Time Well Spent: A New Way to Value Time Could Change Your Life
Calculating the subjective value of your time reveals where small changes in your weekly schedule can significantly boost life satisfaction and well-being.
Topics
Jon Krause/theispot.com
When individuals engage in fulfilling activities outside of work, they perform better on the job, but simply encouraging work-life balance doesn’t help with hour-by-hour time management. A new tool for measuring the subjective value of time for individuals as it varies across their weekly activities provides the granular data insights that can help shift nonwork activities to those that are of greater benefit to well-being. The article explains how leaders can make this a team activity.
Hour by hour, how we spend our time adds up to how we spend our lives — and for many of us, the sum can feel unsatisfying. Cultural attitudes embedded in adages like “time is money” spur us to prioritize efficiency and to look for ways to condense and consolidate to maximize how much we can get done. But which activities should we really prioritize if we want to craft our best lives at work and in life? We lack a way to assess our time spent from the perspective of the value we personally derive from it. We need such a measure if we are to make the best allocations of our time and build more satisfying lives.
Given mounting evidence that happiness and satisfaction in life can yield high performance and engagement at work, the question of how we spend our time to shape fulfilling lives is ever more salient for leaders and their teams.1 If we want to consider that question rigorously and begin to make changes in our daily activities, we need better insight into the subjective value of our time — our experience of what we are doing — rather than the productive value of our time, which we’re already pretty good at assessing. While that has defied measurement in the past, our recent research drawing on detailed time-and-activity reporting from thousands of individuals has yielded new tools and metrics that quantify the subjective value each person derives from time spent. This approach has enabled research participants to make small but meaningful changes in how they spend their time, improving their life satisfaction.
Our goal is to explain how you can maximize the subjective value you derive from how you spend your time — and how you can extend this practice to your team. That may not require major change: Shifting one or two hours a week to a higher-value activity, or recognizing how a low-value activity can be enriched, can make a big difference in how you experience your quality of life.
We have developed a framework and tools to help you do exactly that. In this article, we’ll explain the underlying research and walk through how anyone can use our approach to gain insight into whether they are spending their time in ways that maximize personal value for them.
References
1. P.B. Lester, E. Diener, and M. Seligman, “Top Performers Have a Superpower: Happiness,” MIT Sloan Management Review 63, no. 3 (spring 2022): 57-61.
2.C.M. Christensen, “How Will You Measure Your Life?” Harvard Business Review 88, nos. 7-8 (July-August 2010): 46-51; and C.M. Christensen, J. Allworth, and K. Dillon, “How Will You Measure Your Life?” (New York: Harper Business, 2012).
3. L. Nash and H. Stevenson, “Success That Lasts,” Harvard Business Review 82, no. 2 (February 2004): 102-109; and L. Nash and H. Stevenson, “Just Enough: Tools for Creating Success in Your Work and Life” (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 2004).
4.R. Strack, S. Dyrchs, and A. Bailey, “Use Strategic Thinking to Create the Life You Want,” Harvard Business Review, Dec. 5, 2023, https://hbr.org.
5. E. Diener, E.M. Suh, R.E. Lucas, et al., “Subjective Well-Being: Three Decades of Progress,” Psychological Bulletin 125, no. 2 (March 1999): 276-302; E. Diener and M.E.P. Seligman, “Very Happy People,” Psychological Science 13, no. 1 (January 2002): 81-84; and R.F. Baumeister, J.D. Campbell, J.I. Krueger, et al., “Does High Self-Esteem Cause Better Performance, Interpersonal Success, Happiness, or Healthier Lifestyles?” Psychological Science in the Public Interest 4, no. 1 (May 2003): 1-44.
6. J.R. Hackman and G.R. Oldham, “Motivation Through the Design of Work: Test of a Theory,” Organizational Behavior and Human Performance 16, no. 2 (August 1976): 250-279; J.R. Hackman and G.R. Oldham, “Development of the Job Diagnostic Survey,” Journal of Applied Psychology 60, no. 2 (April 1975): 159-170; A. Wrzesniewski, C. McCauley, P. Rozin, et al., “Jobs, Careers, and Callings: People’s Relations to Their Work,” Journal of Research in Personality 31, no. 1 (March 1997): 21-33; and B.D. Rosso, K.H. Dekas, and A. Wrzesniewski, “On the Meaning of Work: A Theoretical Integration and Review,” Research in Organizational Behavior 30 (2010): 91-127.