Owning Your Hours: Time Freedom and Autonomy

Introduction

Picture an ordinary Tuesday. It is half past ten in the morning. Somewhere, millions of people are in the third meeting of the day, answering emails they did not ask for, on a schedule set by someone else. And somewhere else, a person who stepped away from paid work a few years early is walking a child home from school, reading in a patch of sunlight, or starting a long-postponed project simply because this is the hour they feel like doing it. Nothing dramatic is happening. No one is on a yacht. Yet for many early retirees, this unremarkable scene is the whole point: the hours belong to them.

Pete Adeney, who stopped full-time work at around 30 and later wrote as Mr. Money Mustache, captured this with typical mischief when he introduced his blog in 2011. Among the ‘exotic things’ financial freedom made possible, he listed raising young children, long holidays and ‘sweeping your driveway in pajamas at 11am on a sunny Thursday morning’ (Adeney, 2011). The joke works because it points at something serious. What early retirement offers is not mainly luxury. It is control over time.

This chapter is about that control, which psychologists call autonomy, and about the related feeling of having enough time, which researchers call time affluence. We will look at what the research says about why owning your hours matters so much to wellbeing, at what retired people actually do with their days, and at the stories of people who left paid work early and found that time itself was the richest thing they had gained. We will also be honest about the less comfortable finding: an open calendar is not automatically a happy one. Time freedom seems to be a gift that works best when we use it deliberately.

Vicki Robin and Joe Dominguez’s Your Money or Your Life (1992), one of the founding texts of the modern financial independence movement, framed all of this in a single idea. Money, they argued, is not an abstraction. It is what we get in exchange for our life energy. In Robin’s own summary of the book, life energy is ‘our allotment of time here on earth, the hours of precious life available to us’, and ‘money is something we choose to trade our life energy for’ (Robin, n.d.). Seen this way, the question of early retirement is not ‘How much money do I need?’ but ‘How many of my remaining hours am I willing to sell, and for what?’ Thoreau was asking the same question from his cabin at Walden Pond in 1854. The difference now is that we have a good deal of evidence about the answer.

What the research tells us

Autonomy is a basic psychological need

The most influential framework for understanding why control over our own time matters is self-determination theory, developed by the psychologists Richard Ryan and Edward Deci. In a widely cited paper in American Psychologist, they set out the case that human beings have three basic psychological needs: autonomy (feeling that our actions come from ourselves, not from outside pressure), competence (feeling capable and effective) and relatedness (feeling connected to others). When these needs are met, people tend to show more intrinsic motivation, better psychological development and greater wellbeing. When they are thwarted, motivation and wellbeing suffer (Ryan and Deci, 2000).

Autonomy in this sense does not mean doing whatever you like or living without obligations. It means that what you do feels endorsed by you. A person can be busy, even working hard, and still feel autonomous, provided the busyness is chosen and meaningful to them. The reverse is also true. A person can have plenty of leisure and still feel controlled, if that leisure is shaped by guilt, social expectation or the sense of having been pushed out of work.

The workplace research points the same way. In a classic study, the sociologist Robert Karasek argued that psychological strain at work arises not simply from heavy demands but from heavy demands combined with low decision latitude, meaning little control over how and when the work is done (Karasek, 1979). Much of what makes a job exhausting is not the effort itself but the sense of having no say over one’s own hours.

Time poverty: a modern epidemic

If autonomy is the psychological need, time is the resource through which we most often feel it satisfied or denied. A growing body of research on ‘time poverty’, the chronic feeling of having too many things to do and not enough time to do them, suggests that many working adults are running on empty. In a review in Nature Human Behaviour, Laura Giurge, Ashley Whillans and Colin West report Gallup data showing that in 2011, 70% of employed Americans said they ‘never had enough time’, and that by 2018 this had risen to 80%. They summarise evidence linking feeling time-poor to lower life satisfaction, poorer mental health, reduced work performance and creativity, and weaker relationships (Giurge, Whillans and West, 2020).

The flip side is time affluence: the subjective sense of having enough time. Across four studies of American adults and students, Tim Kasser and Kennon Sheldon found that people who felt time-affluent reported greater wellbeing, even after taking their material affluence into account. Their later studies suggested that part of the reason is that time-affluent people are more mindful and more able to satisfy the basic psychological needs described above (Kasser and Sheldon, 2009).

Ashley Whillans, now at Harvard Business School, has built a research programme around this idea. In one set of studies involving 4,690 participants, she and her colleagues found that people who consistently prioritise time over money report greater subjective wellbeing, and that this was not explained by income, materialism or current feelings of affluence (Whillans, Weidman and Dunn, 2016). In a later preregistered study that followed around 1,000 university students through graduation, those who valued time over money went on to choose more intrinsically rewarding activities, and they were happier a year later, even after controlling for how happy they had been to begin with (Whillans, Macchia and Dunn, 2019). The authors describe the pursuit of intrinsically motivated activity as the mechanism: valuing time leads people to spend their lives on things they find rewarding for their own sake.

In a further project, Whillans and colleagues surveyed 6,271 people in the United States, Canada, Denmark and the Netherlands and found that those who spent money on time-saving services reported greater life satisfaction. A field experiment with working adults then showed that people felt happier after a time-saving purchase than after a material one (Whillans et al., 2017). The lesson for anyone thinking about early retirement is striking. Much of the modern economy invites us to convert time into money. The research suggests that, beyond a certain point, the conversion that makes people happier runs the other way.

What happens to wellbeing when work ends?

Most studies of retirement follow people who stop work at or near state pension age, so we should be careful about applying them directly to people who leave paid work in their thirties, forties or fifties. Even so, several findings bear directly on time and autonomy.

The first is that choice matters enormously. Using longitudinal data from the American Health and Retirement Study, Esteban Calvo, Kelly Haverstick and Steven Sass examined how happiness changed between people’s last period of full employment and their first period of full retirement. Their conclusion was that what mattered was not whether people retired gradually or all at once, but whether they perceived the transition as chosen or forced (Calvo, Haverstick and Sass, 2009). A retirement that is planned and chosen, which is what most financially independent early retirees have, is precisely the kind associated with better outcomes.

The second is that the quality of motivation in retirement matters. In a French study of 150 active retirees involved in university-based post-retirement activities, Yannick Stephan and colleagues found that intrinsic motivation, especially for accomplishment and stimulation, was positively related to satisfaction with retirement, over and above time since retirement, expectations and health (Stephan, Fouquereau and Fernandez, 2008). The sample was small and self-selected, but the pattern fits self-determination theory neatly: retirees who do things because they find them interesting and satisfying tend to enjoy retirement more.

The third is that release from work often brings a measurable easing of strain. In the French GAZEL cohort of more than 14,000 employees of the national gas and electricity company, followed from seven years before to seven years after retirement, Hugo Westerlund and colleagues found that retirement did not change the risk of major chronic diseases, but it was associated with a substantial drop in both mental and physical fatigue and in depressive symptoms (Westerlund et al., 2010). The odds of reporting mental fatigue one year after retirement were around a fifth of those one year before.

Sleep offers a very concrete example of what owning your hours can mean. In the Finnish Public Sector study, Saana Myllyntausta and colleagues followed 5,785 people through statutory retirement and found that average sleep duration rose by 22 minutes, from 7 hours to 7 hours 22 minutes, during the retirement transition. The increase was greatest among those who had been short sleepers or had sleep difficulties before (Myllyntausta et al., 2017). Twenty-two minutes may not sound like much, but multiplied across years, and set against a working life in which the alarm clock rules, it is a small daily sign of time returned.

What do retired people actually do with their time?

Time-use surveys, in which people record what they are doing throughout a day, give us a picture of where freed-up hours go. In the UK, the Office for National Statistics’ time-use survey for March 2023 looked separately at working-age adults who were economically inactive because they had retired, which is to say, people who had stopped work before state pension age. After sleep and rest, they spent most of their time on unpaid work such as housework, caring and household management (3 hours 51 minutes a day on average), on entertainment and leisure activities (3 hours 16 minutes) and on watching television (3 hours 1 minute) (Office for National Statistics, 2023).

Those figures deserve a generous reading as well as a cautious one. The large share of unpaid work reflects the reality that early retirees often become the backbone of their families and communities, looking after children, grandchildren, ageing parents and homes. That is time given, not time lost. At the same time, three hours of television a day is a reminder that free time does not organise itself into flourishing.

Can you have too much free time?

This brings us to one of the most important studies for anyone contemplating early retirement. Marissa Sharif, Cassie Mogilner and Hal Hershfield analysed two large American data sets covering 35,375 people, alongside two experiments. They found an inverted-U relationship between discretionary time and wellbeing. Having too little free time was linked to lower wellbeing because of stress. But having more and more time did not keep making people happier, and having a great deal of discretionary time was sometimes linked to lower wellbeing, because of a lack of a sense of productivity. Crucially, the negative effect of abundant free time was weakened when people spent it on productive activities (Sharif, Mogilner and Hershfield, 2021). In the American Time Use Survey data, well-being rose with free time up to about two hours a day, levelled off, and began to decline after about five (American Psychological Association, 2021).

It would be easy to read this as a warning against early retirement. It is better read as an instruction manual. The study measured discretionary time, the hours people feel they can spend however they like, and found that what spoils abundant time is the absence of purposeful activity. That is exactly the gap that self-determination theory predicts, and exactly the gap that the early retirees in the next section describe learning to fill.

Lives enriched: real stories

Joe Dominguez — the Wall Street analyst who turned money into life energy

Joe Dominguez was born in New York City in 1938 and worked as a stock-market analyst on Wall Street. In 1969, when he was around 30, he had built what the Associated Press later called ‘a sufficient nest egg to quit his paid employment’, and he left the rat race decades before conventional retirement age (Associated Press, 1997). What he did with the time he reclaimed became his legacy. With Vicki Robin he developed the ideas that became Your Money or Your Life (1992), which the same obituary describes as a bible of the living-simply movement; it set out a nine-step programme for changing attitudes to earning and spending and had sold more than half a million copies in English by the time of his death in 1997. Royalties from the book and from a later seminar and workbook course went to a charity, the New Road Map Foundation. At the end of his life he was living on about $6,000 a year (Associated Press, 1997).

What Dominguez did with his freed time is instructive. He did not stop working; he stopped selling his hours. The central tool he and Robin gave the world, the practice of calculating how many hours of ‘life energy’ each purchase really costs, grew out of his own decision to reclaim his time long before retirement age (Robin and Dominguez, 1992; Robin, n.d.). Rather than keep earning, he chose to give the fruits of his later work away.

Justin (Root of Good) — ‘my weekend lasts seven days’

Justin, who writes the blog Root of Good, retired at 33 in 2013 and lives with his wife and three children in Raleigh, North Carolina. His route out was not a triumphant resignation. As he recounts, he was unexpectedly let go from his job one Monday morning in August 2013, went home, reviewed the family’s written financial plan, and realised that they already had enough to live on without his salary. By sunset he had decided he was retired, and his wife joined him in early retirement in 2016 (Root of Good, 2016; Root of Good, n.d.).

What followed is one of the most detailed public accounts of how an early retiree actually spends time. In 2015 he published his typical week: roughly 13 hours of ‘work’ such as housework, yard work and managing finances, 18 hours of physical activity, 35.5 hours of fun and 7.5 hours of socialising. His only fixed points were school drop-off and pick-up at around 8 am and 3 pm. He described deliberately open-ended ‘adventure time’ with his family, walking instead of driving for short errands, and occasionally getting absorbed for days in a new project, such as learning a language or teaching himself to blog. He compared this with his old working week, in which the fun was ‘crammed into a tiny sliver of workday evenings’ and weekends (Root of Good, 2015).

A year later, reflecting on his first thousand days, he wrote that the period had been ‘amazing’, that he was spending more time volunteering at his children’s school, and that when asked what early retirement is like he often ends up saying it is everything working people do at weekends, ‘except my weekend lasts seven days’ (Root of Good, 2016). His story shows two things this chapter keeps returning to: time freedom is often spent on family and community rather than on luxury, and it was his prior financial preparation, not good fortune alone, that turned a job loss into a choice.

Tanja Hester — slow mornings and the ‘detox phase’

Tanja Hester was a long-time political communications strategist; her husband Mark Bunge was a pollster. They retired at the end of 2017, when she was 38 and he was 41, and live near Lake Tahoe in California, where they spend as much time as they can skiing, hiking, cycling and paddling (Hester, n.d.). She went on to write the blog Our Next Life and the book Work Optional (2019).

A few months after leaving work, Hester described their state in an interview on the Physician on FIRE blog. They were, she said, ‘still in what we think of as the detox phase of early retirement, catching up on the years of sleep we didn’t get while working’. But they were ‘already enjoying slow mornings, more time to work on our own creative and purpose projects, more time outdoors’ and more travel (Hester, 2018). She also described how completely she and Mark had been defined by their careers, and said that on her blog she deliberately goes beyond the finances to explore how people will define themselves and replace their sense of purpose once a career is gone (Hester, 2018).

Hester’s account is valuable precisely because it is not all sunshine. Her phrase ‘detox phase’ is a reminder that the first months of time freedom may be spent simply recovering. The richer questions of identity and purpose tend to come afterwards, and she treated them as work worth doing.

Brandon, ‘the Mad Fientist’ — the album that time freedom made possible

Brandon, who has written and podcast as the Mad Fientist since before he reached financial independence, retired from a full-time software career in 2016 at the age of 34. In an interview he put it this way: ‘I’ll never stop working on things that interest me’, but he had reached financial independence and left his career (Mad Fientist, 2019).

For five years he published an honest annual update on life after work. In the final one, in 2021, he reported the thing he was proudest of: he had finally released the album he had wanted to write for his whole adult life, which he described as the whole reason he had pursued financial independence in the first place. With striking candour he added that his job had not really been the obstacle. He had had enough spare time before; what had held him back were ‘mental hang-ups’ about failure. It took financial independence, and then pandemic lockdowns, before he actually did it (Mad Fientist, 2021).

He also described the unexpected challenge of losing money as a source of motivation, and admitted that without that push he sometimes avoided uncomfortable tasks that might pay off in the long run (Mad Fientist, 2021). His story is a near-perfect illustration of the research in this chapter. Time freedom made room for intrinsically motivated, deeply meaningful work, but autonomy also meant that he alone was responsible for summoning the courage to use it.

Pete Adeney (Mr. Money Mustache) — leisure without apology

Pete Adeney stopped full-time work at around 30 and began writing as Mr. Money Mustache in 2011, heading his first post with the question ‘What do you mean you retired at 30?’ (Adeney, 2011). The freedoms he listed there were not about luxury consumption. They were about time: raising young children, long trips away and small unhurried pleasures on weekday mornings. In a reply to a reader beneath that first post, he also recommended keeping the door open to occasional paid work if circumstances required it (Adeney, 2011), a reminder that for many early retirees, ‘retired’ means free to choose rather than forbidden to work.

A balanced view

The evidence that time affluence and autonomy support wellbeing is strong and consistent, but it comes with important limits that anyone considering early retirement should take seriously.

First, most retirement research is not about early retirees. The GAZEL, Finnish and Health and Retirement Study findings concern people leaving work in their fifties and sixties, often from secure public-sector jobs. People who retire at 35 or 45 face different circumstances: decades of market uncertainty, peers who are still working, and in many cases young children. Giurge and colleagues note that time poverty research has hardly looked at people who work few or no hours, and they explicitly name retirees as a group needing more study (Giurge, Whillans and West, 2020).

Second, the stories in this chapter are self-selected. People who write blogs about how well early retirement is going are, almost by definition, people for whom it is going reasonably well, and most are North American professionals with high earnings. Their experiences are real, but they are not a representative sample.

Third, too much unstructured time can hurt. Sharif and colleagues’ finding that very high levels of discretionary time are linked to lower wellbeing when not spent productively is a genuine warning (Sharif, Mogilner and Hershfield, 2021). So is the ONS finding that working-age retirees spend around three hours a day watching television (Office for National Statistics, 2023). Brandon’s discovery that removing his job did not remove his fears (Mad Fientist, 2021), and Tanja Hester’s need to rebuild a sense of purpose (Hester, 2018), show that autonomy brings responsibility as well as release.

Fourth, the sociologist David Ekerdt observed long ago that retired people often justify their leisure through a ‘busy ethic’, filling their days with activity in ways that echo the work ethic and defend them against the stereotype of idleness (Ekerdt, 1986). Some of this is healthy. But it is worth asking whether our busyness in retirement is chosen or merely performed. Genuine autonomy includes the freedom to rest.

Finally, choice is the hinge. Calvo and colleagues’ finding that perceived choice matters more than the form of retirement (Calvo, Haverstick and Sass, 2009) cuts both ways. Retirement pushed on people by ill health, redundancy or caring duties is often a very different experience. Justin’s story shows how financial preparation can convert an involuntary job loss into a chosen retirement, but not everyone has that cushion, and it would be wrong to pretend that time freedom is equally available to all.

Putting it into practice

• Calculate your real hourly wage. Following Robin and Dominguez, add up all the hours your job really takes (commuting, getting ready, recovering, work-related errands) and subtract all the costs it really imposes. Divide what is left by the hours. The result often reframes spending decisions as trades of life energy (Robin and Dominguez, 1992; Robin, n.d.).
• Ask the three questions. For each category of spending, Robin suggests asking: did I receive fulfilment, satisfaction and value in proportion to life energy spent? Is this in alignment with my values and life purpose? How might this change if I didn’t have to work for a living? (Robin, n.d.).
• Run a time audit. For one ordinary week, record what you do in half-hour blocks and mark each block as chosen or imposed. Notice which imposed hours you would reclaim first, and which chosen ones you would want more of.
• Design your ideal week on paper. Borrow Justin’s approach and sketch a typical week in early retirement, divided into work, physical activity, fun and social time (Root of Good, 2015). If the plan looks empty, that is valuable information now rather than later.
• Aim for the sweet spot, not the maximum. The research suggests that wellbeing is highest when discretionary time is generous but purposeful (Sharif, Mogilner and Hershfield, 2021). Plan anchors for your days: a project, a regular commitment, a physical routine, time with people.
• Start the intrinsically rewarding things now. Whillans’s research suggests that valuing time leads to more intrinsically rewarding choices (Whillans, Macchia and Dunn, 2019). Brandon’s experience suggests that waiting for total freedom can be a way of postponing fear (Mad Fientist, 2021). Begin the album, the course or the garden before you leave work.
• Buy time where it counts. While you are still working, consider spending modest amounts to outsource tasks you dislike, which is associated with greater life satisfaction (Whillans et al., 2017).
• Allow for a detox phase. Expect the first months to be about rest and recovery, as Tanja Hester described (Hester, 2018). Resist the pressure to fill the calendar immediately.
• Protect your autonomy from new obligations. Once you are known to be ‘free’, requests will multiply. Say yes to what you endorse, and practise saying no to what you do not.

Questions for reflection

1. If you calculated your real hourly wage in life energy, which of your current expenses would you still gladly pay for?
2. Which hours of your present week feel most truly yours, and what makes them feel that way?
3. What would you do with a free Tuesday morning at half past ten, and what does your answer reveal about what you value?
4. Is there a project you are waiting to start ‘when you have time’? What, honestly, is standing in the way today?
5. How would you know whether you had too much unstructured time? What early warning signs would you watch for?
6. Whose time, besides your own, would your freedom change? A partner’s, a child’s, a parent’s, a community’s?
7. How will you tell the difference between chosen busyness and the ‘busy ethic’ of keeping up appearances?

References