The Paradox of Unexpected Time Savings: An Underused Resource to Boost Happiness

Most people in today’s society feel they do not have enough time to get everything done. Thus, if activities take less time than planned, this should make people happier. However, five preregistered experiments document that people tend to be surprisingly numb to unexpected time gains, leading to a substantial asymmetry in people’s hedonic response to unexpected time gains and losses. While finishing a task later than planned strongly decreases happiness (Average d = -1.88, completing it earlier by the same amount hardly increases happiness (Average d = 0.00 Studies 1-5). This asymmetry is weaker for money—unexpected monetary gains increase happiness significantly more than unexpected time gains (Study 2)—and replicates across various activities (Study 3). One underlying reason for this numbness is that many people fail to reinvest the time they save and let it pass by (Study 4). Notably, a simple intervention encouraging people to plan the reallocation of potential time gains increased their happiness when encountering them (Study 5). Most (if not all) people experience unexpected time deviations. By uncovering the psychology of unexpected time gains, we hope our findings encourage people to better use them and firms to guide consumers to help alleviate their time stress.