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Managing yourself

Don’t Feel Guilty About Wanting Your Time Back

por HBR Editors

Don’t Feel Guilty About Wanting Your Time Back

The happiest people use their money to buy time, according to Harvard Business School assistant professor Ashley Whillans. This could mean using a grocery delivery service so you can spend an extra hour with family, or taking a cab to work instead of driving so you can read a good book while you’re riding.

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But even today, when Americans have more time for leisure than they did 40 years ago, it can be hard to take good advantage of free hours. That’s in part because people tend to use any extra time to try to make more money. “We focus our attention on getting ahead, and so when we have free time, we fill it or even fail to recognize the extra free time that we have,” says Whillans. It’s also because people feel bad about paying for help — they may feel ashamed about not being able to do it all, or guilty because they’re burdening someone else with their chores.

Whillans, in the IdeaCast below, notes that these feelings are common. And she doesn’t support outsourcing everything — in fact, her research finds that people who outsource too much have the lowest levels of happiness. Rather, she suggests first looking at the margins, finding simple activities to outsource that don’t cost a lot and can be done by companies that pay and treat their employees well. And you don’t have to be wealthy in order to start; Whillans’s work also looks at how the pattern of money-for-time extends across different income brackets. For more, listen below or via iTunes or Google Podcasts.
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