ALISON BEARD: I’m Alison Beard.
ADI IGNATIUS: And I’m Adi Ignatius. And this is the HBR IdeaCast.
ALISON BEARD: Adi, I’m going to ask you a personal question, do you have a lot of joy in your life?
ADI IGNATIUS: That is a very personal question. Well, let’s talk about professional lives at least. I was editor-in-chief of Harvard Business Review for 16 years. I recently took on a new role as editor-at-large, and that was because I needed something different in my professional life, right? In the past I wanted to be a manager and have lots of direct reports and lots of responsibility. And I realized that joy in my professional life as I’ve gotten older, really depended not on those trappings of power, but on being able to do creative work. So in my professional life, I definitely have more joy these days.
ALISON BEARD: That’s very good to hear. And I’m also impressed that you can find joy at work. Our guest today has done a lot of research with very busy, very ambitious, very successful people. And she finds maybe as you did when you were an editor-in-chief, managing a whole organization that it’s sometimes difficult to find joy at work. And so you really do need to do it in your free time. And it’s important even when you’re sort of at the stage of your career where you’re climbing the ranks and that sort of, even at the stage where you’re climbing the ranks and definitely prioritizing work you need at all stages to have three pillars for a satisfying life. One is achievement, 100%. Also meaning the purpose you find in your friends, your family, and your job, but then also joy. You need it at all times to truly feel satisfied.
ADI IGNATIUS: So I’m wondering, is there a business case for why people need to seek and find joy?
ALISON BEARD: Absolutely. Because when you do find joy in the limited free time that you have, you become a better person at work. You’re a more thoughtful caring manager, you are a higher performer, you are more productive. It’s definitely a virtuous cycle. So she studied 1,500 Harvard Business School alumni using a tool called The Life Matrix that she developed, which all of us can check out. And she dug into how all of these people who are absolutely high-flyers in their careers found joy in their very limited free time and their five ways you can do it. And she’s going to explain all of them.
Leslie Perlow is a professor at Harvard Business School and co-author of the HBR article, How the Busiest People Find Joy. Here’s my conversation with her.
ALISON BEARD: So let’s start with the problem. This might seem like a silly question, but why is it so important, especially for all those high achievers out there listening to be interested in finding more joy?
LESLIE PERLOW: Well, joy is super important for us to have in our day-to-day lives. More important than I think many of us recognize. What we’ve found is that you actually need some amount of joy, meaning, and achievement at all stages of your lives. And if you take my students at the Harvard Business School, they tend to think that they’re going to have achievement first and then meaningfulness and later in life, joy. But actually it’s incredibly important for you to find joy for your own well-being. And we also find that the more joy you find in your life outside of work, the more you’ll find value in your work and bring a more productive self into the workplace as well.
ALISON BEARD: Ok. So your definition of joy is, what?
LESLIE PERLOW: Positive emotion in the moment. And it is important to us that it’s in the moment, it’s not this broader sort of catch-all phrase of happiness, but more that you’re currently in the moment experiencing this positive emotion.
ALISON BEARD: How do you measure that? I imagine it must be really subjective, what generates positive emotion for might not for me. Can you also find joy in the same things that give you achievement and meaning? How do you quantify any of this?
LESLIE PERLOW: Yeah, so that’s an excellent question. And if you’ve even stepped back and think about how do you even evaluate your time, we know to think about if our time is productive, are we efficient or effective? And there’s tons of research on how to better manage your time. But are you living your best life? Are you using your time in the best ways? And that’s a hard question for us to actually answer ourselves.
And so what we’ve done is build a tool that actually has you walk through all the activities that you do in the course of your week and ask you to both assess how important are joy, achievement and meaning to you, as well as how much joy, achievement, and meaningfulness do you feel that you derive from each of these activities.
ALISON BEARD: So it’s self-reported the positive emotion that I might be feeling in any particular activity.
LESLIE PERLOW: Absolutely. Self-reported but then also compared across your different activities. We also ask you about your aggregate or your perception of joy in your life at large. We have a set of questions where we first start by asking you to understand what’s what we call your jam type joy, achievement and meaningfulness type. And people can be dominant in any one of the three or any two or all three.
It’s important to understand just to start with what matters to you. Because at the core, what we’re really trying to do is build a way for people to assess, are you living your life consistent with your values? And so we want to understand what are your values and then we want to understand how are you actually living your weekly 168 hours.
How much joy achievement and meaningfulness matter to you affect what is the minimum that you need, as well as life stage, what’s going on – there’s a variety of factors that are affecting those minimums. What we’re doing in the LIFE Matrix is providing you information about how you are relative to others in terms of meeting, what’s the minimum for you.
ALISON BEARD: So your original study group using this tool that the article is based on is a group of Harvard Business School graduates who have both demanding careers and families, correct?
LESLIE PERLOW: Yeah. My definition, we just looked if you were in the full-time workforce and had kids, what we found is that this group, and it is a highly ambitious group where can average of 50 hours a week and have another 12 hours a week of caretaking or chore, responsibilities or what we call non-work responsibilities.
ALISON BEARD: And so for these sort of high-powered executives, what did you find in terms of their desire for joy, achievement and meaning and how well they were living up to those expectations?
LESLIE PERLOW: First of all we find that, in your work or your non-work responsibilities. We find that joy is much more limited in those realms of your life, but the place where people find joy is in their free time or their discretionary time. We also find that they don’t have that, even though they have about 26 hours a week of discretionary time, only 10 hours or so are actually joyful for people. This is the discretionary time, so you have 26 hours in addition to all your work, your sleep, your hygiene, your non-work responsibilities, but it might be spent scrolling social media or sitting in front of the TV or whatever you are choosing to do with that time, which often unfortunately doesn’t bring people nearly as much joy as it could.
We found that they spent their discretionary time often doing things that didn’t provide them value, and it’s not as surprising. It didn’t necessarily provide them achievement and meaningfulness, but joy is something that people do find in their free time. And so what it raised for us is are there ways for people to actually find more joy on average?
ALISON BEARD: So the crux of your article is this idea that it’s really not necessarily about finding more free time in a busy life when you have so many professional and personal obligations, it’s actually about making more of that limited free time that you have because people aren’t tending to do that well right now.
LESLIE PERLOW: I think that’s such an important point. Certainly resonates with me even how much time you spend complaining about I am always at work, I have all these responsibilities. We have so many demands on our time and so we say, “Oh, I just don’t have enough free time.” But the huge insight that we found in this research was actually you should stop complaining. I should stop complaining and we should start making more of the time we have because actually you’ll be way better off if you just take advantage of the free time you do have. And it doesn’t matter, even for people who work a lot, people have a lot of outside responsibilities. Just making an hour or two more of the free time you have more joyful will have a profound effect both on your life, on your well-being, but actually also on you that you bring to work.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah, I mean, just anecdotally, oftentimes I think to myself like, oh, well, I really only have an hour and then I find myself scrolling social media. But if I had spent that hour, I don’t know, calling a friend or even doing a crossword, I feel like I might feel better after that hour. So let’s dig into the various ways that you can improve the limited free time that you do have and find more joy in it. Just at a high level, what are some of the big buckets of advice that you would give to people?
LESLIE PERLOW: So we found five key opportunities for people to find more joy. One is simply doing things with others. We found for every activity that we were tracking, that if you did it with others versus alone on average, you would be better off doing it with others. One of my favorite findings about this is watching TV. The more time you spend watching TV is negatively correlated with life satisfaction. But actually if you watch TV with others, suddenly becomes positively correlated to life satisfaction. So simply thinking about what are you doing and with whom are you doing it is one of the important takeaways for us.
ALISON BEARD: That does make me feel better because I do like watching TV, but I generally do it with my husband or my kids.
LESLIE PERLOW: Keep on doing that. Definitely. The second thing we found is that of course there’s going to be activities that you do alone, but it’s really important to make those solo activities, things that you’re doing that are active versus passive. Back to this sitting alone watching TV or scrolling social media are particularly negative for your life satisfaction. Doing things that are active are much, much better.
We also find that, and I think we’re all guilty of this, giving advice to our kids or to ourselves that you should do the things that are perceived by others to be valuable. But actually we find you should worry less about doing the things that other people find valuable in their free time, that things that other people drive joy and do the ones that you really drive joy from. And so our favorite example, and we talk about this in the article, is if you really like cleaning your closets, you should clean your closets instead of doing a set of other activities that people are telling you to do. And I have to say, I’ve started sharing that in some of our exec ed classes and the number of people who truly find joy in cleaning their closet is just awesome.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah, I regret that is not something I find joy in. Sorry, Marie Kondo. Okay. Yeah. Next bucket.
LESLIE PERLOW: Another thing we find is that you really should diversify the activities that you’re doing in your free time. That there is a point for all activities at which there starts to be a declining return in terms of the value you’re driving. And I think that’s probably because at some point it goes from being something joyous and something that you’re really engaged in because it’s just a spontaneous, it’s a free time activity and it becomes more of a responsibility or a project or a chore. You can play too much chess because it goes from just being something that you’re doing because it brings you joy to something that you’ve got very competitive and you feel a real need to win.
ALISON BEARD: And it becomes more achievement focused.
LESLIE PERLOW: Exactly exactly. And so diversifying your activities. And then we also find you should on the margin, be protecting your time because it’s such a slippery slope. It’s so easy to spend that extra marginal hour at work versus at home. And if you can use that marginal hour at home and in particular something that brings you joy, it just has tremendous value for you.
ALISON BEARD: And it’s also tempting to use that marginal hour folding the laundry or rather than going outside and playing kickball or something with your kids. So I want to dig into each of those categories. First of all, engage with others. Does it matter who? Because obviously there are people who bring you joy and people who don’t.
LESLIE PERLOW: Yeah. So I think the answer is obviously, and that’s for you to define for yourself, to be aware of doing it with the others and the right others, people who make you feel more joyful is what we want to encourage you to be thinking about. So who are those people for you? And then how do you encourage yourself and them to be doing some of these activities together?
ALISON BEARD: And then on the active versus passive pursuits question. I, in particular, as you probably can tell by the examples that I’ve given, I love doing crossword puzzles. I love reading books. So why is it better for me to go exercise instead of doing those things?
LESLIE PERLOW:
I mean, I think on some level these are averages and advice for you to be thinking about, and it’s important for you not to spend all your time doing those things. But on the margin, doing some of that versus some other things, all these rules are not mutually exclusive. And so figuring out what brings you the most value. I think on average people aren’t spending their passive solo time in ways that actually are bringing them the value that it could. And so we really see these as opportunities for you to reflect on your life and think about, okay, what am I doing and what brings me value?
ALISON BEARD: I guess those tensions sort of lead us into the whole idea of following your passions, because if your passion is something that’s more sedentary, like crossword puzzles or knitting, then it’s okay to do that because it does bring you joy.
LESLIE PERLOW: Exactly. Right? I mean, the whole idea here is to really get you to pause and think about am I using my discretionary time in ways that bring me joy?
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. What do you say to people who say, “Well, my passion is social media. My passion is video games,” or things that generally people wouldn’t recommend you spend your free time doing?
LESLIE PERLOW: There’s a declining return. I mean, I’m not going to say you should do no social media, but my students have argued long and hard with me about the fact that they want to come home after class and sit on the couch and do scroll through their social media. And that may be valuable. They’re convinced it’s valuable up to a point. But I think that the key thing is to realize you can do way too much of it. And I think we all deep down recognize that there’s partly that you’re doing a little bit of it to keep in touch and to keep up on what’s going on for some people, but then it just goes over a cliff.
ALISON BEARD: We talked a little bit about the diversify your activities idea that they’re sort of diminishing returns, but how do you quantify that? Is it different for every person or is there a certain number of hours that is the threshold where once you get over that you got to stop?
LESLIE PERLOW: I wish there was a black and white answer to that. We don’t find that. It does seem to be there’s an answer for each activity, but it’s not the same for all activities. And that’s probably because we do on average different amounts of certain activities. We just simply are exercising more in the week on average, certainly as the group of people that we were studying than we’re doing things like reading.
ALISON BEARD: Would you say that it’s better to have a small diversity of activities or a very wide diversity of activities, so you’re dabbling in everything, or is it better to find a core that you really enjoy and bring you joy?
LESLIE PERLOW: So the data suggests the more, the better. There’s no sense that you can be doing too many, but look, you don’t have that many hours. So I think that there’s a limiting factor, certainly with this population. If you add all your hours and you were spending them all on discretionary time, we might find something different. But for this group, finding several versus one is clearly better.
ALISON BEARD: On the protect your time advice, what recommendations do you have for how people might actually do that when there are so many competing demands, certainly for the HBS graduates you studied, certainly for the C-suite executives that are in our audience base, and really for everyone that’s trying to balance career and family?
LESLIE PERLOW: I just think it’s very easy to get suckered into believing that the extra hour at work is actually going to be more critical than the extra hour at home. And so we tend to make the trade-off to work and convince ourselves that actually, and by the way, our managers and our peers convincing us as well, that that’s what really matters. And I think the best thing we can do is set some hard constraints around making sure we have enough time. And maybe it’s just picking a few discretionary activities that are specifically going to bring you joy and putting them into your calendar and holding yourself to those just like you hold yourself to your work engagements.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah, block off that time.
LESLIE PERLOW: Yeah.
ALISON BEARD: And do you find that the people that you’ve studied who have difficulty protecting the time, is it going back to that thing you said that they say to themselves, this is my time for achievement, this is my time for meaning, and I can postpone finding joy or at least find a lot less of it for a while?
LESLIE PERLOW: I find people convince themselves that especially in professional service jobs, that this is the way it has to be. This is what the client needs and they’ll put in their heart and soul into doing their work and it will pay off later. And what we’re finding is that that actually has very negative implications for you and your life and your wellbeing and actually for you that you bring to your work as well. But I think people convince themselves, especially earlier in their careers, that this is I’m paying forward.
ALISON BEARD: So the negative consequences are things like burnout or actually not performing as well at work.
LESLIE PERLOW: Yeah. Not performing as well, not coming to work as sharp, as motivated with as much intentionality as they could. So I think it’s not just the long run effects, but actually the day-to-day effects. We find lots of evidence that if you just have a little more joy in your life outside, you come to work as a much more refreshed, engaged, committed employee.
There’s this hidden metric for team performance, which you get from how you spend your time outside of work. And I think we’re obsessed with what people are doing at work, and we’re all obsessed with sharing and being busy, whether it’s at work or all the things we have to do outside of work, instead of recognizing the tremendous value of what we can do in little ways.
ALISON BEARD: Right. Before we started recording, we actually talked a little bit about commuting, which I now realize is where people spend so much of their free time, even though it’s not free because you’re driving. But do you have any recommendations for what all of us might do if we’re on the train or stuck in traffic to sort of employ some of the advice?
LESLIE PERLOW: I think figuring out ways to use that commuting time, I mean now because of technology, whether it’s listening to podcasts or using it to do more than just commute, there is a tremendous opportunity for you to make that feel more valuable. And there are some people who commuting is considered, we can see this in all the ratings. It’s just not such a negative experience. And then for others, it’s a negative experience. And I’ll just say one of the things in the pandemic that people would say to us is, “Wow, now I miss my commute.” They never miss their commute. But now in the pandemic, when you’re always at home that that commute actually can be a valuable time between work and getting home, but how do you use it for that and making sure you’re getting value from it and pausing to think about what would that be? I think we just don’t ask ourselves that question very often.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. I tend to listen to the news, which does not bring me joy, but I also tend to call my mom, which might bring her more joy than it brings to me. But maybe that brings me joy too.
LESLIE PERLOW: Or maybe meaningfulness.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah, exactly. What advice would you give managers who want to encourage their employees to try to find more joy but also still get their work done?
LESLIE PERLOW: Yeah. For me, this finding is actually very exciting for managers. I’ve worked a lot with organizations trying to help them think about how do you make the workplace better and what small changes can we make at work that will both make work better, but also people’s lives better? And suddenly, I think we’re finding actually, if you want to create better work, if you actually provide people just the awareness and just the encouragement to, if they will spend an hour or two a week doing something that’s valuable outside of work. As a manager, you don’t have to give them any more time off. You don’t really have to do anything beyond just encourage that they, they’re creating that space for themselves outside of work. Then it has tremendous opportunity for you to be a more caring, engaged manager of your employees and your employees to actually come to work in a better way.
So it wasn’t at all what we set off to do, but I think what we’ve discovered is what I said this before, this sort of hidden metric to team performance. And so I would encourage managers to actually be aware of are they providing the space for their employees to get some joy outside of work? I would not encourage them to start meddling in people’s lives outside of work or to take that on as a responsibility. I don’t think that’s the place. I think it’s more just making sure that an hour or two a week of something joyful is going to be tremendously valuable to everybody.
ALISON BEARD: So it’s really helping out with the protect time element and then just the self-awareness about what brings each individual joy and encouragement to pursue that.
LESLIE PERLOW: I even think if everyone was able to say one activity, they were going to do a week and the team worked together to ensure that they could do that, to protect the time, but recognize it’s not even protect the time so they can have it outside of work, but protect the time because they truly recognize that by them having it outside of work, it brings value to work that it’s truly about the work, not just even about their life outside.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. So it’s almost just saying, “Betty’s taking her yoga class at noon, so let’s move the meeting, but then I know we need to get out at six so that Peter can go to salsa dancing,” that sort of thing.
LESLIE PERLOW: I think so. Or just the team even being before just sharing with each other, being vulnerable and saying, “Here’s the one thing that I really care about that I’m going to commit to doing,” and then making sure that everybody commits to doing that, but not so that every day there’s a middle of the day and an end of the day, I mean, the way you describe it could become a little bit daunting for the manager. And I more see it as an opportunity for it to be empowering for the team to really work together to engage and own collectively that they care about each other.
ALISON BEARD: Got it. And what about for higher level organizational leaders? We do hear about the idea of creating joyful workplaces, but it sounds like you’re saying that where people find the most joy would be outside work. So should organizational leaders should create a culture and policies that allow people that flexibility, so such that they do have the free time and can make choices, their own individual choices about what brings them joy in that time?
LESLIE PERLOW: Yes. But you make it seem more daunting than I want managers to think it is. I just want managers to realize they don’t have to do anything. They don’t have to change anything. They don’t have to be more flexible. If they could just have people be aware of the time they have, and if they could use the time they have, the discretionary time better, they would be better off.
I am just trying to lower the bar so much that there’s no excuses for us not doing this, because if we just do that, we all have a lot to gain. We can raise the bar for sure and do even more, but I think right now if we could just acknowledge that and enable that, it’s so low cost.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. So it sounds like for people at every level, it’s very much a self-management question versus a managing people or managing organization’s question.
LESLIE PERLOW: Absolutely.
ALISON BEARD: Great. Well, Leslie, thank you so much for being with me today. I hope that you have some time off today to find joy.
LESLIE PERLOW: Awesome. Thanks so much. I really appreciate it.
ALISON BEARD: That’s Harvard Business School Professor Leslie Perlow. She’s co-author of the HBR article, How the Busiest People Find Joy, and you can find the LIFE Matrix tool at yourlifematrix.com.
Next week, Adi speaks with Laura Huang about the importance of recognizing and following your intuition.
If you found this episode helpful, share it with a colleague and be sure to subscribe to and rate IdeaCast in Apple Podcast, Spotify, or wherever you listen. If you want to help leaders move the world forward, please consider subscribing to Harvard Business Review. You’ll get access to the HBR mobile app, the weekly exclusive insider newsletter, and unlimited access to HBR online. Just head to hbr.org/subscribe.
Thanks to our team, senior producer Mary Dooe, audio product manager Ian Fox, and senior production specialist Rob Eckhardt. And thanks to you for listening to the HBR IdeaCast. We’ll be back with a new episode on Tuesday. I’m Alison Beard.
