We spend our days making constant trade-offs between time and money. Together, they’re the most important resources we have, and yet throughout our lives they seem to be at constant odds with each other. Cook at home or order takeout? Take on that extra project at work, or spend more time with the family? The gain of one always seems to be at the expense of the other.

Emerging research on the relationship between time, money and subjective well-being is showing that prioritizing the value of your time is the best way to boost happiness and financial success. Ashley Whillans is a leading researcher on this matter, and the extensive research in her book Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life (which is the inspiration for this post) puts forward a simple premise: that we are much better at spending and saving money rather than time, and we’d be a lot happier if we valued time more wisely. 

It sounds a little counterintuitive to say you’d be better off valuing time more than money, but studies show that we have a tendency to focus too much on working and making money and not enough on having more and better time, and that it’s actually costing us our happiness and financial well-being. Money is extremely important, there’s no doubt about that; but the key thing to remember is that time is ultimately our most precious resource, and if we view our money as a means to give us more freedom and control over how we spend our time, we’ll be much better off for it. 

Self-check: Are you being time-oriented or money-oriented?

First, here’s a quick exercise to gauge how you currently make decisions when it comes to time and money at this stage in your life. From the two options below, choose the one that most closely resembles your decision making and outlook:

1. Are you willing to sacrifice money to have more time? For example, would you rather work fewer hours and make less money than work more hours and make more money? If so, you are time-oriented.
2. Are you willing to sacrifice time to have more money? For example, would you rather work more hours and make more money than work fewer hours and have more time? If so, you are money-oriented.

Keep in mind that these two outlooks represent extreme ends of a spectrum. The reality is that we can’t just indiscriminately sacrifice as much money as we want to have more time and vice versa. There’s also no “right” way to be. You will be more time-oriented or money-oriented depending on your life circumstances, and this changes throughout time.

In her research, Ashley Whillans found that being time-oriented has the most positive impact on overall happiness and well-being, especially so for those who have less financial resources; but it’s a challenge that takes constant practice, a few reasons being: 1) time is abstract, and so your brain more easily comprehends the value of money, 2) you’re living in a time-poor society where we you are expected to work long hours and divide your attention among a myriad of technology platforms, and 3) if you are in a socioeconomic position where you must work extra hard to make ends meet, you will unfortunately have more restrictions on your time-related choices..

No matter where we find ourselves in our relationship to time as a resource, the most important first step is awareness. It allows us to begin to focus on what’s most important (e.g. taking care of ourselves and our families, investing in our career, passions, our community, etc.) and understanding that our money and time are both in service to those things. 

The Benefits of Valuing Your Time

It’s somewhat ironic that the biggest boosts to life satisfaction and wealth come from prioritizing the value of our time. Again, this is not to say that money isn’t extremely important – for many it’s a matter of survival. And yet research still shows that even those who must prioritize money over their time, still stand much to gain in happiness and overall well-being by practicing seeing time as their most valuable resource. Valuing your time over money brings a wide array of benefits:

• It promotes happiness. Research has shown that simply having a time-oriented mindset gives people a boost in happiness equal to about half they would get from being married – and this holds across all demographics (regardless of marital status). 
• It promotes social connections. Focusing on time helps us focus on social interactions first, which is key in reducing stress and boosting happiness, even if it’s sparing a few minutes to chat with someone you see regularly at the grocery store.
• It promotes relationship satisfaction. Couples who outsource household tasks spend more quality time together. In general, time-oriented people have happier partners and better sex lives than money-oriented people. 
• It promotes job satisfaction. Even though time-oriented people work as many hours as money-oriented people, they tend to make more money because they’re more likely to be in careers doing things they love, and thus are less stressed, more productive and less likely to quit.

Moreover, one of the most interesting results of the research Whillans and her team conducted was the idea of “happiness dollars”, which is the income equivalent (in dollars) of the amount of happiness created by a time-related choice. Based on surveys and statistical analyses to assign dollar values to the influence of time-use decisions on happiness, here are the monetary values, denoted in happiness dollars (h$) of certain time-oriented decisions:

• h$2,200 for valuing time: Based on an annual income of $50,000, simply shifting your mindset from valuing money to valuing time is the equivalent of a $2,200 raise. Not bad!
• h$3,600 for savoring: Are you someone who frets about which restaurant to go to, hoping for the best experience, or are you someone who is content with whatever choice is made and enjoys the experience? (Note that mindfulness practices promote that latter “savoring” mentality.) Shifting to a savoring mindset is worth a $3,600 raise. 
• h$18,000 for outsourcing: Outsourcing your most disliked task (e.g. laundry, cooking, cleaning) each month is worth an $18,000 raise on a $50,000 income. For example, if you dislike grocery shopping, you can hire someone to buy and put away your groceries for about $100/week in most American cities. That’s about $5,200 a year. Seems like a pricey thing to do just on its own, but after factoring in the h$18,000 value of outsourcing, it becomes a major investment. 
• -h$3,300 for chasing deals: It actually costs us the equivalent of about $3,300 a year when we drive around chasing pennies for cheaper gas and comparison-shop across stores for bargains that wind up saving us only a few bucks. Granted, this may not apply to you if you actually get a thrill of happiness from finding those bargains!
• h$4,400 for vacation: Whillans found that the average U.S. employee takes about 9 days of vacation per year, but the average vacation time provided is 2 weeks. If Americans took eight more days off per year (17 in total), it would result in a bump of h$4,400. As an aside, this begs a bigger, more systemic question of the reasons behind why people aren’t taking as much vacation. Broader societal pressures may have a large part to play in an overworked, under-vacationed workforce. Better workplace policies could help with this. 

Read More: Happy Money: A Book Review

How To Boost The Value of Your Time

Now, for some actionable things you can do that not only will help you boost the value of your time, but also will help you practice the mindset of being more time-centric and better align your time-related decisions to your personal values.

Document Your Time

Keep a log of how you spend your time throughout the entirety of a typical weekday, and then reflect on the results. Think about which activities that you consider to be productive versus unproductive, pleasant versus unpleasant, meaningful versus not meaningful. Create a table with three columns: 1) the activity or task, 2) the type of experience (pleasurable, stressful, meaningful), and 3) the reason for the type of experience (e.g. why it was meaningful). Then see if there’s a way you can minimize tasks and activities that bring you stress and maximize those that bring you more satisfaction.

Tidy Up Your Time 

Similar to the reflection on documenting time. Think of this as taking the Marie Kondo approach to your usage of time. Observe how you spend your time and ask yourself, “Do I love this activity or not?” If not, then see if it’s possible to stop doing it. Some tasks we can’t get rid of, but this isn’t about escaping your responsibilities as a human – it’s about creating a better sense of control over your time. By tidying up your time every now and then, you may find opportunities to create space to do more of what you love to do.

Fund Your Time

Thanks to technology and the explosion of startup companies offering time-saving solutions, there are many different ways to either outsource the chores and activities that we dislike or cut down on the time that they take. Angie’s List, Beyond the Rack, Instacart and TaskRabbit are just a few companies that make it more possible to divest yourself from activities for which you’d find greater value in having someone else do. 

Reframe Your Time

By practicing changing the way you feel and think about time, you can actually gain a real sense of having more control over it and more of it, which reduces stress and increases satisfaction. Ruminating on the past or anticipating the future puts you in a squeeze and makes you feel pressed for time, but focusing attention on the present makes you more sensitive to existing pleasures. Furthermore, reframing your perception of work as something positive can make you feel more time rich. For example, research shows that when people who work in physically demanding jobs think of their work as “exercise”, it leads to liking their jobs more and feeling more physically fit. 

A common thread through the research on the relationship between time-related decisions, happiness and wealth is intentionality. To value your time properly, you need to understand who you are and what is most important to you. You also need to have an awareness of what brings you joy and what causes you undue stress. Then, practice training your focus on time as your most precious asset. From a holistic standpoint, you’ll create the most wealth for yourself and those around you when you’re better able to spend your time in accordance with your values.

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