

Nicole was a newly minted executive at a major credit card company. Thomas, her husband, was a busy VP. They were rarely in the same city and hadn’t taken a vacation together in years. One day, Thomas received a pleasant surprise: courtesy of a generous client, he was offered the chance to extend his work trip by a week and enjoy the Swiss Alps, all expenses paid. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Thomas pleaded with his wife. “Nicole, please come. It’s only for a few days.” Nicole sighed and said, “I can’t. I have an important meeting that I shouldn’t miss.” Thomas hit the slopes with his sister Leah instead, and the siblings enjoyed what they both deemed “the best trip ever.”

“Five years later, they still talk about this damn trip,” Nicole told me. “And, whenever they do, Thomas asks me, ‘Nicole, what was that meeting about again?’ ‘To be honest, I can’t remember.’ He always replies, ‘That important, huh?’ ”

Later, Nicole admitted that she had vacation time available, and the meeting was optional. Her team would have been fine without her. But at the time, it seemed too important to her; she just felt she should be there. Thomas and Leah made memories that will last a lifetime, while Nicole’s “important” work obligations have faded into the past.

During a recent field visit in rural India, fifteen-year-old Usha explained to me the daily decision she has to make: spend time getting and transporting water (in large, heavy urns balanced on her head) to support her family, or attend school. “I have to fetch water from wells and ponds, which takes hours every day and leaves me no time to attend school. I want to be a teacher, but I do not have time to study because of these chores, which are killing my dreams. Without help, I will live a life of poverty—filled with unknown darkness and illiteracy.” Although most of our lives are very different from Usha’s, many working parents I have talked to feel a similar tension between supporting their families (versus working more hours, or going back to school). Society needs to help Ushas everywhere feel that they have the time and support to choose school over chores.

Another story that’s never far from my mind is that of Alice, a first-generation college student. She paid her own way through school and worked her way up from research assistant to PhD. After graduation, she was lucky enough to be offered two jobs that could be classified as dream jobs. Job 1 offered reasonable hours, social connection, and meaning. It would allow her to live in her hometown, surrounded by friends and family. She wouldn’t make much money but would contribute her skills to the community by working for local government. Job 2 offered money and prestige. It required a cross-country move to a new city. Alice would be given more opportunities than she ever imagined, having grown up the daughter of a mail carrier in a small town.

She chose job 2 without much hesitation. At that time, it seemed like a no-brainer. Alice and her partner of eight years, Paul, didn’t have kids. It would be the adventure of a lifetime, and hard work now would lead to many opportunities later. Except when they settled in, Paul was miserable. Alice traveled a lot, and Paul had no job and no friends to turn to. After three months he moved home, and they parted ways forever. Alice was devastated, but under contract. All she could do was keep working.

Later that year, while Alice was working overseas, her best friend had her first child. Then Alice’s cousin passed away. The funeral was scheduled at the same time as a work trip. Alice told herself what many of us tell ourselves when we sacrifice our time for jobs and money: “It’s fine. I’m doing this now so I will have more time to be happy tomorrow, and I can make it up to people then.”

This logic makes sense, as long as tomorrow actually arrives. It didn’t for Carly and Adam, who were happy, healthy, and productive thirty-somethings living in Oregon. Adam was a teacher. Carly was finishing grad school. On the weekends, they hiked near their house and cooked meals for the week. Adam was training for his first marathon. Carly started outdoor climbing. They shared an apartment, adopted a puppy, and began saving for a wedding (and kids!). They were busy—always too busy to go on the dream road trip they had planned but kept putting off until next year.

Just before Carly was to graduate, Adam was rushed to the ER with cramps and a fever. It seemed like appendicitis. Shockingly, Adam and Carly learned that Adam had advanced pancreatic cancer, and three months to live. Within twenty-four hours, Carly and Adam were married. Carly quit school and set in motion a road trip cum honeymoon across the Pacific Northwest that the couple would schedule in between chemo treatments. On their GoFundMe page, Carly wrote, “We thought we had all the time in the world.”

No matter our age, education, or income, we share the same reality: none of us knows how much time we have left. One day, time runs out and tomorrow never comes. This is one of the core discoveries I’ve made researching time and money: we don’t understand well that time is our most valuable resource, and it is finite. Chasing money is valuable to a point, but it’s an infinite errand. You can always try to get more—and research shows people do that, no matter how much money they have already. Given how precious time is, we should put it first. But many of us focus on our careers, constantly giving up more of our time in exchange for more money or productivity.

We’re conditioned to do this. Since the Industrial Revolution, we’ve learned to put a dollar value on time. We’ve been told, literally, that money is our most valuable resource: time is money. To gain financial prosperity we’ve exchanged things that make us happy, at great expense. Many twenty- and thirty-year-olds like Alice sacrifice the best years of their lives based on the assumption that they can make time for joy tomorrow. I can attest to this. If you hadn’t yet figured it out, I am Alice.

Meanwhile, those in their thirties and forties chase the idea of having perfect children and careers, deferring personal and marital bliss until they retire. They can take the transformative vacation in the Alps when they’re older and more settled.

Then fifty-, sixty-, and seventy-year-olds continue to work, putting off life goals and bucket-list items until “next year,” year after year—only to run out of time and end up, like my friend’s dad, with unused plane tickets lining the inside of their caskets.

This sounds heavy, and it is. My research has shown me that the stakes really are this high. People tend to focus too much on working and making money and not enough on having more and better time. Most of us, myself included, fail to value time as much as money. This focus on money contributes to the epidemic levels of stress, unhappiness, and loneliness that many societies struggle with. It costs us a lot, financially and otherwise. Collectively researchers call this phenomenon time poverty, and it is chronic.

The Shape of This Book

Throughout this book you will calculate trade-offs between time and money, and see that many of the decisions you make are suboptimal. It’s easy to make time choices poorly, and easier still to underestimate the long-term costs of prioritizing money. Just as analytics in sports have transformed how teams are built, the analytics that expose the flaws in time–money decision making—along with some understanding of the psychological and behavioral biases that drive us—will help reshape our choices about how we build our lives.

That doesn’t mean the choices are always easy and obvious. It has become clear to me in the course of my research that there’s no one right way of approaching time−money decisions. For example, I can’t say for certain whether Nicole made the right decision, only that, in general, data suggest that she would have been happier making a different one. We all want different things in life, and each of us wants different things at different times in our lives. The best choice will vary. And society prevents some people, like Usha, from making better choices. That’s where policy makers need to better recognize the value of time.

Still, we know that for a large number of people, at all economic strata and across many cultures, the best choices are not being made. Nothing less than our health and our happiness depends on reversing the nearly innate notion that time is money. It’s not. Money is time. This book will help you live that truth.

You will start in Chapter 1, “Time Traps and the Time Poverty Epidemic,” by delving into how pernicious time poverty can be for anyone, no matter their means.¹ You may be surprised by the costs, in the same way that you may be surprised when you see your cash spending laid out over the course of a year. You might think, I spend how much on coffee and dining out?! But unlike those accountings, you’ll also look at the startling effects of being time impoverished, from the profound (massively elevated stress) to the peculiar (less smiling).

Chapter 2, “Steps to Finding Time and Funding Time,” looks from the other shore at time affluence: the state of having and using time meaningfully. Who is time affluent? A few people. What do they do differently? For one, they spend more time eating. And how does time affluence change them? No spoiler: they’re much, much happier.

With a newfound understanding, you’ll turn to yourself and learn what you can do to recognize and avoid time traps that prevent you from achieving time affluence in chapter 3, “The Time-Affluence Habit.” All of us can become more time affluent without quitting our jobs or winning the lottery. You must commit to time affluence as you do to your physical health, which is the cumulative effect of many small behavior changes such as taking the stairs instead of an elevator and eating a salad for dinner more often than eating a cheeseburger. Similarly, time affluence involves small decisions that allow you to have more and better time, such as saying no more often and paying your way out of time-consuming, unrewarding tasks.

Time affluence, like financial affluence, also involves long-term planning. Chapter 4, “The Long View,” lays out strategies to help you plan for longer arcs of time, such as building a career or a family. It will never be enough to change your behavior once and stick with it. Demands change. Goals shift. Life happens. By planning and reevaluating your time choices, you can make decisions based on what you need at different stages.

Finally, you’ll turn your attention to other people who influence your time affluence. Chapter 5, “Systemic Change,” shows you how systems, from technology to public policy to human resources, work against a time-affluent existence. This chapter lays out intervention strategies to support a better balance between time and money for citizens and employees. Being time affluent is not only good for you as an individual, it is also good for institutions, which often are led by people who have no idea about the negative costs they’re accruing because of the time poverty they help perpetuate. It is my hope that you will share this chapter with people in HR and government who have the power to effect change and create time affluence.

In each chapter, you’ll get to apply what you’ve learned by using toolkits that contain activities and worksheets. These toolkits will help you to account for your time and plan ways to recuperate wasted time so that you can climb your way out of time poverty.

Are You a Taylor or a Morgan?

To get the most from the strategies and activities in this book, it helps to have a baseline understanding of how you think about time and money now. So pause and reflect on how you typically make trade-offs between time and money. Then read the descriptions of the two people that follow, and decide which one you most strongly identify with. It doesn’t have to be a perfect match. Just pick who, on average, most closely resembles your outlook and decision making.

• Taylor values time more than money. Taylor is willing to sacrifice money to have more time. For example, Taylor would rather work fewer hours and make less money than work more hours and make more money.
• Morgan values money more than time. Morgan is willing to sacrifice time to have more money. For example, Morgan would rather work more hours and make more money than work fewer hours and have more time.

I have presented this activity to tens of thousands of people. Just by knowing whether someone’s a Taylor or a Morgan, I can predict behavior with surprising accuracy. I know what kinds of flights they’ll choose and what kinds of gifts they value most. I can also predict how many hours they work, if they volunteer, their socializing behaviors, and even what kinds of jobs they’ll take. It’s not a magic trick; it’s only matching data to behaviors.² Now that I’ve done that you will benefit, because the strategies that follow in this book are based on rigorous studies from behavioral science that take into consideration whether you’re a Taylor or a Morgan.

So which are you? Spend time thinking about this question, and answer honestly. Calling yourself a Taylor because you think that’s more desirable means neither that you actually are a Taylor nor that you’re perfectly time affluent. It’s possible for you to become more time rich, no matter where you start from. And don’t suppose that there is a right answer or that you are inherently one or the other. Sure, some factors make us more inclined to be a Taylor or a Morgan, but it changes many times during our lives. I am a time researcher who understands all the data on time poverty, but if I’m honest with myself, at this point in my life I have to conclude that I am a Morgan.

Because you’re reading this book, I suspect you feel like a Morgan, but even if you identify as a Taylor you can benefit from practicing being more time smart. Studies show a wide range of benefits for those who focus on time over money. A time-centric mindset:

• Promotes happiness. People gain about half as much happiness from valuing time more than money as they would from being married.³ And this boost holds across demographics: it’s not explained by the amount of money people make, their educational background, the number of kids they have living at home, or their marital status.
• Promotes social connections. Focusing on time encourages us to put our social relationships first.⁴ Even fleeting social interactions—such as chatting with that person you always see on the bus—can play a surprisingly important role in reducing time stress and increasing happiness.⁵
• Promotes relationship satisfaction. Time-focused people have happier spouses and better sex lives than money-focused people. Couples who spend money on time-saving services spend more quality time together and derive greater happiness from their relationships. Time-saving purchases can even erase some of the unhappiness of having an unsupportive spouse. My research suggests that paying for a house cleaner might do as much for your marriage as learning how to be a better listener.⁶
• Promotes job satisfaction. People who value time work the same number of hours as people who value money. Ironically, those who value time often make more income than those who value money, because they are more likely to pursue careers they love and so they work with less stress, are more productive and creative, and are less likely to quit.⁷

Most important of all, being time-centric is prosocial, which is the word academics use to describe actions that benefit others.

When you are building your time-affluence toolkit, there could be a moment when it makes you feel guilty.⁸ You may think that time affluence is a nice way of saying privilege. You may think, I can afford to make decisions of time over money, and others can’t. I’m being selfish.

I’ve struggled with this myself. Friends and colleagues have teased me about my research making life easier for well-off people. Over time, these feelings have gone away, for two reasons. First, we have begun to amass data showing that time affluence positively affects people at all economic strata.⁹ Second, studies have emerged showing that the time affluence you gain can benefit everyone, because it puts you in a better position to help others.

When I have to say no, or when I am about to take a vacation, I try to think about the fact that freeing up my time unlocks energy that I can use to invest in the causes and people I care about—such as helping undergraduate students apply for PhD programs or spending time with my partner. This argument isn’t merely a hopeful anecdote; it’s based on rigorous data: when we feel we have enough time, we’re better able to serve others.

The most famous example of time affluence encouraging us to help others is the “Good Samaritan” study. In this study, researchers recruited theology students from Princeton, who completed a couple of questionnaires that—in typical psychology study fashion—were bogus, only a means to an end. The students were then asked to schlep across campus to a local elementary school to teach the story of the Good Samaritan, who helps a downtrodden stranger by the side of the road.

After completing the initial survey, some students were told that they were running late and that the class was already waiting for their arrival. Other students were told they had several minutes to get to class. On their walk across campus, all students encountered a man slumped over in an alley, moaning in pain. Most of the students who were told they had time stopped to help. But fewer than 10 percent of the students who were in a hurry helped the man; most didn’t even take notice.¹⁰

Other research—including some of my own—points to the same general conclusion: people who feel time rich are more likely to volunteer, engage with local politicians, and help out at their kids’ school.¹¹ People who feel time rich are also more likely to be eco-friendly by taking time out of their day to recycle and compost, and by buying energy-efficient appliances.¹²

Even reminding ourselves of the prosocial nature of time can help us make better time decisions. When we think about time-saving purchases as prosocial acts (“these purchases help me spend time with people I care about”), we feel less guilt and are more likely to follow through with those choices.¹³

In short, as you embark on the difficult challenge of prioritizing time over money, remind yourself that focusing on time isn’t only about you. By focusing on time, you can contribute to the happiness of family, friends, coworkers, your community, and the planet.

The secret to happier time is simple: prioritize time over money—one decision at a time.

As with many of life’s truths, it is easy to know and far more difficult to live. These pages aren’t filled with promises of quick and easy transformations. Most of the interventions I write about produce small (but noticeable) increases in time affluence and implementing and executing these changes takes careful thought.

I’m here to help, but living a time-affluent life is ultimately part of a new mindset and new discipline you will develop. The learning never really stops. I still struggle every day with decisions about time and money. I say yes too often when work opportunities arise where the personal costs outweigh the professional benefits. My partner often has to sit me down and say, “Ashley, you should really get out of this. It is not worth your time.”

My life is a work in progress. But my research and personal experiences have taught me that time is worth fighting for. None of us knows how much of it we have left. The present, this moment right now, is the best time to start to make small but meaningful changes so that you can be less stressed, enjoy your job more, and have healthier social relationships—so that you can, in short, be time rich and live your best life. Happiness is not the subject of this book. It’s the product.

Let’s get started.