Time Wealth and Time Affluence

“The busy man is busy with everything except living; there is nothing more difficult to learn how to do right”                                                               

Seneca

We all know what monetary wealth can do for us. It sustains a standard of living, buys the occasional luxury good, and offers avenues to invest for more wealth in the future. However, there is a wealth we hardly consider; one we often give up in pursuit of monetary wealth.

Time Wealth and Time Affluence | The Wealth We Should Try to Cultivate More

Time wealth is having your own time to spend how you want, where you want, with whom you want. Time wealth is also called Time Affluence, which is the feeling of having sufficient time to pursue personally meaningful activities. This can be as small as having five minutes to yourself to mediate to taking an eighteen-month sabbatical around the world.

Time wealth is often at odds with monetary wealth because most of us are trading some form of our time for money; usually through a day job or other form of product creation.

There is nothing wrong with trading time for money. We all need to do it to survive and build the lives we want. The point of being more time affluent is to be more conscious of what we are giving up in the process.

Most people generally start working full-time after graduating from high school or college. From there people trade forty-years of work to then have hopefully twenty years in retirement. Part of this can be curbed by performing the work you enjoy, but even then, it doesn’t solve everything.

This strategy is the ultimate form of delayed gratification to reach the “finally have time” mindset to work on passion projects or even just time to relax.

Forty years is a very long time to wait to start doing what you want with life.

Building time wealth into your life lets you have time to relax, and do what you want with your life along the journey. You can often make time; it is just the aspect of being conscious of it.

The Benefits of Time Wealth

Material wealth can make us happy. It can buy tickets to a concert or that new mixer which makes you happy. However, we have to be careful to not overspend our time to earn income. Having more time is often a better investment for a long life filled with happiness.

1. Time Wealth Makes Us Happier Than Monetary Gains

In a study by Hershfield, when offered the chance to work extra hours for some extra pay, or to go home, 69% of people stayed the extra hour. Only 31% opted to go home. However, at the end of the week, those who went home instead of working one more hour reported higher levels of happiness, and life satisfaction, while also reporting lower levels of stress.

It can be tempting to work the extra hour to get the incremental gain but working for ten hours one day can increase the levels of stress and anxiety over the week. Taken to the extreme, chronic overworking can throw our lives further out of balance and lead to negative side effects such as strained relationships, increased weight gain, sleepless nights, and increased levels of stress.

2. Time Wealth Makes Us More Productive

In a study lead by John Trougakos at the University of Toronto, people who engage in respite activity during workday recovery breaks have higher levels of positive affect after breaks.

When breaks were used for relaxing, social activities, napping, and exercise – the individuals benefited from increased focus and resilience. In the same study, taking 2 ½ hours per week for exercise during work hours increased worker productivity over those who didn’t take breaks, even though workers were logging 6% fewer hours. 

3. Time Wealth Can Spark Innovative Ideas

It can be tempting to keep working and banging your head against the wall until a revolutionary idea comes. However, the more you try, the harder it is. It is important to get away for a time to have creative ideas. To illustrate, we can look at a famous example.

It is 1940 and England is being Blitzed by the German army almost nightly with bombs landing all over London. The United States cannot send support to its allies in England without violating Neutral Party War Laws and throwing the United States into WWII. Franklin Roosevelt (FDR) cannot figure out how to lend aid without violating international law. He decides to take a ten-day fly-fishing trip. On this trip, he comes up with the “lend-lease program” where he realizes the United States can lend weapons to England as long as England returns them after the war. This allowed the allied forces to benefit from the United States without the United States becoming formally involved in the war effort.

This creative idea only came about because FDR got away from the Whitehouse and gave himself time to think. If he can find time to get away on the eve of WWII, we can also find time to break away from our day-to-day routines to find inspiration that can eventually help our work more than if we stayed working on the problem. 

4. Time Wealth Can Build Stronger Relationships

Having healthy and meaningful connections in life is a major source of happiness. In a study by Mogilner, when people were primed to think about having time affluence, they spent twice as much time socializing in a café than those who were primed about making money. When people were leaving the café, they were asked about their happiness rating. Those who spent time focusing on making money reported a happiness level of 3.53 while those who socialized more left with a happiness rating of 4.17 (on a five-point scale).

Time wealth focuses on using the time we have to do fun things and live a happy life. Even if it means socializing with strangers in a café, that leads to a happier life than spending time working to make more money.

Ways to build time wealth

Financial wealth is important because it funds a standard of living, can fund the future, and enable the ones we love to pursue their passions. That being said, we also need to remember the importance of time affluence.

Working ourselves to death will not lead to a balanced life; we need to cultivate time-wealth into our daily lives.

1. Work Less Hours

Working fewer hours can increase productivity beyond what working sixty hours a week could accomplish. Instead of working sixty grueling hours every week, try to work forty-five effective hours. Build-in more balance in the day and see how work becomes easier. These breaks provide an important time to spark creative ideas and mentally decompress.

The extra time could be spent exercising, socializing with family, pursuing hobbies, or relaxing.

2. Use Your PTO

In a study by CNN, Americans average 24 days paid time off every year from their company, but only use 17 of them. That means on average, there is still a week and a half per employee that goes unused. The biggest sited reason for not using this PTO is that travel is expensive. We don’t have to travel with our PTO. We can stay home for an extra week to use our time to spend with family or work on meaningful passion projects. Better yet, we can space out the week across several weeks, making normal weekends a three-day weekend or maximizing a holiday break.

3. Build in Time Every Day

Build-in twenty minutes each day for yourself dedicated to what you want to do. At times during college, I would be working in some way from 6 AM to 11 PM, between my school course work and my professional job. No matter what, I always made sure to carve out twenty minutes at the end of my day for reading. I knew that no matter how busy the day was, I would have twenty minutes before bed to do what I wanted to do, which was read. It gave me something to look forward to and I had less anxiety every day because I knew I had control of my schedule. Circumstances made the day busy, but I controlled aspects of it.

Find time in your day to day life; whether it be early in the morning, during a lunch break, or sometime in the evening where you have the time to dedicate to the things you most enjoy. This can take the form of socializing with friends, working on a skill, or pursuing a hobby.

Main Take-Aways:

• Earning money is important to help build a balanced life, but too much emphasis on making money can add stress and take away from daily happiness.
• Focusing on the future where we have more money to be happy is a good thought, but it is a trap that causes us to miss the day to day joy we can cultivate by having more time in our lives for longer.
• Having extra time makes us happier, more productive, more creative, builds stronger relationships, and leads to living a more fulfilled life.

Action item

• Look at your schedule this week. Where can you carve out time every day to have twenty minutes to yourself? What would you like to do with that time? Plan out the time you will use for yourself for the next seven days and reap the benefits of having more time.
• Looking further ahead, how much time off can you take in the next six months? Use one day off to make a three-day weekend to rest and re-set yourself, and stick to taking the time off.