The Richest Thing You Can Buy Is an Hour

If someone handed you forty dollars and told you to spend it on something that would make you happier, what would you buy?

That was, more or less, the question a team of researchers put to people in a study published in 2017. The answer they found has stayed with me ever since, partly because it is so simple and partly because almost nobody acts on it.

The Experiment

The study, led by Ashley Whillans with colleagues including Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton, was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences under the plain title Buying time promotes happiness. It combined a survey of more than 6,000 adults in the United States, Canada, Denmark and the Netherlands with a small but elegant experiment.

In the experiment, working adults were given forty dollars on two separate weekends. On one weekend, they were asked to spend it on something that would save them time, such as paying for a cleaner, a delivery or a taxi. On the other, they were asked to spend it on a material purchase, something to keep. When they spent money on saving time, they reported feeling happier and less pressed for time than when they spent it on things.

The survey backed this up. People who spent money on outsourcing tasks they disliked reported greater life satisfaction, and the effect held across income levels, even after the researchers accounted for how much people earned.

The Part That Surprised the Researchers

Very few people actually do this. When the researchers asked a separate group of working adults how they would spend a $40 windfall, only 2% chose something that would save them time. In a sample of 850 millionaires, nearly half said they spent nothing at all on outsourcing tasks they disliked.

Think about that. People with more money than they could reasonably spend were still cleaning their own gutters and waiting in their own queues, not because they had to, but because it did not occur to them that time was something they could buy.

Why We Resist It

I recognise the resistance, because I have it. Paying someone to do something I could do myself feels faintly indulgent, as though I am skipping a chore I somehow ought to earn my way out of. It also feels like the money vanishes. A new coat hangs in the wardrobe as evidence of the purchase. An hour that did not have to be spent on the ironing leaves no trace at all, except that you had it.

There is also a deep habit, particularly among people who built their finances carefully, of treating any spending that is not strictly necessary as a leak. That instinct is useful when you are starting. Later, it can quietly become a way of spending your most limited resource to protect your least limited one.

The Problem Has a Name

Whillans has since written at length about what she calls time poverty, the persistent feeling of having too many things to do and not enough time to do them. What makes it interesting is that it does not track income neatly. Plenty of people with comfortable salaries feel desperately short of time, and the extra money often arrives bundled with extra obligations that eat the hours it might have bought.

That is the trap. We tend to measure our wealth in pounds and our stress in hours, and rarely notice that the first can be used to relieve the second.

Buying back time is not about luxury in the sense of expensive things. It is closer to the idea of living well that I keep returning to: a life arranged so that your hours go to the things that matter to you rather than the things that merely need doing. It connects to something I wrote in The Long Lunch Is a Power Move. The long lunch is only possible if the hours around it have not already been swallowed by chores.

How I Am Trying It

I will not pretend I have mastered this. My instinct is still to do things myself, and faster, and with a slight air of martyrdom. But I have started asking one question before I automatically take on a task I dislike: what is an hour of my time actually worth to me, and is this task worth more or less than that?

Sometimes the answer is to do it myself, because the task is small or the cost is silly. Sometimes it is to pay someone else, and use the hour for something that actually improves my week, whether that is rest, work that moves something forward, or a proper conversation with someone I love.

The research is detailed that it works. The research is equally detailed that most of us will not do it. I am trying to be in the minority, and so far the hardest part has not been the money. It has been permitting myself.

The Jacqueline Brand — knowledge builds confidence, confidence builds wealth. This is editorial commentary for inspiration, not financial or professional advice. Always do your own research. The Collection