{"id":10413,"date":"2024-10-03T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-10-03T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=10413"},"modified":"2024-10-02T22:59:11","modified_gmt":"2024-10-03T02:59:11","slug":"happier-hour","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2024\/10\/03\/happier-hour\/","title":{"rendered":"Happier Hour."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I heard Dr. Cassie Holmes talk about her book Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most<\/a> <\/em>and her approach to time management, making sure we get the most out of the limited free time most of us have, on the Hidden Brain podcast<\/a> a month or so ago. She was an excellent guest, telling some great anecdotes and offering a superficial look at her recommendations for people to reorganize their time around the activities that give them the most joy or pleasure. The book, however, goes no deeper than that, and really could have been a pamphlet for all the insight it offers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Happier Hour<\/em>\u2019s main advice is simple to understand and plan, albeit perhaps not to implement. Holmes asks readers to spend about two weeks tracking their time in small increments, writing down what they\u2019re doing and how they felt while doing it. The goal is to identify the activities that give you the most happiness, however you may define that. That\u2019s often social activities with family, friends, etc., but it will vary by person \u2013 you might enjoy solving a puzzle by yourself more than playing a game with friends, and if so, then you should enter that in your little journal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once you\u2019ve gathered that information, you should then create a schedule of your week, filling in the activities that you must do before you get to anything else. Holmes distinguishes between types of required activities, however; for many people, there will be aspects of work that you enjoy, and aspects that you don\u2019t enjoy but have to do anyway. (One recurring problem with Happier Hour<\/em>, though, is that this is very much a book for privileged people. Here, you have to have a job that gives you some flexibility in when you perform required tasks, at the very least.) Her advice is to isolate the best parts of work \u2013 the ones that give you some positive feeling, however you wish to define that \u2013 and dedicate time to them at the time(s) of day when you feel best. She\u2019s a morning person, and she likes the deep work parts of her job, so she sets aside a few hours each morning for it, delaying the lesser parts of the job, like answering emails, to the afternoon when she\u2019s not at her best anyway.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

She counsels the same approach to your leisure hours \u2013 some of which will, again, involve required tasks, like making dinner, chauffeuring children or other family members, or performing certain chores. As I write this, I just emptied the garbage and recycling bins in the kitchen, dealt with the cats\u2019 litter, and took the trash bins to the curb, a required task I perform every Wednesday. That would be on my calendar, each Wednesday night, taking up maybe 15 minutes at most. Once those fixed tasks are in place, I would then fill I the remaining time with activities that give me the most joy and with required tasks that can be performed at any time, again prioritizing the good stuff for times when I feel my best. (This also would require that I know when I feel my best. It depends on the day.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s all there is to the Happier Hour <\/em>system, aside from some minor details. Beyond that, the book is fluff \u2013 a little research here and there on how social activities tend to make us happiest, how experiences beat acquisitions (no kidding<\/a>), or how social media sucks, plus some mostly cute stories from Holmes\u2019 own life (along with one pretty lousy one). I don\u2019t mind hearing about the author\u2019s experiences when they relate to the book; her decision to leave a prestigious but intense job that was cutting into her time with her young children is understandable, and there\u2019s a straight line from that to the research she does now at UCLA. However, they also underscore how this book is only for a small sliver of the population: It is way, way easier to execute the program in Happier Hour<\/em> if you\u2019re either rich, or in a flexible job (like mine, come to think of it), or both. So many of her stories just scream wealth and privilege: oh, you have a weekly coffee-and-hot-cocoa date on Thursday mornings with your preschool-aged daughter? How nice for you, but most of your readers with kids that young will take them to day care or similar arrangements so they can go to their not flexible jobs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I say this with full awareness that my job is flexible \u2013 I\u2019m a writer, and as long as I hit my deadlines, I could write at any time of the day I wanted. I could do it from 2 to 4 in the morning if I wanted to. (I do not.) And I could write from anywhere; in the offseason, I don\u2019t even need to be in this hemisphere, as long as I have a phone and an internet connection. I am in the target audience for this book. I just didn\u2019t feel very moved by it, and by the time I was about 2\/3 of the way through, I was just annoyed by how much extra verbiage there was around something that could be described in under ten pages. This book could have been a podcast, and in fact, it was.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Next up: Still reading Adam Hochschild\u2019s To End All Wars<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I heard Dr. Cassie Holmes talk about her book Happier Hour: How to Beat Distraction, Expand Your Time, and Focus on What Matters Most and her approach to time management, making sure we get the most out of the limited free time most of us have, on the Hidden Brain podcast a month or so […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[102,225,783,900],"class_list":["post-10413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-disappointments","tag-non-fiction","tag-psychology","tag-self-help-books","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10413"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10413\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10414,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10413\/revisions\/10414"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}