You’d think people, just out of self-interest, would realize what’s good for them and come around.
—ROY BAUMEISTER
IT WAS SELF-INTEREST THAT led me to this field of study. I had reached a stage of my life where I could not continue doing what I was doing. I was anxious and irritable and perpetually exhausted. That’s not what I wanted my life to look like, and a vastly increased income had made it all worse, not better.
I was doing what I was told would make my life better: finding strategies to streamline my chores, using productivity journals, following a guaranteed exercise regime, and working very, very hard. I became more successful in my career, but that success was not accompanied by less stress and increased well-being. Instead, the more success I had, the more anxious I became.
I had spent years peeling back the layers to find out what had gone wrong. The next step was to devise a solution. Luckily, that wasn’t difficult once I learned how humans lived before James Watt first decided to tinker with a steam engine.
The revelation that emerged after all my research into neuroscience and evolutionary biology and primatology was that we know how to do this already. We’ve gotten a little off-track, but we can right the ship now.
As soon as the business community landed on efficiency as a pathway to greater profits, many other considerations were made a lower priority, and the same has occurred in our personal lives. As we have become more efficient, we have also become more fragile. Consider the difference between the goal of efficiency—adaptation to an existing environment—and the goal of resilience—the ability to adapt to changes in one’s environment.
“Resilient systems,” writes Roger Martin in the Harvard Business Review, “are typically characterized by the very features—diversity and redundancy, or slack—that efficiency seeks to destroy.” Essentially, we adapted to the environment that seemed ideal two hundred years ago, using systems that worked well in business when manufacturing powered our economies and millions of people worked in factories.
As our environment changed, we failed to adapt and instead doubled down on the strategy that seemed to work in 1880, although I would argue that it wasn’t particularly good for the majority of human beings at any point in history.
Now we’ve reached a precipice. The dark cloud that has loomed on the horizon for two centuries is now above our heads. It’s time to change.
What I thought was a personal problem is in fact more widespread. Many of my friends are experiencing the same frustration and anxiety, and so are their coworkers and their families. I am merely a reflection of the culture in which I was raised, as are we all.
Before we take any action, perhaps it’s best to be still for just a moment so we can look around and take stock. It’s important to have a clear (and honest) picture of where we stand. It’s possible we’re not truly aware of our own habits and behavior. Many people in the industrialized world have what I call “busyness delusion,” or the mistaken belief that we are busier than we really are. This may be difficult to accept, but many of us tend to think we work more hours than we actually do.
I understand if you are immediately put off by that sentence. I know I regularly feel exhausted at the end of my day and I’m barely able to drag myself on a walk with my dog, let alone start cooking a meal. Perhaps that’s why the meal kit industry, which began in 2007, grew so quickly that eleven years later, it was worth up to $5 billion. If you immediately thought, I really am working too many hours. It’s not in my head, I understand. I thought the same thing. Bear with me.
Since the mid-1960s we have conducted time-use surveys in the United States and therefore have a pretty accurate understanding of average work schedules. Men today work about twelve hours less per week than they did in the 1970s. Women work more, partly because many more women have full-time jobs than they did fifty years ago, but their unpaid labor has dropped by double digits.
When working mothers kept diaries for several weeks recently, they found they had much more time with their children than they thought. In fact, the total time spent working has not risen since the 1990s and parents in general are spending more hours with their children every week.
Still, many of us feel we are working too many hours and are constantly pressed for time. That’s why it’s crucial to determine just how your hours are being spent, so you can identify the source of your fatigue. A useful tool in this circumstance is a simple diary of some kind. If you keep track of your schedule in a detailed way for a couple weeks, you’ll be able to get a clear picture of how your time is spent. Before you address any of the other issues associated with addiction to efficiency and productivity, you must have an accurate assessment of how that addiction is influencing your habits and choices.
Regardless of whether you’re really working excessive hours or not, believing that you are short on time has real, damaging effects. Keeping your eye on the clock, even subconsciously, can lead to a sharp drop in performance. Research shows that when you are highly aware of time passing, it even makes you less compassionate toward others. What’s more, it can interfere with your ability to make rational decisions.
Because of that, feeling pressed for time can lead you to make bad choices about how to use your time. This can quickly become a vicious cycle. Having no clear understanding of how you spend your time can leave you feeling more overwhelmed than necessary, which can cause you to make decisions that lead to more stress and anxiety, which feeds the sense that you’re pressed for time, and you end up feeling more overwhelmed than necessary.
An understanding of how our hours are spent is known as “time perception.” People who have little time perception spend more time watching TV or lingering on social media sites, and they often report feeling overwhelmed.
On the other hand, people who have high time perception scores, who are very aware of their schedules, actually tend to set aside more time for leisure. These people allow for time to contemplate and reflect, and that gives them the sense that they have more time. This is not a vicious cycle, but a virtuous one. You may believe you can relax if you put in a few more hours and get ahead of your workload, but actually you’re more likely to reduce your stress level by taking a break.
Increasing my time perception has made a radical difference in my life. At the end of the day, I feel accomplished because I’m fully aware of all that I’ve done, but I also feel relaxed because I know I spent a couple hours sitting on my porch reading magazines.
This one small change—becoming more aware of what you do between waking and sleeping—could have a cascade of benefits. As I mentioned, it may leave you with a sense that you have more time to take care of both your needs and your desires and, as it turns out, that feeling is better for you than a raise in pay. A study in 2009 showed that even after controlling for income, if you make someone believe they have time to spare, they feel healthier and happier.
You’ll notice I said “make someone believe they have free time.” That describes a feeling, not necessarily a tangible reality. No one in the experiment actually found more free time; participants just felt they had more. And that feeling can come from keeping track of your hours, without changing a thing! That happens not by knuckling down and working more, but by taking more breaks. Counterintuitive, but perfectly true.
Obviously, there are basic needs that must be met. Some people have to work several jobs in order to keep a roof over their heads and food on the table. It has not been long since I was in that situation, and I would have laughed at someone who told me either to lean in to my work or lean out. I was in fight-or-flight mode. For some, of course, a sense of time affluence may be out of reach.
However, if you are not scrambling to pay for water, food, clothing, and shelter, you might discover that increasing your time perception (becoming aware of how you spend your time) will bring greater happiness than a higher salary. And in any case, once you venture into the upper-income brackets, higher pay is often associated with a lower sense of well-being and less enjoyment at work. That is one of the ironies of our current system: Pursuing higher salaries can bring less happiness, not more.
We work long hours in order to make more money, not realizing that once we’ve met our fundamental needs, it is leisure time that increases happiness, not necessarily extra cash. If you have time to relax and you’re not using it, that’s a serious issue. It may be you’re experiencing unnecessary stress if you think there aren’t enough hours in the day and you’re wrong.
Begin by keeping a diary and tracking your activities. Be honest! If you spent a half hour on Twitter, note that down. If you discover that you spent twenty minutes looking at shoes online, write that down too. After all, no one will see this diary but you, and the more honest you are, the more helpful this exercise will be.
Once you have a clear idea of how much you’re working, how many hours are devoted to social media, and how much time you spend on leisure, you can begin to ask yourself some important questions. For example, How much time do I want to spend on social media or email? Do I want to exercise every day? How much time should it take to eat dinner? Use the answers to these questions to create guidelines for yourself.
I spent three weeks keeping a diary of my time in order to get a clear picture of my habits. To do this, I simply bought a notebook and divided my day into half-hour chunks. Every few hours, I would write down what I’d been doing. At the end of three weeks, I realized that I spent about two and a half hours on email every day, and a couple more hours reading Facebook posts and tweets. Weekly, I spent more than three hours idly shopping on the internet.
I’m only awake for about sixteen hours, so it was a shock to discover that more than a third of my day was spent doing mostly useless things online. Instead of reading a book while I sat in waiting rooms or on the train, I would refresh my Instagram feed and “like” my friends’ posts. That’s not how I wanted to spend my day, and, frankly, I’d had no idea that’s what I was doing with my time.
I decided that I wanted to spend no more than ninety minutes a day on email and social media. (Since then, I’ve pared that down to an hour.) In order to accomplish that, I knew I’d have to make drastic changes in my habits. So I created two ideal schedules, one for gym days and one for the rest. I work from home when I’m not traveling, so weekends don’t have the same significance to me. You might find it more useful to create a schedule for weekdays and another for weekends.
I asked myself, What’s the ideal use of my time on a daily basis? I created a list of the things I wanted to do every day, plus the things I had to do, then spread them over my sixteen waking hours. Here’s what those schedules look like:
7:00—wake/take care of the dog/dress
7:30—walk the dog
8:30—gym
9:30—shower
9:45—meditate
10:00—email and social media
10:30—write/work
12:30—lunch
1:00—short walk
1:30—write/work
3:30—free time and meditate
5:30—walk the dog
6:30—dinner
7:30—free time
9:00—bath or self-care
10:00—bed
7:00—wake/take care of the dog/dress
7:30—walk the dog
8:00—meditate
8:30—house chores and errands
9:30—email and social media
10:00—write
12:30—lunch
1:00—short walk
1:30—write
3:30—free time and meditate
5:30—walk the dog
6:30—dinner
7:30—free time
9:00—bath or self-care
10:00—bed
These schedules are very flexible. Often, I have to do interviews or meet with friends, and that means my day changes. There’s no point in agonizing over whether I’ve stuck to the timeline or not because I don’t see these schedules as restrictive but supportive. They are merely suggestions. If I spend forty minutes on social media some days instead of thirty, I don’t sweat it, and my dog doesn’t always get three walks a day. (Sometimes she gets four.)
Obviously, if I’m traveling, these schedules change quite a bit. And yet I’ve found that the basic underpinnings remain the same. I nearly always find time for the activities listed here, even if they occur at very different times. This is an ideal schedule, remember, and ideal is rarely the same as real.
Since creating these schedules, I check email once an hour and generally limit my social media time to one hour a day. Sometimes a couple hours go by before I realize that I haven’t looked at my inbox, which was unheard of in past years. On weekends, I often forget about email completely after I check it in the morning. I can’t even describe how liberating that is, and how relaxing. I installed an app on my phone that limits my access when it’s turned on. If I start the app and then try to unlock my phone, it says “Really??” and I quickly put it down.
I printed my schedules and hung copies in my office. After following them for a few weeks, I was surprised to discover that I had plenty of time to do everything I wanted to do, with hours to spare. It was a powerful moment for me. When I truly understood that my work was not out of control or unmanageable, a tangible wave of relief swept through my body. I had enough time!