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- Thursday, January 20th at 12:00pm: Time Smart: Scientific Strategies for Reclaiming Your Time & Living a Happier Life with Ashley Whillans
There’s an 80 percent chance you’re poor. Time poor, that is. Four out of five adults report feeling that they have too much to do and not enough time to do it. These time-poor people experience less joy each day. They laugh less. They are less healthy, less productive, and more likely to divorce. In one study, time stress produced a stronger negative effect on happiness than unemployment. How can we escape the time traps that make us feel this way and keep us from living our best lives? In this talk, Author and Harvard Business School professor Ashley Whillans will give you proven strategies for improving your “time affluence.”
The techniques Whillans provides will free up seconds, minutes, and hours that, over the long term, become weeks and months that you can reinvest in positive, healthy activities. The science-based strategies Whillans presents will help you make the shift to time-smart living and, in the process, build a happier, more fulfilling life.
Biography:
Ashley Whillans is an assistant professor in the Negotiation, Organizations & Markets Unit at the Harvard Business School, teaching Negotiations to Executives and the Motivation and Incentives course to MBA students. Her research investigates whether and how intangible incentives, such as experiential and time-saving rewards, affect motivation and well-being. In both 2015 and 2018, she was named a Rising Star of Behavioral Science by the International Behavioral Exchange and the Behavioral Science and Policy Association. Her research has been published in top academic journals and popular media outlets including Harvard Business Review, The New York Times, and The Wall Street Journal. Her first book “Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time & Live a Happier Life” was published in October 2020 by Harvard Business Publishing. Professor Whillans earned her BA, MA, and PhD in Social Psychology from the University of British Columbia. Prior to joining HBS, she was a visiting scholar and guest lecturer at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Her dissertation research on time and happiness won the 2018 CAGS Distinguished Dissertation Award for being the single best PhD thesis in Canada across the fine arts, humanities, and social sciences. You can find out more about Ashley’s work at http://www.ashleywhillans.com/
Already happened but you can find links to materials and watch the recordings here
- October 6th at 7 pm: Book club – The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
“Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor black tobacco farmer whose cells—taken without her knowledge in 1951—became one of the most important tools in medicine, vital for developing the polio vaccine, cloning, gene mapping, in vitro fertilization, and more. Henrietta’s cells have been bought and sold by the billions, yet she remains virtually unknown, and her family can’t afford health insurance.
… this New York Times bestseller takes readers on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers filled with HeLa cells, from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia, to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks tells a riveting story of the collision between ethics, race, and medicine; of scientific discovery and faith healing; and of a daughter consumed with questions about the mother she never knew. It’s a story inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we’re made of.”
If you choose to buy the book, we encourage you to buy from an independent bookstore. Here are some ideas:
- Frugal Bookstore, the only Black-owned bookstore in Boston
- Papercuts, an independent, woman-owned bookstore
- Bookshop.org, an online bookstore with a mission to financially support local, independent bookstores
You can also get the book through the Boston Public Library, Somerville Public Library, or Cambridge Public Library, or through online access via the Harvard Hollis System.
Everyone is welcome to attend, regardless of gender or gender identity! Please feel free to join the discussion even if you have not read or finished the book!
- November 11th at 12pm: Lunch with Allies
Please join us Thursday, November 11th at 12PM for a virtual Lunch with Allies. We will review some statistics from the Martinos Center about how gender inequities show up in our workplace, discuss ways to deepen our allyship, and reflect on our own lab cultures and practices and how they may be perpetuating inequities under the radar. People of all genders, backgrounds, and experience are encouraged to attend- this programming is crafted primarily for men. Bring your lunch and tune it- it’s time to get to work!
