Investing time in the tasks and routines that bring the most joy has been shown to improve both home and work lives, according to Cassie Holmes, chaired professor at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA) Anderson School of Management (Los Angeles) and author of “Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most.”

During her opening keynote session at the 2024 Healthcare Design Expo + Conference in Indianapolis, Holmes discussed how people spend their time and shared ideas for how to prioritize happiness and use time at work more optimally by designing schedules with purpose.

Research on happiness

Using empirically based insights, she told attendees that spending two hours a day doing what makes them happy can improve not only their lives, but also their work.

“When you feel happier, it allows you to show up better in the work you do and for those around you. … There is plenty of data showing that happiness has positive consequences across our daily lives, in the workplace, interpersonal relationships, and in respect to health,” she says.

“It makes us more creative, more adaptive in our problem solving. Happy people are more engaged and better performers. They’re less likely to call in sick or leave the company.”

What is time poverty?

In her research, she found that 48 percent of Americans report feeling “time poor,” which she defines as “the acute feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to do it.”

Time poverty, she adds, “makes us less healthy, less kind, less confident, and less happy.”

However, there is such a thing as having too much time, she adds.

Using her own research conducted at UCLA, Holmes shared with attendees that having more than five hours of discretionary time also makes people less happy. The “sweet spot,” she says, is between two and five hours of free time daily.

“Having too much free time undermines our sense of purpose and leaves us feeling less satisfied,” she says, adding that the key is “not being time rich, but making the time you have rich.”

Actionable advice

Holmes shared some strategies to achieve that goal and help people experience greater joy, including:

  • Wiser spending. Identify worthwhile ways to spend time by tracking activities over the course of a week and rating those activities on a 10-point scale for happiness.
  • Turn routine into ritual, give it a name, and make it special. This can include date nights for couples, as well as protecting time for the work that is most meaningful.
  • Waste management. People can “buy better time,” she says, by outsourcing with time-saving services such as a meal-prep subscription.
  • Bundle the “unfun with fun.” This might mean listening to a podcast during a daily commute or during household chores.
  • Identify your purpose. Understanding the “why” behind the work we do can clarify what to say yes to (what’s worthwhile) and what to say no to.
  • Treat the weekend like a vacation. The research shows that people are more satisfied and recharged after a weekend in which they are more present and engaged—when they can shift out of the task orientation of getting things done and give themselves license to slow down and enjoy activities.
  • Count the times left. People who realize that the rituals they most enjoy are finite can avoid hedonic adaptation, or the propensity to get used to things over time such that they stop noticing.

Wrapping up, Homes notes that happiness is not about the quantity of time, but the quality of time. “How we invest the time that we have and how invested we are in how we spend that time,” she says.

More coverage of the 2024 HCD Conference + Expo will be featured in Healthcare Design’s November/December issue. For more conference new and updates, go here.