How You Spend It: With Guests Joshua Fields Millburn & Cassie Mogilner Holmes

Katy Milkman: We asked some volunteers to try a little thought experiment.

Speaker 2: Who is someone who means a lot to you right now?

Speaker 3: So his name is Zach. Well, I met him when I went traveling in Australia. He was my best man at my wedding. We love just traveling around or just hitting a trail and hiking and perhaps going for a camp.

Speaker 2: How many more times do you think you'll get to do that in your life?

Speaker 3: So let's say another 50 years we see each other at least twice a year to go for an epic hike. So let's say a hundred or so times that we'll be hanging out hiking. Now that there's a number on it, it makes me feel like I need to call him, and we need to arrange a date to hang out, to go for a hike, to maybe leave distractions behind us.

Speaker 4: My little sister is 18. I moved away like last year, and so I don't get to see her very often. She's graduating. She's going away for post-secondary in a month. And I see her every week once, maybe add in a second time after work or something. Then that would probably be six more times, which seems very little.

Speaker 2: What would you do differently now that you've calculated that out?

Speaker 4: Maybe just make more of an effort to go out. And even if I'm not feeling too up to it, I can invite her over here, go to my family’s for dinner more often. Yeah, just to have time to chat.

Katy Milkman: You might have noticed how estimating the remaining number of opportunities for social connection prompted our volunteers to reflect on the value of their relationships and the time they spend on them. This simple cue is an effective way to remind people that time is a limited resource. In this episode, we'll dive into how focusing on time and using it wisely can make you happier and healthier.

You'll hear about one man's quest for financial success and the events that caused him to radically change his priorities. And I'll speak with behavioral scientist Cassie Holmes, author of the new book Happier Hour about her research on time and happiness and what it can teach us all about how to live more fulfilling lives.

I'm Dr. Katy Milkman. And this is Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. It's a show about the psychology and economics behind our decisions. We bring you true stories involving life-changing moments, and then we explore how they relate to the latest research in behavioral science. We do it all to help you make better judgements and avoid costly mistakes.

Joshua Fields Millburn: I was 28 years old when my mother died and my marriage ended. And both of those things happened in the same month.

Katy Milkman: This is Joshua.

Joshua Fields Millburn: Hi, my name's Joshua Fields Millburn.

Katy Milkman: A little context on how Joshua arrived at that incredibly painful moment in his life. For a start, he had a very difficult childhood.

Joshua Fields Millburn: I was born in Dayton, Ohio, in 1981. And we grew up really poor. It was food stamps and government assistance, and there was always this sort of scarcity in the household.

Katy Milkman: His father passed away when he was nine. Joshua lived with his mother, who was an alcoholic.

Joshua Fields Millburn: There was a lot of alcohol abuse in the home. And so when I turned 18, I realized I didn't want to keep going down that path.

Katy Milkman: Joshua set out to gain independence and financial stability as soon as possible.

Joshua Fields Millburn: I decided to skip college and go right out into the job market. I realized that if I worked really hard, many, many hours a week, 50, 60, 70, sometimes 80 hours a week every week, I would make good money. In fact, by age 19, I was making $50,000 a year, which in the late '90s in Dayton, Ohio, was a tremendous feat.

Katy Milkman: He found some success in work, but his relationship with his mother didn't improve.

Joshua Fields Millburn: It was a troubled relationship. Growing up with an alcoholic mother, it was difficult. I remember my 21st birthday, my mom was in jail at that time. She was at the Warren County Correctional Facility. She was doing 60 days in jail for a DUI. And that was sort of a synecdoche for our relationship at large.

Katy Milkman: So while he couldn't count on his mother, he could at least continue to work hard and earn more money to fight for the life he was denied as a kid.

Joshua Fields Millburn: And yet it didn't feel like it was enough still. Maybe it's not $50,000 a year that's going to make me happy. Maybe it's 65,000 or 90,000, or maybe it's six figures that will be the key to happiness.

Katy Milkman: Joshua continued to chase that elusive goal, long hours at work earning more and more money. It seemed like marriage was the next logical step on his path to financial and emotional independence.

Joshua Fields Millburn: I got married at 22. We had been together for a couple years before that. And so, yeah, I think I got married pretty young, but it's not like I didn't know what I was doing either. I just was doing what I was supposed to do.

Katy Milkman: The idea of marriage made sense, in theory, but practically it was a challenge. Joshua was spending all of his time at his job. He worked at a telecommunications company and was focused on earning more money. He spent very little time working on his relationship.

Joshua Fields Millburn: I didn't pay much attention to her. I was so busy working really and climbing the corporate ladder.

Katy Milkman: He often worked for weeks at a time without taking a single day off. He did so well that at the age of 22, he became the youngest person at his company to be promoted to a leadership position. That led to more promotions. Up that corporate ladder he went, until finally he was a director. The youngest in the company's 130-year history.

Joshua Fields Millburn: By my late 20s, I was living the American dream. I had all the things that money could buy, the big house in the suburbs with more toilets than people, two living rooms, a giant basement, the picket fence. All of these things that signaled to the world around me that I was successful. I had the walk-in closets full of designer clothes. I had luxury cars, plural. I wore a suit to work. I drove a fancy car and I had a two-and-a-half car garage, whatever that means. I was a portrait of success.

Katy Milkman: But that success came with a cost.

Joshua Fields Millburn: The more I acquired, the more stress and debt and anxiety I experienced. I was worried about what other people thought about me. I was worried about achievements and status and applause and veneration. I wanted to be liked, and I thought the way that I could be accepted, the way that could show I was enough, even, was to accumulate the right things to impress people.

Katy Milkman: This stress and anxiety continued to build and build. Promotions and larger paychecks and more possessions didn't seem to make him happy. And then one day he got the news. His mother had been diagnosed with lung cancer. Fortunately, Joshua and his mother had recently reconciled.

Joshua Fields Millburn: As an adult, especially the last few years of my mother's life, we really repaired our relationship, and I'm grateful for that. And if anything, my relationship with her helped me avoid many of the pitfalls that she succumbed to over her life. Realizing that I didn't have to go down that same path, that she sobered up before she found out she had lung cancer. She was a wonderful woman.

Katy Milkman: Joshua's mother endured many rounds of chemotherapy and radiation treatments for more than a year. But eventually, she succumbed to the illness.

Joshua Fields Millburn: When my mom died, I went down to Florida to deal with her stuff. And so I got down there. It took me 12 days to sort through all of her things. And it's not like mom was a hoarder. She just owned a lot of stuff. She had 65 years' worth of accumulations. I rented the biggest U-Haul they had, a 26-foot truck. And I decided, "Oh, I can't co-mingle mom's stuff with my stuff. I already have a big house and basement full of stuff." And so I decided to rent a giant storage locker. And I didn't realize it at the time, but it was kind of like renting a mausoleum for stuff.

Katy Milkman: Joshua realized something important while he was surrounded by his mother's belongings.

Joshua Fields Millburn: I realized like, "Well, wait a minute. I don't have to do this. I don't have to hold onto all of her things." And in that moment I realized my memories are not in her things. The memories are inside me. And so I didn't need to hold onto mom's things to hold onto memories of her. And that's when I decided to let go. I invited some of mom's friends over to help me sort through some of the things, and we decided to let go of anything that I didn't want to keep.

Katy Milkman: Around the same time his mother was struggling with cancer, Joshua and his wife were struggling with their marriage. They had been married for six years, and yet they barely spent any time together. They went to relationship counseling to try and make it work, but they eventually decided that their life goals were not aligned, and they parted ways.

Joshua Fields Millburn: Mother died and my marriage ended both in the same month. And of course those events don't really happen overnight. It seems like it at the time. But it's all of these tiny little things that add up. "Oh, I wish I would've spent more time with her there," or "I wish I could have been kinder to my mom when it really mattered." These types of things. Do you think money will fix all of your problems? I was sort of spending my time and my attention recklessly, and of course there's no refund for misspent time or misspent attention. You'll never get that time back.

Katy Milkman: You'll never get that time back. This was an important insight that Joshua gained from losing his mother and his marriage.

Joshua Fields Millburn: It took that to figure out that everything I ever wanted wasn't actually what I wanted at all. I wanted peace. I wanted freedom.

Katy Milkman: Joshua had focused on success and money, but he'd lost valuable time in the process. He decided to dispense with many of the material things that had become a burden and focus instead on spending his time on the people and projects that he was passionate about.

Joshua Fields Millburn: I walked away from almost everything. I think it started with the stuff, but then I started decluttering the other types of clutter that I discovered. I had career clutter. I realized that my values no longer aligned with the corporation for whom I worked, and so I decided to let that go. I took about a 90% pay cut.

Katy Milkman: His income took a big hit, but he had more time to spend than ever before. This was in sharp contrast to how he used to spend his days.

Joshua Fields Millburn: By just wasting my time, my attention, my energy, my skills. And I also forsook the people closest to me. I was working so many hours that I simply just didn't have time to spend with the people I cared about. The people I said I loved were getting very little of me. Or if they were getting pieces of me, I was distracted. I was giving them my time without my attention. And so there were a lot of tiny compromises along the way.

Katy Milkman: By relinquishing his mother's things and decluttering his own life, Joshua was able to shift the balance. He can now spend more quality time with the people he loved, more quality time on the work and the projects that were most fulfilling. These days, Joshua runs a blog and a podcast along with his childhood friend Ryan Nicodemus. The pair has also written several books and produced documentaries about their minimalist-living journey. But Joshua and Ryan's version of minimalism isn't what you might assume at first.

Joshua Fields Millburn: When someone asks me what minimalism is, the short answer I tend to give them is minimalism is the thing that gets us past the things so we can make room for life's most important things, which actually aren't things at all.

Katy Milkman: Joshua says the key here is not simply getting rid of your stuff, it's about making time for the things you care most about in life.

Joshua Fields Millburn: In my life, my family is my priority. What is most important to me? My health so I can contribute to my family and other close-knit relationships, community. Also, pursuing something I'm passionate about, some sort of creative endeavor. For me that's writing. I teach a writing class, but I've also published five books. And so writing is the thing that I'm most passionate about.

Katy Milkman: Nowadays, Joshua feels wealthy with time and more content than when he was focused on money.

Joshua Fields Millburn: And now I live out in Southern California. I have a wife and a nine-year-old daughter. We're not spending all of our time chasing, pursuing, organizing, cleaning, worrying about our things. Instead, we're spending that time. We're becoming time rich in a way that we weren't before.

Katy Milkman: Joshua Fields Millburn is based on Los Angeles where he is one half of the simple-living duo the Minimalists. You can find a link to their documentaries, books, and podcast in the show notes and at schwab.com/podcast.

Joshua's story of being incredibly driven by money and materialism is fairly common in our culture, and I should be clear that there's a rationale for it. Many people don't have enough to get by, and that scarcity creates a focus on what is desperately needed, which makes absolute sense. And in fact, research shows that having more money generally makes us happier, though the benefits decrease after you reach a certain comfort threshold.

But Joshua's decision to make a major shift towards a different lifestyle that focused on spending his time more carefully and ending his absorption with accumulating money and possessions, that's much less common. The increased contentment he talked about, being happier with a smaller income and fewer things, but more time and more meaningful time, isn't idiosyncratic to Joshua.

Feeling less time poor and focusing on spending your time in more meaningful ways has been associated with greater happiness in several studies and in research focusing on people at all wealth levels, which might surprise you. Regardless of whether you have excess funds or just enough to get by, focusing on time is important to happiness.

My next guest has done some of my favorite research on this topic. Cassie Mogilner Holmes is a professor at UCLA's Anderson School of Management, and she's best known for her research on time and happiness. She's the author of the new book Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most, which is based on her wildly popular MBA course "Applying the Science of Happiness to Life Design."

Hi, Cassie. Thank you so much for joining me today.

Cassie Mogilner Holmes: Hi, Katy. I am so excited. This is such a treat. Thanks for having me.

Katy Milkman: Well, it is a treat for me too. And I am particularly excited to hear about your research because it is so relevant to all of our lives. And I want to actually just ask you at the beginning to talk about what it means to focus on time versus money when you're pursuing happiness. What's the distinction you draw in your research?

Cassie Mogilner Holmes: So my research, I look at the effects of being focused on time versus money on happiness. And I have found again and again in different approaches to the studies, the experiments, that people who focus on time where that is the resource that is most salient in their minds, they realize that it is most critical to their well-being. And when I ask them the question "Which do you want more of, more time or more money?" If they're more likely to say time because they value it, we find that those folks are happier in their day-to-day and more satisfied in their life.

And interestingly, a lot of times the question is like, "Well, sure, that sounds nice. It's easy to say that you want more time if you have plenty of money." But we actually find that the benefit of focusing on time more than money holds regardless of how much time and money the individual has. So controlling for their income level, we see that those who say they would prefer more time than money are happier.

Katy Milkman: That's really interesting. And it holds across age levels too. So if you have more time left in your life versus less.

Cassie Mogilner Holmes: Yes. So we find that this effect holds across age levels. It holds across parental status. Interestingly, you see that age influences people's answer to that question. So as people get older, they're more likely to prefer time over money. But the relationship between choosing and valuing time over money holds across ages.

Katy Milkman: That's so interesting. You've already summarized a little bit what the sort of key findings are across all these different methodologies from your work. But I'm wondering if you could describe your favorite empirical study that compares people's happiness levels when they focus on time versus money.

Cassie Mogilner Holmes: There are actually two studies that I love to show this point, and when you put them together, they make the point really well, is when we ask people which you want more of, more time or more money? And we measure their happiness and satisfaction in life. You see this relationship, a correlation between preferring time over money and happiness, controlling for demographic factors.

Katy Milkman: So, the more I care about time, the more I am a happy person, even when you take everything else about me out of the equation basically.

Cassie Mogilner Holmes: Yeah, but the question is what's the effect there? Is it that happier people that want more time, or is it that drawing people's attention to time versus money could also influence people's happiness? And to look at that, we went to an environment where people both socially connect as well as spend time working: at a cafe. And what we did was as people were entering the cafe, we presented them with a survey, asked them if they wouldn't mind filling it out.

Katy Milkman: I love this study. This is the one where you randomly assigned some people to see a survey where they brought different topics to mind, right? One that focused people on time, one that focused them on money, and one that served as a control. Is that right?

Cassie Mogilner Holmes: Yes. So these resources were in their minds as they entered the cafe. And then unbeknownst to them, I had a research assistant, and they're observing how they spent their time at the cafe, to what extent did they spend their time chatting with others. So socially connecting, whether in line with the barista or with friends. And how much of their time at the cafe did they spend doing work on their laptop.

And what we found was that those led to think about time going in spent a greater proportion of their time at the cafe socially connecting than those who were led to think about money and those in the control condition. Then when they were leaving, we asked them to fill out another survey to tell us how happy they were feeling, how satisfied they felt with their experience at the cafe that day. Those who were led to think about time going in left happier because of that social connection.

Katy Milkman: Those studies are so interesting, Cassie. And I'm wondering if you could talk a little bit more about the why. And I think the last study you just described started getting at that, that it seems like it's something about thinking about time that changes whether or not we want to connect with others. Am I thinking about that right?

Cassie Mogilner Holmes: Well, it's actually when people think about time, they become more deliberate with how they spend it, spending in ways that are more fulfilling, more in line with their values. And the reason is because they become more self-reflective. So how we spend our time is a direct reflection of who we are. How we spend our hours sum up to our days, our years, and ultimately our life. Social connection is an activity that does contribute to happiness in the moment, as well as greater sense of meaning. So it's about being deliberate and thoughtful with this resource that makes people happier.

Katy Milkman: So Cassie, you've just talked a bunch about the benefits of focusing on time. But are there any downsides?

Cassie Mogilner Holmes: For a lot of us when we think about hours, we start freaking out because we're like, "Oh my gosh, I don't have enough hours in my day." And this experience of time poverty is not positive at all. It's actually quite negative. And we've been exploring the prevalence of time poverty. And so time poverty is this feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to do it. And we find that in a nationally representative sample of Americans, almost half feel that they never have enough time to do everything they want to do.

And the effects of that are actually quite negative. When we feel time-poor, we are less happy or are less healthy. You also see that people are less kind when they feel time-poor. They're less likely to slow down and spend time to help others. So between being less healthy, less nice, and less happy, those are actually really negative effects of time poverty. And that stress from thinking and being so absorbed with how few hours you have in the day.

The positive effects of time come from realizing that those hours are sort of pieces of your life overall. And when you think about your time in life, that's where you get these wonderful effects where people become more deliberate and focused on. Meaning when people are time-poor, they become more reactive devoting their time to things that feel urgent, regardless of the importance.

Katy Milkman: Are there downsides to focusing on money, or is that just the equivalent to having no focus on time?

Cassie Mogilner Holmes: My focus in my research has been the relative attention devoted to time versus money. There is other work that finds that being focused on money does have negative effects. There's work that looks at the downside of materialism, where a feature of materialism is that their values are tightly tied to how much money they have, how many things they have. And research has showed that materialistic people are less happy.

Katy Milkman: So, Cassie, for your average listener, what do you think the key takeaway should be from learning about your research on this topic? What do you think they should do or think about differently in their lives?

Cassie Mogilner Holmes: People should be more focused on time as the critical resource for their satisfaction in life, their happiness in the day-to-day than the typical attention towards money. And also, they should take away that unlike money, where more is better, for time it's not necessarily that more is better. It's really how you spend the time that you have, both the activities that you spend them on, as well as your engagement and mindset when you're spending that time.

Katy Milkman: Cassie, are there better and worse ways to spend our money when we're thinking about the importance of time and using it wisely?

Cassie Mogilner Holmes: That's a great question. There are ways of spending money that are associated with greater happiness. There's a body of research that shows that investing money in experiences over material goods is associated with greater happiness and greater lasting happiness. And one of the reasons, actually, for that is social connection that is associated with greater happiness. Another way of spending money that is associated with greater happiness is actually spending on others. So, in more charitable giving, which again, there's a social value to that.

Katy Milkman: OK. So while I have you here, I want to ask you, when you reflect on all the research that's been done on happiness over the years, research by yourself, research by others, do you have a few favorite science-based tips for how people can spend their time that would lead to greater happiness? And that might not already be completely intuitive to people?

Cassie Mogilner Holmes: Count the times of something you love doing that you have to do it left. We found that when people recognize their time is limited, whether as they're aging or they're reminded, based off of situations in their environment or they continue to remind themself the reality that our time is in fact limited in life, people savor their simple moments, their day-to-day moments, more.

And I think it's really powerful because there's so much happiness available to us already in our lives if we just pay attention, and that we are not distracted during them, whether it's distracted with our phones or even distracted in our minds, because we're cycling through all the things we have to do. When we recognize that the time that we have in our life is limited, we pay attention to those moments that are so precious.

And so, if you sort of reflect back on your week, what are the ways of spending time that were most satisfying, most fulfilling, most joyful, I suspect that they required very little money, if any at all. But they do require attention, and they also don't require a whole bunch of time. It's not that you have to quit and spend hours upon hours on those activities. It's just that when you do spend them, you're fully engaged and you can anticipate them while you're doing it, you can savor them, and then afterwards continue to reflect on them and feel grateful for them. Just those moments can have a profound influence on how much satisfaction we feel in our life.

Katy Milkman: I love that takeaway. Thank you so much for being on the podcast, Cassie. I really appreciate it.

Cassie Mogilner Holmes: Thanks so much for having me. It was so much fun to chat.

Katy Milkman: Cassie Mogilner Holmes is a professor of marketing at UCLA's Anderson School of Management and author of the new book Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most. You can find links to the book and her research in the show notes and at schwab.com/podcast.

Being more intentional about how and with whom you spend your time is a proven way to live a happier, more meaningful life. But when it comes to your finances, you might wonder if some decisions are more likely to align with your values and influence your sense of well-being.

One emerging trend in the world of investing aims to help investors achieve goals beyond just risk and return. To learn more, check out the episode of the Financial Decoder podcast called "How Can You Invest Your Values?" You can find it at schwab.com/financialdecoder.

My favorite takeaway from all this research is that by just being a bit more thoughtful about how you want to spend the precious hours you have in this world, you can live a happier life. When making tradeoffs, I've found it particularly useful to count how many more times I'll get to enjoy whatever opportunity I'm considering foregoing.

Regardless of where you are on the income ladder, this research matters. The findings show that everyone benefits from a greater focus on time when making any tradeoff. Ask yourself how many more times will your kid perform in a school play that you'll have a chance to watch. If the answer is not many, you'll probably be happier if you move heaven and earth to make sure you're there.

And how many more meals will you get to share with your parents? And how many more camping trips will you get to enjoy with your family? In each case, it may be fewer than you appreciated before you took the time to count. And recognizing that could help you treasure and make the most of the time you have, rather than mistakenly treating your time as a limitless resource.

You've been listening to Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. If you've enjoyed the show, we'd be really grateful if you'd leave us a review on Apple Podcasts. You can also follow us for free in your favorite podcasting app. And if you want more of the kinds of insights we bring you on Choiceology about how to improve your decisions, you can order my book, How to Change. Or sign up for my monthly newsletter, Milkman Delivers, at katymilkman.com/newsletter. I'm Dr. Katy Milkman. Talk to you soon.

Speaker 8: For important disclosures, see the show notes or visit schwab.com/podcast.