We have an odd
paradox, time is our enemy, while more time is also considered a luxury.
Looking back, things
probably weren’t much different in 1682, when William Penn wrote: “Time is
what we want most, but what, alas! we use worst.”
Understanding
our strange relationship with time can help us manage it better. When you feel
like you have time, the world opens up. You’re motivated to act and explore on
the one hand, and revel in the luxury of it on the other.
Contrast that
when you feel like you don’t have enough time.
It’s stressful and taxing and you start making decisions based on that anxious
feeling of lack. It might mean reaching for the quick, unhealthy snack rather
than your usual walk and putting those non-urgent
(but important) activities that nourish and enrich you, like exercise,
personal projects, and relationships, on hold.
Since how you
think about time affects the reality of how you spend it, the ability to
influence that perception can be incredibly powerful. Here are three surprising
methods, backed by research, that will help expand your sense of time and
motivate better decisions about how you use it.
Give Time to Others
One of the most
counterintuitive things you can do to increase your sense of time is to give
some of it away.
Cassie Mogilner,
from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, found that spending time on other people instead of wasting time or spending unexpected
free time on yourself, expands your sense of present and future time. For
example, in one experiment, participants had to either write a short letter to
a seriously ill child or count the number of times the letter “e” showed up in
some Latin text. The letter-writers reported that they felt like they had more
time.
In a follow-up
experiment, Mogilner and her colleagues asked some people to spend 10 or 30
minutes “doing something for yourself that you weren’t already planning to do
today.” Others were assigned the task of spending 10 or 30 minutes on someone
else, doing something that hadn’t been planned. The duration of the time spent
didn’t matter but what they spent it on did — spending time on others expanded
people’s sense of the future.
This expansion
happens because helping people increases your sense of usefulness and
effectiveness. As Mogilner explains:
Decompressing in
front of the television or getting a massage might be fun and relaxing, but
activities like these are unlikely to increase feelings of self-efficacy.
Indeed, people’s choice to spend additional leisure time on themselves may
partly explain why the increase in leisure time in modern life has not
increased people’s feelings of time affluence.
Instead, spend
time on others to help that stressful feeling like you’re trying to squeeze
your day into a shoe size that’s too small. You don’t have to donate
extraordinary amounts. Mogilner notes that little acts of prosocial behaviour are
enough: “Carve out 10 to 15 minutes a day to do something for someone else.”
Seek Awesome
When you think
about a point at which time stood still or even melted away, as you were caught
up in the moment, there’s a good likelihood that you were experiencing awe.
Indeed, researchers Melanie Rudd and Jennifer Aaker from Stanford and Kathleen
Vohs from the University of Minnesota confirmed in a series of studies that awe expands your sense of
time.
The feeling of
awe, itself, is quite expansive. It’s what you feel when you perceive a kind of
vastness that shifts your understanding of the world, altering your perspective
about your place in it. You might, for example, experience awe from
encountering immensity or beauty, like the Grand Canyon, or a personal turning
point like childbirth.div></div>
In one
experiment, participants who watched awe-eliciting commercials featuring images
like beautiful waterfalls and astronauts in space reported feeling like they
had more time than people who watched happiness-eliciting commercials. The
researchers found that this expanded sense of time even increased people’s
willingness to volunteer to help others because they felt less impatient.
Awe
helps you live in the present, captivating your attention, the study explains, which itself stretches
out time because you’re not as concerned with how much of it you have.
You might think
that awe-eliciting experiences might be hard to find but small doses can be
enough. Remember that even the one-minute ads that the researchers used in the
experiment were effective. Seek out things that make you go “whoa.” One
of the best ways to do that is to get out and experience the beauty and wonders
of nature. Experience new things such as travel, which helps you focus on the
present moment and increase the chance of an awe-inspiring moment. Or, as Vohs points out, simply look up at the night sky.
Schedule Good Stuff
Just enjoying
the moment seems like an obvious answer to increasing our happiness and
reducing anxiety over how we’re spending it. The problem is that we often deny
ourselves those moments because we feel too busy, creating an unhealthy feedback loop, or we feel
guilty, which lessens our enjoyment of it.
In a paper for The
Journal of Consumer Psychology, Aaker, Rudd, and Mogilner [pdf] examined how rethinking time
affects our happiness and concluded that it also depends on our sense of
control. They write:
having spare
time and perceiving control over how to spend that time (i.e. discretionary
time) has been shown to have a strong and consistent effect on life
satisfaction and happiness, even controlling for the actual amount of free time
one has.
Feeling an expanded
sense of time makes us happier because we feel like we’re not victim to forces
totally outside of our power.
Using time
wisely requires managing our sense of control over how we spend our time
rather than letting time just happen to us. Aaker, in an interview with Eric Barker, suggests that a good way to do this is to schedule
things that you want to spend time on as diligently as you might schedule a
business meeting. If you want to exercise or spend more time with a friend or
read more, literally put it into your calendar.
The suggestion
sounds almost too simple and maybe even a little too type-A, but the fact
remains that we don’t follow through on our goals. As Aaker explains
that even though our smarter selves know what energizes and sustains us, “there
is often a gap between where people say they want to spend their
time and how they actually spend their time.”
You can close
the gap of habit and regain a better sense of control by making your desired
activity an easier decision so that you’re less at the mercy of self-doubt,
procrastination, and inertia to overpower you. “When you put something on a
calendar, you’re more likely to actually do that activity – partly because
you’re less likely to have to make an active decision whether you should do it
– because it’s already on your calendar.” It’s like smarter past-you has got
future-you’s back.
Fill in your time with what you really want to do instead of filling
your thoughts with regret on missed opportunities and how you’ll get to goals
when you have a spare moment. The productive spare moment is a rare beast
indeed, and the chances are higher that you’ll have the time when you schedule
it.
In Summary
The secret to
changing your time mindset comes down to convincing yourself that you have
enough so that it’s not an enemy or an opponent to race, beat, and kill. When
you work with it and make it work for you, you’ll stop feeling exhausted and
overwhelmed from swimming against its current.
I hope this helps you
to be outstanding.
That is all -
David
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