Does IQ predict people using their time the way they'd ideally want to use it?

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Yes it does. The way we examined this was by asking people (n = 516) a) what is the ideal amount of time they would like to spend on various activities and b) what is the actual time they spend on those same activities. The activities we asked them about were spending time on the internet, exercising, planning for the future, reading, sleeping, spending time with a partner, spending time with family, spending time with friends, watching TV and working. For each of the activities we calculated the difference between the ideal and actual time and summed up the absolute values of those differences to obtain a total time discrepancy score. Therefore, the higher the total time discrepancy score, the more actual time spent on activities differs from people's reported ideal time. When we correlated this time discrepancy score with our IQ measure, the correlation was r = -0.23 meaning that higher IQ people spend more of their time as they would ideally like compared to lower IQ people. The link between using time the way you most desire does not seem to be explained by household income because even when controlling for household income we find that the correlation between time use discrepancy and IQ remains the same. Here is the scatterplot of this relationship.

What do the other studies say?

We did not find studies or meta-analyses that investigated this same question that we  did here, but under the assumption that good management of own time requires a good self control and is therefore an indicator of self control, we can look at what other studies say about the relationship between IQ and self control. Here, the results seem to indicate a positive relationship between IQ and self control, such as in Duckworth et al. (2012) study on n = 1264 students where students’ IQ was correlated with parent and teacher reports of students’ self control (r = 0.25 and r = 0.33 respectively).There is also a meta analysis by Shamosh & Gray (2008) on the relationship between IQ and delay discounting which is a form of self control that found the correlation between IQ and delay discounting to be r = -0.23 (this is expected as lower delay discounting implies higher self control). Thus, in this sense, our results are in line with previous literature. However, even if this time discrepancy is related to self-control, it likely involves other factors beyond self-control.

Takeaways

• Higher IQ people are more successful in using their time as they would ideally like to than lower IQ people.

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