The Art of Doing Nothing

23:46I was surprised that my hero was experiencing pretty much the same thing. You're tunneling. You're just literally, it feels like survival. I'm having this day to day. I just taught two classes and had two hours of office hours. All I'm thinking about is, when am I going to drink water? When is my next nap? I don't have the cognitive resources to also think about, how am I going to connect with a friend who hasn't been doing very well? Back in the 1970s, researchers John Darley and Daniel Batson ran a test to see why people help others. Was being nice a function of a person's personality? Or did it depend on the situation?

24:24To test these questions, they chose a population known for being do-gooders, students at the Princeton Theological Seminary. Darley and Batson figured that students training to be priests were probably prone to being nice to other people. And so the researchers told these subjects that they needed to deliver a public sermon about Jesus' story of the Good Samaritan. In this parable, a man is beaten, robbed, and left unconscious on the street. Several people, including a priest, passed by without stopping. But one person, the Good Samaritan, took pity on the victim. He helped the man up and even brought him to an inn to eat and rest.

25:00The Samaritan, Jesus explains, is the guy we're all supposed to emulate. He's the one that's going to heaven. The seminary students all knew the tale well. So having to give a sermon on that topic should have been mildly stressful, but relatively straightforward. And that's when Darley and Batson upped the stakes. All of the students had to head across campus to another building to give the talk. One group was told that their sermon would happen later that day, so they had plenty of time to get there. A second group was told that they'd make it in time, but only if they set off immediately. But a third group was told that they were already late.

25:37They needed to sprint over there right away. And that's when Darley and Batson had a surprise for the men. They basically staged an experimental version of the Good Samaritan story. They hired an actor to pretend to be injured on the ground, who was blocking a narrow part of the route. the students would literally have to physically step over the actor's writhing body in order to make it past. So what did a little time famine do to the students' willingness to help? The results were really striking. 63 % of the students who had time to spare stopped to help the hurt stranger. Which honestly is already pretty bad.

26:13That means over a third of trainee priests basically stepped over a guy lying hurt on the street. But what happened when subjects were in a mad hurry? Only 10 % of them stopped to help. 90 % of the subjects completely ignored an obviously injured person on the street because they were rushing to give a sermon about how Jesus said you should stop to help injured people on the street. When we're time famished, we become crappy people. When people are thinking about the economic value of their time, when they're thinking about being hyper-efficient with every second, this comes at a cost of our willingness to take time out of our day to help others, to volunteer, to do something as simple as recycle a piece of scrap paper in the lab, something that takes 10, 15 seconds to do.

27:00Ashley actually has experimental data to back up this last point. She had students cut up sheets of paper for a construction project. She told them they could either throw their scraps away in a nearby trash can or walk a few feet outside the room to a recycling bin. In this first control condition, 41 % of the students opted to recycle. But Ashley also tested another experimental group, in which she first had subjects write down how many hours they expected to work after graduation, and then calculate their hourly pay rate. What happened to recycling in this experimental group? Only 12 % made the extra effort required.

27:38Policymakers should take note here. Have you ever considered that giving people more time will help them become better, greener citizens? What we really need to do is to solve time poverty so that people can have more cognitive resources and also just a more outward focus. So we're not just simply trying to solve our own time scarcity and get from point A to point B in our lives. But we're able to have these self-transcendent values and think about how can I use my time to benefit others. Which raises a big question. How can we fight time poverty? What can people like me do to feel a little more time affluent?

28:14We'll tackle those important questions when The Happiness Lab returns in a moment.

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31:17I would get up at 8 with the kids or 7.30. Then I would sit down in my study at 9 o 'clock. And I wouldn't leave until 1 p.m. So I would do four straight hours of work. And that was it. Welcome to the typical day of time affluence guru Tom Hodgkinson. I was struck that Tom's day involved both less and more idling than I'd expected, if that makes sense. After lunch, I would go into the garden, go for a walk, sleep. My children would come back from school, would do dinner, have a couple of beers, read books in the evening, go to bed sort of fairly early, 10 or 11. That was great. And, you know, that was a four-hour working day.

31:57Often took Fridays off for trips and so on. So that was lovely. Tom is super time affluent, but he isn't some bum who never gets anything done. He's an incredibly accomplished writer with six best-selling books. And that doesn't even include his ukulele handbook. The problem with being an idler, actually, is that you can end up working quite hard. I mean, I get a lot of criticism from my readers saying, well, you seem to work quite hard, Tom, because you're quite productive. And I think that's because, you know, You know, you give yourself lots of thinking time and then you start having creative ideas and then you want to carry them out.

32:28And, you know, it takes some work to actually make them happen. And so I asked Tom for some advice. Practical tips that would actually work with my busy professor lifestyle. Practical tips. OK, please, you know, take an hour off for lunch and talk to people. I sheepishly admitted to Tom that I pretty rarely take a lunch break that doesn't involve checking my email. Overwork can drag you backwards. Take your lunch break. A full uninterrupted meal break with proper conversation already was seeming like the stuff of fantasy. But then Tom upped the ante with an even more indulgent afternoon activity.

33:01Ideally, have a short nap after lunch. I mean, I personally find that time between two and four, I mean, I'm completely dead. I actually get quite depressed. I can't think. I'm so tired. And then I wake up again at four. Uh, a two hour siesta. Yeah, that basically sounds kind of impossible for me. Tom was horrified when he learned that I had a flight later that day and that I plan to spend most of that travel time working. Travel time is a gift. In the old days, you couldn't work. We didn't have Wi-Fi and stuff. And so it was a lovely opportunity just to gaze out the window. But you could still do that.

33:32Planes, trains, automobiles, you know, sit in the back, stare out the window, unplug, you know, or read a book, a real actual book, and sleep and doze. Even walking along the roads is supposed to be a sort of self-improving activity because you put your headphones on and plug into some kind of inspirational podcast. Um, what? I mean, okay, this is a good podcast to listen to. You'll want. Tom's point isn't to cancel your Happiness Lab subscription. Like, seriously, don't do that. Tom's point is just that we need to find some time when it feels like we're not working or desperately trying to cram things in.

34:07Give a gift to yourself of that time. It's completely free. It doesn't cost anything. It could really have incalculable benefits for your mental health. I was so thankful to hear Tom's suggestions. But realistically, I wasn't totally sure his advice was going to work for my level of time famine. I mean, I can shoot for longer email-free lunches, but napping for hours a day is not really practical for my situation. And if I'm being honest, it's also unlikely that I'll leave my laptop totally switched off on my next flight. I started to worry that Tom's recommendations were a bit too advanced for my level of time famine.

34:44I needed to start with some beginner tips, sort of a time affluence for dummies kind of thing. So I turned to my other hero, Ashley Willans. She's an academic, just like me. So I figured that she might have some more applicable advice. As usual, I was in a rush to get straight to the point. So you're a super busy Harvard professor who teaches about time. It feels a little bit ironic. My life sometimes feels very ironic, yes. So how are you actually putting this stuff into effect in your own life? I'm trying and sometimes failing. Yeah, I feel like I'm grasping at straws sometimes to try to keep it all together.

35:22It wasn't exactly the guru level of time mastery I was hoping for, but I also admired Ashley's honesty. One thing that I did structurally in my life is I cut my commute time to basically zero. I pay a lot of money in rent, but I can walk to the office. So I'm not only buying myself time each and every day, but I can also spend that time in ways that are good for happiness, like walking, enjoying the scenery. I take in a lot of sunrises walking across the bridge to work. And I think that's one thing that I've done that I've noticed has dramatically improved the quality of my life. So Ashley exchanges money in the form of rent for less time wasted on a dull commute.

36:01She also uses her other expenditures in the same way. Like house cleaning, grocery delivery. It turns out that allocating more of your available budget to these services can substantially increase your time affluence. If you spend money in a typical month to outsource disliked tasks to others, therefore buying back some of your time or at least buying more positive moments, we see that that is a good predictor of happiness for people all across the income spectrum, the richest people that we've studied, people living kind of at or even slightly below the poverty line. Paying someone to do your disliked tasks can also provide a much needed boost to your social life.

36:35When you outsource something you don't like, you not only get to spend more time with people you care about, but you're less thinking about all these other things you have to do while you're socializing. And so it buys us out of some of this dread, this anticipation of having to come home from a nice social event on the weekend and have a million chores to do before the work week starts. And we've also started looking at the effects of time-saving services, housecleaning, someone to mow your lawn on relationship satisfaction. And we have some findings suggesting that couples who make a concerted effort to outsource in a typical month experience greater relationship satisfaction because they're less negatively impacted by daily stressors.

37:15And that effect on relationship satisfaction is just about as good as having a partner who's a really good listener. All of this sounds great, but I bet some of you are thinking the same thing I was. Is this a strategy everyone can use? Or is this just for wealthy Harvard professors? Who can afford a house cleaner? I get this question a lot. Isn't this just for rich people? Most of us listening, at least, are lucky enough to have some discretionary income at our disposal. So then we want to start thinking, well, if I have$100 a month,$200 a month,$300 a month, how can I start thinking about spending that money in a way that might best promote my happiness?

37:52And there are small things that we can all do around the margins. One example might be hire the neighbor's kid to mow your lawn. That might not cost very much money. getting takeout. Takeout can be one way of saving time, but interestingly, we often don't think about takeout in that way. So we show in some of our studies that some of the happiness benefit of these time-saving purchases that we make on a regular basis, some of that benefit is actually from just thinking that you're saving time and then spending that time in a more deliberate way. So you could even, if you don't want to change the way that you're spending, sit down and look at your purchases that you make in a typical month and say, hey, when I made that takeout purchase, I actually was saving time that I wasn't spending on cooking.

38:35What did I do with that time? And next week when I buy that fast food, could I be spending that time I would have spent cooking in a better way? So part of the benefit is just removing negative tasks that you don't like. And part of the benefit of time saving is being more deliberate with the free time that you've gained. The idea of being more deliberate with how we think about our time is critical. Remember, time affluence isn't the objective amount of free time you have, the actual number of open blocks in your calendar. It's your subjective sense that you have some free time. And that means you can do a lot to boost your sense of time affluence, even if in reality, you can't really open up that much actual free time.

39:16It's just the sense of giving yourself a bit of a break that makes all the difference, even if the amount of time you actually gain is small. I saw this firsthand in my happiness class when I first introduced my Yale students to the concept of time affluence. With hard classes, demanding extracurriculars, and an intense social life, Yale students feel incredibly time famished pretty much all the time. So I decided to give them a booster shot of time affluence by surprising them with a canceled class one spring day. Students came to lecture expecting to be in class for an hour and 15 minutes. But when they arrived, my teaching assistants were handing out flyers, explaining that I was giving students a bit of time affluence by canceling class that day.

39:58The students were ecstatic. They finally had a bit of free time. Some even started screaming and jumping up and down. Others just seemed incredibly relieved. One woman even burst into tears, announcing it was the first free hour she's had all semester. But my students' joy demonstrates this important feature of time affluence. It doesn't take all that much to feel incredibly good. My Yalies were only given an hour and 15 minutes free, but at the time, it felt like years. Many of them even used that free hour to do something really fun. They hung out with friends over bubble teas or went for a short hike, which shows one of the most important features of using our time affluence well.

40:38In the rare cases when we get free time, we need to use it wisely. This is something I really struggle with. Because I do get little blasts of free time confetti here and there. There are lots of unexpected changes as an academic. Meetings canceled, talks that wrap up earlier than predicted, appointments with people who never show. I usually use those free moments to do a quick social media check or dig into my email. But Ashley argues that I should plan to use those little time windfalls a lot more effectively. How can we start claiming back some of these windfalls to really think about them in this more deliberate way so that these small pockets of time that we do receive in our everyday lives feel more like a gain and therefore might be more likely to increase our happiness?

41:24Have you done this in your own life? Are there specific tips you use when you have a meeting canceled or have a small time windfall? Yeah, so I actually have started to keep a time windfall list of if I have small pockets of five minutes and 10 minutes, what are some life things? Not work things, not emails. Those will always be there. But some small positive life things that I can do with those windfalls. Send a letter of gratitude. Call my mom. Reach out to a friend from grad school I haven't talked to in a while. And I write those in my agenda. and I don't always get to all of them, but I do get to some of them.

42:01And I think that doing this research has made me a little bit more strategic about not squandering the small moments that all of us find ourselves with on a daily basis. Making this episode hasn't completely cured my sense of time famine, but it has helped a lot. I've started my own time windfall list. I want to connect more with friends I haven't seen in a while and take more opportunities to express gratitude to the people I care about. I also want to take time to be more mindful. And so I'm going to try to use some of those free 15-minute blocks for a quick meditation and some deep breaths.

42:34And in honor of Tom, I promised to spend at least a few minutes gazing out the window on my next flight. But most of all, making this episode has caused me to realize that I'm not helping the people I care about by packing my schedule to the brim. Hearing the science has caused me to reflect on the negative impact my time famine is having on the people I care about most. It also made me worry about the person I could become if I don't carve out a bit more free time. So, Happiness Lab listeners, I'm making a public commitment to all of you that I plan to prioritize my own time affluence. And I hope you will, too.

43:07As I said before, you don't need to unsubscribe from your favorite podcast. Seriously, don't do that. Even just making the most of small-time windfalls can bump up your mood. And maybe, just maybe, it might even make you a better person.

43:31One of the things we talk a lot about on this show is behavior change and how small, easy swaps actually stick. That's why Hero Bread is such a great example of making progress without overthinking it. Hero makes everyday bread products with 0 to 5 grams of net carbs per serving, 0 grams of sugar, and up to 19 grams of protein. and they still feel satisfying to eat. It's bread that fits into real life. Visit Hero.co, check out their products and reviews and use my code HAPPINESS for 10 % off your first order. All figures are per serving, not a low-calorie food. See Nutrition Facts for more info.

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