What $40 of Bought Time Did in Whillans's 2017 Study
Buying time and happiness: what Whillans et al. (PNAS, 2017) found in 6,271 surveyed adults and a $40 experiment, the effect sizes, the caveats, and what to outsource.
In this article6 sections
Ask 98 working adults what they would do with a surprise $40, and 2.0% of them say they would spend it on saving time. That figure comes from the final survey in Whillans, Dunn, Smeets, Bekkers and Norton’s “Buying time promotes happiness,” published in PNAS in 2017 (114(32):8523-8527). The same paper reports that people who do buy time are measurably more satisfied with their lives, and that the one experiment in it, 60 people and two weekends, moved mood in the expected direction.
So does paying for time make you happier? On the evidence of that paper, a little, and mostly by lowering how rushed you feel on the day. The effect is small, it is largely correlational, and it comes with limits that matter if your life is already a mess.
What did the Whillans 2017 surveys measure?
Buying time, in the paper, means paying someone else to do an unenjoyable daily task: cleaning, shopping, cooking, household maintenance. Respondents answered two questions about whether and how much they spent monthly on this, then rated their life satisfaction on two 0 to 10 items (a happiness question and the Cantril ladder).
The samples were a Mechanical Turk group (n = 366), a representative sample of working Americans (1,260), Danish adults (467), Canadian adults (326), a representative Dutch sample (1,232), a sample of Dutch millionaires (818), and a final US sample of 1,802 given a broader definition of time-saving purchases. Together that is the 6,271 in the abstract. I read the full text on PubMed Central; the supplementary appendix I did not open.
What were the numbers?
| Result | Figure | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Share of respondents buying time (first six samples, n = 4,469) | 28.2% | Most people spend nothing on it |
| Mean monthly spend among buyers | $147.95 | Averaged over the minority who pay at all |
| Life satisfaction, buyers vs non-buyers | d = 0.24 (95% CI 0.18 to 0.31) | A small effect by convention |
| Same, with covariates (n = 3,983) | d = 0.22 | Barely changed |
| Moderation by income | Z = -0.35, P = 0.729 | No evidence the link depends on income |
| Time stress and life satisfaction, non-buyers | B = -0.18 | Being rushed costs satisfaction |
| Same slope, buyers | B = -0.03, P = 0.144 | The cost is close to flat |
| Millionaires who spent nothing outsourcing | just under half of 818 | Affording it and doing it are different things |
The pattern in the time-stress rows is the paper’s real claim. It does not say buyers feel less rushed on average; the surveys showed no direct link between buying time and time pressure. It says that among buyers, being rushed predicted much less unhappiness. The authors call this a buffering effect, borrowed from social-support research, and note that people under more pressure are also more likely to buy time, which would mask a direct link in survey data.
What happened in the $40 experiment?
Sixty working adults in Vancouver received $40 on two consecutive weekends. One weekend they had to spend it on something that saved time, the other on a material purchase, in counterbalanced order. A phone call at 5:00 PM asked how they felt that day.
| End-of-day measure | Time-saving | Material | Effect size |
|---|---|---|---|
| Positive affect | 4.00 | 3.71 | d = 0.33 |
| Negative affect | 1.38 | 1.65 | d = 0.33 |
| Perceived time pressure | 3.49 | 4.22 | d = 0.36 |
Lower time pressure statistically explained the mood gain: with time pressure in the model, the direct effect of the purchase on positive affect fell to B = 0.18 (P = 0.108). One day of mood, in a small sample, reported by the people who chose the purchases.
Who gets left out of the finding?
Four limits, all stated by the authors or visible in the tables.
Self-report carries the whole result. Satisfaction, time stress and spending were all rated or recalled by the respondents. The surveys are cross-sectional, so happier, less stressed people may simply be the ones who hire help.
The experiment ran over two weekends with 60 people, and the outcome was a 5 PM phone call. Nothing in it shows that the effect lasts.
The lowest incomes are thin in the data. The authors write that their studies “include relatively few people at the lowest rungs of the income spectrum,” so the finding that income does not matter should not be stretched to people choosing between $40 of help and $40 of groceries. For a wider look at what money does and does not do to wellbeing, the Kahneman and Killingsworth 2023 reconciliation is a useful companion.
And there is a hint of a ceiling. Exploratory analysis suggested the benefit may reverse at the highest spending levels, which the authors tie to a possible loss of perceived control.
What should a person with a messy life outsource?
This part is my reading, not the paper’s. The paper’s buyers were mostly outsourcing cooking, shopping and household maintenance. Applying that to a pile-up of overdue admin, laundry and unopened mail suggests a few rules.
Outsource the task that costs the most dread per dollar, not the largest task. A $40 deep clean of one room can beat a $40 grocery order if the room is the thing you avoid walking into.
Outsource tasks with a fixed end. Laundry service, a one-off clean, a delivered meal, an hour of someone sorting a closet. These are bounded and you can see the result by Sunday. Open-ended jobs, such as “sort out my finances,” need a decision from you first.
Do not outsource the decision that is the actual problem. If the mess is a job you want to quit or a relationship you are avoiding, paying someone to do the dishes will lower the Saturday rush and leave the cause untouched. Sorting which problem is which is what a triage order for when everything is broken is for.
Be wary of buying time that gets refilled. Fragmented hours do not feel restful whether you bought them or not, a point the time confetti entry makes about how free minutes arrive.
The hours you buy back still need a start. Keynes made the same worry about leisure in general in 1930, and a time-use comparison with a week-long audit shows how to find out how many free hours you already have.
The same logic explains one use of an alarm app. DontSnooze, which gives you 30 seconds to film proof you are up or sends a random camera-roll photo to your friends, moves a single 6 a.m. decision off the person worst placed to make it, much as the cleaner takes the bathroom off yours.
What does it cost to try?
Forty dollars, one weekend, one task you hate. Write down your own 1 to 7 rating of how rushed you feel at 5 PM on a normal Saturday and on the bought-time Saturday. That is a sample of one with no control, so it cannot show causation. It does reproduce the paper’s measurement, and it is the cheapest check available.