6:00

Let's dig into the research on why

6:02

people like me overschedule themselves and become

6:05

too disciplined, while others feel

6:07

like the days, months, and years are kind

6:09

of slipping away. I

6:14

think everyone should go to therapy. I don't

6:16

want to. I'm not a millennial. I

6:19

am. My

6:22

name is Ashley Willens, and I'm an

6:24

assistant professor of business administration at the

6:26

Harvard Business School, and my research focuses

6:29

on time, money, and happiness. Ashley

6:31

Willens is a colleague of mine at the

6:33

Harvard Business School and the author of Time

6:35

Smart, How to Reclaim Your Time and Live

6:37

a Happier Life. You know,

6:40

a lot of research is research, and we

6:42

study the things that we struggle with, and

6:44

as a happiness researcher, I was doing all

6:46

of this academic research when I started my

6:48

job five years ago on the

6:50

importance of prioritizing time for happiness,

6:52

for personal relationships. Meanwhile,

6:55

my relationship was totally

6:59

falling apart. Ashley

7:01

studies one side of the time problem, the

7:03

one that busy strivers face, those who try

7:05

to make the most out of every waking

7:07

moment. And you know who you are. She's

7:11

a fellow happiness researcher whose work

7:13

covers time poverty, a term

7:15

she uses to describe the modern epidemic of people

7:17

with too much to do and not enough time

7:19

to do it. Ashley

7:22

walked us through her concept of time

7:24

traps, the traps that motivate us to

7:26

spend almost all of our time on

7:28

work and productivity. So

7:30

I want to figure out what explains this and

7:32

what to do about it. So

7:39

I had this partner of 10 years. We

7:42

were going to move to Boston, start

7:44

a new life together from Vancouver, and

7:46

this person left me in Boston after

7:48

three weeks because they said that I

7:50

was spending all my time in work

7:52

and that there was no relationship to

7:54

be there for. And

7:57

meanwhile, I was giving

7:59

thoughts. It

10:01

would be kind of odd, almost intrusive, maybe

10:03

irrelevant to say, how do you make

10:05

your money? Right. And

10:08

yet you're suggesting that this is really not

10:10

about money. It's really about time. It's really

10:12

about the fact that we're so busy, which

10:15

is a way to show ourselves and others

10:17

that we're highly in demand. And so the

10:20

root of this problem philosophically, well,

10:22

is philosophical, isn't it? Because it's the philosophy

10:24

of how we value ourselves, right? Isn't that

10:26

the root of what we're talking about here?

10:29

Yeah, this doesn't happen in European

10:31

countries like Italy, where actually

10:34

it's the opposite. People who have

10:36

more vacations seem to be doing

10:38

something right in life. I've

10:40

talked to so many colleagues about my

10:42

findings and they say things

10:44

like, well, I thought, you know, when

10:46

my kids moved out and went to

10:49

college that I would finally get around

10:51

to doing those hobbies that I always

10:53

had wanted to do. And

10:56

instead I just filled those additional hours

10:58

with work and I don't

11:01

know why. And then

11:03

we would have these conversations about how

11:05

productivity has become our habit. And

11:07

we don't even know how

11:10

to enjoy our free time. We've

11:13

lost this habit and

11:15

they asked me, how do I start

11:17

to pursue a passion

11:21

so that I don't fill every

11:23

spare moment I have with work?

11:26

Because that's all I've been doing. And

11:28

it is like we have to almost

11:30

retrain ourselves to have leisure

11:32

as a habit so that our defaults

11:35

are not work

11:37

emails, work meetings. But

11:39

instead our defaults

11:41

are family, friends,

11:44

exercise, active leisure

11:46

activities. And we

11:48

really, especially in North American culture,

11:50

need to be pushing against work

11:53

as our default mode of operating.

11:55

For happiness reasons. For happiness. Yeah, for

11:57

happiness reasons. Let me get back to

11:59

you. This

16:01

episode is brought to you by PepsiCo. From

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Quaker Oats to Lay's Potato Chips, PepsiCo

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strives to provide food that is grown

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well, made well, and creates more

16:10

smiles. Visit pepsico.com and

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search fans of food to learn

16:15

more about the Seed to Smile journey. For

16:26

my last book, I was interviewing this woman who was

16:29

doing what you were doing five years ago at the beginning of

16:31

your career, but never stopped. And

16:34

she's confessing to me that she's got

16:36

a cordial relationship at best with her

16:38

husband. You know, she doesn't know her adult

16:40

kids very well. She drinks too much. She hasn't

16:42

been to the gym in a long time. And furthermore,

16:44

that her young colleagues don't trust her decision making because it's

16:47

not as crisp as it once was. She's like, what

16:49

do I do? And I said, you don't need to tell

16:51

me what to do. You need to use your time

16:53

differently, you know, than you are. And

16:55

I said, why don't you do what you know you

16:57

need to do? And she kind

16:59

of stops and says, I

17:02

guess I prefer to be special than happy. How

17:05

much of that is going around? At

17:09

least she admitted it. I feel like

17:11

something that's very difficult is that to

17:14

have this realization, right, you have

17:16

to understand what you

17:18

care about and want, like truly

17:20

what you value. Maybe for

17:23

this woman that you talked to, she

17:26

did truly value being the richest

17:28

and having this productive

17:30

life more than she

17:32

valued gaining or improving in these other

17:34

areas of life. And she seems like

17:37

she's actually somewhat self-aware about that. My

17:40

economist colleagues say, write down a model, Ashley, write

17:42

down a model of exactly how I should spend

17:45

my time to be happy. I say, I can't

17:47

do that because I don't know what you value.

17:50

So for us to be spending time

17:52

in the so-called right ways, we have

17:54

to know what we truly value. So

17:56

we have to do that self-awareness reflective

17:59

component. fans

34:00

of food.