by Paul Dolan
So why don’t many of us find the time? I think it has a lot to do with how mistaken we are about how much discretionary time we think we have, as discussed earlier. So when we say that we cannot find twenty minutes out of the one thousand or so minutes that we are awake each day, we really mean that we are not prioritizing doing so. Many happiness books will tell you to schedule time in for others but that planning requires time in itself, which you may put off because there are always other things that seem to be more important. Consistent with many of my observations in this book, it’s worth thinking about how you could find more time without having to plan more time.
So, instead of using the toilet across the hall at work, start using the one at the other end of your floor. It will force you to walk across the office, making it more likely you’ll casually socialize with others. The managers at Pixar in Emeryville, California, were experimenting with redesigning the immediate environment and decided to have only one bathroom in the entire building so their employees would all have to walk to the same place if they wanted to have a wee.32 The managers anticipated that it would make people more likely to speak to each other and that the entire office would be more prone to socializing. They were right. It also boosted creativity.
It is worth saying that even the introverts among you are likely to be happier when you are around people you like. Introversion and extroversion are broad personality categories that describe a range of predispositions and behaviors, such as the propensity to select into social situations, where extroverts have a higher propensity to do so. Many aspects of our world are designed for extroverts, such as group work in classrooms and workplaces. But introverts still benefit from social interaction; they just require a different balance from extroverts and have less tolerance for unpleasant social situations.33
Don’t get distracted
Someone who maximizes their happiness is someone who allocates their attention optimally. Unfortunately, most of us are some way away from the optimum. A big part of the problem emanates from the fact that we get distracted from paying attention to our experiences. Distraction is very different from taking a break. Distraction comes from internal disruption, such as intrusive thoughts about whether you left the car lights on or where to go on holiday this summer, and also from external stimuli, such as people and e-mails. Taking a break, on the other hand, is deliberately chosen to happen at that time. And as we saw earlier in this chapter, taking the right kind of break can increase creativity. The same cannot be said for distraction. So if you hear someone say “distraction is a good thing,” what they ought to mean is that a designated break is a good thing.
Distraction costs
Distraction is damaging because it requires switching costs. A switching cost is how much attentional energy is required to change from one task to the next.34 Every time you shift your attention, your brain has to reorient itself, further taxing your mental resources. When you interrupt yourself to text, tweet, or e-mail you are using attentional energy to switch tasks. If you do this frequently, your attention reserves quickly become diminished, making it even harder for you to focus on whatever it is you want to do. Assuming that what you want to do is a pleasurable and/or purposeful activity, it will make you less happy if you give it limited attention.
So multitasking makes you less happy and also results in less productivity. One nice recent study involved 218 Dutch students being asked to solve a Sudoku puzzle and complete a word search in a fixed time of twenty-four minutes. Participants in the experiment were randomly assigned to one of three treatments: one where they were forced to multitask; one where they could organize their work by freely switching between the Sudoku puzzle and the word search; and one where they performed the tasks sequentially. They were awarded points for each correctly filled Sudoku cell and each word found. The total points scored were lowest in the first group and highest in the third.35 These results suggest that having a clear schedule of work is better for productivity. So multitasking might sound cool, but it actually makes you a fool.
Multitasking can, however, make us feel as if we are more productive, thus resulting in a mistaken belief about ourselves. This is a good reason why so many of us continue to do it.36 But now you can remember that you’d feel even better if you concentrated on one thing at a time—and you would also get more done. Multitasking takes effort and it’s not worth it. I never use lecture slides for this reason: students don’t waste their attentional resources going between the slides and my voice. This is also a nice example of adaptation, by the way; the unease among my students at the start of term is palpable but the lack of slides is the one thing that they comment on most positively at the end of the course.
The costs of distraction are now more transparent in the modern age. Recent technological advances have brought a range of benefits, including national income growth, lower consumer prices, and possibly even higher life satisfaction.37 And as an academic, my life is made so much easier by being able to download journal articles instead of lugging around piles of books and papers. But modern technology has brought a few costs, too, the biggest of which is distraction. A recent study estimated the combined cost of distractions for US businesses to be around $600 billion per year.38 Thomas Jackson, known as “Dr. Email” for his nearly two decades of work on . . . wait for it . . . e-mail distractions, estimates that e-mail alone costs UK businesses about £10,000 ($16,500) per employee per year.39
Research also shows that reading something online that is embedded with links makes us more likely to be confused about what we are reading, even when we don’t even click on the links, compared to reading printed text.40 The mere fact that there is a link forces your brain to make a choice to click or not to click, which itself is distracting. All the time you spend online sharpens the neural circuits dedicated to “skimming” rather than those for “reading and thinking deeply.” When you then go offline, you have trained your brain to attend to things that it wouldn’t attend to otherwise. This is a waste of time where you could instead be experiencing pleasure and purpose.
If you need further convincing about the costs of distraction, consider the correlation between the increase in parents being distracted by Internet, text, and e-mail, and the increase in accidents in young kids, reversing a long-term downward trend, and also in contrast to the continuing decrease in accidents in older kids.41 Or, in a more controlled setting, consider the causal effects of (1) using the phone, (2) texting, or (3) listening to music on the likelihood of being hit while crossing the road in a simulated environment. Which do you think would be the most distracting? Well, you are more likely to get hit by a car while texting or listening to music but all three conditions are more dangerous than not being distracted.42 And when people pretended to drive cars in a simulator, switching between braking in response to the brake lights of a car ahead and counting the number of times a sound occurred, the result was a delay that equated to sixteen feet of stopping distance.43 This might be something to remember the next time you’re behind the wheel.
Money on my mind
Paying attention to what we are doing can feel increasingly difficult as there seem to be ever-increasing demands on our time. As you get richer, you attach more value to your time, and attaching more value to time, or anything else for that matter, means that it feels scarcer. And so you pay it ever more attention. If you could charge $1.50 per minute for working at a computer you would feel more time pressure than if you charged only $0.15 per minute for exactly the same task.44 In fact, the same authors show that you only need to have your wealth brought to your attention to feel time pressed. If you were made to feel rich by being given a scale where “high savings” was anything over $500, you would report feeling “more pressed for time today” than if you were made to feel poor by being given a scale where you needed to have over $400,000 to be deemed to have high savings.
Thinking about time as money also affects experiences of pleasure during
leisure activities. Imagine you are asked some questions about how much you earned over the past year and that your friend answered the same questions as well as being asked their hourly wage. Then you each listen to eighty-six seconds of “The Flower Duet” from the opera Lakmé. Who do you think would enjoy the music the most and be the most patient? You would—because your friend has just been reminded how much she earns in a unit (an hour), which draws attention to itself. Similar effects were also found when the researchers allowed participants to create their own leisure experience by playing around online.45 The moral of these various studies is that you are less happy when you are paying attention to time (and especially to time as money) rather than to the activities you are engaged in. So again, try to be fully engaged in what you’re doing, which includes not looking at the clock every few minutes. For example, I try hard not to be too set in how much time I spend playing with the kids in breaks from working.
Moreover, the more money you have, the more you may think of all the things you could do with that money if only you had the time, such as taking longer holidays. Surely richer people would actually take longer holidays whenever they could, right? This was indeed the trend in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s, but from the 1980s on, something quite interesting has happened. People with less than a college degree have had relatively more leisure time, and those with a college degree or higher have had relatively less. The gap between the incomes of the rich and the poor has widened considerably since the 1980s but the gap between the amounts of leisure time they have has widened, too, favoring those with lower incomes.46
Little wonder, then, that daily moods do not improve beyond making around $75,000 per year in the United States—there is no time to be happy if you are rich. Focusing attention on the scarcity of time or money can lead to all of us making decisions that place a great deal of emphasis on getting more of that resource now at the expense of lots of it later. As a great illustration of this, one study randomly assigned participants into groups that varied in how much time they were allowed to think about answers to trivia questions, and into further groups that determined whether or not they would be allowed to take more time to answer now at the expense of less time later. Time-poor participants had three hundred seconds to answer, whereas time-rich participants had one thousand seconds. The former group borrowed on average 22 percent of their budget (so, sixty-six seconds), whereas time-rich participants borrowed on average 8 percent of their budget (so, eighty seconds). As you might expect, the time-rich groups did better than the time-poor groups, whether or not they could borrow, but the time-poor group performed the best when they could not borrow at all. In a nutshell, time-poor participants borrowed their way into poor performance. If a resource becomes scarce, we will all act in very similar ways to those who are currently poor in that resource.47
And so in general, it’s better if you don’t pay too much attention to money at all. Given my upbringing, I appreciate that money matters when circumstances dictate that every penny counts but it might generally be worth chilling out a bit about it if you are not in that position. Sure, money matters and you should respect it, but not so much that it overruns your life. It’s certainly not worth making yourself miserable over. Rob Metcalfe and I have shown that, while poorer people have more intrusive thoughts about money than do wealthier people, the latter’s happiness is more negatively influenced by those thoughts.48
A wandering mind
There is evidence that general mind wanderings, whether about money or anything else, are frequent, occurring up to a third of the time when people are asked what they are thinking about at random times during the day.49 It seems that we are predisposed to let our minds wander: neurological evidence from brain imaging studies shows that mind wanderings are more common when a particular network of cortical regions in our brains is activated—which are the same regions that typically correspond to periods of rest.50 It can be difficult to separate out what is evolutionarily adaptive and what is simply an evolutionary mistake; simply because you are neurologically wired to let your mind wander does not mean that you should, in much the same way that being genetically programmed to eat a lot because our ancestors didn’t know when they would eat next doesn’t mean that we should necessarily do so.51 Knowing that you are hardwired does help explain why it happens, though, which will hopefully help you deal more effectively with the mind wanderings you do have, and not to ruminate further on them.
You are doubtless made less happy if your mental escape from your current experience is to somewhere worse than where you are now, such as if you start worrying about your blood test results in the middle of a meeting you cannot leave. But it seems that you might also be made less happy if your intrusive thoughts are positive; that is, even if you mentally escape to somewhere better, like your next holiday, in the middle of that meeting.52 But context matters. I have an electric toothbrush that whirs automatically for two minutes. When I pay attention to cleaning my teeth, those two minutes can feel like an eternity and I can’t wait for them to finish. When I am thinking about other stuff, in contrast, the two minutes fly by and I tend to enjoy my mind wanderings.
So, let’s focus on negative intrusive thoughts, which are nearly always damaging to happiness. Most of the relevant research has been conducted on clinical populations or those who have experienced a difficult event, such as loss of a loved one: one study found that men who experienced a lot of intrusive thoughts in the first month of their bereavement adapted less quickly, as indicated by their lower morale one year later compared to those who had fewer intrusive thoughts.53
In an attempt to consider the importance of intrusive thoughts in the valuation of health states (a subject, you’ll recall, that is close to my academic heart), I asked more than a thousand members of the general population in the United States first to describe their current health status. I then asked them how often and how intensely they thought about any current health problems. Finally, I asked them to say how many years of life they would be willing to give up in order to alleviate their health problems. I found that participants’ willingness to give up life years was better explained by the frequency and intensity of their thoughts about health than by the description of the actual health issue. This study highlights once more that you are affected by what you attend to more than by the objective circumstances of your life.54
If you begin to worry or think about other things when you don’t want to, it is possible to redirect your attention by finding ways that prevent your mind from wandering. For a very long time people have been making “worry tables” by writing down their worries and distinguishing between those they can and can’t control, in order to help them stop worrying about what they can’t.55 If you were to try writing down what you were worrying about a month ago, let alone a year ago, you would most likely have trouble remembering; and even if you could remember, it is likely that the concern rarely had consequences anywhere close to your fears.
Most of our concerns more generally are about what has not yet happened, and sometimes about what has already taken place. In contrast, we nearly always have nothing to worry about right now. This is a pretty compelling reason to attend to the here and now. If you always did this, the “there and then” that you currently worry about would never affect you. The focus of your attention would be here and now, which is nearly always okay. This certainly applies to my stammer, which rarely makes me feel as bad as I imagine it will. When I feel an intrusive thought taking hold, I ask myself, “What have you got to worry about right now?” When the answer is nothing at all, as it nearly always is, I feel a little happier.
One intervention aimed at suppressing intrusive thoughts among people waiting for medical test results showed that simply making a plan for how they would manage the thoughts was helpful (e.g., by starting a conversation with someone to bring attention to the present).56 Using this method, you could consciously write down a few things you might do t
o help yourself when situations arise where negative thoughts are most likely to pop up.
You could also remind yourself to “phone a friend” when your mind begins to wander. We have already seen that time with family and friends is a vital part of being happy, so how better to take advantage of them, in the nicest possible way, than when your mind starts going to places that would make you less happy?
New experiences can also mitigate intrusive thoughts. Those of us who do something new as opposed to something routine are much less likely to experience intrusive thoughts because new experiences require more attention in the moment than do routine ones.57 So in addition to fostering creativity and slowing down time, which we have already discussed, new experiences have further benefits, which adds to our understanding of why people who are open to them are happier. “Try something new” is probably one of the more evidence-based suggestions in self-help books.
It is likely that your mind will wander from purpose toward pleasure, and your behavior might as well. Too often to be consistent with the maximization of my happiness, my attention while writing this book has been diverted from experiencing purpose toward searching out pleasure. Sometimes those mind wanderings have led to mouse wanderings, too, as I have searched the Internet. Even at the time of the distraction, I have been aware that I would rather be concentrating more fully on the book. I can more easily concentrate on pleasure without getting distracted, and I suspect you can, too. It will not come as any surprise to anyone who knows me that, in general, I am quite easily distracted. Ask any of the students who have sat through my mind wanderings in lectures. It’s hard to be sure, and I get distracted thinking about it anyway, but I reckon I have always only ever concentrated in short bursts. In our own ways, we are each susceptible to being distracted, but we’re also able to mitigate its effects.
