You might not realise it, but how you allocate and use your time can have a profound impact on your overall happiness. Learning to organise your time effectively might be your key to relieving stress and increasing your wellbeing.
Carving out time for the people and activities that bring you joy is an increasingly difficult task in today’s busy world. So many different things compete for our attention, it can be hard to know what to prioritise.
This can lead to some of those people or activities being neglected, and study after study shows this has a devastating impact on your level of life satisfaction.
At the same time, too much leisure time can leave you feeling as though you have little purpose. This can be a real problem in retirement, especially if you derived a lot of your self-worth and identity from your job.
According to retirement expert Don Ezra, the ideal number of discretionary hours in a day is somewhere in the two- to five-hour range. Any less than that and we feel stressed, any more and you might begin to feel directionless.
What’s really important, he says, is not that you have a lot of free time, but that you use the free time you do have to enrich and maximise happiness.
He suggests tracking your time use for a couple of weeks using a spreadsheet, noting your activities and how long you spend doing them.
Also note how you feel about each activity, possibly giving it a happiness rating (happy time, ‘meh’ time, wasted time, productive time).
Once you’ve done that you will have a better understanding of how you use your time. You may even already be seeing patterns or areas for improvement.
But if it’s still not clear what you could reduce (or increase), take the activities that make you happy. Mr Ezra says to then identify three things about each of them – what kind of activity was it, where were you doing the activity and who, if anyone, were you doing the activity with.
You should be able to identify some commonalities across the different activities. Were you happiest while exercising with friends? Or reading quietly alone? Do you get the most satisfaction from spending time with family or friends?
Now do the reverse analysis on your least favourite activities. Look for the same commonalities and you should be able to identify activities (or people) you might want to cut out of your life.
Using these analyses, you have a much better idea of what makes you happy, and what doesn’t, and can then use this information to rearrange your schedule to suit you.
How much free time do you have these days? Does it affect your happiness? Let us know in the comments section below.
Also Read: How not to die with retirement regret
