How a Happiness Professor Uses the Link Between Time and Happiness to Make Every Hour Count

Everyday Better is LinkedIn News’ weekly personal development podcast and weekly newsletter hosted by Leah Smart, a LinkedIn News Editor . You’ll hear from some of the world's brightest minds and bravest hearts who use science and story to share strategies for how we can flourish individually, in relationship to others and to the world around us. We talk about improving emotional, work, physical and relational health.

This Week on Everyday Better

Fifteen years ago, Cassie Holmes hit her breaking point. She was sitting on the train, on her way home from a big meeting in New York City. Cassie was a marketing professor, and back then, she was teaching at UPenn’s Wharton School of Business and living in Philadelphia. From the moment she woke up that day, it was one thing after another, after another.

She had frantically rushed from meeting to meeting, closed her day with a big presentation, and stuck around in the city for a group dinner. During the dinner, she looked at her watch and realized she'd completely lost track of time and was about to miss the last train home to her four-month-old baby.

It wasn’t just the pressures of work, Cassie explained, but the pressures of being a good mom and a good partner, plus the never-ending list of chores and her desire to do it all well, that left her feeling completely overwhelmed and depleted. After speeding in a taxi and barely making the train, she sank into her seat and thought, I cannot keep up.

She faced what so many people go through: wanting to "do it all" but not having the time. Even though she couldn’t keep up, Cassie didn’t want to give anything up. In that moment, Cassie decided that instead of forfeiting a career or precious connections with her family, she'd refocus her work to solve this dizzying problem. She would later coin the phrase "time poverty" to describe this all-too-common sense of not having enough time to do what you need to do or want to do.

Now, a professor at UCLA's Anderson School of Management, Cassie developed and teaches one of their most popular courses, "Applying the Science of Happiness to Life Design." This week, Cassie discusses the research and strategies from her book, Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time and Focus on What Matters Most, along with surprising findings about:

• Why our limited time isn’t the problem but the solution to our happiness.
• What specific actions balance feelings of "time poverty" to create "time affluence."
• A simple way to make weekends feel longer and richer.

When it comes to feeling agency over our time, Cassie's research shows we have a lot more control than we might think. By making even slight changes to the way we spend and savor time, we can see major lifts in our sense of purpose, contentment, and productivity. Each of these contributes to overall life satisfaction and well-being.

One of the most effective ways Cassie makes the most of her time and cuts distractions is called "time crafting." She equates this to designing a mosaic on a blank canvas. But before you can craft your time, you have to know how you tend to spend it. Enter: time tracking.

How to time track

Spend at least a week (Cassie prefers two) writing down your activities every 30 minutes. Do your best not to alter your activities because you are tracking. As you time track, categorize each activity as specifically as you can. For example, "work" can be broken down into specific projects and their stages. "Social" activities can be compartmentalized as time with family versus friends, or parties versus smaller gatherings.

During or towards the end of each activity, note how positive you feel as you do it on a scale from 1–10 (1 being not satisfying or positive at all to 10 being very satisfying and positive).

Once the two weeks are over, go back to look for patterns. Ask yourself which points were most positive and which were most negative. Investigate why. Maybe you like to take action, and in a work example, you're most negative at the point during a project when your team gets into every detail before getting started. This could show you there's a gap in your understanding or skillset, or that next time you'll simply ask to lean in more on execution.

More details on this activity, including how to time craft once you've tracked, are in her book Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most .

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Read: Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time and Focus on What Matters Most

Try: Cassie's time tracking sheet to audit how satisfied you are with how you spend your time

Try: Cassie's time crafting canvas to take more control over each hour

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Everyday Better is LinkedIn News’ weekly personal development podcast hosted by Leah Smart , a LinkedIn News Editor. You’ll hear from some of the worlds brightest minds and bravest hearts about how to live with more clarity and intention every day, in and out of work. Subscribe to the show's newsletter .

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