The Amount of Free Time Required to Improve Our Work/Life Balance is Less Than We Think

You don't have to quit work and go live in the mountains to rebalance your life - there are small changes you can make to hit the work/life 'sweet spot'.

I love to reserve time at the end of my lectures to take questions from the audience. It’s one of the great joys of my job. 

I can guarantee there will be some interesting idea that springs from these Q&A sessions, something that makes me think about happiness in a new way. 

For the latest season of my podcast, The Happiness Lab, I asked listeners to submit questions - and a subject that came up time and again was work/life balance. 

I’m currently doing my own experiment on work-life balance - I’m taking a temporary break from my duties at Yale to address my own sense of burnout. So I was immediately drawn to a question from listener Niki Walker.

“ Are we born to work or are we born to live?”

Niki was a TV producer – but while working from home during the Covid pandemic she began to question the path she was on. 

“I raised my head one day and I was like: ‘What am I doing here? Why am I still doing this? Do I really enjoy what I'm doing?’

Niki decided to quit. She left her home in DC and settled in Colorado. “It's something that I've wanted to do for a while. I mountain bike a lot and I hike with my dog.”

The changes Niki made to her life are working for her, but they're at the radical end of the spectrum – some people can’t leave their jobs or homes, no matter how much that idea might appeal to them. 

Our finances might not allow us to quit a job; or we may need to stay in a certain location while our kids finish school, or to care for an elderly relative. 

But that doesn’t mean we can’t make smaller meaningful changes to improve our work/life balance.

Science suggests the amount of time we need to free up to feel happier is less than we might think, according to Cassie Holmes of UCLA Anderson School of Management, and the author of Happier Hour.

Cassie was inspired to study this topic because she too was questioning an increasingly hectic work life. 

“I was an assistant professor and I had a new baby at home. I had a husband who I loved very much and friends who I wanted to spend time with. And I was on the last train home because I agreed to give a talk at Columbia Business School. I was just exhausted. And I was like: ‘Can I actually do this?’ And I was about to give it all up.” 

Cassie (along with Marissa Sharif and Hal Hershfield) looked at data from the American Time Use Survey – which quizzes 35,000 people about how they spend their time and how they feel about those decisions. 

Cassie and her colleagues found that having little or no free time is awful – it’s overwhelming and stressful and brings all those yucky symptoms stress triggers in our bodies. 

But, according to her research, we don’t need to quit our jobs and devote ourselves to a life of leisure. 

“I didn't know that there would be a sweet spot. I thought it would just be more free time is better,” says Cassie. “But what we've found in the data is that in fact there is a sweet spot.”

And that sweet spot seems to be between two and five hours a day – less than that causes unhappiness, but with more than five hours of free time “you actually see a decrease in life satisfaction... because people feel they're lacking a sense of purpose”.

For many of us, freeing up five hours to do something we love may seem implausible. “I will say that sounds totally unattainable,” agrees Cassie. “[However] it's likely that two hours is not completely out of reach.” 

Like with many happiness hacks I share in this newsletter, balancing work and leisure is something you have to attend to constantly. 

“It's not just about relaxing on the weekend or on vacation,” says Cassie. We have to try to carve out and protect 120 minutes of time for ourselves each and every day. 

That could start by making sure we take breaks and a lunch hour at work – or it could mean reading a novel instead of work emails on our daily train commute. 

Cassie had a lot more to say about Niki’s question on work/life balance. And so we’ll hear her strategies for crafting happier jobs in my next article. 

So stay well and stay happy,

Laurie