Congratulations on becoming time affluent!

Will you spend your riches wisely?

Photo by Jon Tyson on Unsplash

I came across the phrase “time affluence” only a week ago, but apparently the term has been around since a researcher coined it in 2009. If the meaning isn’t clear at a glance, start by looking at its opposite, “time poverty.” You have time poverty if every waking moment of your day is consumed by the stresses of work, caregiving, and other necessary but not particularly enjoyable tasks.

Sound familiar? Four out of five working Americans feels time poor, according to Ashley V. Whillans, a Harvard professor of business administration who specializes in the links between time, money, and happiness.
 

Time affluence, then, is feeling that you have enough time in a day for things you want to do. If you have stopped working, there’s an excellent chance that you are time affluent.

And that’s a good thing. Because Whillans’ research finds that people who value time more than money tend to be happier. They also are more engaged in civic affairs and more likely to pursue those activities they are most passionate about.

Time affluence is among the greatest benefits of being an older adult. We might even say it’s our due, our just compensation for decades of stress and exhaustion as we tried to fit the multiple demands of work, family, and social ties into days that refused our every effort to stretch them beyond 24 hours. So with full-time work off the table, the tradeoff for surrendering the steady paycheck is a surplus of time for our leisure and enjoyment.  

The Cult of Busyness

There’s just one catch.

As Americans, we live in a culture that provides us no guidance on how to spend leisure time productively. In fact, one of the dominant forces in American life is what Whillans calls “the cult of busyness.” Being busy, or pretending to be busy, is a status symbol that signals importance. We are so wedded to busyness that we almost need to retrain ourselves to enjoy leisure time, she says.

The opposite reaction is also a problem. Some of us, drunk on our sudden rich reserves of leisure time, may spend it recklessly and lose the opportunity to use it to our benefit.

Let me cite one example with which I am intimately acquainted. Ahem. In my so-called retirement, I spend about 20 hours each week on The EndGame: Researching and writing a weekly post, creating and editing a biweekly podcast, and writing biweekly premium content for paid subscribers. That should leave me 92 waking hours each week. Even after accounting for the necessities of personal hygiene, body maintenance, spiritual maintenance, relationship maintenance, food prep, food consumption, and the occasional walk, there ought to be plenty of time to devote to things I value. And there would be,  were it not for the fact that I waste roughly 20 hours a week doomscrolling through video clips on Facebook. I distract myself with snippets from old television shows about cops, lawyers, doctors, and spies, interspersed with with the occasional classic western and romcoms. For several decades I ignored television and managed to bypass all this cultural effluvia; now suddenly I feel a strange compulsion to see what I’ve been missing – for hours at a time.

While this particular time-suck does me no direct harm, it does fritter away valuable time that I would rather spend on more stimulating and rewarding activities: discover new music, write a book, learn guitar finger-picking, volunteer at a school, check in with friends, bounce off the walls with my grandchildren.  

What can I do to turn my down time into constructive me time?

Managing Time

Whillans, the author of Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live A Happier Life, notes that “leisure time” is rather abstract. To make it real, we need to make it more concrete by breaking time down to specific activities. A good starting place to to track our time, she says, so we know where it goes. Once we know, we can budget it more effectively.

Kim Childs, a life and career coach who specializes in positive psychology, has found a number of techniques that help us capture more leisure time for our own enjoyment:

• Set alarms to remind you to pause and breathe (or in my case, to break away from distraction).

• Step away from the computer to do something totally unrelated to work.

• Consolidate errands in one or two days, leaving other days free.

• Start the morning with something to nurture your spirit and set the tone for a more intentional, less reactive day.

• When reviewing the to-do list, ask what you want to do next, rather than what you must do next.

The word on the street is that money can’t buy happiness. Time affluence, on the other hand, just might. If we can learn to make the most of our bonus hours, we can really live the lives we want to live as older and wiser people.