Which of these 6 time traps is eating up all your time?
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There is an 8 out of 10 chance that you are one of the poorest people in the world: time-poor.
People who are time poor are less happy, less productive and more stressed out. They exercise less, eat fattier food and have a higher incidence of cardiovascular disease. Time poverty forces us to compromise.
Time poverty doesn’t arise from a mismatch between the hours we have and the hours we need; it results from how we think about and value those hours.
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Time trap #1: Technology interruptions break our hours into confetti
Time confetti: the little bits of seconds and minutes lost to unproductive multitasking. Each bit alone is not very bad, but all add up to something more pernicious.
Time confetti fragments an hour of leisure to smaller chunks (5-6 minutes long).
It takes time to cognitively recover from shifting our minds from the present to a stress-inducing activity. Time confetti makes us feel even more time impoverished than we actually are.
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Time trap #2: We focus too much on work and money
Money protects against sadness but doesn’t buy joy. Once we make enough money to pay our bills, save for the future and have some fun, making more does little for our happiness.
A culture obsessed with making more money believes, wrongly, that the way to become more time affluent is to become financially wealthier. Focusing on chasing wealth leads only to an increased focus on chasing wealth.
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Time trap #3: We undervalue our time
Because of a cultural obsession with money, many people protect their money in ways that are counterproductive to time affluence. We reflexively go for the lowest cost when we shouldn’t.
Even if we’re making a bad trade-off between time and money — such as driving two miles out of our way to save 10 cents per gallon on gas — it doesn’t feel like a bad choice. That’s because we don’t really know the worth of the time it took.
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Time trap #4: We regard busyness as a status symbol
Our identities are tied to work.
Financial insecurity drives workism. Most of us cope by working more and trying to make more money. And we feel guilty about spending money on things that make us happy, such as dining out or vacations.
The social appearance of being busy makes us feel good about ourselves. In contrast, focusing our attention on something other than work can threaten our livelihood and status.
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Time trap #5: We have an aversion to idleness
Being constantly connected to our devices prevents the brain from recovering, keeps our stress levels elevated and takes us out of the present.
Idleness has been shown to be a valuable form of leisure and can increase time affluence. The physical and mental benefits of disengaging the brain are far more valuable than the stress created by keeping the mind engaged at all times.
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Time trap #6: We think we have more time tomorrow than we actually do
The best predictor of how busy we are going to be next week is how busy we are right now.
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