Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life

No matter what time affluence looks like for you, the happiest and most time affluent among us are deliberate with their free time. Working toward time affluence is about recognizing and overcoming the time traps in our lives and intentionally carving out happier and more meaningful moments each day.

Although most of us are time poor, the (working) wealthy feel more time poor.35 This makes sense in part because their higher wages mean that, literally, their time is more valuable than those who earn less (each hour worked earns them more money). The increased value of time makes it feel more precious and scarce.

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. Coll

Prioritizing Time in Our Everyday Lives This chapter and chapter 4 are designed to help you internalize the good practices I’ve laid out in previous chapters and build a time-affluence regimen that you can live by. These strategies are designed to help you walk the talk when it comes to treating time as the valuable, precious resource it is. To mak

One way to prevent this is to allow for, or even plan, slack time, which is extra time left between appointments that can be used as a buffer or as downtime. Some researchers advocate rough scheduling, under which you don’t schedule time with friends for 7 p.m., instead planning to meet “after work.” Or you’ll do gardening “sometime Sunday morning”

If your answers suggest that you truly are disconnecting from anxiety and stress, or that you get genuine pleasure out of the activity, then keep doing it for a bit. Enjoy leveling up on Candy Crush or looking at the latest cute stuff your friends’ baby did on the internet. It still may be useful to write down how much time you think would be good

You can also find time by adding to your positive experiences. Is there a positive activity (either productive or unproductive) that you want to do more of? For me, reading and listening to music are two of my happiest experiences, so I am purposeful about filling my downtime with those activities. Even a few minutes of your happiest or most purpos

Ironically, perpetual busyness undermines the goals that we set out to achieve with all our busyness in the first place.

It’s the important activities that we defer when mere urgency surfaces (clean up résumé; write a project proposal; call mother). Clock-time types can set aside an hour for pro-time.