It’s because time poverty doesn’t necessarily arise from a mismatch between the hours we have and the hours we need. It results from how we think about and value those hours. It’s as much psychological as it is structural. We might not be working more hours, but we are making decisions to work at all hours.15 We are ceaselessly connected.16 It’s

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

Nothing less than our health and our happiness depends on reversing the nearly innate notion that time is money. It’s not. Money is time. This book will help you live that truth.

Step 4: Fund Time You can find time largely for free. It costs no money to cancel one optional meeting a week and take a walk instead. But there is a more direct way to subtract negative, time-impoverishing experiences, and that’s to buy your way out. You can fund time. The startup community uses this tactic well. Venture capitalists (VCs) advise

We’ve all heard the saying, “Money doesn’t buy happiness,” and, empirically, it’s true. Research shows that money protects against sadness but doesn’t buy joy.29 Once we make enough money to pay our bills, save for the future, and have at least some fun on the weekend, making more does little for our happiness. In data from 1.7 million people in

One approach to time affluence isn’t better than the other; the better system is the one that matches your mindset. In either case, you need to follow through on your best-laid plans, whether those plans are set by the clock or by the event. Know who you are, and start planning (or roughly sketching out) your approach.

Put simply, we can account for money, but there’s no accounting for time. If there were an accounting for time—if we could say what our time is worth—it would be easier to make time-affluent decisions. An accounting for time would make it easier to believe that time-focused decisions carry greater value than the money we might miss out on.

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

Three Activities to Build Time Affluence After reflecting on your typical time-use activities, commit to trying three time-affluence strategies, including finding time, funding time, and reframing time. Finding time. This activity involves removing your most negative and unproductive time-use activities or injecting these activities (like