Work-Life Balance & Happiness
Happiness Encyclopedia XIII from the Happiness PhD Project...
Having worked with hundreds of professionals – from Marine Corps drill instructors to schoolteachers to financial services executives to truck drivers – I’ve come to find work–life balance (or lack thereof) is a seemingly universal challenge. I know almost nobody who suffers from the problem of too much time and too little to do.
Most objections or challenges to work–life balance fall into one of two categories:
(A) it’s a myth or it doesn’t matter, or
(B) it’s impossible.
I’d like to challenge both of those.
For those who think it doesn’t matter, it’s usually some version of “success is all about hard work” or “if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life.” And there is some truth to both claims. It’s true that when you feel engaged in your work, in a flow state, hours can pass by in a way that’s quite enjoyable and doesn’t feel like a drain on energy. Hard work, too, is a noble virtue in many cases.
The problem is not everyone can find their dream job. And maximizing professional success and achievement isn’t the way for everyone. To my point, research consistently shows that people are happier when they have better balance.
People who work more than 55 hours per week are 1.66 times more likely to suffer from depression and 1.74 times more likely to suffer from anxiety. (1)
A study in Social Psychology and Personality Science presented this abstract:
“Money and time are both scarce resources that people believe would bring them greater happiness. But would people prefer having more money or more time? And how does one’s preference between resources relate to happiness? Across studies, we asked thousands of Americans whether they would prefer more money or more time. Although the majority of people chose more money, choosing more time was associated with greater happiness – even controlling for existing levels of available time and money.” (2)
In Whillans and Dunn’s 2019 paper, “Valuing Time Over Money Predicts Happiness After a Major Life Transition,” they took a sample of graduating college seniors and measured how they value time versus money. (3) They did this by asking participants which of two hypothetical people they were more like:
Tina values her time more than her money. She is willing to sacrifice her money to have more time. For example, Tina would rather work fewer hours and make less money than work more hours and make more money.
Maggie values her money more than her time. She is willing to sacrifice her time to have more money. For example, Maggie would rather work more hours and make more money than work fewer hours and have more time.
Are you more like Tina or Maggie?
They followed up with participants one year later, after most had started their careers. They measured their subjective well-being and found that those who valued time over money had higher well-being one year later. What’s more, they controlled for other factors (such as initial happiness level) and found that improvements in well-being were partially explained by one’s preference for time over money at the time of the initial sample. So one’s preference for time had a meaningful positive effect on happiness later on.
Final evidence comes from Kasser and Sheldon. (4) They looked at four different studies in business settings and found that time affluence (feeling rich in time) supported happiness. I’ve heard this referred to in less academic terms as becoming a “time millionaire.” This is someone who measures their worth not in terms of financial assets but in terms of ownership over their calendar – the time they are able to take back from work and chores to spend on leisure or whatever they see fit.
You can imagine a Wall Street banker working 72 hours per week to make $200,000 – they’re on Zoom or in the office from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m., six days a week. On the other hand, you have an electrician working 30 hours per week making $100,000. I’d argue the latter is much wealthier than the former – and that’s true on an hourly basis as well.
So even if you’re with me (and the research) that having more time and better balance leads to happiness, you may be hesitant. It surely seems impossible to work less – at least without sacrificing income or productivity.
To that, I again respectfully disagree. Proof comes in a man I had the privilege of interviewing years ago: Bill Duane. Here’s the story in his words…
Becoming a Google Executive while working a 4-day week
(You can watch this interview on my Youtube: “Becoming a Google executive while working a 4 day week.”)
So I want to tell you the story about working part-time at Google during its hypergrowth period for a few years. The reason why I wanted to switch to a 4-day week is because I came off a period of intense burnout. I had been working really hard, and then a death in the family hit me really hard. To get through that period, I needed to turn down the dial on my work life, which had been, in Spinal Tap terms, turned to 11 on the work amp.
I wanted to do an experiment of dialing it back. I really wanted to make time in my schedule to de-stress a little and, in particular, to do work on things that I knew would help me grow into future positions of being able to handle more stress — stuff like meditation, reading, therapy. I wanted to make more time for that.
But the key thing I wanted to avoid was disappointing people who depended on me. So before I got approval to do a two-month experiment of working four days a week, I wanted to be really clear that if I was taking a 20% pay cut and a 20% bonus cut, I wasn’t going to be working on my day off. And I wasn’t just going to compress the same amount of work into four 15-hour days.
To make sure I wasn’t letting anyone down — employees, other managers, or upstreams — I asked in all my one-on-ones: “What do I do that makes your life better in some way?” A few interesting things came out of those conversations. Most of it wasn’t a surprise; most of us know what we’re good at. But some things were surprising — helpful things that weren’t really on my radar — and those conversations helped me emphasize them.
The third part was discovering the things I was doing that no one said helped them. In general, those were behaviors I had picked up by trying to emulate other senior managers — things I thought good leaders were supposed to do. But leadership is very contextual. Different people lead in radically different ways that are helpful.
I realized the stuff I was doing that no one found helpful all had a flavor of being performative. I was a little bit out of integrity. I was optimizing not for what helped the people around me, but for what made me feel like I was being seen as competent. Huge difference.
Like I said, my main motivation was to de-stress. But as a result of focusing on what was most important and helpful at all levels — employees, peers, upstreams — even though I had less time, my impact grew much larger.
Surprisingly, not only did my performance rating not slip — it actually went up. And then it went up again. We extended the experiment from a few months to six months, then to a year. After a year, they offered me a promotion. I’d always been the kind of person to go after a promotion, so it was a useful growth experience for me to say no at first.
Eventually, they said I was screwing up the compensation curve. They said I should go for the promotion because it was starting to get weird administratively. So I went for it. HR got curious. They said I was the only person they knew of to get promoted to senior staff while working part-time.
I think what was interesting is that the outcome of working four days a week was quite different than expected. My motivation had just been to take a break after a rough period. But the time constraint forced me to focus and get clear on what mattered. Not only did that help me get promoted — it felt great. I knew I was helping people a lot. That sense of being of service really increased.
That idea of being aligned with your values is huge. When we talk about stress, we often focus on hours or intensity. But one of the best ways to reduce stress is to act in alignment with your values. You can handle a lot more if you’re doing that. I didn’t plan it that way — but it worked.
I stayed part-time for about two and a half to three years, until I was offered an executive position in another part of the company. We all agreed that for that role, it would be a disservice to the people I’d be leading if I wasn’t fully available during the ramp-up period.
If Bill can become an executive at Google working 20% less than everyone else, I think there’s hope for most of us. This also squares with research over the last few years on companies that adopted a shorter workweek. By and large, they see huge improvements in employee satisfaction and morale without any losses in productivity or revenue.
I do, however, recognize that it may not be this simple for many jobs that are more manual or service-based. A security guard can’t work fewer hours and still do their job (by definition), and a truck driver can’t suddenly get from Los Angeles to Tulsa 20% faster.
But I reckon for most of us, if we are more intentional with defining success and managing activity, we can improve work–life balance without sacrificing productivity.
Let’s look at an approach to do just that, then return to a model for happiness at work.
Three Steps to Work–Life Balance…
The problem with many time management systems is that they take too much time to manage.
If you spend an hour per day arranging tasks and lists in your productivity app, that’s not very productive. You’re working on planning what you’re going to work on for 5 hours per week. If you work a 40-hour week, that’s about 12.5% of your time spent not actually working on anything.
So I’m going to give you the simplest possible system, which you can expand upon if you wish.
Focus: be intelligent and lazy.
Protect your most important time.
Run a personal operating system (pOS).
Oliver Burkeman has coined a term for what many of us experience: “productivity debt.” Here’s an explanation in his words –
Apparently I struck a chord on Twitter the other day when I observed that many people (by which I meant me) seem to feel as if they start off each morning in a kind of “productivity debt”, which they must struggle to pay off through the day, in hopes of reaching a zero balance by the time evening comes. Few things feel more basic to my experience of adulthood than this vague sense that I’m falling behind, and need to claw my way back up to some minimum standard of output. It’s as if I need to justify my existence, by staying “on top of things”, in order to stave off some ill-defined catastrophe that might otherwise come crashing down upon my head.
Relatable? The first step to work–life balance is to overcome productivity-debt-driven anxiety, which leads to frenetic and inefficient commotion. This is what I sometimes call motion as opposed to action. Imagine you’ve got 20 things to do on a given day, so you switch between your email, your texts, then a Zoom meeting about the marketing plan, and then a meeting about one of your reports, then back to email, then you need to think about what you were supposed to get at the store on your way home, then your kid calls, then all of a sudden it’s 4 p.m. and you’ve been running around all day putting out fires, but nothing important really got done: all motion, no action.
This neurotic anxiety is the doom of strategic focus. This is particularly true for knowledge workers because not only do you have to do the work, you are responsible for defining the work to do and what “done” means.
The antidote to this way of operating is first psychological and second tactical. So, starting with your psychology, I suggest you adopt a new perspective: intelligent laziness. Rather than starting your day with a feeling of anxiety and dread about digging your way out of a hole of commitments and tasks, consider starting at a zero balance, aiming lower and slower, and asking yourself, “What would this look like if it were easy?”
The most helpful framing for this perspective is the Pareto Principle. The Pareto Principle is sometimes called the 80/20 Rule. It means that in many contexts 20 percent of the inputs, causes, activities will lead to 80 percent of the outputs, consequences, and results. It is not always 80 and 20, but some similar distribution.
This pattern originated in economics when Vilfredo Pareto noticed that about 20% of the plants in his garden produced 80% of the peas. He then observed that 80% of the land in Italy was owned by 20% of the population. In the modern world 8% own about 85% of total wealth (that’s from Credit Suisse in 2013; estimates vary).
This pattern is everywhere. If you work in a company, you can probably see that 10% of employees lead to 90% of the problems, and a different 10% of employees lead to 90% of the productive work. Similarly, it may be that one or two people in your life lead to the vast majority of annoyance and a different one or two to the vast majority of joy. If you look closely at your activity, this is often the case as well (for both happiness and productivity).
Imagine you bust your ass at work week after week, then by chance at a dinner party you meet a friend of a friend who is hiring for a job. She recommends you, and you land a $30k pay increase. Those two hours of networking and interviewing were exponentially more consequential than your thousands of other hours working.
So here are some questions to help you think in intelligent laziness…
If I could only work 2 hours per day this week, what would I do?
(If employed) What are the specific measurables upon which my performance is assessed? What if I doubled the amount of time I spent on those areas and stepped back from everything else?
(If self-employed) What 20% of my customers, activities, or products lead to 80% of my sales, results, attention, etc.? What if I only served those customers, did those activities, or marketed in those ways?
If I only had one day off for the next month, what would I do to maximize happiness? What in my life (people, places, activities) brings the most joy?
Where do I want to be in 5 years? How could I get there in 5 months?
I should add: this may be simple, but it’s not easy. Simple but not easy – as so much of this happiness and living business is. If you’re ready to embrace focus with an attitude of intelligent laziness in order to overcome the anxiety to be always-in-motion, then you are on your way.
Charlie Munger probably didn’t think he was giving great productivity advice when he said this, but he did. In the final line of a commencement address he said, “may each of you rise high by spending each day of a long life aiming low.”
Once you have this perspective, it takes us to step two: protect your time with “sacred hours” and “power hours.”
Here’s the reality – not all time is created equal. Imagine you have 4 hours of PTO. Would you prefer to take it Tuesday morning 8 to 12 or Friday afternoon 1 to 5? Imagine you have to spend 2–3 hours writing an in-depth strategic plan. Would you rather have 9–12 on a Monday morning or 30-minute chunks spread out each afternoon over the course of a week?
The idea here is to identify pockets of time and activity that have a disproportionate impact on your happiness and productivity (e.g., work and life in work–life balance). From there, you claim time for each one.
Note that I say claim time. It’s not about making time. You can’t make time, can you? Time is a fixed supply, and yours is probably already accounted for. So don’t make it – claim it.
A cautionary note before I explain this – start with something easy. Don’t try to set aside 2 hours per day of reading, then an hour workout, then your 8-hour workday, then a date night – it’s impossible. Start with claiming maybe a few hours per week maximum. It does not have to be every single day nor does it have to be exactly an hour. Sacred and power hours are just the terms.
Start with sacred hours first. This is claiming time for what is important in your “life” side of the equation first, so it doesn’t get crowded out. Then you hold that time as “sacred” – it is yours and yours alone.
This could be a daily 30-minute meditation and reading time in the morning, it could be your five workouts during the week, it could be every Wednesday-night date night, it could be every Sunday unplug and take a day truly off.
I worked with a senior leader in the Army National Guard who was a full-time police officer. Between his law enforcement and military administrative duties, he was working 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. just about every day during the workweek. I worked with him to apply sacred hours. We said – look, there’s no magic wand to all of a sudden take away a bunch of work from you. But what might be a pocket of time that would bring you more balance and joy?
He saw an opportunity where every day around 6 p.m. his wife got home from work, his kids got home from sports, and everyone was trying to get something to eat. So we worked with his manager and direct reports to restructure his workflow. Each day he’d work in the office from 7:45–5:45, then he’d get home and have a sacred hour from 6 to 7. But remember he still had a couple hours of administrative work to do most days, so he’d telework from about 7 to 9.
Was he still working too much? Probably. But he got an hour of quality time over dinner with his family nearly every day and said he felt a dramatic improvement in his work–life balance even though he worked roughly the same amount of time.
Action – look at your calendar and claim your sacred hours each day and/or week.
The “power hour” is the work version of the above. Often, when I talk to professionals, they feel they are running around putting out fires all day and don’t have time to work on big-picture things or developing their people. Some feel they get behind on email or communication and just can’t get caught up.
In any case, power hours are about claiming a daily and/or weekly block of time when you are at your best for deep, focused work on the things that are important but not necessarily urgent. We worked with another General Staff officer in the military who was basically the head of HR for several thousand soldiers.
She told us that if she could sit down right after her morning coffee and get a focused hour to blow through action items in her inbox with no distractions, she could get through most of the day’s critical work well before noon. So she put up a sign on her door – “Power Hour: please knock for emergencies” – each day from 9 a.m. to 10:30 or so. Many of her reports adopted the same policy, and the productivity of the entire group shot up (not to mention the psychological relief of not having to feel overwhelmed and stuck all the time).
This may be a daily 1–2 hours when you are fresh, or maybe an entire half-day once per week to do strategy or team development. For what it’s worth, I wrote my first book (How to Stick to Meditation) with about six bouts of four-hour (highly caffeinated) Saturday-morning writing blocks over the course of two months.
Action – look at your calendar and claim your power hours each day and/or week.
So you now have a more focused perspective on your work–life balance, and you’ve protected time for your most important things. If you were to just stop here and stubbornly stick to the commitments you’ve made for yourself, then you’d already be 80% of the way to better work–life balance.
The final step is to create a personal operating system (pOS). If interested, I can coach you through building your own (studyhappiness.notion.site/pos-personal-operating-system).
“The mind is for having ideas, not holding them.” – David Allen
That’s the crux of this approach. I wager that most of the stress, overwhelm, and fragmented attention that we experience comes not from the work itself, but from the workload of managing it all in our heads.
The human brain evolved to hold something like 3–5 separate things in mind at once. You’d be focused on your hunt, then have to remember to pick some berries and build a new spear when you get home. The brain is a thinking device, not a storage device. But when most of us have 100 to 200 unprocessed and unfinished commitments rattling around in there, no wonder we feel dazed and confused.
You’re trying to compose an articulate email to your boss and getting hit with “figure out the kitchen remodel, pick up eggs at the store, send the other email to Mike, figure out how to lose 10 pounds, did I send that bill to accounting the other day?, meet with Jessica,” etc.
The pOS is getting everything out of your head and into an external mind, which is some combination of lists and a calendar.
Capture anything and everything that you’d otherwise keep in your mind. What constitutes something to capture? Any commitment to do something, figure something out, or oversee something that is pulling at your attention. Capture these on a piece of paper, a phone note, an excel, or whatever.
Now, after you capture something, you need to do two things – store it in an organized list and clarify what the next action attached to it is.
“Mom’s birthday” is not an action. “Taxes” is not an action. “Purchase a birthday gift for Mom and send her a text,” or “set aside 2 hours to file taxes” – those are actions.
So after you capture it, you clarify it and add it to a list. I recognize that many of the things you capture aren’t a simple action. Writing a book or figuring out a new product launch will be pretty big projects. So I suggest you subdivide your list into Projects (things that are ongoing and many steps) and Tasks (simple one-step things).
The third list you want can be a separate list or some sort of tag you add to the entries in your other lists. But in any case, you’ll want a “waiting for” list. If you’re in management, this protocol alone will probably double your effectiveness. It is a to-do list, but for things you are waiting on others for. If you send an email to Kevin in accounting and need a reply, you add it there. If you need to get an answer from your friend Deb before you book your flights for vacation, then that goes on your wait list.
Finally, you’ll want some list at the top that includes your main goals and areas of focus. These are more general priorities that are important to you (e.g., stay healthy, be a good mom, get a promotion, etc.).
So far, you are brain-dump capturing all your commitments into some note, paper, app, etc. Then you are, either at that moment or later in the day, clarifying the action and sorting into your lists, which should include Projects, Tasks, Waiting, and Goals/Priorities.
This is where the system starts to work its magic. Once you have your lists, you are going to sit down at the end of each day or the end of each week and plan out your work.
One of my first bosses was one of the top financial advisers in the country, with hundreds of millions in assets under management. He said the secret to success is to say you’re going to do something, then do it. The hard truth is many of us don’t get this right. We’re stuck in reactive mode. It feels like the day takes over and we’re flying around out of control.
In this step, you set out the plan so that the system runs your day. You don’t have to react, and you don’t have to decide. That’s where you get the feeling of effortless effectiveness. Without a systematized plan, we just haphazardly stumble forward in distracted action. See the quote: “I am rather like a mosquito in a nudist camp; I know what I want to do, but I don’t know where to begin.”
So look at your lists and pick the three most important things for the next day or the five most important things for the week. You will want to experiment with what is best for you between a daily or weekly cadence.
Estimate for each one about how long it will take to complete. If it’s a big, ambiguous thing, remember to break it down into actionable chunks. Now take your estimate and multiply it by 1.5x because we always underestimate how long stuff takes. Now put this time into your calendar as an appointment with yourself.
Importantly (!) make sure you leave a minimum of 25% of your time as “reactive” or white space.
This means that you know things are going to come up unexpectedly, so you leave some time in there to field those tasks as they arise. Depending on your role this will vary quite a bit. If you’re a project manager dealing with an active job site, you might need 70 percent of your time to be reactive. If you’re a famous author with no employees, you can probably block 6 hours straight every day for creative writing. You need to suit this to your context.
So, in this hypothetical, you can imagine I look across my goals/priorities and lists and say – “OK, tomorrow I want to make 10 cold calls, which should take an hour. I want to write one book chapter, which should take 90 minutes. And I want to write a statement of work for a new client, which will take 30 minutes.”
I will then plot on my calendar (remember to 1.5X your assumption) 9 a.m. to 11:15 book writing, 11:15 to 12:45 cold calling, and 12:45 to 1:30 statement of work. Then the next few hours will be checking email and texts or whatever other work arises that day. In the event I have extra time, I can look back at my lists and decide what to work on next.
Keep your lists in order and your calendar up to date. On a daily or weekly basis, review your systems and plan your work. Your system drives you, rather than you trying to keep a thousand things in your head, running around like a headless chicken.
Build your pOS around the time you claimed with your Sacred Hour and Power Hour. And embrace intelligent laziness with 80/20 thinking.
If you do this, I promise you will double your sense of work–life balance in the next month.
Read a popular press summary at HarvardOnline.Harvard.edu/blog “Prioritize Work-Life Balance”
Hershfield, H. E., Mogilner, C., & Barnea, U. (2016). People Who Choose Time Over Money Are Happier. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 7(7), 697-706.
Whillans, A. V., Macchia, L., & Dunn, E. W. (2019, September 18). Valuing time over money predicts happiness after a major life transition: A preregistered longitudinal study of graduating students. Science Advances, 5(9), eaax2615.
Kasser, T., & Sheldon, K. M. (2009). Time affluence as a path toward personal happiness and ethical business practice: Empirical evidence from four studies. Journal of Business Ethics, 84(Suppl2), 243–255.
