Missed birthday dinners, presenting a work project on four hours of sleep, ordering take-out, or skipping a team building event. These are just a few of the many compromises employees make daily. Despite the American Dream that everything is possible if you work hard enough, most people have faced the reality that, when it comes to juggling, they can’t do it all. That can be an unnerving thought. But embracing that reality opens the door to strategies that are more realistic and effective than multi-tasking, getting up at 5 a.m. every day, or quitting a rewarding job. The strategy below might not help you do everything perfectly. But it might help you find more happiness in life.
The Fallacy of Time Management
When we think of work-life balance, we often adopt a time perspective. It is a never-ending puzzle of how to cram all the things you want to do into a day. Employees have a variety of activities and responsibilities outside of their jobs. Some might go home to a family, while others spend time with friends, take care of family members, exercise, or volunteer. For most people, the total of a job plus their non-work activities vastly exceeds 24 hours. Work is rarely a fixed project completed by the end of the day as you can always take on more projects or deliver higher quality. With non-work activities, this is no different. There is no end to the time that you could spend with family or friends, and there are always tasks to be done. Better time management can certainly make your life easier, but the question is whether it is enough to make you feel balanced and happy.
In a study published in the Journal of Vocational Behavior, Professor Brenda Lautsch from Simon Fraser University and I asked 63 working parents how they would ideally allocate their hours each day to work, family, and other life roles, such as exercise and volunteering. Then, we asked them to log each day for one week how many hours they actually spent in their roles. Participants spent less time with family than they had intended. They also did not have enough time for exercise, while they spent more time on work than they wanted. Being aware of this discrepancy might push some to take action. They may decline overtime work for a while, or they get up early for a morning run for a week. But these changes are often temporary. You accept overtime for a really cool work project, or you skip a run when it rains. We’re back where we started: Constantly busy and often feeling guilty about the things we don’t get to.
Happiness Ingredients
Instead of focusing on time management or asking yourself what tasks and activities you need to do, it is time to ask a different question. What do you need to feel happy? Psychologists have found an answer to this question, dedicating entire careers to determining the ingredients of well-being. Professors Emeritus Edward Deci and Richard Ryan identified three fundamental psychological needs: autonomy, belonging, and competence. Autonomy means that you are doing something because you genuinely want to, either because you enjoy the activity or because you find it important. It is your choice to do something. Belonging means feeling part of a group and having rewarding relationships with others; competence means feeling good at something. People thrive if they have autonomy over what they do, feel part of a group, and feel competent in their actions.
The three ingredients of happiness help clarify whether students are happy at school or whether employees experience well-being at work. For instance, in a study among 331 third- and seventh-graders, published in the Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, researchers found that children who felt more autonomy, belonging, and competence were happier six weeks later. Another study, published in the Journal of Applied Social Psychology, reports very similar findings among employees: those with greater autonomy, belonging, and competence at work report higher well-being and fewer health complaints.
Using Work and Non-work Roles Strategically
If happiness ingredients explain why someone thrives in a specific domain, can we use these insights to improve our overall happiness in life? Life, for most people, consists of more than one domain. The beauty of having more life roles is that they can compensate for each other. If you have a micromanaging supervisor, your job likely doesn’t give you much autonomy. But maybe your choice to volunteer does, so that you still feel happy in life.
If you use your life domains strategically, you can ensure that, together, they fulfill the three psychological needs. For instance, someone could use their home domain for belonging when connecting with friends. Work covers competence, and a personal domain — maybe exercise, a hobby, or volunteering — makes them feel fully in control. If done well, domains can complement each other so that, overall, you feel in control, connected, and competent.
In 2023, I asked 274 North Americans about their life roles, how much autonomy, belonging, and competence they felt in these roles, and how happy they felt. I wanted to know what set the happiest people apart from those who gave their happiness score lower than five on a 10-point scale. The results revealed a clear difference in the need-fulfillment patterns of happy and unhappy people.
- Happy people had at least one domain in which they scored high on a need. For instance, they felt highly in control at home, or very connected at work, or extremely competent in exercise. They had at least a few highs.
- Happy people had very few unfulfilled needs. They thus had few lows.
- For unhappy people, this pattern is reversed: They have very few highs, but many lows.
These findings reveal two key insights. The first is that unhappy people are doubly unlucky – Autonomy, belonging, and competence are often low in one or more domains, and they are unable to compensate, as needs are rarely very high in other domains. The second conclusion is that you do not need to excel in all domains to be happy. Happy people did not feel in control, connected, and competent in every single life domain. Instead, they made sure they experienced each happiness ingredient at a high level in at least one life role. This is good news for all jugglers out there. It means you can let go of the idea that you must be perfect in everything you do. Instead, think carefully about how your roles can complement each other. Which role will you use to feel in control? Which one to feel connected? Which one to feel competent? That is the start of your route to happiness.