Hedonic adaptation and spreading pleasures

What happens when you start thinking of time as a scarce resource? What practical strategies can you use to protect it from being passively spent or hijacked so that you can spend the time you have in more fulfilling and meaningful ways?

Cassie Holmes is a professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, and also the author of the book Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most.
Greg and Cassie discuss how to use time more intentionally to increase both day-to-day joy and overall life satisfaction. Cassie explains how even though these happiness questions are timeless, they have become newly urgent due to modern distractions, cell phones, productivity culture, and the pandemic’s effects on time perception, anxiety, burnout, and workplace engagement. Cassie describes exercises such as tracking one’s time and rating activities to identify what is personally most joyful and meaningful, noting common low-happiness activities (commuting, work, housework) and how individuals can find variation within them. Cassie opens the window on some of the examples of this within her own life through her regular coffee dates with her daughter and a prearranged commitment device that allows her to count on date nights with her husband. They also cover bundling chores with enjoyable activities, selectively outsourcing tasks, and the tradeoffs of pricing time in money, emphasizing that better time management enables more meaningful and satisfying life activities, not simply doing less.

*unSILOed Podcast is produced by University FM.*

Episode Quotes:

Why being busy doesn't make you fulfilled

08:46: The unhappiness comes from when you have been busy and have spent your time and are looking back on it, feeling unfulfilled, like it got spent without you having invested in anything that ultimately matters to you. Whether it is things that give you that like true sense of joy and enjoyment, oftentimes through our interpersonal relationships, but also even that sense of satisfaction when you are making actual progress on whatever your project is, whatever that endeavor that you are sort of working towards is in line with your purpose, whether it is your personal purpose, which is really what my focus on is in the book, is the individual, and then ideally it is aligned. Your personal purpose is aligned with the sort of purpose of the work that you are doing.

What is time poverty?

40:31: What time poverty is, it is this feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to do it. It is a feeling of being limited by the resources, in this case, time that you have available to achieve what you set out to do.

Why isn't more enough, when it comes to happiness?

20:22: Not recognizing the role of hedonic adaptation is sure that first half hour, like, yes, that is the delight, right? You have your glass of wine, and you finally can kick back. But once you press, next episode, and you are three hours into your watching TV that night, you see on the happiness ratings that it, your enjoyment goes down over time. So that is also really helpful information, right? Because if we are trying to optimize using your optimization, sort of discipline and thinking, then we will, well, actually, we should spread out those positives, like my TV watching. This is also where intentionality comes into play. Like instead of zoning out for like many hours every night, just watch that first half hour.

Show Links:

Recommended Resources:

• Happiness
• Hedonic Treadmill
• Intentionality
• Marie Kondo
• George Shultz
• Time Poverty
• Katy Milkman

Guest Profile:

• CassieHolmes.com
• Faculty Profile at UCLA Anderson School of Management
• LinkedIn Profile

Guest Work:

• Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most
• TEDx Talk | Finding Happiness in Ordinary Moments

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