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"Time affluence" can radically change how you view your daily life

Not enough hours in the day? This might be for you.

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A powerful new way to take control of your day.

What does it really mean to be wealthy? Having a hefty bank account and multiple streams of income? A fancy job with an even fancier-sounding name? ("Director" has a nice ring to it, don't you think?) There are a million ways to answer this question, but before you do, ask yourself one more: Will that really make me happy? While many of us would love a few more hours in the day, our actions don't reflect that. Often, we as a society spend an inordinate time dedicated to money: making it and saving it. But what about leisure time or rest? Yes, money is important, but without the time to do things we actually enjoy, what’s the point?

A growing body of research suggests something revolutionary: that a concept called “time affluence” is the true measure of a person's wealth. Rather than nice cars or a corner office in a high-rise building downtown, time affluence is the real key to happiness and well-being. Time affluence refers to the idea that, like money, time is a resource that can be saved, spent, and wasted. According to Ashley V. Whillans, a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and the author of Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life, time affluence is the “feeling of having control and feeling like you have enough time on an everyday basis.” Her research indicates that those who value time over money tend to live happier, more civically engaged lives and are more inclined to pursue activities they’re passionate about.

So, why do so many of us feel like we’re running out of time?


Meet “time poverty”

Time affluence exists on a spectrum, with "time poverty" at the opposite end. While time-affluent people experience increased autonomy, improved moods, and enhanced states of mindfulness, those experiencing time poverty live in a world of constant stress. They remain fixated on work and productivity, feeling perpetually overwhelmed by an endless list of tasks with seemingly insufficient time to complete them. Research shows that time poverty leads to decreased well-being, poor physical health, and reduced productivity—yet why aren't we addressing this crisis? While billions are invested yearly to combat material poverty, while time poverty remains largely ignored and continues to worsen.


stress, frustration, unhappiness, time, time waster, busy, stressedWhy aren't we addressing this growing crisis?Photo credit: Canva

Our relationship with time reveals a troubling reality. Despite the rise of time-saving technologies in recent decades—from Internet to personal computers—these innovations and productivity tools haven't fundamentally changed how we use our time, nor have they increased our sense of time affluence. A 2010 study found that merely 9% of adults reported "quite often" having free time, while 45% claimed they were almost "never free."

Even Whillans recognized something was wrong when she, a successful Harvard Business School professor on the tenure track, felt chronically short on time. Despite her material wealth—the pay, prestige, and job security—she never allowed herself to rest. Her calendar was filled with meetings, but she left herself no space for leisure or personal pursuits. "Focusing our time is not selfish. It's really about making enough time for ourselves that we're able to have the energy and attention to best serve those that we care about," Whillans explained during a presentation in 2020. "We want to be reframing our time to see leisure as something that's productive and restful, and an end to itself."


The elusive concept of “time affluence”

Here's the paradox: having more money or time doesn't necessarily solve the problem—it can actually make it worse. In a study by Sanford E. DeVoe and Jeffrey Pfeffer in 2011, researchers found that people who placed a higher financial value on time (following the old adage "time is money") reported increased time pressure and showed less patience. Similarly, other research indicates that when people overly focus on time's value, they also experience greater psychological and physiological stress, and are less likely to slow down or enjoy leisure activities.


time, running out of time, clock, busy, life, stressWhen it comes to well-being, time does not equal money. Photo credit: Canva

But...too much time can be a problem, too. In a study conducted by Cassie Mogilner Holmes, a psychologist and professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, she looked at the relationship between leisure time and happiness. On one hand, she found that people with less than two hours a day of free time reported decreased levels of happiness. On the other hand, those with more than five hours of free time per day also reported decreased levels of happiness. What’s going on here? It seems that the key to time affluence, which Holmes defines as “feeling confident that you are able to accomplish everything you want to do"—isn’t the abundance of free time or having unlimited hours in the day. “While having some time (i.e. more than two hours) is essential, the positive correlation between time and satisfaction only goes so far,” writes Barnaby Lashbrooke for Forbes. “Being time affluent, then, is less about having an excess of time, and actually about how you use the limited time that you do have.”


How to become time-affluent

So, you want to become time-affluent? Experts suggest the following strategies:

  1. Prioritize ruthlessly. With limited hours in each day, it makes sense to tackle the most important tasks first. Some people follow the Ivy Lee Method, which involves writing down your five most important tasks each evening, then completing them one by one the next day. Others prefer the "1-3-5" rule—focusing on one big task, three medium tasks, and five small tasks daily. Whichever method you choose, always ask yourself: What's the most urgent and important task? Start there.
  2. Buy back time by outsourcing tasks. While money can't buy happiness directly, it can buy precious time through strategic outsourcing. A few well-spent dollars can free you from tasks you dislike or find draining. Consider hiring a house cleaner or paying more in rent to live closer to work. As Laurie Santos, a psychologist and happiness researcher, says, "Studies show that people who spend money to get more free time are often happier than those who don't." But remember—outsourcing doesn't always require money. You can lean on your community, such as arranging alternating school drop-off schedules with neighbors.
  3. Practice “monotasking.” By now, most people know that multitasking isn’t real. It’s a myth—the human mind and brain aren’t sophisticated enough to perform more than two tasks simultaneously. So, do the opposite. Focus on one thing at a time.
  4. Be intentional about leisure time. “We want to be reframing our time to see leisure as something that’s productive and restful, and an end to itself,” advises Whillans. “Focusing on time is not selfish. It’s really in making enough time for ourselves that we’re able to have the energy and attention to best serve those that we care about.” Just like an important meeting or appointment, block time off on your calendar to dedicate purely to leisure and rest. By doing so, you are committing to caring about your well-being, and it’s just as essential as work.

In a world that's always demanding “more” of us—earn more, buy more, do more—perhaps what’s most revolutionary is reclaiming our time. And with it, our happiness.

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A guy and his friends shared their travel plans. The results perfectly explain the wealth gap.

What on Jeff Bezos's green earth did we just watch?

TikTok/@tcruznc

Sometimes you see something so mind-boggling you have to take a minute to digest what just happened in your brain. Be prepared to take that moment while watching these videos.

Real estate investor and TikTok user Tom Cruz shared two (now deleted) videos explaining the spreadsheets he and his friends use to plan vacations. They call it the "Forbes List" and it's...well...something. Watch the first one, kindly posted by @Radio_Reem on X:

So, "Broke Bobby" makes $125,000 a year. There's that.

How about the fact that his guy has more than zero friends who budget $80,000 for a 3-day getaway? Y'all, I wouldn't know how to spend $80,000 in three days if you paid me to. Especially if we're talking about a trip with friends where we're all splitting the cost. Like what does this even look like? Are they flying in private jets that burn dollar bills as fuel? Are they bathing in hot tubs full of cocaine? I genuinely don't get it.



But that's not even the full spreadsheet. It might make sense if this guy was just rich, had always been rich, and only knew rich people, therefore making have a friend group made up of multiple millionaires his norm. Surely that's the reality for some born into the 1%.

But that's not the case here. Though the video is no longer gracing TikTok, Cruz shared that he also has a "Welfare 10 List." He says this group of friends who make less than $100K a year call themselves that, and perhaps that's true. (If I were a part of this group, I might call myself a welfare case too because everything's relative and some of these dudes spend more in an hour of vacation than I spend on my mortgage each month.)

To be crystal clear, the top 5 friends on the "Forbes List" are willing to spend more than double what the guy at the bottom of the "Welfare 10 List "makes per year on a 3-day guy's trip. I don't know what to do with this information.

It's like we can see our society's wealth gap all laid out nice and neatly in a spreadsheet, only these people aren't even the uber-wealthy and uber-poor. This is just the range of this one guy's friends.

I have nothing against people who build success and wealth for themselves, and even $5 million per year is hardly obscenely wealthy by billionaire standards. But Cruz says he's known most of his "welfare" friends since college, which presumably means most of those guys have college degrees and are making a pittance in comparison with the "Forbes List." One could claim the guy making $5 million a year just works harder, but does he really work 100 times harder than the guy making $50,000? Doubt it.

Money makes money, and after a certain threshold of wealth or income, it's actually quite easy to get and stay rich without actually "earning" more money (assuming you're reasonably wise and responsible). So, maybe the guys who are willing to shell out $125,000 for a week-long trip should offer to pay the travel expenses of the friends they "hang out with regardless of income" who don't even make that in a year, since that's probably just the interest they're making on their wealth anyway.

But what do I know? This is like an entirely different world to me and probably 99+% of Americans, as evidenced by some of the responses.

Naturally, there will be a range of incomes in any group of people, but 1) most of us don't actually know how much our friends make, and 2) even fewer of us make spreadsheets with that information in order to rank our friends and figure out who can go on which vacations.

People are just endlessly fascinating. That's all I've got.


This article originally appeared three years ago.

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A story about two pairs of boots illustrates how rich people get richer in ways poor people can't

It’s got nothing to do with bootstraps.

Photo by Maxim Hopman on Unsplash

The Sam Vimes "Boots" Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness explains one way the rich get richer.

Any time conversations about wealth and poverty come up, people inevitably start talking about boots. The standard phrase that comes up is "pull yourself up by your bootstraps," which is usually shorthand for "work harder and don't ask for or expect help." (The fact that the phrase was originally used sarcastically because pulling oneself up by one's bootstraps is literally, physically impossible is rarely acknowledged, but c'est la vie.)

The idea that people who build wealth do so because they individually work harder than poor people is baked into the American consciousness and wrapped up in the ideal of the American dream. A different take on boots and building wealth, however, paints a more accurate picture of what it takes to get out of poverty.

Author Terry Pratchett is no longer with us, but his writing lives on and is occasionally shared on his official social media accounts. Recently, his Twitter page shared the "Sam Vimes 'Boots' Theory of Socioeconomic Unfairness" from Pratchett's 1993 book "Men At Arms." This boots theory explains that one reason the rich are able to get richer is because they are able to spend less money.

If that sounds confusing, read on:

Pratchett wrote:

"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.

Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that’d still be keeping his feet dry in ten years’ time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet."

In other words, people who have the money to spend a little more upfront often end up spending less in the long run. A $50 pair of boots that last five years essentially cost you $10 a year. But if you can only afford $10 upfront for a pair of boots that last six months, that's what you buy—and you end up paying twice as much over a five-year period.

There are so many areas in which this principle applies when you're poor. Buying in bulk saves you money over the long run, but you have to be able to afford the bulk cost up front. A reliable car that doesn't require regular repairs will cost more than a beater, but if the beater is all you can afford, that's what you're stuck with. You'll likely spend the same or more over time than if you'd bought a newer/higher quality car, but without the capital (or the credit rating) to begin with, you don't have much choice.

People who can afford larger down payments pay lower interest rates, saving them money both immediately and in the long run. People who can afford to buy more can spend more with credit cards, pay off the balances, build up good credit and qualify for lower interest rate loans.

There are lots of good financial decisions and strategies one can utilize if one has the ability to build up some cash. But if you are living paycheck to paycheck, you can't.

Climbing the financial ladder requires getting to the bottom rung first. Those who started off anywhere on the ladder can make all kinds of pronouncements about how to climb it—good, sound advice that really does work if you're already on the ladder. But for people living in poverty, the bottom rung is just out of reach, and the walls you have to climb to get to it are slippery. It's expensive to be poor.

When people talk about how hard it is to climb out of poverty, this is a big part of what they mean. Ladder-climbing advice is useless if you can't actually get to the ladder. And yet, far too many people decry offering people assistance that might help them reach the ladder so they can start taking advantage of all that great financial advice. Why? Perhaps because they were born somewhere on the ladder—even if it was the bottom rung—and aren't aware that there are people for whom the ladder is out of reach. Or perhaps they're unaware of how expensive it is to be poor and how the costs of poverty keep people stuck in the pit. Hopefully, this theory will help more people understand and sympathize with the reality of being poor.

Money makes money, but having money also saves you money. The more money you have, the more wealth you're able to build not only because you have extra money to save, but also because you buy higher quality things that last, therefore spending less in the long run. (There's also the reality that the uber-wealthy will pay $5,000 for shoes they'll only wear a few times, but that's a whole other kind of boots story.)

Thanks, Terry Pratchett, for the simple explanation.


This story originally appeared two years ago.

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Why every American should be poor at least once in their life

People who've always been financially comfortable really have no idea.

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Being poor for a while is an eye-opening experience.

Let me start by saying that no one should have to live in poverty. I do, however, believe that every American should experience being poor at least once in their life.

I've never lived in true poverty, thankfully, but I've been poor. I've eaten government cheese. I've internalized the principals of "The Complete Tightwad Gazette" out of necessity. I know what it's like to pinch every penny and to not even think about buying anything "extra." I know the anxiety of paying for a car repair with a credit card that I can only afford minimum payments on, knowing the interest I can't afford will keep piling up.

I've also been fortunate to experience financial comfort. Not enormous wealth, but having enough to not be concerned about affording every little thing I buy. I know how it feels to go to the grocery store without a calculator. I've blown a tire and had the money to cover it. I've been annoyed instead of terrified when I have to replace an appliance. I've been able to take a vacation and splurge a little.

Being financially comfortable is better than being poor, of course. But I don't think people who've never known true financial struggle have any idea how much better it is. They may joke about being "poor" when they have to save their money for something, but they've never experienced not having any money to save.

Being poor teaches you so many things, far beyond just how to budget. You learn that it's hard as hell to climb your way out of financial trouble, how it can feel like you're stuck in a toilet bowl that's constantly swirling and pulling you back down. You learn how expensive it is to be poor—knowing you could save money in the long run shopping at Costco and buying in bulk or stocking up on things during big sales, but you have to have extra means in the moment to be able to do that.

You learn that a few hundred dollars is actually a huge amount of money. You learn that a lot of what people spend money on is totally wasteful. You learn which things are actually worth spending money on (brand names don't matter, shoe quality does). You learn to make excuses for not being able to go on fun outings with friends because you don't want to say, "Sorry, I can't afford that" and feel the awkwardness of it all.

What's surprising, though, is how much more you learn about being poor once you do have some financial ease. When you apply for a loan and get the best interest rates and the lowest fees because you have good credit and some money in the bank, you learn how much the system screws over poor people. When you are able to buy a car that doesn't constantly need repairs and furniture that doesn't fall apart after a year, it really sinks in how much more it costs to not have money. When you're able to pay less overall because you can afford the annual payment instead of the monthly payment for a service, you learn that having money saves money in ways you never imagined.

You learn gratitude for small things if you've been poor. The joy of treating yourself to a fancy coffee or some fresh flowers hits different when it's something you couldn't afford before.

You also learn that there are a lot of people who've never known financial hardship, and it blows your mind. As you spend more time in middle and upper middle class circles, you meet more and more people who aren't necessarily rich but who've never had to actually worry about money. It's not their fault, of course, but it's bizarre to witness these folks in the wild. Like, for some people, it's just normal to pay for a haircut and color at a salon every six weeks, as if it's no different than paying a phone bill. There are people who have never bought generic to save $.50 and simply wouldn't dream of doing so. There are people who set their thermostats to whatever temperature is comfortable and then just go about their day not thinking about their utility bill. It's unnerving to see things you know as luxuries just treated as the norm, to see how much freedom there is in simply not being poor.

But really, the most important lesson you (hopefully) learn from being poor is empathy. You learn not to judge someone for their financial situation. You learn that most people don't choose to be poor, and that it takes not just time and effort, but also luck and very often help, to get to a place of financial okay-ness. You learn that assuming anything about a poor person is likely wrong and that someone's financial situation is almost never a reflection of their moral character. You learn to be humble and kind and not take anything you have for granted.

I'm not saying anyone should go out and become poor on purpose. But even putting yourself through a mental exercise of trying to get by in a low-wage job or figuring out how you would handle a major financial setback can go a long way toward increasing understanding and empathy. Being poor isn't a necessity, but it does provide a valuable first-hand perspective that can be hard to get otherwise.

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