Paying attention to what we are doing can feel increasingly difficult as there seem to be ever-increasing demands on our time. As you get richer, you attach more value to your time, and attaching more value to time, or anything else for that matter, means that it feels scarcer. And so you pay it ever more attention. If you could charge £1.50 per minute for working at a computer you would feel more time pressure than if you charged only £0.15 per minute for exactly the same task.
In fact, the same authors show that you only need to have your wealth brought to your attention to feel time pressed. If you were made to feel rich by being given a scale where “high savings” was anything over £500, you would report feeling “more pressed for time today” than if you were made to feel poor by being given a scale where you needed to have over £400,000 to be deemed to have high savings.
Thinking about time as money also affects experiences of pleasure during leisure activities. Imagine you are asked some questions about how much you earned over the past year and that your friend answered the same questions as well as being asked their hourly wage. Then you each listen to eighty-six seconds of “The Flower Duet” from the opera Lakmé. Who do you think would enjoy the music the most and be the most patient? You would—because your friend has just been reminded how much she earns in a unit (an hour), which draws attention to itself. Similar effects were also found when the researchers allowed participants to create their own leisure experience by playing around online.
The moral of these various studies is that you are less happy when you are paying attention to time (and especially to time as money) rather than to the activities you are engaged in. So again, try to be fully engaged in what you’re doing, which includes not looking at the clock every few minutes. For example, I try hard not to be too set in how much time I spend playing with the kids in breaks from working.
Moreover, the more money you have, the more you may think of all the things you could do with that money if only you had the time, such as taking longer holidays. Surely richer people would actually take longer holidays whenever they could, right? This was indeed the trend in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, but from the 1980s on, something quite interesting has happened. People with less than a college degree have had relatively more leisure time, and those with a college degree or higher have had relatively less. The gap between the incomes of the rich and the poor has widened considerably since the 1980s but the gap between the amounts of leisure time they have has widened, too, favouring those with lower incomes.
Little wonder, then, that daily moods do not improve beyond making around $75,000 per year in the United States—there is no time to be happy if you are rich. Focusing attention on the scarcity of time or money can lead to all of us making decisions that place a great deal of emphasis on getting more of that resource now at the expense of lots of it later. As a great illustration of this, one study randomly assigned participants into groups that varied in how much time they were allowed to think about answers to trivia questions, and into further groups that determined whether or not they would be allowed to take more time to answer now at the expense of less time later.
Time-poor participants had three hundred seconds to answer, whereas time-rich participants had one thousand seconds. The former group borrowed on average 22 percent of their budget (so, sixty-six seconds), whereas time-rich participants borrowed on average 8 percent of their budget (so, eighty seconds). As you might expect, the time-rich groups did better than the time-poor groups whether or not they could borrow, but the time-poor group performed the best when they could not borrow at all. In a nutshell, time-poor participants borrowed their way into poor performance. If a resource becomes scarce, we will all act in very similar ways to those who are currently poor in that resource.
And so in general, it’s better if you don’t pay too much attention to money at all. Given my upbringing, I appreciate that money matters when circumstances dictate that every penny counts but it might generally be worth chilling out a bit about it if you are not in that position. Sure, money matters and you should respect it, but not so much that it overruns your life. It’s certainly not worth making yourself miserable over.
Happiness by Design is available on Amazon UK and Amazon US.