Cassie Holmes: Professor at UCLA Anderson School of Management and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Happier Hour

A fascinating conversation with Cassie Holmes, professor at UCLA Anderson and Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Happier Hour. During this episode, Cassie explains how she would define happiness: as subjective wellbeing, where more positive than negative emotions are experienced on average.

Many clients approach coaches looking for a sense of meaning in their lives, and Cassie explains here how meaning and happiness are interconnected. She also accounts for the ways in which negative experiences can be picked up in our sense of meaning, and looks at the difference between joy and satisfaction.

Cassie’s book Happier Hour looks at how people can invest their time to create more happiness in their lives. Although we may feel that we are “time poor,” she reminds us that it’s not about how much time we have but how we invest the time that’s at our disposal. Cassie also warns Coaching.com CEO Alex Pascal about the risks of feeling “time poor” and how this perspective can cause us to miss what really matters in our lives.

Learn how to use your time intentionally, take a broader perspective of your life, and gather personalized data about what makes you happy by listening to the full episode. 

Transcript

Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee - Cassie Holmes

(interview blurb)

Cassie: It’s actually not about having a whole lot of time for greater happiness, it’s really how do you invest the time that you have and, like I said, it’s about investing in activities that feel worthwhile.

(intro)

Alex: Hi, I’m Alex Pascal, CEO of coaching.com, and this is Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. My guest today is a professor of marketing and behavioral decision making at UCLA Anderson School of Management. Her research examines such questions as how focusing on time increases happiness, how the meaning of happiness changes over the course of one’s lifetime, and how much happiness people enjoy from extraordinary and ordinary experiences. She’s the bestselling author of Happier Hour, which provides a practical guide for how to think about and spend time to live a more joyful life. Please welcome Cassie Holmes.

(Interview)

Alex: Hi, Cassie.

Cassie: Hi, Alex. How are you?

Alex: I’m doing great. It’s great to see you. I know we’re both in LA so we’re pretty close geographically today.

Cassie: Yes. Both enjoying the cool sunshine.

Alex: I know. Looks nice out there. I haven’t been yet so at some point today, hopefully. So let’s start where we start every episode of Coaches on Zoom Drinking Coffee. What are we drinking today?

Cassie: Well, I am drinking coffee but I had wanted to be drinking bubble tea because it is so perfectly caffeinated, as in highly caffeinated and sweet and then the squishy little bobas, it’s like the most delectable thing but, apparently, you cannot get bubble tea before 11 a.m. so I had to give in to my regular coffee ritual. Usually, I do get boba tea in the afternoons but, truly, it should be a morning drink too, just a though for an entrepreneur out there.

Alex: Honestly, I agree. I was shocked when I went on DoorDash about an hour ago to get our tea. As you know, we promised to match with that, as we always do. And, to my surprise, all the bubble places open at 11 so I guess it’s good to know. So, I am not matching you today with coffee because I already had some coffee when I was disappointed with the boba availability and so I’m drinking Health-Ade Kombucha Ginger-Lemon. It has caffeine.

Cassie: That is healthy. 

Alex: Yeah.

Cassie: It’s healthier than all of my approaches to caffeine consumption so good for you.

Alex: Well, I will tell you, this doesn’t really give you that caffeine high, I think the content’s pretty low, but it tastes good, it’s good for you, it has probiotics so not a bad alternative to the boba, but I’m going to have to go get bubble tea in the afternoon because now I’m kind of craving. 

Cassie: Totally.

Alex: Cool. Well, it’s so great to have you here. Thank you for joining me today. Let’s start at the beginning. We were just talking about in the greenroom that you went to a high school that I have family in and friends that went to back in San Diego so take us through your journey from your career, how you ended up writing, really the work you do, the book that you wrote, I love the title of your book, by the way, I think it’s fantastic, Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most. So, how did you end up being researcher and a writer? Love to learn a little bit more about your journey.

Cassie: Yeah, and, well, I absolutely viewed myself as a researcher and a teacher first. I’m a professor at UCLA in the business school and, before that, before I moved back to Southern California for the sunshine and smiley people, I was a professor at Wharton so I’ve been in — and my PhD was actually also at a business school at Stanford, so I’ve been in business schools conducting research and focusing on people because that has always been my sort of source of joy and interest and trying to figure out what drives us to make the decisions that we make and, in particular, what are those decisions that will make us happier with not only decisions that we’re making but with our life, more generally. And so, I have from back when I was getting my PhD and it was actually in marketing, I have been trying to figure out how do we make informed, based off of empirics, based off of data, choices to drive people’s happiness and my focus on time was driven by the fact that, when it came to happiness, I found that my biggest obstacle and challenge was time, feeling time poor, not having enough hours in the day to do what I wanted to do, what I needed to do, and not having enough hours to do any of it well or to enjoy any of it along the way. And so that actually has been what has propelled my research, which is many researchers are driven to do mini search, basically answer questions that we’re personally grappling with and so that’s what I’ve been doing throughout my career is studying how do we invest time, think about time so that we feel greater joy in our days, greater satisfaction in our lives, and then I got to a point where I realized as an academic that not many people read our peer-reviewed journal papers and that wasn’t very satisfying because there were insights in the research, in my research, that I felt people could apply to experience greater satisfaction and meaning in their lives and to figure out how to spend their time better, and I applied the findings to my own life and live it. So, recognizing that the research wasn’t reaching a broader audience, I set out to develop a course for our MBAs, for executive MBAs called Applying the Science of Happiness to Life Design, that is teaching exactly this, the science of happiness so people can invest their time better and feel happier in their days, align their careers with what matters to them, and to live their lives so that they don’t look back with regret. And when I saw the impact that the course was having on my students, when I was approached to write a book, I was like, yes, because this stuff helps and works and this research should find a broader audience. And so I wrote Happier Hour and it was a very different type of writing than an academic article. Parts of it have been fun, but it’s absolutely been rewarding to hear from readers how it is benefiting them and changing their perspective on time and on their lives. So it’s been fun.

Alex: It sounds like it, and time’s such a precious commodity. It’s one of those things that no matter how successful you are, how much money you have, you can’t buy more time, and really understanding how to capitalize on our daily routine so that we structure it in a way that enables us to have a good, solid, healthy relationship with time, it’s just so powerful. So, what does your research say about, like happiness is such a difficult thing to really describe really from a research perspective, I think happiness is a little bit ethereal and I know for thousands of years, philosophers have been grappling with, “What is happiness? How do you live a good life?” So from your research, all that learning that you’ve developed through all those years of reading about the topic, thinking about the topic, teaching, how would you define happiness?

Cassie: Yeah, and it’s a really great and important question because I use the term — and “happiness” is a term that lots of people use in different ways and so, to be clear, what I’m talking about is what we refer to in the literature as subjective wellbeing and that includes both feeling more positive than negative emotion in our experiences, during our experiences, during our days, but it also includes feeling satisfied about our days, satisfied about our lives, so there is this evaluative sort of cognitive component, and meaning also, it got sort of pulled into that satisfaction of like, if I ask you how satisfied are you in life, that is absolutely picking up on the extent to which you feel like you have a sense of meaning. And what’s also interesting is the single biggest predictor of feeling a sense of meaning is feeling happy, like feeling positive emotion. It’s not only positive emotion because we can have negative experiences that when we learn from them, when we make sense of them, then those get sort of picked up in our sense of meaning too. And so when I’m saying “happiness” and “happier hour,” I’m not just talking about this sort of fleeting sense of enjoyment, what I am absolutely talking about is feeling good in and about our days, good in and about our lives. And a lot, when I’m talking and giving advice that’s based off of the research of how to invest time, the ways of investing are those that are worthwhile and that picks up both on feeling a sense of joy as well as feeling a sense of satisfaction. Often, there are, of course, activities that can feel sort of enjoyable in the moment but not that satisfying. Those are fine. But that’s actually not what I’m driving people towards. And there are those things that we should be doing but we really don’t enjoy them or want to be doing and, actually, I sort of help frame those in a way that actually it feels more joyful but what I’m really driving people and hoping people get from it is understanding how do we invest the hours of our days so that we experience joy in those days and look back on those days, and in our weeks and years feeling a sense of fulfillment.

Alex: What are some of the strategies that people can employ every day to make better use of their time that aligns with living a life that ultimately gives you these positive feelings and hopefully leads to a happy life?

Cassie: Oh, my gosh, where do I start? I wrote it into a book, that question.

Alex: Look, I’m very excited to hear kind of how you’re thinking about these tactics because coaches love tools. As coaches, we just love to know what does the research say what’s a practical approach for me to work with a client to give them a better experience of their day to day, to think more strategically about how they deploy their time, their routines, so I love that you were saying earlier that research is just a little bit dry, like so I have a PhD in organizational psychology, since I finished grad school, I have to admit, I haven’t really been following up on the latest and greatest research and, lately, I started reading journal articles again, it’s so cool and there’s so much interesting stuff there and you can trace the articles that you like and the methodologies you like and see how science is evolving. That is not a novel, you know? It’s like if I read it after 10 p.m., 10 minutes after, I’m out, I’m out cold even if I have coffee in the afternoon. So, I love how you mentioned that earlier and so I want you to like take out all that valuable information from the more drier side of research and really give me and the coaches listening some insights as to how we can practically apply that scientific empirical understanding for ourselves and our clients so I think that’s — I’m actually really excited to hear about that.

Cassie: Yeah. So, like I said, the book is exactly that and it’s not a dry read so I encourage folks to read it because I think it helps coaches and clients, like in itself it’s a very rich and digestible guide to answer these big questions.

Alex: I read the first chapter and so, yeah, I started looking at it, I was like, “Oh, that looks interesting,” so I started reading it and, yeah, I love how it starts with you thinking that you may want to quit your job so it’s like immediately I was very engaged because I wanted to learn more about that so that was cool.

Cassie: But I think that what really the goal is is to spend our hours in ways that feel worthwhile, maximizing the amount of time that we spend on worthwhile activities, minimizing the amount of time that we spend on activities or time that feels like a waste. We experienced wasted time as so painful, more than wasted money, actually. But how to spend your time on these worthwhile activities and maximize them is both about what those activities are and identifying them, carving out protecting time for them but also the mindset that you employ or that you have while you’re engaging in the activities because a lot of the work is showing that it’s not about how much time you have available nor is it actually even about how much time you invest in a particular activity to have the big impact on your satisfaction and your happiness, it’s really the quality of that time and so, as you mentioned, you read the first chapter of my book where I share from earlier in my career when I felt extremely time poor, this acute feeling of not having enough to do or having too little time to do all that I wanted to do and I set out to do, and when we feel time poor, I had this daydream like between being a good parent, being a good partner, the pressures at work, the never ending pile of chores, it’s like I just felt like I couldn’t do it and I considered quitting. I considered quitting sort of my dream job as an assistant tenure track professor at Wharton because I was like I want more hours in the day and I would daydream about quitting and moving to an island somewhere where I’d have all the hours of my day to spend exactly how I wanted, thinking that that sort of would bring greater happiness, but recognizing that that’s actually an empirical —

Alex: I mean, it sounds great. 

Cassie: It sounds great, the question is, is it? Are people who have a whole lot of discretionary time, are they in fact happier? And this is an empirical question that we’ve tested, looking across studies and including analyzing data from the American Time Use Survey, looking at tens of thousands of working as well as non-working Americans how they spent a regular day and we could calculate how much time they spent on discretionary activities. And what we found was really interesting. It was an inverted U shape. So, it went down on both ends of the spectrum. Yes, people were less happy when they had too little discretionary time but what was interesting is that people with a whole lot of discretionary time were also less happy and, looking into the data, it suggests it’s because we are driven to be somewhat productive, we are averse to being idle, and so when we have all the hours of our day to day and we spend them with nothing to show for them, it undermines our sense of purpose and, from that, we feel less satisfied. And so that’s pointing to the fact that it’s actually not about having a whole lot of time for greater happiness, it’s really how do you invest the time that you have. And like I said, it’s about investing in activities that feel worthwhile. Now, the question is, what are those activities? Looking to the research, time tracking is — so researchers seeing over the course of people’s days, what are they doing as well as how they’re feeling so they could pull out, on average, what are those activities that tend to be associated with the most positive emotions? What are those activities that tend to be associated with the most negative emotions? And, on average, you see that the most sort of happy activities, the most satisfying activities tend to be those that socially connect us with others, spending time with family and friends, like genuinely connecting with people, and that can include colleagues. The least happy activities, on average, tend to be commuting, work hours, and housework. Now, that’s a big bummer because those, when you put together, getting to work and from work, working, and then all the chores that you have when you get home, that’s like the bulk of our work and so — but it’s really important to know that this is based off of averages and so what I encourage folks to do and the coaches, I absolutely encourage folks to encourage their clients is to track your own time. Over the course of a week, writing down what activity are you doing and, as importantly, rating on a 10-point scale how do you feel coming out of that activity. And, yes, and be more specific, not just socializing and not just work but what particular work activities. For socializing, whom are you with and what are you doing? And while, admittedly, it is tedious to track your time over the course of a week, it is so worthwhile because, at the end of the week, you have this fantastic personalized data set that you can look, what are those activities that made you feel most satisfied, that were the most worthwhile, and what are some commonalities across them so it’s not just that all work feels unfun, there are probably particular types of work tasks, it’s not that all socializing is fun, there’s probably ways of engaging with others that is satisfying. And also you see from this data just how much time you’re spending on your various activities so it will very clearly tell you what are those activities that are worthwhile, what are those activities that are actually a waste, that is — a lot of times, when my students do this, they’re like, “Holy cow, I had no idea that I spent that much time on social media,” and it’s one of these things that they thought that it’s something that they enjoy, but when they looked at their actual ratings of how they felt, they’re like, “Oh, it’s like a 4.” Meanwhile, they’re like too busy to do activities that — meeting up with a friend for dinner after work, that would give them like a 9 or a 10 and those minutes that people sort of view themselves like, “Oh, I’ll just check my social media for a few minutes here,” those minutes add up to half hours, those half hours add up to like more than 10 hours in a week and so that alone is a fantastic opportunity to be like, “Okay, well, what are my activities that are worthwhile? What are these things that are wasteful, unnecessary, and not even actually making me feel great?” And then that opens up time that you can then reallocate towards the more worthwhile activities. So that, in itself, is helpful, identifying what are those ways that are actually satisfying and worthwhile spending. And then I talk a lot about how can you — so, for some of these unfun tasks that are necessary, employing strategies to make them feel more worthwhile, like bundling, for commuting, if taking an activity that you don’t — usually we’re sort of like mindlessly scrolling through radio stations or, if you commute on the subway, on your phone, but if you actually become intentional with that time and bundle it with something that you do enjoy, like listening to an audiobook, listening to a podcast that inspires you, then, all of a sudden, that time feels more worthwhile. Or bundling some hours spent at work, like instead of like trudging through email, actually suggesting to the colleague to go for a cup of coffee because research shows the importance of being outside in itself is a mood booster, exercise is a mood booster, and social connection. And then, in addition, also, like I was saying that I focus a lot on the mindset, how do you make the most of the time. Say, you are actually spending time on an activity that is worthwhile, that makes you feel satisfied, that is potentially joyful, if you’re distracted during it, then you’re missing out. So, research shows that we are distracted a whole lot of the time. There’s interesting research by Dan Gilbert and Matt Killingsworth where they would ping people over the course of their day and ask, “What are you doing and what are you thinking about? Are you thinking about what you’re currently doing or are you thinking about something else? And how happy are you?” And from that, they found that we are distracted almost half of the time. Forty-seven percent of the time, we are not focused on what we are doing, we’re thinking about something else, yet, their data shows that we are happier when we are actually engaged in what we’re doing. And if you’re spending time on an activity that could potentially bring you joy, if your mind is somewhere else, thinking about your to-do list or on your phone tackling items on your to-do list, then you’re absolutely missing out on that happiness that is right there in the time that you’re already spending. And so, again, it’s not about how much time you have available nor is it about necessarily spending more time on a particular activity to have the positive effect on your happiness, it is absolutely about being intentional in what activities you’re going to spend on and being attentive, intentional while engaged while spending on those happy activities.

Alex: So much to unpack there. I really like to focus on intentionality and it’s hard to be intentional. I mean, the mind plays tricks on you, even I am a meditator, so when you meditate, you realize how incredibly difficult it is to hold one thought for more than 10 seconds, then 20 seconds, and it’s such a challenge and when you haven’t meditated, you don’t necessarily know the challenges with trying to do that. If you ask most people that haven’t meditated, they probably think they could hold a thought for a really long time. When I’m hearing you talk about essentially I think a lot of that is like the power of intention and being present and being mindful of how we spend our time and understanding if we’re going to be doing something that we don’t love, like driving to work, listen to music you like, listen to a book. I think a lot of us by default do things like that but then there’s all these aspects of our lives that we don’t pay too much attention to. What does the research say about intentionality? So, being intentional about our actions is very important, being present. Why is it so hard to do? And I think it’s a key question because research shows that if you’re intentional, you’ll probably be happier. So, why isn’t it that we’re all a little bit more intentional naturally?

Cassie: Yeah, we are distracted. We’re distracted by all the things that we could and should be doing at any moment. We are sort of forward thinkers and planners and that’s what allowed us to become successful in what we’re doing because we are planning for and executing on and anticipating what’s next, but the problem is that when we’re always sort of in this thinking about what’s next, it pulls us out of what is right there in front of us. And it’s understandable, so even if I asked you think back over the last couple of weeks, what are those experiences that brought you the most joy, so often, they’re these like really mundane, everyday experiences and they’re so mundane that we tend not to notice them and because we are subject to hedonic adaptation, that is, the fact that we get used to things over time, when you do the same thing again and again, when you’re with the same person again and again, it stops having the same emotional impact, and so it’s really good that we adapt in the face of negative circumstances and experiences because it makes us resilient, it makes us tolerant, it allows us to get through these challenges, but the bummer is when we also adapt to life’s joys, such that we stop noticing them and, I mean, just as an example, if you think back if you have a partner, to the very first time that person said, “I love you,” it’s like fireworks in your mind, in your heart. And then, a few years on, that declaration of love gets shortened into, “Love you,” as you’re hanging up the phone or walking out the door, so you don’t even hear the words anymore and if something as profound and impactful and joyful and meaningful as that declaration of love becomes words that you don’t even hear, that shows the role of hedonic adaptation and it shows how we need to be careful to offset it. And in Happier Hour, I share a bunch of strategies to help offset hedonic adaptation so that we do continue to notice the joy that is in our experiences. One of them is actually recognizing that those times, even though they seem everyday now, that they will not continue to happen every day, and certainly not in the way that they are impacting you now. And so, if you count how many times have you done this activity in the past, how many times do you actually have left to do this activity, accounting for the fact that circumstances in your life will change, if your joyful activity involves someone else, which often it does because of the role of social connection, that circumstances in their life will likely change, then, more often than not, people realize that they have significantly less, that the time that they have to do even these seemingly mundane things is in fact limited. What that does is it makes people protect the time, so spend the time as well, as pay attention during it. So, as an example, my weekly coffee date with my daughter, Lita, this is something that, again, another strategy actually, it’s something that was a routine that was like on the way to drop her off at her preschool and me to my office, I wanted coffee so we would stop at the coffee shop, I would get my flat white, which is what I have here, she would get her hot chocolate and we have these croissants and this is like 30 minutes where it’s just the two of us that we transformed what was a routine into a ritual so it gave it meaning and made it special, it has a name, our Thursday Morning Coffee Date, which actually now is on Saturday mornings, but it’s still called Thursday Morning Coffee Date, but by turning this routine into a ritual, it imbued with meaning and made it special, it draws our attention to it, so that’s one way to sort of pay attention to the important stuff. But I calculated how many times have we done this in our life thus far, weekly, including and also, when I was on my maternity leave, I would sort of bundle her up every day and go to the coffee shop, so we’ve gone on about 400 coffee dates in our life together so far.

Alex: Soon, she’ll be drinking coffee with you.

Cassie: When she does have hot chocolate. But — and then I was like, okay, in the future, she’s seven now, in just five years, she’s gonna be 12 and will probably prefer to go to the coffee shop with her friends than me so it won’t be weekly, and then she’s gonna go off to college and then she’s going to go live in New York, if she’s anything like me, so I calculated we have probably about 230 coffee dates together left. That is 36 percent of our — all of our coffee dates, we have less, that’s much less than half and she’s only seven. And recognizing how limited these times are that are joyful, that are potentially viewed as routine and regular, but they are, in fact, limited. What that makes me do is prioritize the time. It makes me carve out and protect the time and spend the time, but also what it makes me do is pay attention during it. My cell phone is put away out of sight. That to-do list that is always running in my head about what’s next and pulling me out of the moment is absolutely quieted because I’m like this is the time that matters. And it’s only 30 minutes. It’s only 30 minutes in a week and when you asked me before what is happiness, it’s the joy we experienced in our time as well as the satisfaction we feel about our lives. And if you ask me how happy are you, how satisfied are you, I can absolutely say very easily I’m super happy, I’m super satisfied, because what am I thinking about? I’m like I’m thinking about like I have this like wonderful relationship with my daughter and it’s not from I can’t be at three o’clock pickup line because I work, it’s not about the amount of time that I spend with her that sort of is underpinning this sense of connection and closeness in this relationship we have, it’s about making the time and the time that we do have, paying attention, making it quality time. So, the answer for greater happiness with respect to time, again, it’s not about being time rich, it’s about making the time that we spend rich, and that is spending on these activities that are worthwhile, protecting time for them despite the busyness that we are all subject to, but it’s also when spending the time paying attention, soaking it up, savoring it so that those experiences are the ones that get picked up when we’re evaluating both the joy we’re experiencing in the moment but also picked up when we’re evaluating how satisfied are we in our lives.

Alex: Scarcity is such a powerful driver for human behavior. 

Cassie: Yeah.

Alex: I’m kind of shocked that your daughter is seven and you only have 36 percent of those coffee dates left. That kind of understanding and slowing down and maybe running through some numbers of the things that you like and understanding how available is that in my life, how scarce it is, it really could be a powerful driver to be more intentional when you’re actually in those moments, because as you’re going through those 200 and some coffee dates left, if you don’t know that, you’re just, “Oh, we do this all the time. I can just check my LinkedIn, I can do these other things,” but if you actually understand that you’re way more than halfway done with these amazing experiences with your daughter, then it just pushes you to be there in the moment. So I liked that example a lot and so applicable to people. There’s so many aspects of our lives that I think these applies to, like this weekend, I’m traveling to Miami for my cousin’s wedding and my mom lives in San Diego, my dad is actually going to fly from Mexico City so my mom instead of flying with my sister was like, “I’ll fly with you from LA,” and she already called me the other day and was like, “Look, I know you were very efficient traveler so don’t get upset with me when I’m dragging us down and slowing down, so just be patient,” and I was like — I actually started thinking, well, I don’t know how many more times we’re just going to travel the two of us, usually, she’s with my dad or my sister and her kids so I actually even before our conversation today was trying to be very intentional about knowing, yes, it’ll take me probably twice as much to go through security and all that but how often do I get to travel with my mom by myself? So what you described really strikes a chord and, as coaches, I think it’s important to create these rituals with our clients and not only in a relationship with them but also for us to understand how we can instill these in them so that they create their own rituals, whether it’s at work. Sometimes, coaching gets more personal and it’s really more about your personal life that then if you improve certain aspects will help people be more effective at work. I mean, coaching is really complex, there’s all these things going on, but this intentionality about the use of time and the outcome that can be potentially derived from that intentionality, I find it fascinating and just life happens, these little moments that we don’t even pay attention to.

Cassie: Yeah, and I think it’s actually really important for coaches to be aware of this for their clients because all of their clients are time poor. So, we conducted a national poll that showed that nearly half of Americans feel time poor. They feel like this acute feeling that they don’t have enough time to do what they set out to do and the consequences of that, and that’s nearly half of Americans, but I’m sure pretty much every client of the coaches is in that bucket and the consequence of feeling time poor is that we rush through our activities. We often forfeit time on these really meaningful things because we are reacting to what seems urgent irrespective of the actual importance of the tasks. And so what’s really important is for folks to identify what are those ways of spending time that are important. In our work on thinking about time and the role of time, we actually have data to suggest that taking a broader perspective of time, thinking about our years and our life overall as opposed to the hours of our days, those folks report greater meaning, greater satisfaction in their lives, greater happiness in their days, and part of it is driven by them spending their time on what’s important sort of irrespective of the urgency, whereas when we feel time poor and we are rushing, we are always reacting to what seems urgent irrespective of its importance. And so I think it’s so important for folks to identify for themselves, thinking about their life overall, thinking about their years, what is the stuff that matters? A lot of it is the relationships that are outside of work but also even within work. There is the stuff that’s important, the stuff that’s in line with your purpose that is like really driving you towards your goals and then there’s a lot of other noise that fills our time, tasks that fill our time, emails. I was talking about my students identifying from their time tracking that social media was their sort of time suck and filler upper, mine is email. My inbox, it will fill all the hours of the day without even recognizing it and a lot of that is not actually important. It is detracting from you getting the work done that really is important, that matters to you. And so I think it’s really crucial that folks identify taking that broader perspective of their time, looking about their temporal investments and those that actually really pay off and being very clear, what is the stuff that matters? What are those activities that matter so you protect time for it, you make the time for it? And when you’re engaging in the time, the works, tasks, the important ones, like that also is like close out of email, remove the distractions, close the door, turn off your phone, so that you’re not getting interrupted. There’s no way you’re going to get into a flow state, that state where you’re so immersed in what you’re doing, you lose sense of time, you’re most creative, most productive, there’s no way you’re going to get into that with the distractions. So, really, the answer for greater happiness and satisfaction when it comes to time is it is not about being time rich, it’s about making the time that you have rich and, with that, it’s about knowing and being very clear on what are those activities that are important to you, both in your personal life as well as in your work life, and carving out protecting investing time in it in those activities and when you’re spending the time being invested during that time.

Alex: Cassie, thank you so much for sharing your insights from research to really something very applicable. I’m going to finish reading your book. I went through the first chapter as I was prepping for our podcast and, based on that first chapter, I really would recommend your book to the people listening to our episode. So, thank you so much for joining me.

Cassie: And for all of you, like you and everyone else who is time poor, you can bundle and you can listen to the audiobook while you’re driving around, while you’re going on your walks so then you can also learn how to spend your hours more happily without spending too much time.

Alex: Oh, I love that plug. Love audiobooks. I will get on, I have a lot of credits on Audible that I need to deploy so, yes. Thank you so much for joining us and I’m actually really excited for your session in the upcoming WBECS Summit by coaching.com so thank you.

Cassie: Thank you so much. Take care.