What’s more, this happiness increase doesn’t account for the multiplying effect of spending your newly freed-up time in happier ways. If grocery shopping took 2 hours per week, you now have an extra 104 hours—more than four days—to fill with happiness-producing activities like volunteering, exercising, socializing, or engaging in other hobbies.

Find Time to Meet New People and Help Others The benefits of having high-quality social connections are similar to those of getting regular exercise and not smoking.23 Even fleeting social interactions with strangers—like chatting with the person sitting next to you on a flight—improves mood.24 The social interaction of volunteering not only makes

If you are still stuck about how much slack time to schedule, you can use your calendar mindset to decide how much to schedule. There are two calendar mindsets: Clock-time people Event-time people (You can identify your calendar mindset using a questionnaire in the toolkit at the end of this chapter.) Clock-time people use schedules that are

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.

It didn’t matter where they lived or how much money they had in the present; financial uncertainty growing up led to a higher chronic focus on money as adults.

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.

The key to avoiding mere urgency is to be disciplined about pro-time. Don’t miss the scheduled time, and track what you get done. If you lose hours because of an unexpected expense of time, make it up as soon as possible. Follow through—even if you are the only person who will know you did.

One way to beat back bad habits is by asking the small why question: Why am I doing this? Be deliberate. It might help to say it out loud to yourself. Follow up with other questions: What am I hoping to accomplish? Is it truly adding value to my day? And most crucially, Could I use this time for something more fulfilling? Answer as honestly as you

For most of us, the idea of trading cash for time doesn’t even cross our minds. This is largely because it’s hard to measure time’s value.44 Even if we’re making a bad trade-off between time and money—such as driving two miles out of our way to save 10 cents per gallon on gas—it doesn’t feel like a bad choice. That’s because we know we have more