Happier Hour

Description

The antidote to overscheduling and feeling like your days aren’t your own, Happier Hour reframes your time around life’s happiest moments to build days that aren’t just full—but fulfilling.Our most precious resource isn’t money. It’s time. We are allotted just twenty-four hours a day, and we live in a culture that keeps us feeling “time poor” —like we never have enough. Since we can’t add more hours to the day, how can we experience our lives as richer? Is it possible to spend our days so they aren’t just full, but are fulfilling?

Based on her wildly popular MBA class at UCLA, Professor Cassie Holmes demonstrates how to immediately improve our lives by changing how we perceive and invest our time. Happier Hour provides empirically based insights and easy-to-implement tools that will allow you to:

– Optimally spend your hours and feel confident in those choices
– Sidestep distractions
– Create and savor moments of joy
– Design your schedule with purpose
– Look back on your years without regrets

Enlivened by Holmes’s upbeat narrative and groundbreaking research, Happier Hour teaches you how small changes can have an enormous impact, helping you feel less overwhelmed, more present, and more satisfied with your life overall. It all starts by transforming just one hour into a happier hour. Cassie Holmes is a professor at UCLA’s Anderson School of Management. Trained as a social psychologist, she earned her PhD at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business and her BA at Columbia. An award-winning teacher and researcher on the role of time in cultivating happiness and satisfaction in life, Holmes’s work has been widely published in lead academic journals and featured in such outlets as NPR, The Economist, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, and The Washington Post. Happier Hour is her first book. “Enlightening… As thorough as it is practical, this one’s well worth readers’ time.”
—Publisher's Weekly (starred review) “Vital….thoughtful exercises and commonsense advice is just what people need in a world reeling with COVID-19, wars, mass shootings, and inflation.”
—Booklist “More free time isn’t always better—a good reality check for anyone fantasizing about quitting a job to move to a tropical island…. Holmes engagingly conveys … It’s a smart idea for anyone to try, given that life will always include episodes and events that almost seem designed to lower our spirits. ‘Happiness is a choice, she writes. ‘How we decide to approach our hours and spend our days determines the happiness we get to enjoy in life.’”
—The Wall Street Journal “With our schedules overly full, Holmes shares research and easy strategies for not only how to manage, but tap into deeper meaning. Happier Hour is a joyful guide on how to spend hours to live a more satisfying life.”
—Eve Rodsky, New York Times bestselling author of Fair Play “A refreshingly novel approach on how to make your life rich. Happier Hour shows you step-by-step how to wisely invest your most precious resource—time.”
—Jonah Berger, New York Times bestselling author of Contagious  “This book is an absolute gem–useful, evidence-based, and a pleasure to read. Armed with the insights conveyed in Happier Hour, we can all find greater fulfillment in the time we have.” 
—Katy Milkman, National Bestselling author of How to Change “Cassie Holmes is an expert on time, and this readable, practical book might just make you rethink how you spend yours.”
—Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and host of the podcast WorkLife “Terrific advice from one of my favorite scientists about how to make best use of our most limited resource: time.”
—Angela Duckworth, New York Times bestselling author of Grit “Happier Hour is filled with loads and loads of practical, evidence-based advice for how to live better by investing in what really matters. It's the kind of book that can change your life for the better.”
—Laurie Santos, Chandrika and Ranjan Tandon Professor of Psychology at Yale University and host of The Happiness Lab podcast