Sure, time is money.
But when you have to make a choice that prioritizes one or the other, which do you favor?
Would you go out of your way to buy cheaper gas, even if takes more time? If you were looking at a new job, would you want to work more hours and earn more money — or would you take a pay cut to earn a little less if it meant you had more free time?
It turns out that the way you answer these questions — whether you prioritize time over money or the other way around — has a small but significant effect on happiness, according to recent research published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.
In general, people who prioritize time over money report being happier, according to the authors, three psychology researchers from the University of British Columbia in Vancouver.
Here's how they figured it out, providing what they say is the "first empirical evidence that prioritizing time over money is a stable preference related to greater subjective well-being."
The researchers didn't just interview a few college students to get their conclusions. After developing a scale to measure a person's tendency to prioritize time over money, they conducted six studies to show both that the preference towards money or time was stable and to measure its connection to "subjective well-being," or how happy a person feels.
In the end, their studies tracked 4,690 people, including students, adults in Canada, and "a representative sample of employed Americans."
They conducted various types of surveys, in some cases following up a few weeks or months later, to see how people prioritized time and money for life decisions both big (career, where to live) and small (day-to-day behavior). While the researchers were able to show that people's preference for prioritizing either money or time remained stable over a few weeks or months, they do say that further research should assess how these priorities change over longer periods of time. Older people were more likely to say time was important in general.
After controlling for age, gender, education, income, number of hours worked on average each week, marital status, and number of children living at home — all factors that could influence how a person perceives choices about money and time — they found that people who prioritized time consistently reported being happier.
They even were able to distinguish materialism from a preference for prioritizing money. In other words, people could identify as materialistic and still opt for prioritizing time and see the benefits of doing so.
It's worth noting that the overall happiness difference was small, as they say should be expected when measuring the impact of individual psychological factors on something as complex as happiness. Still, the impact of this choice was about half the size of the already-documented impact of things like marital status or income, which is significant.
It's also worth noting that for some people, prioritizing money over time is a necessity, not a choice. Some people may need to choose a higher-paying job with longer hours because they otherwise could not afford the essentials, for example, even if they might prefer to prioritize time if they were able to.
The authors don't know whether choosing time over money makes people happier — or whether happy people choose to prioritize time over money, and then derive greater pleasure from their free time. Maybe people who can afford the luxury of making time a priority are already happier. That's part of why the authors also want to see if this happiness difference only holds true after a person's financial needs are met (they controlled for income, but say more research is needed there).
While there are still questions to be answered, they say that this preference for time "may provide one path to greater happiness."
So the next time you're making a tough choice between having more time or more money, think of your happiness, if you can — not just your wallet.