OK I might be summarising here but spend money on saving time and you’ll be glad you did. Whether it’s getting someone to mow your garden, clean your house or ‘write my wedding speech’ – hiring in help is proven to make you happy.

A new study, published last week in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences asked 6,000 working adults to spend $40 over two weeks. The first week, they could only buy material goods. On the second, they had to make timesaving investments, like hiring somebody to clean their house or run errands for them. By a wide margin, the people who spent money on lackeys reported being substantially happier than those who just filled their homes with more stuff they probably didn’t need.

Why? Ashley Whillans, the study’s lead author and a professor at the Harvard Business School, says that culturally we tend to focus on how to buy into positive experiences, like a meal at a fancy restaurant or a holiday. But we should probably be paying more attention to the benefits of buying ourselves out of negative experiences, she says.

Now Speechy clearly doesn’t consider writing a wedding speech to be a negative experience (in fact, we’re kind of kinky and rather like it). Some people, however, see writing a speech on par with going to Ikea on a Bank Holiday and realising the queue for meatballs is over an hour long (or is that just our personal idea of hell?)

Anyway, the conclusion is, if you’re not enjoying the process of crafting your speech, feel free to give us a call. We’d love to give you your life back. And if it means we’re too busy to go shopping for a Billy bookcase, then so be it.

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