How to Stop Feeling Crushed for Time
Sparingly these days do I find myself thinking I’ve got some time to kill. Time has a way of making itself scarce. I’m like some Pleistocene hunter-gatherer, always scavenging for more. For that matter, isn’t “killing time” a rather misleading phrase? As Christopher Hitchens once observed, time “is killing us.”
Well, I hope you find it bracing to hear, as I did, that we don’t have to be passive in this war. Ashley Whillans, a behavioral scientist, says we can fight back. Her new book, Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life, shows us how. It involves dispensing with the bromide that time is money. Time is more valuable than that. “A major barrier to living this truth—that time is the most valuable resource, something that is finite and uncertain—is this pursuit of money, and the societal focus on having more money and productivity as a means by which to measure the value of our lives,” Whillans says.
I began by pulling on that cultural-psychological thread in my conversation with Whillans, an assistant professor at Harvard Business School. We also discussed her recent eye-opening Nature Human Behavior paper, “Why time poverty matters for individuals, organizations, and nations.” Her enthusiasm for cultivating a “time affluent” attitude, when most people nowadays report feeling “time poor,” was infectious.
