Dr. Cassie Holmes on the Intersection of Time and Happiness, Time Poverty, and How to Make the Most of Our Time

Today is an extra special episode — it’s officially our 300th episode of the show! I am so proud of this. In an appropriate nod to reaching the milestone of 300 episodes, we’re talking today about how to make the most of our days, weeks, months, years — how to savor our time. We’re chatting with Dr. Cassie Holmes about her 2022 bookHappier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most. In the book, Cassie puts forth that time is our most precious resource; in this conversation, we talk about time poverty and how it impacts a life; how she got started in this work; if having too much time on our hands is also a negative; effective time-crafting exercises like time tracking; how we are less happy when we’re distracted; treating our weekends like vacations; hedonic adaptation and what that means; and how her work is not necessarily about being time rich or making more time, but making the time that wedo have more rich. It’s not about how much time you have, necessarily, but how it’s spent. We also talk about why women feel more time poor than men, and how Cassie’s work helps us look back on our lives without regret, knowing we made the most of the time we have.Happier Hourhas become a massive hit since it came out, and I’m really excited to share it with you today. Cassie Holmes is a professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, where she’s an award-winning teacher and researcher. Her work on the intersection of time and happiness has been featured everywhere fromThe New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, NPR,The Washington Post, The Atlantic, and more, and she is a graduate of both Columbia and Stanford’s Graduate School of Business.

Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most by Dr. Cassie Holmes