Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life, reviewed

Review of Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life by Ashley Whillans, available from Amazon & Harvard Business Review Press from October 6th.

There’s an 80 percent chance you’re poor. Time poor, that is.

Four out of five adults report feeling that they have too much to do and not enough time to do it. These time-poor people experience less joy each day. They laugh less. They are less healthy, less productive, and more likely to divorce. In one study, time stress produced a stronger negative effect on happiness than unemployment.

How can we escape the time traps that make us feel this way and keep us from living our best lives?

Time Smart is your playbook for taking back the time you lose to mindless tasks and unfulfilling chores. Author and Harvard Business School professor Ashley Whillans will give you proven strategies for improving your “time affluence.” The techniques Whillans provides will free up seconds, minutes, and hours that, over the long term, become weeks and months that you can reinvest in positive, healthy activities.

Time Smart doesn’t stop at telling you what to do. It also shows you how to do it, helping you achieve the mindset shift that will make these activities part of your everyday regimen through assessments, checklists, and activities you can use right away. The strategies Whillans presents will help you make the shift to time-smart living and, in the process, build a happier, more fulfilling life.

Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life, reviewed

Much like the Slow Computing book that we recently reviewed this soon to be published book by Ashley Whillans taps into a similar train of thought. This does seem to confirm that more and more people are struggling with the problem of not wanting to be ‘always on’. While notifications, likes, status updates and other similar pings do trigger a chemical release in our brains, like eating sugar only, it is not actually a sustainable way to be living.

We have rushed headlong into a digital world, always on, always pinging us, a massive, unchecked experiment on ourselves. Whillans aims to identify this, what causes it, and how we can do our best to push back at least a little or even potentially a lot. The book is short, and practical, and the author acknowledges at several points that she finds it hard too. Which does make it more compelling and honest.

Less time online does offer many many potential benefits, we have created, much like TV, both a wonderful thing, and also potentially a massive distraction for ourselves and our ability to live practical, healthy, balanced lives. You lose nothing by reading this one, and might even end up happier and less time poor too.

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