Dr. Colin West is a Post-Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Toronto, Rotman School of Management, with over 10 years of experience researching behavioral science, focusing on economic decision-making and psychological well-being in the workplace. He completed his Ph.D. at UCLA Anderson School of Management in June 2021. Before that, Colin worked as a consultant and researcher applying behavior science in business and policy settings. Some of his works have been published in Social Psychological and Personality Science, Current Opinion in Psychology, and Organizational Dynamics. One of his most recent publications was focused on time poverty among the working poor. Colin is actively researching the effect of risk profiling on investment decision-making and how micro-entrepreneurs use windfalls of cash versus time.
1) An awakening of sorts for me was becoming aware (through the study of workplace well-being) how much autonomy appears to have a direct-line correlation with personal well-being. You’ve indicated that one way to define stress is “a feeling of control over important events in your life.” In the book Time Smart, Ashley Whillans “emphasized that time, not money, is a better indicator of happiness.” As a generality, given all your work in this area, what is your purview of the presenting problem when it comes to Westerners’ approach to their relationship with time?
I’ll touch on three things here. The first is control over your time. There are lots of things we can only partially control in our lives – our health, our job, our relationships. When important things feel like they are mostly outside of our control, we feel really stressed. In fact, stress is often defined as feeling a lack of control over important outcomes in your life. So, stress and control are tightly connected. However, I think control over our time is especially important – perhaps more important than other forms of control in our lives.
I did some research to explore this. I conducted surveys with thousands of people in the US, Canada, and Kenya, asking them questions like: “How much control do you have over your day-to-day activities? How often do you feel like you’re getting pushed around in the day, rather than actively choosing what you’re doing?” What I’ve found is that people who feel like they have more control over their time tend to be happier and less stressed. In fact, control over one’s time seems to be one of the strongest predictors of happiness, even after controlling for factors like total working hours and annual income.
The second piece is time fragmentation. Think about how you spend your time throughout an average working day? How often do you have long, uninterrupted time to work on important tasks? Most people report that they rarely get uninterrupted time. Instead, their working days are increasingly fragmented into shorter and shorter episodes – people are forced to switching tasks frequently and multi-task.
Some recent research has found that many knowledge workers have incredibly fragmented working days. For instance, one study looked at office workers and found that an average working day involved 88 different episodes (with the end of episode defined as switching tasks or switching who one is interacting with; e.g., going from one meeting to the next, or working on a document then switching to answering email). Dividing one’s day into 88 episodes is kind of insane. If you are forced to switch tasks 88 times throughout the day, you probably feel very little control over your time. You likely feel time-poor. And you probably don’t get much enjoyment from your work – even if you like your job, you can’t immerse yourself in any individual task for long enough achieve anything meaningful.
Time fragmentation is especially pernicious because it can feel like we’re being productive, even when we’re not.
I think time fragmentation is also an important factor in our personal lives. Too often, we’re multi-tasking, for instance, frequently checking our phones while having dinner with friends. It takes time to immerse ourselves in any activity or experience – our minds are not well-suited for constant task-switching.
The third piece is what I call admin time. This does not necessarily mean literal administrative work. I think of admin time as any work task that is not core to the mission of what you’re trying to achieve. This might include scheduling meetings, filling out time sheets, recording expenses, replying to emails, or any other related tasks that might be important for keeping a business organized, but not directly advancing the core mission. Some amount of admin time is unavoidable, but in many organizations it has gotten out of hand.
In a lot of organizations, admin time accumulates unchecked because people think, “oh, this takes three minutes, and it’s good for record-keeping; or responding to this slack message will only take five minutes, right?” Often, admin tasks seem trivially small, but when you add up all of these little tasks over the course of a week, a month, a year, the sum can be a shocking waste of time.
One especially pernicious aspect of admin time is that we often don’t notice it as it grows and grows, slowly taking up more and more of our time. There’s this kind of asymmetry where it grows easily, yet it’s hard to reduce. Companies rarely do an audit of all the admin burdens they place on their employees. And it’s even rarer for companies to spend money trying to automate or outsource seemingly small admin burdens.
I have a theory that admin time is big contributor to people’s overall feeling of being time-poor. That is, a few minutes extra of admin time actually “costs” a lot in terms of wellbeing at work. One thing we know, is that not every minute is equal when it comes to how busy or time-poor we feel. For example, some people might work 30 hours a week and still feel really time-poor, whereas another person might work 70 hours and feel much more time-rich. That is, time poverty is not just about total hours of paid and unpaid labor. Much of my reserh tries to understand how the structure of our working lives contribute to time poverty and how can we feel more time-rich in our working lives and personal lives.
2) Why is making sure there is dedicated time for leisure activities so important? And, are there reasons to give more credence to leisure when it’s active leisure (as opposed to passive leisure)?
There’s good evidence that active leisure is especially important for our wellbeing – moreso than passive leisure. For instance, Daniel Kahneman’s work on the Day Reconstruction Method (DRM) shows that active leisure has a strong association with well-being – including both “reflective” well-being and “in the moment” well-being. This is probably because one of the subcategories within active leisure is socializing. Passive leisure – which includes things like watching TV and scrolling through Instagram and TikTok – has a weaker association with wellbeing.
One reason why active leisure is more important is because it’s more likely to get you into a “flow state.” Flow states are an idea champion by the psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, and we’ve all felt what it’s like to be in one – it’s when you are fully immersed in an activity such that you are completely focused, and you lose track of time. It’s a wonderful feeling. Athletes and artists might describe it as “being in the zone.” But we can also experience it when we’re playing with our kids or having a great conversation with friends. We can feel it whenever we are actively participating in an experience that isn’t too stressful, isn’t too comfortable, and fully captures our attention. Active leisure can produce flow states, passive leisure usually can’t.
However, passive leisure is not without its merits. We all want some of this too. But I think some forms of passive leisure are better than others. For example, watching a movie with your significant other is one thing; scrolling instagram or tik tok is another. This is not yet borne-out in the scientific literature, but I suspect that fragmented passive leisure contributes very little to our wellbeing. Consider the last time you were mindlessly scrolling through Instagram. This is passive leisure, but it’s also incredibly fragmented – you’re jumping from one post or reel to another every few seconds. We don’t have good empirical evidence on the effects of fragmented passive leisure, but I suspect it is either detrimental or neutral for wellbeing. And this is not what we want from our leisure time – the whole point of leisure is that time that we can control it and use it to enrich our lives.
3) You’ve researched the impact of choice and option architecture on decision-making. I advocate for having a premeditated list of fun things to do because, in my experience, doing this work upfront increases the likelihood of engaging in fun activities during times of leisure. I tried my best to architect the intervention grounded in research. I’m curious if, given your wisdom in this area, you have suggestions about crafting choices/options effectively?
I think your core ideas are good ones—building a list, earmarking time, and planning meticulously—how fun, right? But I do think that it’s helpful to schedule leisure activities. Often, we carefully plan out all our work tasks, but then do very little planning for our time away from work. By planning leisure time – writing out what we want to do, adding these activities to our calendar – we mentally earmark this time and pay attention to it. The goal is to plan out a rich day, e.g. “OK, I’m going to plan out my whole day: I want to finish these three work things. I want to call my friend whom I haven’t spoken to in a while. And I’m going to make sure I do two fun activities.” That’s a nice license for a great day, right?
So, the idea of planning out fun activities seems like a fundamentally good concept, but I think there are a few important wrinkles.
Wrinkle No. 1 is, how do you categorize your time? If you’re going to plan out your time, you need to create categories. In my research, I’ve learned that the number and types of categories you use create can, unintentionally, have a big impact on how you allocate your time. For example, imagine you create just two over-arching categories: “work activities” and “personal activities.” This is one way to bucket your time, but it’s probably not all that helpful. So, you might break these down into multiple sub-categories. Most of the time, we create a lot of work categories (e.g., responding to emails, meetings, writing a document, analyzing data, etc.) and very few personal categories. I’ve found that people have tendency to fill whatever buckets they create. So, if you create 10 work categories and only 2 personal categories, you might become biased towards allocating 5x more time to work activities relative to personal activities.
The key take-away is that the tools we use to organize our life can influence us more than we might anticipate. So, in this case, you should create time categories that align with your priorities. If you want to spend more time with friends and family, create more sub-categories to reflect this priority, recognizing that how you mentally partition your time can have a surprising effect on how end up spending your time.
Wrinkle No. 2 is the very human tendency to think we’re super-human. Many well-intentioned, ambitious people tend to create unrealistic schedules. This may be due to a planning fallacy or an optimism bias. The important thing is to recognize this tendency and deliberately build in downtime or ‘buffer’ time into your schedule so that you’re not jumping from one thing to the next. Try to create schedules that add up to a really good day, for example: “I did something hard; I spent time with somebody I care about; and I did something purely hedonic, too.”
Wrinkle No. 3 is that we should be careful not to be too rigid when scheduling our day. The point of scheduling is to help us spend time in ways that align with our goals and intentions, not to turn us into productivity robots. Sometimes, it’s best to throw away the schedule. If you’re really enjoying something or you think something is particularly meaningful, throw away the calendar and give yourself the space to be present in the moment. If you’re always thinking about accomplishing an outcome, you’re not really in the present moment.
I’ll briefly mention one other big idea related to time allocation: the concept of event time versus clock time. This is a big philosophical idea about time that I’d encourage your readers to think about. In general, Western culture is focused on clock time – we schedule activities using the clock, switching from one activity to the next based on the time of day. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this. It’s efficient and good for coordinating in groups and organizations. However, it’s not the only way to think about your time. Other cultures focus more on event time – the idea that we switch activities when we finish them, irrespective of how long it takes in terms of clock time. Perhaps taking the perspective of event time would allow you to be more present in your life. While it might be impractical, consider the times in your life when you might have operated on event time? How often do you think like this? And can you create some space in your life to occasionally be on event time, rather than clock time?
4) In The Fun Habit, I cite the work you and Cassie Holmes did regarding the benefits of a vacation mindset. Big fan of the study! In what other ways have you seen thinking differently about time and/or reframing time have a similar positive impact on people’s lives?
Thanks! I’m proud of this paper, and it got quite a bit of press coverage, which is great. However, it was often framed as a clever ‘life hack’: “Treat your weekends like a vacation and you’ll be happier!” It makes for a nice sound bite, it’s easy to implement, and it can work. In this research with Cassie and Sanford DeVoe, we ran many, many studies over ordinary weekends, randomly assigning people to receive a prompt to “treat your weekend like a vacation” on a Friday. We then followed up on the subsequent Monday and measured changes in their subjective wellbeing, stress, and the extent to which they felt “Monday blues.” Providing this reminder worked! Relative to a control message (“treat your weekend like an ordinary weekend”), people who treated their weekend like a vacation reported more happiness and less stress on Monday.
However, my prediction is that this strategy would not work if used repeatedly. In fact, I think the effect would go away quite quickly if people tried to employ this approach every Friday. This is why I don’t think of this paper as uncovering a life hack. Instead, it tells us something deeper about how people can get more emotional benefits from their time away from work. Our results showed that the prompt to “treat your weekend like a vacation” worked because it led people to be more ‘present’ during their activities over the course of the weekend. People were more engaged in their activities, whether they were luxurious (like going out to a nice dinner with their spouse) or mundane (tidying up their home). We asked people about the extent to which their mind was wandering during their weekend activities and found that people in the ‘vacation mindset’ were less distracted and more present.
This is related to Matt Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert’s work on mind wandering – they found that people are distracted (i.e., re-living the past or worry about the future) a shocking percentage of their time. And, people who were more distracted were less happy. In my work with Cassie and Sanford, we built on this. We found that happiness was only weakly correlated with how people spent their time over the course of a weekend. To our surprise, what people did with their time had little effect on their happiness on Monday. What mattered far more, was how they approached their time. Specifically, whether or not they were present in their activities throughout the weekend. When people were less distracted – even while doing fairly mundane activities – they were happier during the weekend, and this carried over to Monday when they returned to work.
I think this also goes back to the feeling of control that we discussed earlier. There’s nothing magical about a vacation mindset. In essence, treating time away from work like a vacation involved deliberately choosing how to spend our time and being more present during those activities – fully experiencing the present moment.
This issue of control also speaks to why Cassie, Sanford, and I began working on this project in the first place. We wanted to understand why people so often feel “Monday blues.” This isn’t just a cliché – there is empirical evidence on fluctuations in subjective wellbeing over the course of a week and people consistently feel the worst on Mondays. Why is this the case? People just had two days off from work and subsequently they’re feeling worse!? Is there anything people can do about this? These are some of the questions that motivated our work. And I think it’s an important finding that wellbeing on Monday isn’t really about what you do over the weekend, but rather how your approach your time off.
5) What are a few of the best practical ways you have come across that one can use to mitigate time poverty (strategies that would be useful for most people)?
This is where we started, so let’s review: control, fragmentation, and admin time. I think these are 3 core contributors to time poverty. So, to mitigate time poverty, as best you can at your work and in your personal life, see if you can dial these three knobs.
Control. Often, we feel like we have little control over our time. Between work obligations, social obligations, and family commitments, we might feel like most of our time outside of our control. This may be true, but it also means you should be especially aware of their time that is under your control. Acknowledge this time, plan to spend it ways that align with your priorities, and then try to approach it with an aim of being fully present in the moment.
Fragmented time. There are a few things you can do to reduce time fragmentation. First, where possible, schedule your working day into fewer, longer sessions of uninterrupted work. You might talk to your colleagues about trying to protect time in the morning for deep work. Or, you might try to schedule meetings back-to-back, rather than spread throughout the day, thereby creating a portion of the day that is uninterrupted. Cal Newport has great ideas on this in his books Deep Work and A World Without Email.
Admin time. Firstly, you might want to keep a detailed time diary for yourself for a week or a month. There are some tools you can use to do this, like RescueTime. This sounds tedious, but if you commit to detailed time-tracking, for say a month, you might reveal some important patterns. With this data, you critically evaluate how much of your time is spent on core tasks versus admin. There may be some ways that you can cut down on admin time or eliminate some admin tasks altogether. Often people don’t critically evaluate admin tasks and ask whether they are truly necessary.
I’ll finish by highlighting the importance of balance between scheduling and spontaneity. We’ve talked a lot about scheduling – how it’s important to deliberately plan and earmark time for active leisure and downtime. However, sometimes we should throw away the plan.
