Why some people almost always find time to pursue their interests, even in the busiest of schedules?

There is enough research done to prove that

“We have more leisure time today, than what we did a few years back.”

As a matter of fact, John Maynard Keynes, a renowned economist, predicted in 1930 that within a century, we would work only 15 hours a week.

Sure enough, we saw the rise of technology and machinery. Finally, the messiah had arrived and would help us liberate ourselves from the daily drudgery of time-consuming hard work.

However, between you and me, do you really feel that you enough leisure time in the day? I mean, we can never get around to reading that book or learning that language.

You are not alone because there is also enough research done to show that most people perceive that they are busier than ever.

Chances are that you are a part of the large community of people who feel more burdened than ever and can’t figure out how the day ended so quickly.

In all this chaotic busyness of our lives, how are we supposed to carve out time for ourselves? How are we supposed to find time that makes us happier, that allows us to pursue what we love doing?

Ashley Whillans, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School, also wondered the same.

The good news is that there are people who have found the satisfactory answer and thanks to Ashley, we have the research to prove that they got it right.

Ashley researches the trade-offs we make between time and money – and says we often get those wrong. Consequently, we end up being more busy and less happy.

In this article, I present Ashley’s findings on how to use our hard-earned to buy ourselves more personal time. Additionally, I extend the conversation to show how we can make the most of this newly available time by engaging ourselves in happier pursuits.

A day in the life of a Busy Homo Sapien

Brigid Schulte is the author of the best-selling book Overwhelmed: Work, Love, And Play When No One Has The Time.

In her research, she spent time with working mothers, working employees and other prominent time-use researchers in her quest to understand how we spend our time.

“Busyness is now the social norm that people feel they must conform to or risk being outcasts.”

Brigid Schulte

Ashley’s research agrees with the above statement. We have come to think of busyness as a status symbol.

Between our families and careers, we constantly feel the need to do more and more, even when it is not required. A constant need to prove our self-reliance and self-sufficiency also contributes to this mentality.

Especially, in middle class households, we love to worship the “Altar of Overwork”, as Schulte calls it, in a race to become busier than thou. Being so overwhelmed that we don’t have time to spend for ourselves has become a badge of honour.

One of the primary reasons for this attitude is also the “Ideal Worker Syndrome.”

The best way to understand what this means is to see Navin Polyshetty’s viral workplace video called Half Day, where he asks important questions like:

“Why is staying late at work considered a virtue? Why are we rewarding and glorifying it?”

If you haven’t watched it, go and do it now. I will wait for you to come back. If you have watched it before, watch it again.

Powerful stuff, isn’t it?

It’s important for us as well as the company that employs us to understand the fact that there is absolutely no correlation between time spent with our bums on an office chair and our productivity.

However, not all the reasons for our busyness are bad or self-inflicted. Some are quite justified.

There are some people who are uncertain about their financial future and they trade their time (become busy) for more money. The best example are our Uber drivers, for whom any time not spent being busy on the job results in a direct monetary loss.  

But suffice it to say that the number of people with justified busyness is far less than the number of people with unjustified busyness.

At some point, we need to ask ourselves the all-important question:

“Do I really need the bragging rights of being busy enough to live in a debilitating whirlwind of activity?”

The answer is no and the sooner we realize this, the earlier we can get out of the habits that contaminate our experience of our time and life.

Can money buy happiness?

Didn’t Benjamin Franklin settle the debate once and for all when he categorically said that money can’t buy us real internal happiness?

Apparently not.

In her quest to find how we can reclaim our leisure time, Harvard professor Ashley Whillans studied in detail the time-money trade-offs that we make.

In the results of her study, she found evidence to prove that money can indeed allow us to buy real happiness.

“My research really focuses on using the money to buy ourselves out of negative experiences. This means subtracting negative minutes from our day, subtracting time that we spend stuck in traffic, subtracting housecleaning and so on.

Any way that we spend our money that might save us time has reliable and positive effects on the happiness that we get from our days and consequently, our lives.”

Ashley Willhans

If we keep a diary of how we have spent each minute of our day, we might be surprised to see the high number of minutes spent in doing mundane, time-killing, zero value-adding tasks. Additionally, some tasks contribute negatively by making you feel stressed. Anyone with any sort of driving experience in India can vouch for that.

So, the first step is to make a list of such tasks.

Once you have a list, you can then start to subtract these tasks from your lives. One way to do it is by outsourcing them.

This is a common practice in the start-up world where usually the VCs or Angel investors advice young founders to outsource tasks so that they can focus on work and strategy that really matters the most.

“Anything that you can have done for less than x dollars per hour, you should hire it out and not do it yourself.”

Not just the start-up founders, this is an advice which makes sense for all of us. Think of it this way

“If I don’t like it, it causes me stress and if I think my time is worth more than what it costs me to outsource, then I should. Otherwise I am making a sub-optimal decision.”

Some people might argue here that they would rather save that money for their future and sacrifice their personal leisure time for it. I don’t argue with that approach at all. It makes sense.

However, we don’t need to do anything drastic. It’s all about taking small actions and thinking about whether there’s anything we can outsource that we really don’t like, that stresses us out a lot, that we can afford.

Professor Ashley shows in her research conclusive evidence of the fact that paying to outsource housework or to enjoy a shorter commute can have an outsized impact on happiness and relationships.

So, what we are effectively doing is flipping that Benjamin Franklin’s adage on its head and saying, “Well, if time is money, maybe also we can think that money can buy a happier time.”

A day in the life of a relatively less busy Homo Sapien

Now we know how all those people always manage to find time to pursue what they love, even if it seems like they have a stressful and busy day job.

So, we earned ourselves some free time in a day.   

This might not necessarily be a good thing automatically because not knowing what to do with the free time you have is equally stressful and bad. Going back and finding more mundane, time-killing and zero-value adding tasks to pass this newly available time would be worse.

Here is a simple trick to ensure you make the most of your free time:

“Find and identify things that make you happy. Use your leisure time to maximize that positive experiences.”

Suppose you are someone who gets happy by reading books. Subtract the negative experience of driving by travelling via cabs and maximize the positive experience of reading by going through more content in that time you earned yourself.

“Use your earned leisure time by investing it in new experiences.”

Usually, one of the major complaints of a person with a busier lifestyle is their inability to try out new things. Something that they always wanted to do, but could never get to because of their busy schedules.

Well, now you have the time to do it.

“Just the simple act of thinking about giving up money to have more free time seems to make people plan their time a little bit better. If I’m going to incur this cost to have this free time, then I’m going make sure I really enjoy the free time that I have.”

Happiest people use their money to buy time.  

So, spend more of your hard-earned money to buy yourself out of negative experiences and buy into more positive experiences.