How we spend our time—and who we spend it with—has a huge impact on our health and happiness.

Data point of the week
Here’s who Americans spend their time with—on average—over the course of their lives.

Reflection
The sad thing about this graph is that time alone steadily increases after the age of 40, while time spent with everyone else steadily decreases, with the exception of partners. And of course, not everyone has a partner, or children, or coworkers for that matter, if you work from home, as I do.

The other sad thing about this graph is that—after our early twenties—the time we spend with friends drops below all other kinds of time and stays there. Friend time is often “optional,” whereas family and work time are necessary. And it takes conscious effort to make plans and carve out time for friends. But the time we spend with friends has the highest ROTI (return on time investment) in terms of its impact on our happiness.

This isn’t necessarily because we like our friends better than our partners, kids, and coworkers, but because we’re more likely to do fun stuff with friends, whereas at work and home we’re taking care of tasks (and there are always SO many of them).

Connection Skill & Action Step: Invest in friend time
Investing in friend time might mean putting effort into meeting people and developing new friendships or carving out time to spend with your current friends. It may be helpful to take this friendship assessment to reflect on your how you’re feeling about your friendships and how you want to invest your time.

In any case, how can you make spending time with friends a priority, rather than something you’ll do “when you have time”? If asked, most of us would agree that spending time with friends is more important than, say, doing the laundry. And yet, in the moment, laundry often wins out. It’s not that clean underwear isn’t important … but time is finite … and chores/tasks/to-dos are infinite. 

One way to prioritize friend time is to pre-decide. We tend to make better choices for our future selves, based on our values rather than how we feel and the demands of the moment. One way to pre-decide, and make things easier, it to set up what I call “automatic, recurring connections.” That means a recurring event on your calendar, whether it’s a weekly phone call, a bi-weekly coffee date, or a monthly book group. Once it’s scheduled, all you need to do is show up. And chores will squeeze into whatever empty space is left on your calendar!

Questions to reflect on or to spark conversation. Please share your responses in the comments—we love hearing from you!

If you were to create an ideal version of this time chart for your own life, what would it look like? How much time do you want to spend alone, with your friends, coworkers, partner, and kids (if applicable)? What can you do to get closer to your ideal times?