It might seem that high-achievers with important jobs don’t need — or even have time for — activities that bring them joy. But it turns out that finding joy at all stages of life (along with achievement and meaningfulness) is essential to feeling satisfied and being a more effective leader. Harvard Business School professor Leslie Perlow has studied busy executives who do – or do not – find joy and explains the main ways that we can all make the most of limited free time, including avoiding passive pursuits and diversifying our activities. Perlow is founder of the Crafting Your Life Project, which created the Life Matrix tool, and coauthor, along with Sari Menster and Salvatore Affinito, of the HBR article “How the Busiest People Find Joy.”
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