Time Well Spent: A New Way to Value Time Could Transform Your Life

Calculating the subjective value of your time reveals where small changes in your weekly schedule can significantly boost life satisfaction and well-being.

- By Leslie Perlow and Salvatore Affinito

HOUR BY HOUR, HOW WE SPEND OUR time adds up to how we spend our lives — and for many of us, the sum can feel unsatisfying. Cultural attitudes embedded in adages like “time is money” spur us to prioritize efficiency and to look for ways to condense and consolidate to maximize how much we can get done. But which activities should we really prioritize if we want to craft our best lives at work and in life? We lack a way to assess our time spent from the perspective of the value we personally derive from it. We need such a measure if we are to make the best allocations of our time and build more satisfying lives.

Given mounting evidence that happiness and satisfaction in life can yield high performance and engagement at work, the question of how we spend our time to shape fulfilling lives is ever more salient for leaders and their teams.¹ If we want to consider that question rigorously and begin to make changes in our daily activities, we need better insight into the subjective value of our time — our experience of what we are doing — rather than the productive value of our time, which we're already pretty good at assessing. While that has defied measurement in the past, our recent research drawing on detailed time-and-activity reporting from thousands of individuals has yielded new tools and metrics that quantify the subjective value each person derives from time spent. This approach has enabled research participants to make small but meaningful changes in how they spend their time, improving their life satisfaction.

Our goal is to explain how you can maximize the subjective value you derive from how you spend your time — and how you can extend this practice to your team. That may not require major change: Shifting one or two hours a week to a higher-value activity, or recognizing how a low-value activity can be enriched, can make a big difference in how you experience your quality of life.