Finding Joy When You Have Limited Free Time

0:01The most successful leaders, experts, and bestsellers would tell you the same thing. There's no expiration date on growth. That's why Southern New Hampshire University offers more than 80 online graduate programs. With career-focused courses and low online tuition, SNHU's master's degrees are designed for your next move. If you're choosing between a few schools, SNHU is a clear frontrunner. It's flexible, affordable, and career-focused. Progress doesn't happen standing still. Take one step forward at snhu.edu slash idea.

0:47I'm Alison Beard.

0:48Leslie Perlow:And I'm Adi Ignatius, and this is the HPR IdeaCast.

0:58Adi, I'm going to ask you a personal question. Do you have a lot of joy in your life?

1:04Leslie Perlow:That is a very personal question. Well, let's talk about professional lives, at least. I was editor-in-chief of Harvard Business Review for 16 years. I recently took on a new role as editor-at-large. And that was because I needed something different in my professional life. In the past, I wanted to be a manager and have lots of direct reports and lots of responsibility. And I realized that joy in my professional life, you know, as I've gotten older, really depended not on those trappings of power, but on being able to do creative work. So, yeah, in my professional life, I definitely have more joy these days.

1:39That's very good to hear. And I'm also impressed that you can find joy at work. Our guest today has done a lot of research with very busy, very ambitious, very successful people. And she finds, maybe as you did when you were an editor-in-chief managing a whole organization, that it's sometimes difficult to find joy at work. And so you really do need to do it in your free time. And it's important, even when you're sort of at the stage of your career where you're climbing the ranks and definitely prioritizing work, you need at all stages to have three pillars for a satisfying life. One is achievement, 100%.

2:19Also meaning, you know, the purpose you find in your friends, your family, and your job. But then also joy. You need it at all times to truly feel satisfied.

2:30Leslie Perlow:So I'm wondering, you know, is there a business case for why people need to seek and find joy? Absolutely. Because when you do find joy in the limited free time that you have, you become a better person at work. You're a more thoughtful, caring manager. You are a higher performer. You are more productive. It's definitely a virtuous cycle. So she studied 1 ,500 Harvard Business School alumni using a tool called the Life Matrix that she developed, which all of us can check out. And she dug into how all of these people who are absolutely high flyers in their careers found joy in their very limited free time.

3:15And there are five ways you can do it. And she's going to explain all of them. Leslie Perlow is a professor at Harvard Business School and co-author of the HBR article, how the busiest people find joy, here's my conversation with her.

3:31Let's start with the problem. This might seem like a silly question, but why is it so important, especially for all those high achievers out there listening, to be interested in finding more joy? Joy is super important for us to have in our day-to-day lives, more important than I think many of us recognize. What we found is that you actually need some amount of joy, meaning, and achievement at all stages of your lives. And if you take my students at the Harvard Business School, they tend to think that they're going to have achievement first, and then meaningfulness, and later in life, joy. But actually, it's incredibly important for you to find joy for your own well-being.

4:10And we also find that the more joy you find in your life outside of work, the more you'll find value in your work and bring a more productive self into the workplace as well. Okay. So your definition of joy is what? Positive emotion in the moment. And it is important to us that it's in the moment. It's not this broader sort of catch-all phrase of happiness, but more that you're currently in the moment experiencing this positive emotion. How do you measure that? Because I imagine it must be really subjective. You know, what generates positive emotion for you might not for me. Can you also find joy in the same things that give you achievement and meaning?

4:51How do you quantify any of this? So that's an excellent question. And if you even step back and think about how do you even evaluate your time, right? We know to think about if our time is productive. Are we efficient or effective? And there's tons of research on how to better manage your time. But are you living your best life? Are you using your time in the best ways? And that's a hard question for us to actually answer ourselves. And so what we've done is build a tool that actually has you walk through all the activities that you do in the course of your week and ask you to both assess how important are joy, achievement, and meaning to you as well as how much joy, achievement, and meaningfulness do you feel that you derive from each of these activities.

5:37So it's self-reported, the positive emotion that I might be feeling in any particular activity. Absolutely. It's self-reported, but it's then also compared across your different activities. We also ask you about your aggregate or your perception of joy in your life. At large, we have a set of questions where we first start by asking you to understand what's your what we call your jam type, joy, achievement, and meaningfulness type. And people can be dominant in any one of the three or any two or all three. It's important to understand to start with what matters to you. Because at the core, what we're really trying to do is build a way for people to assess, are you living your life consistent with your values?

6:20And so we want to understand what are your values. And then we want to understand how are you actually living your weekly 168 hours. How much joy, achievement, and meaningfulness matter to affect what is the minimum that you need, as well as life stage, what's going on. There's a variety of factors that are affecting those minimums. And what we're doing in the Life Matrix is providing you information about how you are relative to others in terms of meeting. What's the minimum for you? So your original study group using this tool that the article is based on is a group of Harvard Business School graduates who have both demanding careers and families, correct?

6:57Yeah. By definition, we just looked if you were in the full-time workforce and had kids. What we found is that this group, and it is a highly ambitious group, work an average of 50 hours a week and have another 12 hours a week of caretaking or chore responsibilities or what we call non-work responsibilities. Yeah. And so for these sort of high-powered executives, what did you find in terms of their desire for joy, achievement, and meaning, and how well they were living up to those expectations? First of all, we find that in your work or your non-work responsibilities, we find that joy is much more limited in those realms of your life, but the place where people find joy is in their free time or their discretionary time.

7:44We also find that even though they have about 26 hours a week of discretionary time, only 10 hours or so are actually joyful for people. This is the discretionary time, right? So you have 26 hours in addition to all your work, your sleep, your hygiene, your non-work responsibilities, but it might be spent scrolling social media or sitting in front of the TV or whatever you're choosing to do with that time, which often unfortunately doesn't bring people nearly as much joy as it could. We found that they spent their discretionary time often doing things that didn't provide them value. And it's not as surprising it didn't necessarily provide them achievement and meaningfulness, but joy is something that people do find in their free time.

8:29And so what it raised for us is are there ways for people to actually find more joy on average? The crux of your article is this idea that it's really not necessarily about finding more free time, you know, in a busy life when you have so many professional and personal obligations. It's actually about making more of that limited free time that you have because people aren't tending to do that well right now. I think that's such an important point. Certainly resonates with me even, right? How much time you spend complaining about, I'm always at work. I have all these responsibilities. Like we have so many demands on our time.

9:08And so we say, oh, I just don't have enough free time. But the huge insight that we found in this research was actually you should stop complaining. I should stop complaining. And we should start making more of the time we have. Because actually, you'll be way better off if you just take advantage of the free time you do have. And it doesn't matter, even for people who work a lot, people have a lot of outside responsibilities. Just making an hour or two more of the free time you have more joyful will have a profound effect both on your life, on your well-being, but actually also on the you that you bring to work.

9:42Yeah. I mean, just anecdotally, oftentimes I think to myself like, oh, well, I really only have an hour and then I find myself scrolling social media. But if I had spent that hour, I don't know, calling a friend or even doing a crossword, I feel like I might feel better after that hour. So let's dig into the various ways that you can improve the limited free time that you do have and find more joy in it. Just at a high level, you know, what are some of the big buckets of advice that you would give to people? So we found five key opportunities for people to find more joy. One is simply doing things with others.

10:26We found for every activity that we were tracking that if you did it with others versus alone, on average, you would be better off doing it with others. One of my favorite findings about this is watching TV. The more time you spend watching TV is negatively correlated with life satisfaction. But actually, if you watch TV with others, it suddenly becomes positively correlated to life satisfaction. So simply thinking about what are you doing and with whom are you doing it is one of the important takeaways for us. That does make me feel better because I do like watching TV, but I generally do it with my husband or my kids.

11:02Keep on doing that, definitely. The second thing we found is that, of course, there's going to be activities that you do alone, but it's really important to make those solo activities things that you're doing that are active versus passive. Back to this, you know, sitting alone, watching TV or scrolling social media are particularly negative for your life satisfaction. Doing things that are active are much, much better. Okay. We also find that, and I think we're all guilty of this, you know, giving advice to our kids or to ourselves that, you know, you should do the things that are perceived by others to be valuable.

11:38But actually, we find you should worry less about doing the things that other people find valuable in their free time, the things that other people drive joy, and do the ones that you really drive joy from. So our favorite example, and we talk about this in the article, is if you really like cleaning your closets, you should clean your closets instead of doing a set of other activities that people are telling you to do. And I have to say, I've started sharing that in some of our exec ed classes. and the number of people who truly find joy in cleaning their closet is just awesome. Yeah, I regret that is not something I find joy in.

12:13Yeah. Sorry, Marie Kondo. Okay. Next bucket. Another thing we find is that you really should diversify the activities that you're doing in your free time. That there is a point for all activities at which there starts to be a declining return in terms of the value you're deriving. And I think that's probably because at some point it goes from being something joyous and something that you're really engaged in because you just want, you know, it's just a spontaneous, it's a free time activity and it becomes more of a responsibility or a project or a chore. You can play too much chess because it goes from just being something that you're doing because it brings you joy to something that you get very competitive and you feel a real need to win.

12:56And it becomes more achievement focused. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. And so diversifying your activities. And then we also find you should, on the margin, be protecting your time because it's such a slippery slope. It's so easy to spend that extra marginal hour at work versus at home. And if you can use that marginal hour at home and, in particular, something that brings you joy, it just has tremendous value for you. It's also tempting to use that marginal hour folding the laundry or, you know, rather than going outside and playing kickball or something, you know, with your kids. Okay, so I want to dig into each of those categories.

13:33First of all, engage with others. Does it matter who? Because obviously there are people who bring you joy and people who don't. I think the answer is obviously. And that's for you to define for yourself, to be aware of doing it with the others. and the right others, people who bring you, make you feel more joyful is what we want to encourage you to be thinking about. So who are those people for you? And then how do you encourage yourself and them to be doing some of these activities together? And then on the active versus passive pursuits question, you know, I in particular, as I, you probably can tell by the examples that I've given, I love doing crossword puzzles.

14:11I love reading books. So why is it better for me to go exercise instead of doing those things? So, I mean, I think on some level, these are averages and advice for you to be thinking about. And it's important for you not to spend all your time doing those things. But on the margin, doing some of that versus some other things, you know, all these rules are not mutually exclusive. And so figuring out what brings you the most value. I think on average, people aren't spending their passive solo time in ways that actually are bringing them the value that it could. And so we really see these as opportunities for you to reflect on your life and think about, okay, what am I doing and what brings me value?

14:57Yeah. And I guess those tensions sort of lead us into the whole idea of following your passions, because if your passion is something that's more sedentary, you know, like crossword puzzles or knitting, then it's okay to do that because it does bring you joy. Exactly, right? I mean, the whole idea here is to really get you to pause and think about, am I using my discretionary time in ways that bring me joy? What do you say to people who say, well, my passion is social media, my passion is video games, or things that generally people wouldn't recommend you spend your free time doing? There's a declining return.

15:37I mean, I'm not going to say you should do no social media, but my students have argued long and hard with me about the fact that they want to come home after class and sit on the couch and scroll through their social media. And that may be valuable. They're convinced it's valuable up to a point. But I think that the key thing is to realize you can do way too much of it. And I think we all deep down recognize that, right? But there's partly that you're doing a little bit of it to keep in touch and to keep up on what's going on for some people. But then it just goes over a cliff. They say that every day your business is late to AI, you fall two days behind.

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16:49The most successful leaders, experts, and bestsellers would tell you the same thing. There's no expiration date on growth. That's why Southern New Hampshire University offers more than 80 online graduate programs. With career-focused courses and low online tuition, SNHU's master's degrees are designed for your next move. If you're choosing between a few schools, SNHU is a clear frontrunner. It's flexible, affordable, and career-focused. Progress doesn't happen standing still. Take one step forward at snhu.edu slash idea.

17:25We talked a little bit about the diversify your activities idea, you know, that they're sort of diminishing returns. But how do you quantify that? Is it different for every person or is there a certain number of hours that is the threshold where once you get over that, you've got to stop? I wish there was a black and white answer to that. We don't find that. It does seem to be there's an answer for each activity, but it's not the same for all activities. And that's probably because we do, on average, different amounts of certain activities. I mean, we just simply are exercising more in the week, on average, certainly as the group of people that we were studying, than we're doing things like reading.

18:04Would you say that it's better to sort of have a small diversity of activities or a very wide diversity of activities, so you're sort of dabbling in everything? Or is it better to sort of find a core that you really enjoy and bring you joy? So the data suggests the more the better. There's no sense that you can be doing too many, but look, you don't have that many hours. So I think that there's a limiting factor, certainly with this population. If you had all your hours and you were spending them all on discretionary time, we might find something different. But for this group, finding several versus one is clearly better.

18:40On the protect your time advice, what recommendations do you have for how people might actually do that when there are so many competing demands? Certainly for the HBS graduates you studied, certainly for the C-suite executives that are in our audience base. I mean, and really for everyone that's trying to balance career and family. I just think it's very easy to get suckered into believing that the extra hour at work is actually going to be more critical than the extra hour at home. And so we tend to make the tradeoff to work and convince ourselves that actually, and by the way, our managers and our peers convincing us as well, that that's what really matters.

19:20And I think the best thing we can do is set some hard constraints around making sure we have enough time. And maybe it's just picking a few discretionary activities that are specifically going to bring you joy and putting them into your calendar and holding yourself to those just like you hold yourself to your work. Yeah, block off that time. Yeah. And do you find that the people that you've studied who have difficulty protecting the time, is it going back to that thing you said that they say to themselves, this is my time for achievement, this is my time for meaning, and I can postpone finding joy or at least find a lot less of it for a while?

19:58I find people convince themselves that, especially in like professional service jobs, that this is the way it has to be. This is what the client needs. And they'll put in their heart and soul into doing their work. And it will pay off later. And what we're finding is that that actually has very negative implications for you and your life and your well-being and actually for the you that you bring to your work as well. But I think people convince themselves, especially earlier in their careers, that this is I'm paying forward. Yeah. So the negative consequences are things like burnout or actually not performing as well at work.

20:33Yeah, not performing as well, not coming to work as sharp, as motivated, with as much intentionality as they could. So I think it's not just the long-run effects, but actually the day-to-day effects. We find lots of evidence that if you do just have a little more joy in your life outside, you come to work as a much more refreshed, engaged, committed employee. There's this hidden metric for team performance, which you get from how you spend your time outside of work. And I think we're obsessed with what people are doing at work. And we're all obsessed with sharing and being busy, whether it's at work or all the things we have to do outside of work, instead of recognizing the tremendous value of what we can do in little ways.

21:14Right. Before we started recording, we actually talked a little bit about commuting, which I now realize is where people spend so much of their free time, even though it's not free because you're driving. But do you have any recommendations for what all of us might do if we're on the train or stuck in traffic to sort of employ some of the advice? I think figuring out ways to use that commuting time, whether it's, I mean, now because of technology, whether it's listening to podcasts or using it to do more than just commute. There is a tremendous opportunity for you to make that feel more valuable.

21:52And there are some people who commuting is considered, like we can see this in all the ratings, it's just not such a negative experience. And then for others, it's a negative experience. And I just say, one of the things in the pandemic that people would say to us is, wow, now I miss my commute. Like they never missed their commute. But now in the pandemic, when you're always at home, that that commute actually is a valuable, can be a valuable time between work and getting home. But how do you use it for that and making sure you're getting value from it? And pausing to think about what would that be?

22:24I think we just don't ask ourselves that question. Yeah. I tend to listen to the news, which does not bring me joy. But I also tend to call my mom, which might bring her more joy than it brings to me. But maybe that brings me joy, too. Or maybe meaningfulness. Yeah, exactly. What advice would you give managers who want to encourage their employees to try to find more joy but also, you know, still get their work done? For me, this finding is actually very exciting for managers. I've worked a lot with organizations trying to help them think about how do you make the workplace better and what small changes can we make at work that will both make work better but also people's lives better.

23:04And suddenly I think we're finding actually if you want to create better work, if you actually provide people just the awareness and just the encouragement to if they will spend an hour or two a week doing something that's valuable outside of work. As a manager, you don't have to give them any more time off. You don't really have to do anything beyond just encourage that they're creating that space for themselves outside of work. then it has tremendous opportunity for you to be a more caring, engaged manager of your employees and your employees to actually come to work in a better way. So it wasn't at all what we set off to do, but I think what we've discovered is what, you know, I said this before, this sort of hidden metric to team performance.