Speaking of Psychology: How to spend your time more wisely, with Cassie Holmes, PhD

When you feel time poor, endless hours of free time might sound like the ultimate luxury. But psychologists’ research suggests that it’s not simply the amount of time that you have, but how you spend it, that determines your happiness. Cassie Holmes, PhD, discusses whether there’s an ideal amount of free time, how to increase your sense of “time affluence” and how tracking your time can help you live a happier life.

Cassie Mogilner Holmes, PhD, is a professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management and an expert on time and happiness. Her research examines such questions as how focusing on time (rather than money) increases happiness, how the meaning of happiness changes over the course of one’s lifetime, and how much happiness people enjoy from extraordinary versus ordinary experiences. Her academic research on the role of time in cultivating well-being has been published in leading academic journals, including Psychological Science, the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, and the Journal of Consumer Research, and earned her the Early Career Award from both the Association of Consumer Research and the Society of Consumer Psychology.  Holmes’s book Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most, was published in September 2022.

Kim Mills: Do you ever feel like there aren't enough hours in the day for you to do the things you want to do? Pressed by endless work and family obligations, have you ever dreamed of quitting this life and moving to a remote beach, where you could read, paint, play music, or just veg? When we feel time poor, endless hours to do whatever we please sounds like the ultimate luxury. But research suggests that the relationship between leisure time and contentment is not so straightforward. And that it's not the amount of time that you have, but how you spend it that determines your happiness.

So is there an ideal amount of free time? Is it possible to have too much free time or too little? Who's happier, people who focus on the value of time or those who focus on the value of money? And are there ways to increase your sense of time affluence without making a major change like quitting your job? Is it possible to make time sucking chores like housework and commuting seem less onerous?

Welcome to Speaking Of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. My guest today is Dr. Cassie Holmes, a professor of marketing and behavioral decision making at UCLA's Anderson School of Management. She studies time and happiness, including such questions as how focusing on time or money affects happiness and how the meaning of happiness changes over one's lifetime. Her research has been published in top psychology journals and covered by media outlets including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and National Public Radio. Her new book is called Happier Hour: How To Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time and Focus On What Matters Most. It aims to provide a research based practical guide on how to think about time and how to spend your time to live a happier life. 

Thank you for joining me today, Dr. Holmes.

Cassie Holmes, PhD: Hi, Kim. Thank you so much for having me. It's a treat to be here.

Mills: You study time poverty and time affluence. What do those terms mean? What makes somebody time poor or time affluent? Is it just the amount of leisure time that you have?

Holmes: Yeah. So, time poverty is defined as the acute feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to do it. And it is a negative experience and it has negative consequences. And, it's also a very pervasive experience. In a national poll that I just conducted, we found that nearly half of Americans report feeling time poor. Women tend to feel more time poor than men. Folks who are working tend to feel particularly impoverished. And folks who are working, who have a partner who works, with young kids are perhaps the most time poor. But it's not just being a parent or working. Individuals who do not work and individuals who don't have kids are also subject to feeling time poor. The effects of it are negative. And so, I will in a second get to our research that looks at the overall relationship between the amount of discretionary time people have and their happiness.

But pulling from across studies, including some of my own, looking at whether the effects of being time poor, research shows that it makes people less healthy because they're less likely to spend the time exercising. It makes them also less healthy because they're more likely to eat the fast food that is readily available and not necessarily healthy. People delay going to the doctors. It also makes us feel or be less kind. So in some of my work, we found that when people don't feel like they have a lot of time, they become very stingy with their time, less likely to spend time to help others. We also have some work showing that when people feel time poor, they become less confident in being able to achieve their goals. And now the question is, what about the emotional ramifications? And, this research was actually motivated by a personal experience, as someone who falls into all of those demographic categories of being someone who works, with young kids, with a partner who works, I felt and feel particularly time poor. And it led me to be like, “Oh my gosh. Should I go ahead and quit my job? I can't really keep up at this pace.”

But the question is, would I feel happier if I had a whole lot more hours in my day to spend how I wanted? So, hours to spend on discretionary activities. So to answer that question, I recruited a couple of my favorite collaborators, Hal Hershfield and Marisa Sharif. And we looked at the relationship between the amount of hours you have within your regular day-to-day life to spend on discretionary activities. So, discretionary activities being those things that you want to spend your time on, that includes relaxing sort of passive leisure, like watching TV, taking naps. It also includes active leisure, like playing sports, going and watching sporting events. And it includes hobbies, as well as social connections, so spending time with friends and family. And, we looked at what's the relationship between that and life satisfaction.

We looked at a couple of data sets to analyze this. And I think the most sort of telling, because it's the biggest data set and most broadly representative of folks in the U.S., is the American Time Use Survey data. And, that data includes tens of thousands of working and non-working Americans. And what it does is, it captures a regular day and assesses how does each individual spend that day? What activities are they spending their day doing? And what we did is, for each individual, we calculated how much time that day they spent on discretionary activities like those that I just mentioned. And by the way, you might be wondering like, “How did you come, identify those as discretionary activities?” And for that, we actually went to a different sample of participants, presented them with the whole list of a 138 different activity categories and ask them, “Is this discretionary?” By discretionary means, something you want to do or that feels worthwhile in its own.

And, we preregistered that we would count any activity—it was a very conservative test in that any activity that more than 90% of participants identified as discretionary, we would count those. We also had a more lenient threshold with any activity that more than 75% viewed as discretionary, the pattern holds regardless of that particular threshold. So we calculated for each individual, how many hours in that regular day that they spent on discretionary activities and we related it to life satisfaction. What we found was interesting. The pattern of results showed an upside down U shape. So that's to say that, when you have very little time, you see low happiness. That is me. That is those of you who also feel time poor. And in this particular data set it suggested that two hours in the day on discretionary activities counts as too little time.

But what was also interesting was the other end of the spectrum, where we also saw that it dipped down in terms of happiness or life satisfaction. And what we found was that, beyond about five hours of discretionary time, people were also less happy. And so between two and five hours, the relationship was quite flat. And so what that is suggesting is that, except that the extremes, it's not so much about the amount of time you have. Then the question comes in, how are you spending the hours that you have? But I think, going back to the opening motivation for this is, “Would I—and I'm using me as an example, because I’m representative of so many who feel time poor—would I actually feel happier if I were to quit my job and have a whole lot more free time?” And the answer according to our set of studies is no.

Mills: So, people don't feel productive then if they have that much free time, is what you found? That they feel like they're wasting their days and therefore in some sense, wasting their lives?

Holmes: Yeah. So, getting into the reason for that pattern of results. So what we found was, with too little time, it is feelings of stress. People feel higher levels of stress and that is associated with less satisfaction. For the too much time, we did find that people felt less productive. They felt like a lacking sense of purpose within their days. And, this is picking up on other research that shows that we do have a drive to be somewhat productive. And being busy communicates not only to others, but also to ourselves that we have accomplished something. And so, having, day in and day out of having so many hours available just to spend relaxing, you see this dip in satisfaction.

What is also interesting, we see that it's not just about discretionary time per se, because there are some discretionary activities that do feel productive and do feel worthwhile. And, we analyzed the amount of time that individual spent within the discretionary activities on those that they viewed as productive and worthwhile. And there, we actually did not see a significant dip. And so for activities that people identified as productive or discretionary activities that people felt were productive and worthwhile, tended to be hobbies. So things that are personally enriching, playing sports and exercising. So, you didn't see a dip there. You also did not see a dip and actually you saw a sort of linear relationship with socializing. So, when you're spending your time socially connecting with others, you actually see that there isn't such thing as sort of too much. It's really the passive leisure that you see this too much time effect.

Mills: Huh, interesting. So, you spend too much time with your in-laws, there's no such thing then as too much time socializing with people who make you crazy?

Holmes: Yeah. I'll leave it to the individual to identify whether it was particularly connecting and worthwhile time. But yeah, that gets at the underlying psychology certainly.

Mills: Well, I'm being silly. But, I wanted talk about a time tracking exercise that you outline in your book. You recommend people complete this exercise for a couple of weeks—monitor the way that they spend every half hour, the way somebody on a diet might track calories. Can you talk a little bit more about that exercise, how you do it and why it's useful?

Holmes: Yeah. It's useful actually touching back to that two-to-five hour range of where it's not about how much time you have available, it's how you spend your time. And so then the question is, well, what are the activities that are worthwhile and do produce high levels of happiness and satisfaction? Researchers use time tracking data to assess this. So, for across individuals looking, what activities are they doing and how are people feeling while doing those activities? And from that, you can pull out and look at what are the types of activities that are associated with the most positive emotion? What are those activities that tend to be associated with the most negative emotion? On average, when you're looking across people, you see that the activities that tend to be associated with the most positive emotion are again, actually social connection. So, spending quality time with friends and family. Also through intimacy. So, socially connecting physically as well.

The activities that tend to be associated with the least amount of positive emotion, as in the most negative emotion are quite consistent. It is commuting. So, getting to and from work, hours spent working, so the time you're at work, and housework. But that data is based off of averages. So, unfortunately for the average American, work is among their least happy hours. But also, it's averaging across category of activities. So, it's sort of chunking all of work hours into one category and I'm sure you can personally, if you're reflecting on your work hours, there are some work activities that are more positive than others. And so, this time tracking exercise that I delineate and give clear instructions in the book, as well as a helpful worksheet on my website, what it does is, it leads you to collect your own personal data.

So over the course of two weeks, and I suggest two weeks more than one week, because it's a more sort of complete snapshot of the types of activities that fill your day to day life. But it is how you're spending that time. And while you're doing it or as close to completing the activity as possible, rating on a 10 point scale, how positive it was. And that includes how enjoyable it was, how satisfying, how meaningful it felt. So overall positivity. And with this data, your own personalized data, you can at the end of the week—And also, I would suggest that when writing down the particular activity, don't just say work for the reason that I just said. Some work hours are going to be more satisfying than others. So, be more specific in the type of work for instance, or the type of family time that it is. So that, you can look back and see what are those activities that for you are associated with the most positive emotion.

In addition to identifying those most positive and negative activities, you can also see how much time you're spending on these activities. So you can see, I teach a course at UCLA to our MBA students called applying the science of happiness to life design. So, it's pulling all of the research to share with our students, so that they can understand how to spend their time better and feel more fulfilled by it. I have them do this exercise and a common observation among students is that they are spending way more time than they expected on social media. And, it's not as surprising to us listening to it, but it's always surprising to them. Because with this idea, that is like, “Oh, I'll just spend a few minutes here, few minutes there to check.”

Mills: Right.

Holmes: But, those minutes add up to hours. And when they look at their ratings of how positive that time is, it's not very positive. It's like a mediocre five. And these are busy individuals. They're getting their MBA, many of them are working full time as well, they have families and they are time poor. They're like, “Oh my gosh. I don't have enough time to do the things that I really want.” Like those activities in their week that get the 10, like having dinner with their sister. They're like, “I don't have time to have dinner with my sister. I'm so busy.” But then when you see that they're spending 15 hours on social media, it's like, “Oh actually this is really informative.” So, they can sort of reallocate those hours from activities that are not necessary and that are mediocre in terms of how they contribute to one's happiness and reallocate to those activities that are truly joyful.

Mills: So, another piece of advice in your book is about the ways in which time is a finite resource and that everything in life ends. And in fact, you suggest something called time left, that you have a time left exercise where you count the number of times you have left of something that you value. Like, how many weekends before your kindergartener goes to college, or how many more walks will you get in with your aging dog? And this seems like it could be an exercise that might make you sad. But why is focusing on limited time a route to happiness?

Holmes: I'm so glad that you asked it. And, this is a very important and impactful exercise, even though at the face of it might seem sad. The effect that it has on how we spend our time, both the activities that we spend our time on and even our mindset during that time to make the most of it is really critical in the time tracking or you can even for yourself reflect back on the last two weeks, what were those moments where you felt true joy? And even for those of us who are extremely busy, there are likely to be those little snippets in the day that were truly joyful. Interestingly, those tend to be very mundane everyday moments. And because there's such everyday moments, we tend to assume they will continue happening every day. But what the times left exercise does is, it makes you realize that in fact it doesn't and it actually pulls in a lot of my other research where I find that when people recognize that their time is limited, it makes them savor the time more.

So, actually we find that older people tend to feel greater enjoyment and happiness from ordinary moments than younger people, because of their recognition that their time is finite. But to walk through this exercise in terms of the value of it. So, using myself as an example, I will use, I have a six year old, whom we have this wonderful tradition, which actually started as sort of a part of our morning routine, where we would stop after dropping off her big brother in carpool, we would stop at the coffee shop on my way into the office and dropping her off at preschool to get a cup of coffee. For me, not her. And, we would get her a hot chocolate. And what was a caffeine fix stop for me, turned into this wonderful thing each week that we spent this half hour together, just the two of us.

 And, it turned into this beautiful thing that we would anticipate and enjoy and sort of reflect back on. She's six. So, you would think that I would have a whole lifetime of coffee dates with my daughter. But in actually going through this exercise, which the first step is to calculate how many—So, pick something that you enjoy doing. Calculate how many times you've done it in your life so far. Calculate how many times you anticipate being able to do it in your future. Counting for the fact that, our lives are finite, but sort of even more pressing is that, the way that you engage in that activity and the availability of activity is going to shift. So she's six now, but even before she goes off to college, she's not going to want to sadly spend as much time with me. She'll want to go to the coffee shop with her friends.

So accounting for that and then she will likely go off to college. If she's anything like me, she'll move from Southern California and go to school in New York and have her early career in New York. So, I'm lucky if I get to visit her and we have a say even 10 more coffee dates a year. I calculated, even though she's six that I have only 36% of our total coffee dates together left. Now what's the effect of that? A, at the face of it you're like, “Oh, that's sad.” Yes, it does make me sad. But it's actually really motivating, because it makes me darn sure that I am going to carve out—I am not going to schedule meetings, so that I'm rushing and that I cancel this time with my daughter. When I'm spending that time, I am for sure going to put my phone away and not be distracted during this precious time.

I'm not going to be cycling in my head about all those other things that I have to do, because this 30 minutes, that coffee date, that time with my daughter is so precious, it makes me fully engaged and it makes her fully engaged. So, this is actually another nice point to show that it's not about quantity. This is only 30 minutes that happens each week. It is absolutely about quality and how we're spending it, not just the activity, but our mindset during it. So it leads us to carve out, make the time. It makes us pay more attention during that time, so that, that time is higher quality. And then, by sort of turning into something special, it allows us to continue to revisit those times in our minds, so that those minutes have a significant effect on our overall mood throughout the week. Such that, the reason I'm so focused on time as the resources critical to our happiness, is because how we spend our hours sum up to our years, those years sum up to decades and our life overall.

And yes, it's the substance of how we're spending the time. But it's also the stories that we're telling how we think about that time that influences our happiness. With happiness being, how you're feeling in the day to day and in the moment, as well as a more broader evaluation of how satisfied you feel with your life overall.

Mills: Well, let's talk for a minute about the value of time that you've been alluding to you. You work in a business school and you study how people think about the value of time versus the value of money. Do most people value time or money more and is placing more value on one or the other more likely or less likely to make you happy?

Holmes: I am a professor at a business school. Now I got my PhD within a business school. And even at that time when I was a grad student, where I had no money and I didn't have very much time at all, I was struck that, in this context of being surrounded by MBAs and in a school that was about helping businesses be successful, it was solely focused on money. That money was the way that you assessed success both individually and for a business. And that struck me as not true, because I was realizing that when I misspent time, I felt much more regretful than when I misspent money. How I was spending my time when it was in ways that felt worthwhile was much more satisfying, and I think much more reflective of me as an individual, or I would even say for businesses when they are investing in their pursuits in line with what matters to them, based off of their mission and values, then that's much more impressive and compelling than solely being profit driven.

So I wanted to test this and I did. Initially, I tested in the marketing context of leading consumers to think about the time they spent on products versus the money they spent on products. And what we found was that thinking about their time invested, led people to feel more connected to the product. It made them like the product more, like the brand more, because temporal investments are much more personally reflective than are financial ones. But then, I was more interested in not just happiness or satisfaction with the one's products, one's buys, but also satisfaction with their choices more broadly and their happiness more generally. And in that work what I did was, I led people to focus on time versus money and then measured how they actually intended to spend their time as well as actually did spend their time.

And what I found was that those who were led to focus on time invested or spent their time in ways that were more fulfilling and felt more worthwhile, more in line with their values, for the most part that was picking up on again, spending time in socially connecting ways. And as a consequence, people felt happier, more sort of broadly reflective. That was me leaving them to think about time or money and seeing the effects. But in other work with Hal Hershfield again, we ask people, we ask them a very simple question. So, hundreds of individuals across the U.S., which do you want more of? Do you want more time, or do you want more money? And we found that in that sample, the majority of people said that they would prefer to have more money than more time. In addition to asking them which they would prefer to have more of, we also measure their happiness. So, how happy they are in their day to day, as well as how satisfied they feel with their lives overall? And what we found was, controlling for the actual amount of money they had, so their income level, controlling for the actual amount of time that they had, which we operationalized by how many hours they worked per week, we saw that those who chose having more time were happier. And, that is picking up on the extent to which they value their time as their more precious resource.

So that is to say that, yes, the evidence does suggest that being focused on time as the resource that is most precious, most critical, does lead to greater happiness, does lead to greater satisfaction. And it is because it motivates us to spend in ways that are worthwhile, that do matter, that are intrinsically rewarding and satisfying, such that the outcome, particularly when you are successful, is very fulfilling. But also, when you're not reaching those goals, it becomes more motivating as opposed to the general notion of, “What I should be doing?” So oftentimes, particularly teaching MBAs, they come into my class thinking that success in life is money. “If only I made a bunch more money, then I would be happier.”

The problem with that is that, a bunch more money, there's always someone that's making more. And oftentimes, we assess how we're doing by looking at how we're doing compared to those around us. So, this is social comparison. And a sort of unfortunate piece of this is that, when you make more money, the folks around you tend to also be making a lot of money. So, once you make more money and move into a nicer neighborhood, then there's neighbors that are also making more money. And, there's always someone that's going to make more. When you use time as your metric. And again, because it is more reflective of your intrinsic values, then you're not subject to the social comparison.

Mills: Right. Everybody has 24 hours in a day. They can't have 48 and you have 24.

Holmes: Exactly. So, using your own values what matters as your gauge and motivator, compared to these general notions of what success is, which in our culture tends to be money.

Mills: Well, so speaking of value, you published a paper a few years ago that found, that when people give their time away, so when they spend their time helping other people, they feel like they have more time. And that seems kind of counterintuitive. How did you come to that conclusion?

Holmes: Yeah. And, I'm so glad you asked about that because, it sort of touches on one of the things that I said at the beginning was, when we feel time poor, we become less kind. Because, we are busy and we're like, “Oh my gosh. I don't have enough time for anything, let alone to slow down and spend time to help someone else.” But what we found in this work, we conducted it on a Saturday among adults. And in the morning, we gave them a set of instructions. Half of the participants whom we randomly assigned, we told them, “Spend 30 minutes today doing something for someone else that you weren't already planning to do.” We told the other participants, “Spend 30 minutes today doing something for yourself, that you weren't already planning to do.” And then that evening, we followed up with them, asked how they spent that time.

But more importantly, how much time they felt like they had? How time affluent they were? And I love doing this study, because people did nice things, both for themselves and others. So, it's like the types of things that they did for other people, some was for people, someone that they knew well, like making a nice meal for their partner, helping a friend pull up tile in the bathroom—for some reason that one stuck out—writing a letter to one's grandmother. Others did something, not for someone they knew, but more generally kind to their community. So going to the park, picking up trash. The types of things that people did for themselves were sort of pampering, going for a run, reading a book. What we found was that, irrespective of the particular way they gave time, those who spent time on someone else, reported that they had more time.

And the question is why? And what our data, follow up studies, suggested is that, when we spend time to help others, it makes us feel very accomplished. The sense of greater self-efficacy. And so you're like, “I accomplished a lot.” And if you recall, the definition of time poverty is the feeling of having too much to do and not enough time to do it. So basically, having the temporal resources to satisfy the goals of all the things that you want to do, when you realize how much you can accomplish with your time, it makes that time that you have, feel more expansive. You're like, “Oh, actually I can accomplish what I want to and set out to do.” Versus spending time on oneself, which doesn't increase a sense of self-efficacy.

We also had studies comparing it to an even more stringent comparison. So not spending time on one self, but actually getting a windfall of free time. So in this study, it was among undergraduate students who were participating in a lab study. And at the end of the study, we told half of them, please spend this 15 minutes helping a high school student by editing a college application essay. We told the others, “Actually, all the essays have been edited. You have 15 minutes, you have a windfall of 15 minutes of free time in your day.” We measured for everyone how much time did they feel like they had. Those who had spent the time helping the high school student edit the essay felt like they had more time compared to those who had that 15 minute windfall. That is why, even though when we feel time poor and we don't feel like we have minutes to spare to help others, actually taking the time, spending the time to help someone, will make you feel like you have more time.

Now I will say, there is such thing as giving too much time. And so, if you're giving so much of your time that you're not truly able to take care of the needs and what you need to accomplish in your day, then you actually see a backlash. And also, if it feels like people are taking your time, as opposed to you giving your time, then you don't see this positive effect. So, there's not our research, but in the whole field of research of caregivers. It can be very depleting, long term caregiving, that it does feel like an obligation. So, it's not you giving it, it's being absorbed there. You don't see the positive boost in time at once.

Mills: So, here's a question for those of us who spend our weekends cleaning the house and running errands. Are there ways to make these necessary, very time-intensive chores feel less onerous?

Holmes: Yes. And there's two different answers for that. First is, regardless of whether it happens on the weekend. As I mentioned, activities, household chores are among our least happy. There's a bundling strategy that you can do to make that time that you spend on chores, more fulfilling. You can also use those for commuting. So, if you bundle this un-fun activity, I would say with an activity that you do like to do and you want to do, then those hours are going to feel more enjoyable. So as an example, if you, while unloading the dishwasher and doing the laundry, if you actually bundle that time of spending doing chores, listening to podcasts, where you get to enrich your knowledge, particularly Speaking of Psychology or listening to an audio book, then—And I will also say that, in our data, we find that one of the top things that people don't do, because they don't feel like they have enough time, is reading for pleasure.

But if you actually bundle this time that you're spending on chores, with increasing your perspective and interests through audio books or reading, then that time itself becomes more fulfilling. There's another intervention that I love with Colin WesT and Sanford DeVoe, where we found that simply treating your weekend like a vacation makes you happier when you return to work on Monday. And it makes you enjoy the weekend more. The reason that this happens is because weekends are breaks. So, I will also say that we as Americans, are really bad at taking breaks. We don't take vacation. We are one of the few industrialized countries that doesn't have legally mandated, paid vacation. Even though we get less vacation, we don't take it. About half of Americans don't take all of their paid vacation. So we don't take vacation, because we don't feel like we have a time and we don't have money.

But taking breaks, taking vacation is important, because it's associated with greater creativity. It actually makes you more engaged in your work and it makes you happier. So, take vacation. Period. But also, we have breaks in the regular cadence of our weeks. Every week we have two days off and most working Americans do get the weekends off. But why does it not feel like a break? It's because it's part of our routine. We're not paying attention, we're sort of rushing through all of our to-dos, rushing through our activities to get to check off items on our to-do list. But, when you treat it like a vacation, and so we ran several experiments replicating this fact, which I love. So, it was among working adults going into a weekend on a Friday. We randomly assigned half of them, we gave them the simple instructions. “Treat this weekend like a vacation. That is to the extent possible, think in ways and behave in ways you would on vacation.”

The others, we said, “Treat this weekend like a regular weekend. To the extent possible, think in ways and behave in ways you would on a regular weekend.” That was it. That was our intervention. On Monday when they were back at work, we followed up with them and we measured their happiness. And we saw that those who treated the weekend like a vacation ended up happier on Monday. Why? Well, we looked at how they spent their time over the course of the weekend. Yes, they did spend a little bit more of their time doing vacation-like things. They stayed in bed a little longer, so for that physical intimacy. They spent more time eating, they spent less time doing housework and less time doing work work. But interestingly, it wasn't the time that they spent on activities that relayed into their enjoyment of the weekend or into their happiness on Monday, what it was, was their mindset.

Those who treated the weekend like a vacation were more present during their activities. So, they were paying more attention to the present moment. And, it's that paying attention to the present moment that made them like their activities more and made them feel more refreshed when they got back to work on Monday. And so, it's absolutely a mindset thing. That it's not about the routine of getting through things. It is about having a break like a vacation, such that you can chill out and be in the moment. Even if you're doing the same thing. Even if you're like having a pancake breakfast or even if you're the one cooking the pancake breakfast for your family on Saturday morning. When it's like a regular weekend, you're just doing it and getting through it. When it's like a vacation, it feels so much different. It feels so different. And, you engage with the people that you're with in a very different way. So, treat the weekend like a vacation.

Mills: Well, Dr. Holmes, I hate to say this, but we're out of time. So, I want to thank you for joining me today. It's been really interesting and fun to talk to you. I think you've given us all some good ideas about how we can use our time more productively in a way that will make us happy. Thank you.

Holmes: Well, thank you for having me. It was a treat.

Mills: You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology on our website at www.speakingofpsychology.org or on Apple, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have comments or ideas for future podcasts, you can email us at speakingofpsychology@apa.org. Speaking of psychology is produced by Lea Winerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condayan. 

Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.