Buy back your time

Spend money to outsource tasks you dislike, freeing hours for what matters.

Why it works

Disliked, time-consuming chores impose a steady stress and crowd out higher-value or restorative activity. Paying to offload them converts money into discretionary time and reduces end-of-day time pressure, which is the lever that links the spending to greater wellbeing.

How to do it

1. List the recurring tasks you most dislike and that eat real time.
2. Outsource one (cleaning, delivery, errands) and notice how the freed time feels.
3. Reinvest the freed hours deliberately — protect them rather than refilling with more work.

Evidence

Research found that spending money on time-saving services was associated with greater life satisfaction, and a small experiment found buying time increased positive affect more than buying material goods. Whillans and colleagues (2017) documented this pattern across surveys of several thousand people in multiple countries alongside a randomized within-subject spending experiment. (rct)

The experimental sample was small and the survey component is correlational; effects are real but modest, and "buy back time" only helps if you actually protect the freed time.

Sources

• Whillans et al. (2017), buying time promotes happiness, PNAS
• Whillans, A. V., Dunn, E. W., Smeets, P., Bekkers, R., & Norton, M. I. (2017). Buying time promotes happiness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(32), 8523–8527.

Common mistake

Outsourcing a chore and immediately filling the freed time with more work, which erases the wellbeing benefit the time was supposed to provide.