How to Spend Time on What You Value

How to Spend Time on What You Value

It’s very possible that one of THE KEYS to happiness is being clear about your values.

And then, I suppose, focusing on what you value; and devoting your attention and resources to what you value.

Doing so is likely to bring about happiness and success because it ensures you’re more likely to know what TO DO and what NOT TO DO.

And if this is something you’d like to do better, then read on …

via the Atlantic by Rebecca Rashid and Arthur C Brooks

We try to use our time wisely—both at work and in leisure—but we often waste it. We may blame work for stripping us of recreation, but when valuable free time comes around, we can often revert back to more work.

What explains the gap between how we use our time and how we want to use our time? A conversation with Harvard Business School professor Ashley Whillans helps us analyze our complex relationship with time and how to orient our time use around what we value.


This transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Rebecca Rashid: Arthur, I have a question for you. If you had one extra hour today, how would you use it?

Arthur C. Brooks: How would I use it or how should I use it, Becca?

Rashid: How would you use it?

Brooks: I’d use it to work. I would work more. I love my work. It’s a well-established fact to any listener of How to Build a Happy Life that I’m kind of a work addict or a success addict or something like that, or whatever the pathology tends to be.

Thinking back to the episode with Anna Lembke, what should I do with the hour? I should use it to build love in my life. I should use it to pray. To spend time with my wife because now we live alone. To talk to one of my kids, to call one of my dear friends on the phone. That’s what I should do with it.

Many of us are stuck in a kind of vicious cycle with time. Our expectation, our hope, is that time is in our control and we’ll use it wisely, whatever that means. But it doesn’t work that way. The reality is that many of us don’t really know how to use our time at all…

… keep reading the full & original article HERE