counted his hours, she noticed that Sean was spending a large amount of time in the classroom. She
was worried that he would burn out, and Sean recognized that he might be at risk: “It’s a pretty
significant commitment given that I have a day job.” But instead of scaling back his hours, Sean asked
for more: “It’s among the most valuable things that I do.” The more hours he volunteered teaching, the
more energized he felt, until he approached two weeks and cleared one hundred hours of annual
volunteering on educational initiatives.
One hundred seems to be a magic number when it comes to giving. In a study of more than two
thousand Australian adults in their mid-sixties, those who volunteered between one hundred and eight
hundred hours per year were happier and more satisfied with their lives than those who volunteered
fewer than one hundred or more than eight hundred hours annually. In another study, American adults
who volunteered at least one hundred hours in 1998 were more likely to be alive in 2000. There were
no benefits of volunteering more than one hundred hours. This is the 100-hour rule of volunteering. It
appears to be the range where giving is maximally energizing and minimally draining.
A hundred hours a year breaks down to just two hours a week. Research shows that if people start
volunteering two hours a week, their happiness, satisfaction, and self-esteem go up a year later. Two
hours a week in a fresh domain appears to be the sweet spot where people make a meaningful
difference without being overwhelmed or sacrificing other priorities. It’s also the range in which
volunteering is most likely to strike a healthy balance, offering benefits to the volunteer as well as the
recipients.* In a national study, several thousand Canadians reported the number of hours that they
volunteered per year, and whether they gained new technical, social, or organizational knowledge and
skills from volunteering. For the first few hours a week, volunteers gained knowledge and skills at a
consistent rate. By five hours a week, volunteering had diminishing returns: people were learning less
and less with each additional hour. After eleven hours a week, additional time volunteered no longer
added new knowledge and skills.
When Conrey started volunteering as an alumni mentor for TFA, she was giving about seventy-
five hours a year. When she launched Minds Matter, the nonprofit mentoring program for high school
students, she sailed over the 100-hour mark. Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that her energy was
restored right around that point. But it wasn’t just the amount of time that mattered; there’s another
form of chunking in Conrey’s giving that’s also apparent in Sean Hagerty’s giving, and it reveals a key
contrast between selfless and otherish giving.
As Sean Hagerty spent more time teaching in the Vanguard classroom, he began to crave more
opportunities for giving. “I want to leave the place better than I entered it in my small way,” he says,
and he began asking himself how he could have an impact on the world. As he reflected on different
ways of giving, he noticed a pattern in how he was spending his free time. “I found myself reading
more and more about education. I had a natural passion for it.” Sean decided to lead and launch two
new programs around education. One program is called The Classroom Economy, and it has a
national focus: Sean and his colleagues teach the basics of money management to kindergartners
around the United States. The other program, Team Vanguard, is local: Sean has partnered with a
charter school in Philadelphia to administer a four-year mentoring program, where employees
volunteer their time on evenings, weekends, and lunch breaks. Despite the substantial time
commitment, Sean found that both programs “have a tremendously positive impact on my energy. It’s
the selling point I have with senior staff who worry about volunteer hours, which take time out of the
day. It does sometimes, but my point of view is that it creates a much more highly engaged employee,
michael s
(Michael S)
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