NORTH STAR INTERVIEW: Harvard Business School's, Ashley Whillans, Author of 'Time Smart' (OUT NEXT WEEK)
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Ashley Whillans is an assistant professor in the Negotiation, Organizations & Markets Unit at Harvard Business School. She teaches the Negotiations course and her book, Time Smart is about to drop. A great read about using the time you have smarter will surely be flying off the shelves…of Amazon since we’re losing bookshops at an alarming rate. She’s also part of the Global Happiness Council and a damn good egg.
Fantastic topic! What inspired/influenced you to write ‘Time Smart’?
I was inspired to write the book because I had been studying the importance of prioritizing time over money for years. All of my research showed that people who valued time over money were happier, less stressed, and had better social relationships. Despite the years of data that I had collected on this topic, I struggled to put these principles into practice in my own life. I had chased a job that would pay more money and involve a lot of hours and I had sacrificed a lot for it. In the first year of my new job, I got divorced. I missed a cousin’s funeral. I couldn’t be there for the birth of my best friends’ child. I was tired of telling people to “do what my research says, but don’t do what I do.” This book was an opportunity to both communicate what I had learned in my research and try to help people (and myself) take actionable steps towards living the truth that we often talk about but rarely act on: that time is our most valuable and precious resource.
Opportunity cost and sunk-cost fallacy feature in the book - can you explain why/how you focused in on these?
I am a behavioral scientist—I like to try to take the themes and theories from economics, psychology, and sociology and apply them in real-world contexts to help people change their behavior. Opportunity cost and sunk-cost are two terms from the judgement and decision-making literature and from economics that are relevant to a lot of our decisions and are especially relevant to whether or not we choose to prioritize time over money. The idea of opportunity costs is the simple but powerful idea that every decision we make comes at the cost of another decision. When it comes to consumption, if we only have $100 of discretionary income in a given month and we spend this $100 on fast-food, this is $100 that we cannot spend donating to charity. One well-documented bias in the decision-making literature is that we often neglect opportunity costs when making decisions. In the context of making purchases, simply reminding people that by spending less than $100 on fast-food, they can have more money to spend in other ways that they care about like making donations to charity, changes their behavior. This is also true of time. While we often neglect opportunity costs when it comes to money, we are especially guilty of neglecting opportunity costs when it comes to time. We fail to recognize that purchasing a big house in the suburbs will cost us time each and every day stuck in traffic. My data shows that simply starting to recognize the opportunity costs of our decisions—like the careers we choose, where we decide to live, or how many times we commit to cooking each week—can fundamentally alter the way people spend time and their happiness.
The sunk-cost fallacy is another concept from behavioral science that plays an important role in time-use decisions. This fallacy is the idea that we will often continue to follow through on previously chosen options (like a certain career track) even if we might be happier making a different decision. Once we are along a path, we often continue down that same path, even if another path would make us happier, or more time affluent. This bias is of course important in decisions about time vs. money. We often stay in hard careers with long hours that we do not like because it is what we have always done; in my book, I ask readers to challenge ‘status-quo’ decisions and habits, and to self-reflect on whether and how they can change their behavior.
700 million vacation days go unused every year - what effect does this have on a business and how do we change this?
I outline a lot of the specific stats and examples in the book, so I won’t recapitulate them here. However, these vacation days have a profound effect on employee well-being and productivity. Good research shows that happier employees are more productive. And which employees are happier? Employees who take all of their paid vacation. Together, this research suggests that firms and societies would be smart to encourage and potentially force employees to take all of the paid vacation they were entitled to for the benefit of workplaces and of society.
How big is the problem of misspent time personally and professionally? On average?
I think the biggest opportunity for individuals to spend their time in more profitable ways at work and outside of it is to resist the urge to be on 24-7. The nature of work has changed, and it is increasingly difficult to assess how productive an employee is because they are creating reports instead of producing widgets and punching the clock on a factory assembly line. As a result, people often use hours worked as a heuristic for quality. As organizations, we should limit the amount of time that employees can interact or disrupt each other and “legitimize” not always being on—such as creating norms and expectations around reduced email responsivity at certain times of day. As individuals, we need to make time each day for “deep work” by setting blocks of time that we will not allow to be disrupted by meetings or technology. By focusing on the important as opposed to the urgent in our work and our personal lives, we can become more time affluent and live our days more closely to how we want to live our lives.
How can people calculate their own happiness dollars?
We are working on a tool that people will be able to use to calculate their own happiness dollars, stay tuned. My book is published on October 6, and our tool-kit will be part of it, so stay tuned for a way to calculate your own happiness dollars that will be published with the book.
Love the Big Why idea - can you break that down and say why it's so important?
The idea of the “Big Why” is that in order to stick to changing the way we spend our time, we have to keep in mind why we want to focus on time in our own lives. Both of my cousins died from a genetic disorder before the age of 30. They are my “why.” I want to be able to live out my life in a passionate way and make sure I balance both personal and professional goals and work hard toward them, because they were unable to complete their goals, so I want to make sure I can complete the personal and professional goals I have in my own life, and whenever I feel like I am wasting time or not living in a way that is consistent with my values, I think about how our days add up to our lives, and am reminded about the short nature of our lives. I have tattooed their initials on my wrist to serve as a reminder, but any physical reminder, such as a photo, can be a powerful way to help us focus on our priorities and goals in life (and to focus on the important as opposed to the urgent).
Awe is also discussed in the book - I think the idea has been lost recently - how can people factor this into their everyday routines?
Exposure to nature—even in the form of internet videos on inspiring nature—can increase feelings sense of awe. Helping others can also increase awe. Simple injections of these activities into daily life could be a powerful way to increase the amount of awe we experience daily.
Transforming 'bad time' seems like fitting more in the same amount of hours - can't people just relax and do nothing? Why do we have to always be stimulated?
Transforming bad time doesn’t necessarily mean filling free time with more activities; it can also mean focusing on framing negative moments as positive, by living present in the moment.
· We should also focus on being mindful and present, in the absence of activity, which is something scholars have recently come to appreciate in the context of the mindfulness movement. I am not necessarily advocating for ‘adding more’ but rather making any activity more pleasant either by bundling the negative activity (like commuting or doing the dishes) with another, more positive experience (like listening to your favorite podcast) or by focusing on the positive part of the negative experience (like the exercised gained while vacuuming).
What's the next book about? What are you interested in next?
The next book is about the symbolic value of time and how the value of time has changed across the decades. While the current book is practical, the next book will be nerdier: What is time, how has our technology shaped our time-use and how we think about time, and how has the forced experiment in working from home shaped how we perceive, use, and value this resource.
NORTH STAR INTERVIEW: Harvard Business School's, Ashley Whillans, Author of 'Time Smart' (OUT NEXT WEEK)
NORTH STAR INTERVIEW: Harvard Business School's, Ashley Whillans, Author of 'Time Smart' (OUT NEXT WEEK)
NORTH STAR INTERVIEW: Harvard Business School's, Ashley Whillans, Author of 'Time Smart' (OUT NEXT WEEK)
Ashley Whillans is an assistant professor in the Negotiation, Organizations & Markets Unit at Harvard Business School. She teaches the Negotiations course and her book, Time Smart is about to drop. A great read about using the time you have smarter will surely be flying off the shelves…of Amazon since we’re losing bookshops at an alarming rate. She’s also part of the Global Happiness Council and a damn good egg.
DON’T FORGET: TBD Conference has a limited amount of super early, early bird tickets. We’re calling them ‘Egg’ tickets (geddit?). A few are released every day at different times so make sure you snag one for you and a friend. The theme will be announced shortly…
Fantastic topic! What inspired/influenced you to write ‘Time Smart’?
I was inspired to write the book because I had been studying the importance of prioritizing time over money for years. All of my research showed that people who valued time over money were happier, less stressed, and had better social relationships. Despite the years of data that I had collected on this topic, I struggled to put these principles into practice in my own life. I had chased a job that would pay more money and involve a lot of hours and I had sacrificed a lot for it. In the first year of my new job, I got divorced. I missed a cousin’s funeral. I couldn’t be there for the birth of my best friends’ child. I was tired of telling people to “do what my research says, but don’t do what I do.” This book was an opportunity to both communicate what I had learned in my research and try to help people (and myself) take actionable steps towards living the truth that we often talk about but rarely act on: that time is our most valuable and precious resource.
Opportunity cost and sunk-cost fallacy feature in the book - can you explain why/how you focused in on these?
I am a behavioral scientist—I like to try to take the themes and theories from economics, psychology, and sociology and apply them in real-world contexts to help people change their behavior. Opportunity cost and sunk-cost are two terms from the judgement and decision-making literature and from economics that are relevant to a lot of our decisions and are especially relevant to whether or not we choose to prioritize time over money. The idea of opportunity costs is the simple but powerful idea that every decision we make comes at the cost of another decision. When it comes to consumption, if we only have $100 of discretionary income in a given month and we spend this $100 on fast-food, this is $100 that we cannot spend donating to charity. One well-documented bias in the decision-making literature is that we often neglect opportunity costs when making decisions. In the context of making purchases, simply reminding people that by spending less than $100 on fast-food, they can have more money to spend in other ways that they care about like making donations to charity, changes their behavior. This is also true of time. While we often neglect opportunity costs when it comes to money, we are especially guilty of neglecting opportunity costs when it comes to time. We fail to recognize that purchasing a big house in the suburbs will cost us time each and every day stuck in traffic. My data shows that simply starting to recognize the opportunity costs of our decisions—like the careers we choose, where we decide to live, or how many times we commit to cooking each week—can fundamentally alter the way people spend time and their happiness.
The sunk-cost fallacy is another concept from behavioral science that plays an important role in time-use decisions. This fallacy is the idea that we will often continue to follow through on previously chosen options (like a certain career track) even if we might be happier making a different decision. Once we are along a path, we often continue down that same path, even if another path would make us happier, or more time affluent. This bias is of course important in decisions about time vs. money. We often stay in hard careers with long hours that we do not like because it is what we have always done; in my book, I ask readers to challenge ‘status-quo’ decisions and habits, and to self-reflect on whether and how they can change their behavior.
700 million vacation days go unused every year - what effect does this have on a business and how do we change this?
I outline a lot of the specific stats and examples in the book, so I won’t recapitulate them here. However, these vacation days have a profound effect on employee well-being and productivity. Good research shows that happier employees are more productive. And which employees are happier? Employees who take all of their paid vacation. Together, this research suggests that firms and societies would be smart to encourage and potentially force employees to take all of the paid vacation they were entitled to for the benefit of workplaces and of society.
How big is the problem of misspent time personally and professionally? On average?
I think the biggest opportunity for individuals to spend their time in more profitable ways at work and outside of it is to resist the urge to be on 24-7. The nature of work has changed, and it is increasingly difficult to assess how productive an employee is because they are creating reports instead of producing widgets and punching the clock on a factory assembly line. As a result, people often use hours worked as a heuristic for quality. As organizations, we should limit the amount of time that employees can interact or disrupt each other and “legitimize” not always being on—such as creating norms and expectations around reduced email responsivity at certain times of day. As individuals, we need to make time each day for “deep work” by setting blocks of time that we will not allow to be disrupted by meetings or technology. By focusing on the important as opposed to the urgent in our work and our personal lives, we can become more time affluent and live our days more closely to how we want to live our lives.
How can people calculate their own happiness dollars?
We are working on a tool that people will be able to use to calculate their own happiness dollars, stay tuned. My book is published on October 6, and our tool-kit will be part of it, so stay tuned for a way to calculate your own happiness dollars that will be published with the book.
Love the Big Why idea - can you break that down and say why it's so important?
The idea of the “Big Why” is that in order to stick to changing the way we spend our time, we have to keep in mind why we want to focus on time in our own lives. Both of my cousins died from a genetic disorder before the age of 30. They are my “why.” I want to be able to live out my life in a passionate way and make sure I balance both personal and professional goals and work hard toward them, because they were unable to complete their goals, so I want to make sure I can complete the personal and professional goals I have in my own life, and whenever I feel like I am wasting time or not living in a way that is consistent with my values, I think about how our days add up to our lives, and am reminded about the short nature of our lives. I have tattooed their initials on my wrist to serve as a reminder, but any physical reminder, such as a photo, can be a powerful way to help us focus on our priorities and goals in life (and to focus on the important as opposed to the urgent).
Awe is also discussed in the book - I think the idea has been lost recently - how can people factor this into their everyday routines?
Exposure to nature—even in the form of internet videos on inspiring nature—can increase feelings sense of awe. Helping others can also increase awe. Simple injections of these activities into daily life could be a powerful way to increase the amount of awe we experience daily.
Transforming 'bad time' seems like fitting more in the same amount of hours - can't people just relax and do nothing? Why do we have to always be stimulated?
Transforming bad time doesn’t necessarily mean filling free time with more activities; it can also mean focusing on framing negative moments as positive, by living present in the moment.
· We should also focus on being mindful and present, in the absence of activity, which is something scholars have recently come to appreciate in the context of the mindfulness movement. I am not necessarily advocating for ‘adding more’ but rather making any activity more pleasant either by bundling the negative activity (like commuting or doing the dishes) with another, more positive experience (like listening to your favorite podcast) or by focusing on the positive part of the negative experience (like the exercised gained while vacuuming).
What's the next book about? What are you interested in next?
The next book is about the symbolic value of time and how the value of time has changed across the decades. While the current book is practical, the next book will be nerdier: What is time, how has our technology shaped our time-use and how we think about time, and how has the forced experiment in working from home shaped how we perceive, use, and value this resource.
Time Smart is out October 6th on Amazon