January 08, 2024

115: UCLA Professor Cassie Holmes | Time Poverty and Happiness

17 minutes

Cassie Holmes is an award-winning marketing professor at UCLA and the bestselling author of Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most. Her book was called a “must read” by Forbes, the Washington Post, and the Financial Times, and was featured on the Today Show, CBS Mornings, CNN, NPR’s Hidden Brain, and GOOP with Gwyneth Paltrow.

Cassie’s research has been published in leading academic journals, and the course she developed, Applying the Science of Happiness to Life Design, is among UCLA’s most popular MBA classes.

Prior to joining UCLA, Cassie was a professor at Wharton. She has a Ph.D. from Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and a B.A. from Columbia.

In this episode we discuss the following:

The answer for greater happiness isn’t having more time. It’s making our time more fulfilling.

Looking at data of hundreds of thousands of working and nonworking Americans shows that people with too little time were just as unhappy as people with too much time. However, 2-5 hours of discretionary time, plus using that time in meaningful ways, was the sweet spot for maximum happiness.

Happiness isn’t about being time rich. It’s about making our time rich.

One way to make our time rich is to track our time for a week, while also rating how we feel on a 10 point scale coming out of each activity.

Initial data shows that social media can set subjective and arbitrary expectations for how we should spend our time, thus decreasing our feelings of time richness and fulfillment.

When we feel “time poor” we stop helping others. But helping others makes our time more fulfilling thus reducing our feeling of time poverty.

Time management has traditionally focused on maximizing productivity. But by slowing down and focusing on tasks that are more meaningful, like having a nice conversation with a colleague, spouse, or child, we can increase our happiness and reduce our feeling of time poverty.

To increase your happiness, take your grandma to lunch. She’ll have perspective, knowledge, and wisdom gained through experience on how to spend your time meaningfully.

Follow Cassie:

Website: https://www.cassiemholmes.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/cassiemholmes/

Follow Me:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/nate_meikle

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/natemeikle/

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nate_meikle/

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By Nate Meikle

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