Offer most people a choice between a bit more money and a bit more time, and they take the money. It is the obvious choice: money is concrete, you can count it, and everyone around you is optimising for it too. It is also, on the evidence, frequently the wrong choice for your own happiness. The people who lean the other way, who treat time as the more precious resource, are reliably happier, and understanding why reframes the entire case for working less.
What does the research find?
A line of studies by Ashley Whillans and colleagues asked a simple question: do people who value time over money end up happier? The answer was a consistent yes.1 Those who prioritised time reported greater wellbeing, and the effect held across income levels, which is the important part. This is not simply rich people being able to afford to relax. It is an orientation, a way of deciding what matters, that predicts happiness somewhat independently of how much you have.
Why would that be? Partly because people who value time choose differently. Given the choice, they steer toward more intrinsically rewarding activities, relationships, hobbies, experiences, rather than toward acquiring more stuff, and those choices are exactly the ones the wider happiness literature endorses.1 Valuing time is, in effect, a heuristic that quietly points you toward the things that actually make life good.
Can you spend money to buy time, and does it help?
Yes, and the research is encouraging. Studies find that using money to outsource tasks you dislike, to buy back time rather than buy more goods, tends to raise wellbeing more than spending the same money on material things.2 Paying someone to clean, or to handle a chore you dread, and reinvesting the freed time in something meaningful, is one of the better-evidenced ways money can actually purchase happiness. The lesson is not that money is irrelevant, but that its highest happiness return often comes from converting it back into time.
Why do we get this so wrong?
Because the deck is stacked toward money. It is measurable, comparable, and socially celebrated. You can see your salary, compare it to others, watch it grow. Time is none of these things. It is abstract, uncountable, and easy to treat as infinite right up until it is not. So we default to maximising the resource we can measure, even when the resource we cannot measure matters more. And there is a second saboteur: the belief that time off is wasteful. People who regard leisure as unproductive enjoy it less and are less happy overall, which means the guilt that pushes you back toward earning quietly poisons the time you do protect.3
What does this mean for working less?
It supplies the missing piece of the argument. The case for taking AI’s productivity gains as time rather than output is not merely that you would be less tired. It is that, on the evidence, time spent well is a stronger source of happiness than the additional money or output the same hours would have produced. When you cap your work, defend an afternoon, and choose people over more polish, you are not indulging yourself at the expense of success. You are choosing the resource that the research says makes life better. The culture treats time as what is left over after the money is made. The data suggests it should be the other way around.
Frequently asked questions
Does valuing time over money make you happier?
Yes. Research consistently finds that people who prioritise time over money report greater happiness, partly because they spend their time on more intrinsically rewarding activities and relationships rather than on acquiring more.
Can you buy happiness by spending money to save time?
To a degree. Studies find that spending money to outsource disliked tasks and free up time tends to increase wellbeing more than spending the same money on material goods.
Why do we still chase money over time?
Because money is concrete, measurable, and socially rewarded, while time is abstract and easy to undervalue. Many people default to maximising income even when more time would make them happier.
About the author
Tom Goodwin is the author of Don’t Work Harder, a book about taking the time AI gives back as time rather than more work. He is a co-founder of GAMEPLAN and writes on productivity, technology, and the economics of the working week.
Footnotes
Footnotes
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Ashley Whillans, Aaron Weidman, and Elizabeth Dunn, “Valuing Time Over Money Is Associated With Greater Happiness,” Social Psychological and Personality Science (2016); and longitudinal work finding that those who value time choose more intrinsically rewarding activities and are happier later. ↩ ↩2
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Ashley Whillans et al., “Buying Time Promotes Happiness,” PNAS (2017): spending money to outsource disliked tasks tends to raise wellbeing more than spending it on material goods. ↩
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Gabriela Tonietto, Selin Malkoc, Rebecca Reczek, and Michael Norton (2019): people who regard leisure as wasteful report lower happiness and enjoy leisure less. ↩