Keep Leading!® Podcast 092 | How to Be Time Smart as a Leader | Ashley Whillans

Welcome to the Keep Leading!® Podcast, the podcast dedicated to leadership development and insights. I’m your host Eddie turner, The Leadership Excelerator®. I work with leaders to accelerate performance and drive impact through the power of executive and leadership coaching, masterful facilitation, and professional speaking.If you’re listening to this podcast, that means you’re a leader. As a leader, you’re busy, sometimes too busy. As leaders, we get so busy at times, we neglect the important things in life. Would you like a playbook for taking back the time you lose to mindless tasks and unfulfilling chores? My guest today is Harvard Business School professor Ashley Whillans. She has proven strategies for improving what she calls your time affluence. She shares what to do and how to do it in her new book Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life. Ashley Whillans is an assistant professor in the Negotiation, Organizations and Markets unit at Harvard Business School, teaching the Motivation and Incentives course to MBA students. More broadly, she studies how people navigate trade-offs between time and money. In 2016, she co-founded the Department of Behavioral Science in the Policy, Innovation and Engagement division of the British Columbia Public Service. Her research has been published in numerous academic journals and popular media outlets including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post.

Ashley, welcome to the Keep Leading!® Podcast.

Thank you so much for having me.

It is just an absolute joy to have you today. Tell me what I missed.

Well, I think it’s always fun to start the conversation by sharing a little bit about how I became interested in the study of happiness and time management. So, maybe we can start there, if that sounds okay.

That sounds good.

Great. So, if you Google me after this podcast, you will probably come upon an IMDb page. I used to be an actor before I was a professor at the Harvard Business School. And my research really comes out of this deep interest I have for human motivation from theater school. So, one of the very first research jobs I had, in undergrad I went to college for a little bit and then I quit college to become a professional actor. I wasn’t a very good one. I was always more interested in studying in the library about the historical context in which my characters lived than learning my lines or learning blocking. So, in theater school, I wasn’t exactly an A student. And then I ended up going back to college and fell in love with Psychology. And my first ever lab job was giving false feedback to someone where I had to use all my acting skills to make a psychology experiment run and, basically, in combination of putting my acting interests and Psychology interests together. That’s how I ended up in the field of Psychology. And during my PhD, I became very interested in the topics of time, money, and happiness. So, I followed a very famous researcher student Dan Gilbert who’s a tenured professor at Harvard in the Psychology department. His student Elizabeth Dunn was a psych prof at University of British Columbia where I did my undergraduate degree and she was looking for a raise and she was really interested in understanding how can we spend time and money to maximize happiness. So, that was my first foray into the scientific study of time, money and happiness. So, I’ll just leave it there but I’ve been a time, money and happiness nerd for almost a decade now. So, I’m excited to share some of my thoughts based on my research with you today.

Absolutely. We want to know all about that. wow! You gave me a lot to unpack there right out the gate because I was going to ask you later on about your acting career. That’s a fascinating tidbit about you. And you combined acting with Psychology. How many people would think to do that?

Everyone always ask me “How did you go from acting to Psychology? It makes no sense to me.” And like I said, acting is really trying to understand your character’s motivations, why are they acting the way that they’re acting, what are they trying to get out of the situation. And Psychology is no different. In acting you enact your character’s motivation and in Psychology, you study it. So, I’m definitely more of the nerd in the library type as opposed to performing on stage although I do a lot more performing in this job than I ever thought I would back in graduate school. I sometimes joke to my colleagues that I do more acting as an HBS professor than I ever did as a professional actor. So, definitely those skills are not lost in my current profession but there’s definitely a lot of similarities between Psychology and acting.

So, is it a scenario where someone comes to you and says “Professor” and they believe that here is a concept that is correct and you must now put on those acting skills and not humiliate them but give them the right answer?

Yeah, you have to help them come up with their own answer themselves. A lot of improvisation techniques come into play. So, if someone provides a suggestion in class, not saying “No, that’s not right,” but “Sure, that’s one interesting perspective but does anyone else have any other ideas?” So, this yes-and mentality that you’re taught in improv to continue on a scene without a script definitely plays in the HBS classroom.

Nice. Thank you for sharing that and making that connection. And you mentioned that you were not an A student at first with what you were going through and trying to juggle both things but obviously, you did something right because you ended up getting your PhD and now you are a renowned Harvard Business School professor.

Well, I’m still working on my reputation but I’ll take your compliment.

We’re putting it out there. You’re in the major journals and that says a lot. You’re in the academic journals and of course, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and the Washington Post, as we mentioned. So, yes, we’re going to put it out there and I expect to see you continuing to stay there, especially with the release of this new book that we’re talking about. What motivated you to write the book?

So, my book is called, as you mentioned, Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life. And it really came out of my own research interest in this area as well as my personal experience with navigating time and money trade-offs. I was doing all of this research in graduate school showing that people who focus more on time as opposed to money are much happier, have better social relationships, better physical health, they are better able to contribute to their communities, they volunteer more. There’s a whole suite of benefits of having a time affluent and time-first life. And yet, in my own personal life, I was prioritizing work and productivity over all of my personal and social relationships. And it was coming at a cost to my emotional health. And I thought to myself in my first year on faculty, spending Christmas alone after breaking up with a partner of 10 years, “If I am struggling with time and money, I am struggling to make the right decisions day in and day out. I must not be the only one.” And sure enough, my research suggests that 80% of employed Americans report feeling overwhelmed by the demands of daily life. So, I wrote the book to try to put my research …

That’s staggering.

Yeah, it is. So, in large-scale data, I find that 80% of working Americans report feeling time poor and that these feelings of time poverty have greater negative effects for happiness than unemployment.

You talk about this concept of time poverty. Is that what you’re referring to when you say that?

Yeah. So, it’s the psychological feeling of having too many things to do and not enough time to do them. And it afflicts all of us regardless of how old we are.

You can’t see me raising my hand right now.

I know. Well, if you ask people how they’re doing, the quintessential response is “busy” and “stressed” and all of us are feeling overwhelmed. And so, yeah, I wrote the book out of this growing recognition in my own life that it’s very hard to live a time affluent, time-first life in our modern society, modern day. And if I was struggling, other people must be too. So, I tried to put my science into concrete strategies we can all take in our everyday life. So, the book isn’t just theoretical, just academic. It’s really practical on purpose. I want people to live the truth that we all know but have a hard time actually putting into practice, which is time is our most valuable resource, not money.

Yes. And in my head, every time you say time, money, happiness, in my mind I have all those years of trying to get things right with my financial team and talking about time, value, money. So, I have to drop the word ‘value’.

We often were trained to think about time as a way to get money. And I really want to re-flip this thinking that we need to be putting time first and thinking about money as a way to get back our time. And so, it’s really important to break this script in our minds that so many of us have that money is the most important resource, not time. Don’t get me wrong, money does matter but it’s more important for removing stress. It doesn’t necessarily produce greater joy. And we look to money as a mechanism by which to get happiness and meaning in life but my research shows over and over again that that’s not the best path to happiness. Forming and maintaining valuable relationships, having meaningful work, engaging with your communities that you care about, that really is the path to greater happiness but somewhere along the way many of us, myself included, get misled and focus on prestige, career, and money at the expense of happiness.

Yes. And I like your contrast. You move from talking about poverty as it relates to time to the antithesis to affluence. So, you have a concept you go through about time affluence. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?

Exactly. So, time affluence is feeling like you have enough time to do all the things that you want to do or have to do, that you feel in control of your schedule and time affluent people are having a life where their actual time use maps on to their ideal time use. One exercise that I go through in the book and that I like to share and try to do this on a regular basis is go through yesterday or go through your last typical work day. What did the morning, afternoon, and evening look like for you? What activities did you do in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening? And how did you feel about each of those activities? Were they joyful? Were they stressful? Were they meaningless? Were they purposeful? And then write out what your ideal version of that day would have looked like. What does your ideal work day, your ideal productive day look like? People who are time affluent have actual days that map on to their ideal days to a lot greater extent than people who feel time poor and who feel like their time is slipping away from them.

Very interesting exercise. And you mentioned that your book isn’t just full of academic theory, that there are very practical steps that we can take. Can you just share one step that we can take to become more time affluent?

Sure. So, once we’ve identified the time traps that get in the way and make us feel time poor, which I will just briefly outline as some of the points we’ve already talked about – our technology gets in the way of having us enjoy our leisure, we focus too much on money and work and not enough on time – once we identify these steps in our own life, it’s then up to us to use strategies to have more and better time. So, I talk about three strategies in the book which I’ll outline very briefly and delve into detail on one of them. The first is finding time, the second is funding time, and the third is reframing time. So, finding time is what we just talked about, which is identifying where in a day you mindlessly engage in activities like spending too much time on social media and deliberately limiting those mindless activities and replacing them with something more productive or meaningful.

So, you’re saying we got to cut back on the Facebook and the Insta.

Yeah and this is very difficult to do because the whole point of technology is to pull our attention. That’s the business model. So, we need to make sure that we’re being very active in our control over our technology.

And that’s a nice illustration that really is real because even when we find with those who may not necessarily manage their finances well that sometimes the money is going away to junk food as it were or things that are not as important. So, if we can do the same with our time, the social media or the social junk food, and apply it to things that are more in line with our overall goals and things that will lead to happiness, then we can be time smart.

I love that analogy. I have a similar analogy I make in the book around accounting for time. So, you were talking about the importance of accounting for money and making sure we’re not wasting too much of our hard-earned money on discretionary purchases that are unintentional, mindless or don’t bring us joy or satisfaction. I take a similar approach in this concept of finding time where we need to be as deliberate with the way we’re spending our time as we are with our money and truly account for it so that we can see where it goes missing and where we need to tighten up our time budget, if you will, and start being a little bit more deliberate in some of our actions.

Indeed. Well, I am having a fascinating conversation and hopefully becoming more time smart as a leader as I’m talking to Ashley Whillans. She is a Harvard Business School professor, helping leaders everywhere get smarter about time through the new book that she’s released, Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life. We’ll have more with Ashley right after this.

We’re back, everyone. I’m talking to Ashley Whillans. She is a Harvard Business School professor, helping leaders everywhere get smarter about time. She’s the author of the new book Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life.Ashley, I really enjoyed what you were sharing before the break. You gave us three F’s – Finding, Funding, and Reframing – and you summarize very nicely what it means to go find time in our lives. Can you give us the summary of the next two, funding and reframing?

Sure. So, funding time is this idea that we can give up some of our money to have more and better time. This might look like working fewer hours and taking more vacation paid or unpaid. This also might look like spending as little as 40 dollars to have a meal delivered as opposed to cooking. The secret with outsourcing and spending money to save yourself time is you always want to be thinking about minimizing the amount of time you spend in negative activities that feel frustrating and maximizing the amount of time that you spend in enjoyable activities. So, if you like cooking, don’t outsource that but maybe you hate deep cleaning your apartment. So, that would be a task that you might want to consider spending money to save yourself the chore of having to deep clean your apartment if that’s something you really don’t like to do.One thing I often hear from readers is that they feel like the strategy is unattainable. I would encourage you to think about how you might be able to substitute the amount of money that you might spend on a shirt or in a picture frame, something that doesn’t actually bring you a lot of happiness, and substitute the money you would have spent on those objects that don’t bring joy and spend it instead in ways that save time because my research has shown that as little as 40 dollars can produce detectable increases in happiness and reduce stress.

Really?

Yeah. So, this is one thing I love. Some of the college students that listen to me lecture during my graduate student days would take this buying time or funding time principle and put it into action in their own life by buying a used bike so they didn’t have to walk to campus or having an automatic coffee maker that served as an alarm so they didn’t have to stumble around in the dark to brew their own coffee. I love that example.

I love that.

Yeah. And so, saving time via giving up some of our discretionary income is truly attainable even for the college students that I was teaching during graduate school. So, that really emphasizes the important point that we want to make sure that we’re spending as much of our time in productive, meaningful, happy, satisfying pro-social ways and really minimizing the amount of judge work that we have in our life.However, administrative tasks, cooking, and cleaning aren’t always something that we can get ourselves out of even if we throw money at the problem. Sometimes there’s things in life we have to do even if we don’t enjoy them and often at work, this comes up as more administration and paperwork seems to be added to all of our jobs every day. And so, for those kinds of tasks, the third strategy I have is this idea of reframing time. And what this means is that you just need to change your relationship with the task so that it doesn’t stress you out quite so often. One of my dissertation students has a project showing that if you think about a task you really don’t like it work that seems a bit pointless in a way that reframes that task as helping a colleague so you think about that email or that report you’re writing not just going to be something your manager looks at once and never thinks about again but as a way of helping your manager fundamentally get their work done. This can increase the satisfaction we get from those tasks and decrease our stress. And so, that’s one very simple strategy that doesn’t cost anything at all simply. Reframing the negative experiences that we sometimes have to engage in can be a really positive and effective strategy for reducing our stress and increasing our joy.

Thank you for going through those. And I love the practical application even at the college student level. So, this is something we all can do.

Absolutely. And I think that’s a major point that I want people to take away from the book. When we think about getting to greater time affluence, most of us, myself included, think about time as being something I’ll worry about when I have enough money or when I can quit my job or something that will take going on a sabbatical or making a drastic decision in our lives. However, my research that I’ve conducted over many, many years with people living all over the world suggests that even small simple decisions about how we spend the next 30 minutes can have powerful effects on the amount of time affluence and joy we experience. So, it doesn’t take winning the lottery or quitting our jobs to get to greater time affluence and happiness. It really takes consistent small changes around the margins to live a more time smart and happier life.

And that’s interesting that you say that. I was going to ask you more about that because everybody defines happiness differently. So, what does happiness mean to you? How do you address this in the book so that people can then make that connection as to how they’ll spend their time and money to pursue the happiness?

Happiness, I define it as an academic who studies what academic types called subjective wellbeing, is really a combination of two critical factors. The first factor is this overall life evaluation – how you think you’re doing in your life generally. This is known as the cognitive component or sometimes referred to as the reflective component of happiness. So, when you take a step back in your life, how well do you think you’re doing? And that’s one key element. The second key element is probably what more people think about when they think about happiness, which is how you feel in the moment. This is sometimes known as experiencing happiness and it’s really a sense of the extent to which you experience joy, happiness and satisfaction on an everyday basis and also the extent to which you experience more positive emotions as opposed to negative emotions like stress, worry, rumination, and sadness. So, in all of my studies on this topic, I’ve looked both at how focusing on time makes you feel about your life overall and also how it affects your day-to-day mood. And as I’ve already mentioned, focusing on time, putting time first, making sure you feel in control of your schedule is really good for both key elements of subjective wellbeing. And I think that is driven in part by the fact that people who are more time focused also prioritize social relationships more than people who are more money focused. And we know from decades of research that social interactions, even short ones, 5 to 10-minute conversations with a friend or your neighbor, have really powerful impacts for both how well you think you’re doing in life and also your day-to-day mood.

Yeah, absolutely. I couldn’t agree with you more. That’s wonderful. And I knew there would be no way I could talk to a Harvard Business School professor and not learn something. The next time someone asked me if I am happy, I will tell them about my subjective wellbeing.

Perfect. A+

Excellent. I love that. Fantastic. Speaking of being at the Harvard Business School, you spent some time at my hometown Chicago at the University of Chicago. One can forgive you for leaving us and heading over to Harvard Business School but I do have to ask you since you spent time in Chicago, your pizza choice, who’s your favorite.

Oh, I don’t know if I have a favorite but I do love deep dish and I did go to some Cubs games with my grad school buddies and we ate deep dish pizza and drank beer and it was a wonderful American experience. I’m Canadian. So, it was definitely like a quintessential US experience for me in grad school, although. Again, I was a bit of a nerd in the library. I can’t say I went out enough during my period of time there to know which pizza place to go to but I do like deep dish and I did eat it at a Cubs game. So, I feel like I’m not a total failure in the going out department.

No, no, no, that’s excellent. You have a true Chicago experience. You ate deep dish pizza and you went to a Cubs game. Excellent.

Right? I think that’s pretty good. I love Chicago. It’s one of my favorite cities in the US. I hope one day I get to spend enough time there again that I get to eat my way around Chicago as I’ve done Boston, two great cities for eating, but in grad school, I think I was too focused on data analysis and not enough focused on eating deep dish pizza but I think maybe this book will reform me.

So, what’s it like to be on the campus especially right now?

HBS is taking a hybrid approach model to teaching. I wasn’t teaching last year in part to finish writing the book and write some cases. As people listening may know, all of our classes are taught not through lecturing or assigning academic journals but actually by assigning case studies based on companies we reach out to and talk to. And so, as I make it through the ranks at the Harvard Business School, more of the case writing responsibility becomes something I take on. So, I was busily writing cases for a new upcoming class I’m teaching in January called Motivation and Incentives. So, I wasn’t teaching MBAs during the work-from-home period. I was teaching a few exec-ed courses that were completely virtually administered. And right now, we really have a limited physical campus at HBS. The students are, to the extent that they want to be, on campus but they’re in their rooms. There’s limited physical engagement. Some students are going to class in a hybrid model. So, they’re physically distancing, the instructor will be in the room with a face shield, some of the students will be in class and then some of the students will be virtual so that we can accommodate the physical distance requirements. And I’ve been to campus only once since March. I had to pick up my computer and set up my home office at home since I’ll be parked here sort of indefinitely but there’s definitely a much quieter experience on campus. MOST of us have been working from home offices since March. And I think that’s going to be the cadence going forward at least until the end of the school year. I have been really proud of the case counts and the due diligence that everyone is taking on campus to be mindful of the restrictions that are in place due to COVID. And so, although we’re definitely missing these in-person social interactions, I’m very happy to see that everyone is staying safe and staying well on campus and we’re all getting a lot better at Zoom teaching. The very first time I taught, I was teaching an exec-ed and I was joking to one of my colleagues, I said “I didn’t know you could work up a sweat in front of your computer” because, usually, when you’re teaching, you’re in a big class, you’re running around asking questions. And apparently, you can also work up a sweat in Zoom teaching. I felt like I’d run a half marathon by the end of it given all the hand gestures and trying to cold call people very quickly to keep the energy up in a Zoom room. So, it’s definitely been a different experience but everyone’s adjusting to the best extent that they can.

Fantastic. And not everyone knows what the pedagogical approach is there at HBS. And so, thank you for enlightening my audience. And I always wondered who wrote those cases. And so, it’s nice to know that I now know at least one person who’s responsible for pouring through the interviews and going through all of this and making it happen.

Yeah, it’s really an interesting exercise. I’m a social psychologist. So, usually, I don’t focus on individuals as data points. I’m looking at average level responses across multiple people. So, it’s been a really fun exercise to really get in the minds of the CEOs and the founders and employees of large companies and try to understand what they were thinking as they were making a business decision. I call myself a pracademic, an academic who really cares about practical orientation. So, HBS is a perfect job because when I was thinking about what I wanted to do after graduate school, I wasn’t so sold on the idea of only publishing in academic journals and having only a handful of my colleagues, various team colleagues, of course, but colleagues nonetheless, be the only one that really thinks about the work I’m doing. So, it’s been so fun to be at HBS and have all these really meaningful conversations with people such as yourself, authors, founders of major companies, employees at large companies and hear their experiences. I think it’s one of the great opportunities of HBS and business school in general both as a student participant but also as an instructor just all the interesting conversations you get to have about whether and how your ideas resonate with other people or other likeminded people.

Yes, I can only imagine.

And also getting students pushed back on your ideas, I love that. I personally love the case method where you just pose a question and students debate with each other and they’re debating with you. Now, when I give seminar talks and no one talks, I’m like “Come on! Tell me my idea is wrong” like “Come on! Let’s go for it.”

Looking for some pushback.

Yeah, I’m used to the pushback now and I always demand it in meetings as a result.

Well, fantastic. I could talk to you for hours. You’re simply fascinating and I love the work you’re doing and how you’ve put it in the hands of the masses that made it simple for us.What’s the main message you would like to leave us with today?

The main message I’d like to leave you with is that time affluence and happiness is largely determined by our actions on an everyday basis. Like physical fitness, time affluence is something that we can all work toward each and every day. So, for listeners, I want to ask you to think about what the one activity is or the one strategy you might try to live a more time affluent and happier life tomorrow in the next 24 hours and tell a friend about it, tell a colleague about it, get someone to hold you accountable because we all know what makes us happy and we all know that time is important but sometimes, we just need a little nudge in the right direction to help us live that truth.

Wonderful. And this is the Keep Leading!® Podcast and as such, I always like to know a quote or the best piece of leadership advice you’ve ever received to help our audience keep leading.

Sure. So, the quote that I really like and think about a lot is related to the professor that I spoke to you about earlier in this interview, Dan Gilbert, who’s citing Willa Cather, and he cites this in his book Stumbling on Happiness, and he writes and quotes Willa Cather, “One cannot divine nor forecast the conditions that will make happiness. One only stumbles upon them by chance in a lucky hour at the world’s end somewhere and holds fast to the days as to fortune or to fame.” What I like about this is whenever I think about this quote, it does remind you that so much of our life is out of our control. And when we find things that are good and are working for us, we need to hold on to them. However, the only way we can really achieve that goal is when we take the time and make it enough time in our schedule to truly enjoy and get more of the things that bring us joy and meaning.

That is wonderful and thank you for explaining the application. I like that. Tell my audience where they can learn more about you.

I’m quite findable on social media. You can find me on twitter @AshleyWhillans. Also, on LinkedIn you can find my faculty page. I’m really excited to hear how everyone listening is being time smart in their own life and how they’re thinking about applying some of these strategies to the work-from-home scenario that so many of us are in. So, please feel free to reach out. I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Wonderful. Ashley, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule there at Harvard Business School to talk to me and share with my listeners your amazing work and tell us about your fascinating book and helping us all to be able to be time smart and reclaim our time and live a happier life.

Of course, thank you so much for having me.

Thank you.And thank you for listening. That concludes this episode, everyone. I’m Eddie Turner, The Leadership Excelerator®, reminding you that leadership is not about our title or our position. Leadership is an activity. Leadership is action. It’s not the case of once a leader, always a leader. It’s not a garment we put on and take off. We must be a leader at our core and allow it to emanate in all we do. So, whatever you’re doing, always keep leading.