How should you balance your time to be happier?
- Principal investigator: Jordi Quoidbach
- Research group: Leadership Development Research Center (GLEAD)
- Funding body: BBVA Becas Leonardo 2021
About the project
How should you balance your time to be happier? The decisions we make every day about what to do, when to do it, and who to do it with have important consequences for well-being. Research suggests that up to 40% of differences in people's happiness can be explained through how they balance their time. However, the ways our daily schedules work remain poorly understood. To date, studies have been unable to capture time use comprehensively or model its relationship to happiness in all its complexity.
To solve these fundamental problems, the project has two goals:
- Capture the complex ways people spend and balance their time.
- Identify the fundamental dimensions of time use that predict happiness.
To achieve these goals, the project will (1) build an integrative mobile app that combines experience sampling, mobile sensing, and machine learning to capture how people use their time with an unprecedented level of accuracy, and (2) it will collect large-scale data to determine which dimensions of time use predict subjective and objective well-being.
This project will provide the first in-depth explanation of the everyday determinants of happiness. The aim is that the new tools and models proposed will facilitate innovative, powerful and scalable ways to help people live happier lives.
