How Time-Affluent Are You?
Not how many hours you have, but how many feel like yours
Time affluence is not the number of free hours in your week - it is the feeling that you have enough time for what matters, and research links it to greater happiness and life satisfaction. This test also looks at two things that travel with it: how rushed your days generally feel, and whether you lean toward paying to get time back rather than spending time to save money.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about your typical week, not an unusually busy or unusually free one.
What it measures
The core construct from the time affluence research: your subjective sense of having enough time, independent of how many hours you actually have. Plus two closely related constructs from the same field: how rushed and pressured your days feel, and whether you lean toward buying time (paying to skip a task) or spending time to save money. It differs from our time-management test, which is about planning skills, and from our time-perspective test, which is about whether your mind lives in the past, present or future.
Based on: Time Affluence Scale (Kasser & Sheldon, 2009)
Possible results
Time affluence
Whether you feel you have enough time for what matters.
Time pressure
How rushed and hurried your days feel.
Buying time
Whether you would rather pay to save time than spend time to save money.
Common questions
Is low time affluence just a sign of being lazy or disorganised?
Usually not. Feeling time-poor tracks real constraints - work hours, unpaid care, commuting - more than it tracks planning skill, which is why it can stay low even for people who organise their day carefully. Better planning helps at the margins, but it rarely closes a gap caused by simply having too much on the schedule.
Can you have a lot of free time and still score low on time affluence?
Yes, and it happens fairly often. Time affluence is about the felt sense of having enough, not the raw hours on a calendar - someone with plenty of unscheduled time can still feel time-poor if that time is fragmented, spent worrying, or not going toward anything they value.
Does having more money automatically create more time affluence?
It helps, but only if it is actually spent on getting time back. Research on this trade-off, using large samples across four countries, found that spending money on time-saving services was linked to greater life satisfaction, and a follow-up experiment found people felt happier after a time-saving purchase than a material one - yet plenty of people with money to spare keep choosing to spend time instead, often out of habit rather than necessity.
Sources
- Kasser, T., & Sheldon, K. M. (2009). Time Affluence as a Path toward Personal Happiness and Ethical Business Practice: Empirical Evidence from Four Studies. Journal of Business Ethics. doi:10.1007/s10551-008-9696-1
- Whillans, A. V., Dunn, E. W., Smeets, P., Bekkers, R., & Norton, M. I. (2017). Buying time promotes happiness. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. doi:10.1073/pnas.1706541114
An honest note The time affluence items here are Quinthea's own wording, adapted from Kasser and Sheldon's short scale, so your score is not comparable to any published norm - only the first bar corresponds to their published measure; time pressure and buying time are related constructs from the same research area, not validated factors of it. Most of this research is correlational and comes from wealthier countries, so causal claims and cross-cultural generalisations should be read cautiously.