Valuing time over money is associated with greater happiness

Indeed it's easier to value time over money if you have a lot of money and your time is highly valued.

Money is nothing if you have it. Money is everything if you don't have it.

> Resource Orientation Measure (ROM) Across all studies, we assessed whether individuals prioritized having more time or having more money by presenting them with a bina ry choice. To help participants imagine these trade-offs concretely and to encourag e honest responding (Fisher, 1993), we asked participants to read a short paragraph des cribing two individuals who prioritize money or who prioritize time in their daily lives. The identities of the characters and the pronouns used in the vignettes were matched to the participant’s gender (Tina/Tom and Maggie/Michael); for participants who did not repor t identifying as either male or female, the names and pronouns used in the vignettes were d isplayed as gender neutral (Madison/Taylor). The choices were presented as fol lows: Tina values her time more than her money. She is willing to sacrifice h er money to have more time. For example, Tina would rather w ork fewer hours and make less money, than work more hours and make more mone y. Maggie values her money more than her time. She is willing to sacrifice he r time to have more money. For example, Maggie would rathe r work more hours and make more money, than work fewer hours and have mor e time. We chose a binary response format for pragmatic and theoretical reasons. Practically, there is an increased awareness about the importance of conducting research with large representative samples (Open Science Col laboration, 2015). Thus, it is necessary to design short measures that minimize pa rticipant burden while maximizing reliability (Nagy, 2002). Conceptually, we chose th is response format because we were interested in assessing people’s broad preferences related to prioritizing time over money, as opposed to assessing people’s domain-specific pr eferences.

A perhaps laudable measure in order to increase study coherence, but it definitely limits the usefulness of this study in terms of making nuanced life choices.