Career - My Juggler

Don’t Just Spend Your Time—Invest It

Erez Safar — Tue, 17 Jan 2023 18:15:50 +0000

Time, like money, can be allocated to build wealth, meaning and happiness in the years to come

When it comes to time, we are born rich and then spend down our fortunes over the years. It may not grow like money in a bank account, but there are ways to get time to pay out a similar kind of interest.

The go-to verb for what we do with time is “spend” it. Researchers say it might be better to think of time as something we invest, using our precious hours to accumulate a wealth of fulfillment and meaning that our future selves can draw on.

This shift in thinking is particularly important because it might help us think longer term. Recent research by Hal Hershfield and Cassie Holmes, both professors at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management, and their collaborators indicates that those who think about their time over longer horizons—say, years or a lifetime—tend to be happier day-to-day and more satisfied with their life.

“If we start thinking about investments of time, rather than expenditures, maybe we’ll start focusing on allocating time toward the things that are more closely linked to our longer-term well-being,” Prof. Hershfield says.

He is currently investigating whether cuing people to think about “investing” their time, versus “spending” it, might prod them into that longer-term mind-set and affect what they choose to devote their time to.

Our anxieties about misusing our limited time have deep roots. Among the earliest written uses of the verb “spend” with “time” is from a 14th-century poem, according to Kory Stamper, a lexicographer. The regret-tinged line, originally composed in Middle English, roughly translates to “The lifetime that I’ve been lent / in idleness I have spent.”

When we invest money, we tie up our present resources in exchange for future gains. But investments of time have the advantage of paying out in both present enjoyment and far-off benefits, says Prof. Holmes.

For someone creating a temporal portfolio, an important task is to figure out which activities deliver the best return on investment. Studies have found that some reliably gratifying ways to use your time include deepening social connections, exercising and getting absorbed in meaningful work, says Prof. Holmes.

Prof. Holmes recommends determining your own best investments by performing an audit of your time use for a week or two. This exercise, which Prof. Holmes details in her book “Happier Hour,” consists of recording, in half-hour increments, what you did and how happy you felt while doing it on a scale of 1 to 10.

When Prof. Holmes has her business-school students conduct a self-audit, some of them are surprised to find that they spend more than a dozen hours a week on social media.

“When they look at how they feel having spent time scrolling, they see, ‘Holy cow, on a 10-point scale, it’s like a four,’” Prof. Holmes says. “Meanwhile, going out to dinner with their sister or friend or partner is like a nine, but often, it’s like, ‘I don’t have time to meet up with my friends for dinner because I’m so busy.’ ”

Having a time-investing mind-set means being proactive, Prof. Holmes says. It means committing in advance to rewarding activities rather than attempting to squeeze those things in only after doing whatever seems most urgent at the moment.

A proactive move she recommends is to block off time on your calendar for the investments that are important to you, just as you would a business meeting. In her own life, these high-priority weekly events are a couple morning runs, a date night with her husband, and going to a coffee shop with her daughter (who is 7, and orders hot chocolate).

Prof. Holmes maintains that even highly time-crunched people can benefit from an investing mind-set, because the value of small time commitments can compound. The recurring coffee date with her daughter, for example, is only 30 minutes a week, she says, “but the impact of that 30 minutes on not only my relationship with her, but on my satisfaction with my life overall, is profound.”

When choosing between different ways you could allocate your time, it can also help to imagine what your future self might hope you chose.

“Who am I, what am I going to be doing in five years, 10 years?” asks Prof. Hershfield. “When we look back, we don’t want to regret finding that our time slipped through our fingers, being spent on stuff that turned out to not be all that meaningful.”

Prof. Hershfield is the author of the forthcoming book “Your Future Self,” and writing it led him to take the perspective of his own future self more often. Recently, when he had a few open days on his calendar, he was torn between focusing on an important work project and taking time off to visit his 99-year-old grandmother with his 3-year-old son.

Looking at the situation through the eyes of his future self made the decision to spend time with family an easy one. “It’s not clear to me that in 10 years, I’ll even remember what progress I would have made on whatever project it was,” he says.

Even a year or two of imagined hindsight can help, according to Anat Keinan, a marketing professor at Boston University’s Questrom School of Business.

Prof. Keinan has conducted surveys of college students after they returned from winter break, asking them if they wished they had spent more time working and studying, or more time traveling and enjoying themselves. The group that was asked about their latest winter break was more likely to regret not doing more of the former, more productive activities. Meanwhile, the group that was asked about their winter break a year prior was more likely to regret not doing more of the latter, more meaningful and fun activities.

One force that can stop people from doing things their future selves would appreciate, Prof. Keinan has found, is guilt about not doing something productive.

“It’s not idle time,” Prof. Keinan says. “It’s actually a great investment in your future memories.”

Write to Joe Pinsker at joe.pinsker@wsj.com

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What Drives You?

juggler_admin — Fri, 10 Dec 2021 14:47:42 +0000

Maybe it’s time to step back and change what is really running your life.

KEY POINTS

Some drivers in our lives are destructive or keep us from reaching our potential.
We can think of common drivers likes steps on a ladder from most negative to most positive.
By acknowledging your drivers, you have the opportunity to focus on and change them.

When you step back and look at the landscape of your life, what’s drives you? What shapes what you do, not in terms of priorities—the things you focus on—but the engine that pushes your life along?

Seeing our lives as being driven is not new to psychology. Freud mapped out his 5 stages of development: oral, anal, phallic, genital, that not only propel a child’s development but can shape the adult’s.¹ And Maslow became famous for his Hierarchy of Needs, which moves up from the biological to self-actualizing.² As these authors point out, there are good and bad drivers, but each sets the pace, the tone of your life. You can choose what drives you, but the challenge is that you don’t choose. Instead, you accept what you get, or get used to, and call it life. You can change that, but first, you need to know where you stand.

Here are some of the most common drivers, ranked from those with the most significant positive impact (passions) to those providing the most negative impact (addictions). The line separates what we might consider adverse mental health from the positive.

Passions / Purpose

Goals

Routines

______________

Emotionally Driven / Shoulds / Self-Criticism

Anxiety / Depression

Addictions

Here’s how they break down:

Addictions

Here we think of alcoholism, drugs, sex, workaholism. What makes them addictive is that they kidnap your brain. Rational thinking goes offline, your midbrain pleasure center takes over and you just do what you do because you do it. You’re the passenger, and your addiction is running your life.

Anxiety / Depression

Unfortunately, this is the driver for too many of us. According to the Anxiety & Depression Association of America, anxiety is the number one mental health problem in the U.S. affecting 18 percent of the population.³ It can take many forms—panic attacks, obsessive-compulsive disorder, generalized anxiety, phobias. But regardless of the form, the impact is the same—your life is derailed. You worry, you avoid, you feel compelled to do things that you know are irrational, occupying too much of your time and mind.

Depression is the cousin of anxiety. Often, they go hand-in-hand. Worry leads to feeling overwhelmed, which can lead to feeling stuck or trapped, leading to feeling hopeless. When one or both of these take over, you are either always thinking about the what-ifs of the future or regretful and trapped by the past. The present dissolves into a blur.

Emotionally Driven / Shoulds / Self-criticism

While these are not formally diagnosable conditions, each has a negative impact on your life. Folks who are emotionally driven tend to run their lives based on how they feel. If they “feel” like cleaning up the house, they do; if they don’t, they don’t. While there’s an apparent spontaneity in their lives, they also struggle with the discipline needed to get things done that are difficult or necessary. They miss deadlines, problems get swept under the rug, they can seem to be unreliable to others.

Those driven by too many shoulds can go too far in the other direction. Rules run their lives. They can seem rigid with their black and white thinking and may feel guilty for breaking the rules. Because the rules are usually inherited from others, running your life this way often keeps you out of touch with your deeper needs and wants.

Finally, self-criticism is the bully who beats you up when you break the rules. Rather than enjoying your life, you spend much of your time trying to stay out of trouble with yourself.

Routines

Routines are useful. Without them, our anxiety goes up and we are essentially forced to invent each day from scratch. But if your days become too routinized, we’re running on autopilot; there’s too little spontaneity, few opportunities for joy. Life is safe but bland.

Goals

Setting goals and working towards them are good antidotes to routine’s downsides. You are proactive rather than reactive, creative rather than staid. But you can undermine your goals if you are emotionally driven. When the going gets tough and the goals are not your own, you lose enthusiasm, or your expectations are unrealistic. When that happens, it’s easy for anxiety, self-criticism, and depression to take over.

Passions/Purpose

Passion and purpose are at the top of our ladder because they arise from that core of who we are and want to be and carry none of the baggage of the others. When driven by passion and purpose, we are honest with ourselves and others. There is a natural integrity as our inner and outer lives reflect each other. We have the discipline to do what we want and need to do, yet can change our minds and be spontaneous without guilt or self-criticism.

So, when you step back and look at your life, what are your drivers? What keeps you from moving up that ladder? What do you need to do to reach greater fulfillment? How can you start today?

References

Freud, S. (1905). 3 Essays on the theory of sexuality. Standard edition 7: 123-246.

Maslow, A.J. (1954). Motivation & Personality. New York: Harper & Row.

Facts & statistics. Anxiety & Depression Association of American. www. adaa.org

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Congratulations, You’re Average

juggler_admin — Tue, 17 Nov 2020 15:14:05 +0000

Changing our definition of average and how this benefits us in the long run

In the career world, resumés are the yardstick with which we measure our progress. This metric is one of the few ways we can quantitatively size up our successes, and there’s something about having that standardized measurement of accomplishment that intimidates even the most exceptional overachiever.

It’s like a mirror that seems to add 20 pounds to your figure. Seeing every accomplishment, every job, all of the internships and volunteer work that you’ve ever had summed up into 12-point Times New Roman text that doesn’t even take up an entire page is discouraging, to say the least. Pondering your newfound inadequacy, you ask yourself, is this all I am? Am I really this average?

Yes. You really are that average. And that’s OK.

The Role of Social Media Plays in Feeling Subpar

It seems we have created a distorted view of being average, and consequently, we try to avoid it at all costs. A study done on averageness and how we perceive it shows just how skewed our perspective is on the notion. Participants overall tended to label their own abilities as above average—try drawing that bell curve out—but the study also found evidence that people consider “average” as being synonymous with having below-average abilities rather than interpreting the term as its literal definition.

It’s a sign of the times, and it’s also social comparison at work. With every scroll through social media, every new LinkedIn connection, we are reminded not of our own accomplishments, but the accomplishments of others (read: things you didn’t accomplish but somebody else did). Meanwhile, other social media platforms like Instagram or Facebook remind us of the cars we don’t drive and the places we haven’t been. The age of technology has opened our eyes to the lives we don’t have, and all of the sudden, each of ours seems lackluster in comparison. It’s like how every novel on the shelf at the bookstore is somehow a New York Times bestseller. How is that even possible? you ask yourself. But then you look down at the book you picked and see that it is the only one in the store without that shining medallion on the cover. Oh, and it’s also a collection of amateur poetry. A lot of times, we make ourselves feel like our life is that single, unlauded book on the shelf.

As the usage of platforms like LinkedIn continues to increase, we may increasingly feel subpar in relation to our peers. Imposter syndrome is a feeling that many people face within competitive environments, but even our social media has become a place of comparison that we now carry everywhere.

Young adults in the United States who are currently entering the job market find ourselves searching for a way to cope with achievement culture being at an all-time high. Told from infancy that we are unique, exceptional, and capable of doing whatever we set our minds to, we have reached territory where these affirmations no longer necessarily apply. The departure from adolescence has been difficult for every previous generation and will always continue to be so, but equipped with a new, digital metric for success, Generation Z must learn to adapt to its modern world and newfound adulthood.

Our Very Own Treadmill

The coping mechanisms of overachievers often involve, in this situation, taking on far too many responsibilities, roles, and emotional investments to carry, in hopes of overcoming the feeling of inadequacy. And for a little while, it works. The fear of the average leaves us alone. But then, we decide to add one more thing to the pile and everything goes south. It’s as if we each are sprinting on our very own treadmills, and we bump up the speed every so often because it seems possible to go a little bit faster. And the whole time we are running on this treadmill, this monster called averageness is chasing you, until you’re sprinting so hard you can’t keep up and fly off of the back of the treadmill. Still nursing your wounds, you climb back on the treadmill, turn the speed down a notch, and go back to sprinting away from this monster that forever nips at your heels.

We romanticize this mad, stupid sprint. Like martyrs, we sacrifice ourselves to this futile cause of making ourselves superhuman. Everyone dreams of being that person who does it all—balancing a career, a family, and a social life like it’s fine china, all while using the newest iPhone without a case on it and casually wafting an oh-so-abundant resumé in your direction. And so, we run.

It’s time to hit the brakes on our sprint and slow down. Far too often, we try to outpace our averageness, but switching our version of success from quantitative to qualitative is what will help us realize that being average is, in the end, a great life to live.

Often, when you look for something you’ve lost, you never find it; it’s when you stop looking that it reappears. If all we seek is high achievements or being the best, we will only find disappointment. Not only that, but we can no longer give our entire abilities to tasks at hand if there are too many to balance. In the end, we are not necessarily any less average than we were before balancing all of these responsibilities; we may simply be average at more things.

Slowing down and no longer buying into the quantitative mindset of success will allow us to pour our energy and time into what we prioritize, and we will be all the better because of it. Resumés and social media can capture breadth, but they often fail to capture depth. Yet depth is really where averageness is surpassed.

Surrendering to an average existence could be, paradoxically, how we find our better and happier selves. Studies suggest it’s not simply the case that success leads to happiness; happiness itself may lead to greater success. So maybe, it’s time we reprioritize what’s worth sprinting for.

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Ex-Lehman Financial Chief Doesn’t Look Back

juggler_admin — Sat, 20 Oct 2018 18:37:09 +0000

Erin Montella says her life today is the antithesis of the life she led a bit more than a decade ago.

Then, she was known as Erin Callan. She was chief financial officer for Lehman Brothers Holdings Inc. in the months before the company’s September 2008 collapse.

The Lehman Brothers building in New York on September 15, 2008, the day the company filed for bankruptcy. PHOTO: JOSHUA LOTT/REUTERS

Ms. Montella — as she prefers to be called since adopting her husband’s surname a few years ago — ascended to the CFO role at age 41 in December 2007, just as the financial crisis was gathering momentum.

Some considered the investment banker an unorthodox choice, because she had never worked as an accountant or in a finance department. She quickly became the public face of the firm, striving to make the case that the business was sound through the media and in conference calls and meetings with investors.

The highest-ranking woman on Wall Street at the time, Ms. Montella also became a lightning rod for anger from investors including hedge-fund manager David Einhorn, who had bet Lehman shares would decline. In June 2008, after Lehman posted a $2.8 billion second-quarter loss, Ms. Montella resigned. Three months later, the firm was gone, too, when Lehman filed for the largest bankruptcy in U.S. history.

Following her resignation, the Harvard University graduate, who started her career as a corporate tax attorney, moved to Credit Suisse Group AG to work with hedge funds. But in early 2009, she left both Credit Suisse and Wall Street behind.

In her 2016 memoir “Full Circle: A Memoir of Leaning In Too Far and the Journey Back,” Ms. Montella chronicles her career and her efforts, following a suicide attempt in late 2008, to build a new life with Anthony Montella, a former New York City firefighter who she’d met in high school in Queens, N.Y. The two re-connected in 2007.

Erin Montella’s 2016 memoir. PHOTO: TRIPLE M PRESS/AMAZON

“I was depressed, sad and angry all bundled up in one little firecracker ready to explode,” Ms. Montella wrote in her memoir. “The way I looked at the world, what I did was the totality of who I was. And if I wasn’t doing it, then was I anybody, really? Was there any value to me without my job?”

Ms. Montella concluded she “had to change my life and my priorities dramatically so that I would never again make a decision” like that.

These days, Ms. Montella, 52, spends most of her time in Sanibel Island, Fla., where she and Mr. Montella live with their 3-year-old daughter.

“I have led a very low-profile life since I left Wall Street,” Ms. Montella said in an interview. “I spend my time at this point raising my daughter.”

In 2013, after the publication of “Lean In: Women, Work and the Will to Lead” by Sheryl Sandberg, Ms. Montella wrote an op-ed article in the New York Times in which she cautioned against giving too much to a job.

“When I left my job, it devastated me,” she wrote. “I couldn’t just rally and move on. I did not know how to value who I was versus what I did…Until recently, I thought my singular focus on my career was the most powerful ingredient in my success. But I am beginning to realize that I sold myself short. I was talented, intelligent and energetic. It didn’t have to be so extreme.”

The volume of response from readers, she said, prompted her to write the memoir.

Ms. Montella warns that small decisions—to spend an hour on Sundays catching up on email, for example—can quickly establish “a new norm” that results in work crowding out other parts of life.

Achieving balance between work and personal life, she said, is not simple. “It’s not, let’s lean in all the way and it’s going to work out. The struggle to have two top priorities isn’t easy. That doesn’t mean you don’t try, but you shouldn’t feel that if it’s not easy you are doing something wrong.”

The Montellas recently launched a charitable foundation called the Life Balance Foundation. They started raising money this year to support programs including grants to families who cannot afford to take maternity leave. The broader goal, Ms. Montella said, is to help people establish balance between work and family life.

Ms. Montella declined to comment on her final months at Lehman beyond what she wrote in her book. One highlight: a 2015 phone call from Lehman’s chief executive Richard Fuld Jr., who said: “…he felt he had left me on my own to handle things and shouldn’t have,” she wrote. “As much as I appreciated the call, and I genuinely did, I put it in its proper place. A final closing for that chapter of my life, leaving it with a better ending.”

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