When I interviewed Alan Johnston he was waiting to hear whether heavy snow would prevent him from reaching Scotland for Christmas. It wasn’t looking hopeful, but his reaction suggested that despite what he said, he had taken something lasting from his experience. ‘If I don’t go to Scotland for Christmas it’s not the end of the world,’ he told me. ‘When I was in captivity I’d have given anything to be stuck in London unable to get home for Christmas, or sitting on a plane waiting for them to offload a Chihuahua.’
Luckily most people won’t encounter a situation as appalling as Alan’s, but his experience does demonstrate the flexibility of our experience of time. If he can make time in captivity go faster, then it must be possible for the rest of us to speed up our experience on something inconsequential like a long-haul flight. To do it, you need to make every attempt to avoid all the factors which are known to decelerate time, which is of course what most people try to do. They try to get comfortable and then they partake in that hour-engulfing activity so despised by time researchers – watching TV. It works because anything that absorbs you or distracts you from the passage of time itself will make it speed up. So you should avoiding checking your watch too.
But what if you find yourself in a situation without such distractions? You’re on a broken-down train with nothing to read, no signal on your phone and no one to talk to. In this situation you need to do the opposite: distracting yourself from your surroundings is not going to work, so try focusing on them instead. This is where mindfulness comes into play again. Taking the senses one at a time, observe everything in the carriage. Notice all the different textures – the smooth, shiny poles, the slightly furry seats, the metal ridges on the floor. Then there are the smells, the sounds, the sights. If you can look on this as an opportunity to practise 10 minutes of uninterrupted mindfulness then you’ll feel less irritated. The more absorbed you become, the faster time will go.
PROBLEM 3: TOO MUCH TO DO, TOO LITTLE TIME
The invention of the car hasn’t saved us hours of travelling; instead we travel further. Social-networking sites haven’t saved us time seeing people; instead we stay in touch with more people and communicate with them more often. When I learnt to edit radio programmes I used white sticky tape and a razor blade. We would sit and edit with long strings of black tape hanging round our necks. We would sometimes cut our fingers by mistake and became accustomed to sorting patiently through spaghetti-like tangles of tape on the floor to find the perfect piece when yet again we had dropped it. There was no doubt that it was more time-consuming, but now that today’s digital editing means we can edit much faster it has also allowed us to become fussier, removing every ‘um’ and ‘er’ and experimenting more with the order of a piece. The result is that it takes us just as long.
Despite all the new technology we have, many of us still feel there aren’t enough hours in the day, and that if only there were, life would be easier. There is some evidence that the number of hours when we feel forced to rush has more influence than age does over the perception that time is moving fast. In an internet study of more than 1,500 people in the Netherlands, the psychologist William Friedman found that those who felt they spent a lot of their time racing to do everything they needed to, also believed time went very fast.126 The consciousness of not having enough hours draws our attention to time slipping away, making it feel faster.
The world of time management wants to come to the rescue, with its promise of improved productivity and the prospect of personal transformation by the saving of so many hours. Along with increasing our efficiency at work, we will suddenly find we have the time to learn new languages, get fit, bake our own bread in the morning, run a small start-up from home in the evening and charm friends with the hand-made gifts we make for them at weekends. The only problem is that however clever some of the techniques of time management might appear – software that analyses your computer-use second by second, digital alarms which marshal the minutes, advice on triaging your tasks, not triaging your tasks, setting goals, assessing urgency versus importance or even timing tasks to fit in with your ‘natural rhythms’ – there’s very little researched evidence to suggest that adopting these techniques makes any difference at all.
Some swear by starting the working day doing a single task for an hour before opening their emails. This gives them the satisfaction of completing a substantive task early in the day, ahead of an activity that invariably results in a list of new tasks. Others find lists help them to prioritise, and serve as a memory aid, but of course this only saves time if you don’t spend more time colour-coding the list than working. Some keep a ‘done’ list, adding tasks after they’ve been completed, giving them the pleasure in seeing how much they’ve achieved in a day. There are tips to deal with the screenfuls of emails waiting for you after a holiday, such as starting with the most recent instead of the earliest in the hope that some problems have been resolved by the time you reach the newer messages, or the riskier strategy of deleting the whole lot on the basis that if anything is really vital either someone else will tell you about it or the sender will email you again.
Any of these strategies might work for you, but evidence that they work for everyone or even most people is hard to find. Many people who use their time efficiently don’t employ any specific time-management techniques. Yet the quantity of advice available shows that there is a demand for help and that many people do have a desire to fit more activities into fewer hours.
This suggests to me that perhaps we need to address something different – the perception that we have no time. Most people in employment claim to be time-poor, but what if the deficit lies not in hours but in their estimation of free time? In the same way that sleep diaries reveal that people who believe they have insomnia in reality sleep for a bit longer than they realise, activity diaries demonstrate that most people underestimate the amount of free time they have – and underestimate it considerably. In one study people guessed that they had 20 hours spare each week. Their diaries revealed that they had 40. To have 40 spare hours a week would suggest you could fit in a second full-time job, but the problem of course is that not all hours in the day are created equal. Two free hours when you are tired late at night are unlikely to be as productive as two hours during the day.
Even if we concede that we have more spare time than we think, this doesn’t avoid the fact that sometimes we have deadlines to meet which seem impossible. What can research tell us about the most efficient way of using the hours when we’re up against it? Multi-tasking is a theme that comes up a lot here. Is it quicker to do things all at once or one at a time? If I look at my computer screen right now there are four Word documents open including this one, three PDFs of journal papers, three email accounts, one social-networking site and four other websites. This is partly because I refer to several sources while I work, but also because I can’t resist social contact, even when I know it distracts me.
It seems I’m not alone, and that this trend is increasing. The younger a person is, the more likely they are to employ two forms of media simultaneously. In the early evening a third of people are using two at once, for example, chatting on the phone while surfing the internet or texting while watching TV.127 In theory this could save time, like the British cabinet minister who confessed that the job was so pressured that she saved vital minutes by cleaning her teeth while she was on the loo. The alternative view is the monochronic assumption – that it is always better to complete one task before beginning the next. In research conducted over several decades, Allen Bluedorn has found that, unsurprisingly, it’s a matter of personal preference. Some people favour monochronicity and feel happier completing one task before they start the next. Others are polychronic and do appear to perform better when they are doing lots of things at once, and can excel in jobs that require them to do just that.128 Running a busy café would be a good example – though this doesn’t mean they necessarily get the jobs done faster. In a café there’s no option but to jump
from task to task. However, if your job does give you the choice, then it’s as well to be aware of what’s known as attention residue. When you switch from one task to another, it can be demonstrated experimentally that a bit of your mind is still focused on the previous task. Each time you switch back again you have to remind yourself about what it was you were doing, while dealing simultaneously with the slight distraction from the first.129 Although this can increase your cognitive load, many people still prefer to work this way and there is no problem with that. It only creates difficulties if you feel unable to focus on any single task. Then some people find that setting an egg timer for between 15 and 20 minutes, and deciding to focus on one job until it rings, can help them to concentrate. It might work for you, and it does for me, but when you do it repeatedly it can be a very intense way of working and, again, it is hard to find much more than anecdotal evidence to support the idea that working this way is beneficial. The research really hasn’t offered up a single time-management prescription that will work for everybody.
Research on future thinking has revealed that deadlines do strange things to our experience of time. In the same way that a building looks further away when you’re carrying a heavy suitcase, the psychologist Gabriela Jiga-Boy found that an event seems more distant the more you need to do before you reach it.130 But only when there’s no deadline. When there’s a firm deadline everything changes; it makes the event feel closer. So if you are house-hunting, the actual day of the move may seem far away because you know there’s so much to do beforehand, but if you have a deadline like trying to move house before the birth of your baby, the date will feel much closer.
Deadlines do strange things to the mind. They can even reduce the attention-residue problem, which can occur when moving from one task to another. When you complete a task up against a deadline, you are forced to narrow your options and to make decisions that are cognitively less complex. This in turn decreases the hangover from that first task, allowing you to put it behind you and get on with the next job. So an approaching deadline not only concentrates the mind, but allows it to clear more easily after it’s passed, leaving us to worry about the next deadline instead.
If, after experimenting with the use of deadlines and monochronic versus polychronic work, you still find yourself with too much to do and too little time to do it, then you have a choice. Either slim down your commitments or accept that you are busy and are likely to be so for a long time to come. We tend to kid ourselves that if only we can get through this week or the next month, things will be calmer in the future. This might be true if you have a big one-off project, but experience probably tells you that it’s not. Forever yearning for that calm future where everything is perfectly organised sets you up for disappointment. You probably won’t reach this imaginary period of order and relaxation. Unforeseen events will continue to happen to members of your family, computers will go wrong and something in your home will always need mending. And if you do find yourself with that longed-for, undisturbed stretch of time in which to relax, it might not even make you happier. Research on British ex-pats who had moved to south-west France found that once people had finished working on their houses they became less happy because they had nothing to do. They were now living in the gîtes or chateaux they had dreamed of and worked so hard to restore, but time hung heavy. Maybe there’s only so much pleasure to be had relaxing with a glass of rosé on the perfect terrace. As the researcher put it, if you’re moving abroad for that place in the sun, the lesson is: never finish your house. So, unless you feel you can’t cope, maybe it is best to come to some accommodation with time, to accept that your timetable is full and will continue to be so. And think of the advantages instead – a full schedule will create plenty of memories on which you can look back, reducing the impression that time is rushing by.
Or maybe you decide that you do need more spare time, in which case I like Philip Zimbardo’s recommendation that you start viewing time as a gift and choose whom to give it to. If time feels scarce, choose to give it to two sets of people – those who gain the most from spending time with you and those whom you most want to see. Refuse some invitations. I have to confess to liking the episode of Friends where, faced with someone needing help moving house, Phoebe simply said, ‘I’d love to help, but I’m afraid I don’t want to.’ Not very generous perhaps, but honest, at least.
If you do make a decision to clear more time in your diary, there is one other factor to take into account. Mark Williams, a clinical psychologist at Oxford University who researches the psychological benefits of mindfulness, has noticed that when people feel stressed and overwhelmed by their busy lives, they often choose to give up the one activity that most benefits their well-being. It is easy to see why. They can’t choose to give up their families or their jobs, but they can stop singing in a choir, taking exercise or going to evening art classes. These are added extras that might seem hard to justify time-wise, but in fact have been demonstrated to reduce stress and increase well-being.
One final word on this topic. With all today’s talk of work-life balance and 24-hour schedules, it is worth remembering that the pressures of time are not confined to modern life. In 1887 Nietzsche described a feeling that seems familiar now: ‘One thinks with a watch in one’s hand even as one eats one’s midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market.’ A compilation of five different measures of time taken over the past 50 years indicate that the average American man has six to nine hours more free time every week than he had five decades ago. The American Time Use Survey from 2010 revealed that men have 5 hours and 48 minutes of spare leisure time each day, while women have a little less (funny, that), with 5 hours and 6 minutes of leisure time each day. The survey also reveals that if people find their leisure time increases – perhaps they have found a way of working more efficiently or have reduced their commitments – then there is one chief way in which they use that longed-for extra free time. They watch more TV. So if the political scientist Robert Putnam was correct in his assertion that each extra hour people spend watching TV is associated with lower levels of social trust and group membership, then could more free time counter-intuitively result in lower levels of social engagement?131
PROBLEM 4: FAILING TO PLAN AHEAD
Sometimes, however organised you are, however much you slim down your commitments, you cannot meet your deadline, even when you chose the date yourself. Here the Planning Fallacy is at work and it means the deadline you set was never realistic. The Planning Fallacy is the tendency to believe that a job will take less time than it eventually does. If you spot that this is something you are prone to, you can avoid it. Combining the findings of all the research that’s been conducted in this area, here’s how to devise a realistic time-frame for a task: list every concrete step and estimate how long each will take; think of past events and look for similarities and differences and add on some more time if they took you longer in the past; add on some more time for anything you can recall that disrupted you last time and finally include some extra hours (or days, depending on the total duration of the project) for the unexpected to happen. Then look at your diary and calculate precisely how many hours you have available to devote to the project, bearing in mind you will have no more free time in the future than you do next week. Only after all that can you come up with a realistic deadline. The hardest part is resisting the temptation to give in to the optimistic idea that you will have more spare time in the future. Even the idea of cooking supper for friends one night next week will seem easier time-wise than the idea of doing it tonight. As a final check, since research has shown that other people make more accurate judgements about our time, describe the task to a friend and ask them to guess how long it will take you. The more skilled at deadline-setting we become, the less we are forced to rush because we stop over-committing and then fearing we’ll let other people down when we can’t keep up.
When we plan ahead, the major finding from the work on future thinking is
the tendency to ignore the inessential features of an impending event. Again there’s a simple way round this. If you feel you are someone who takes on too much (and this might not apply to you – I’m not saying everybody should turn down every request), then before you commit to an event later in the year, imagine it is happening next week. If it seems out of the question that you could fit it in, then ask yourself what steps you would need to take to be free to do it in six months’ time, remembering once again that you are unlikely to have more free time. By imagining it is next week you are more likely to consider the practical feasibility of the whole event, instead of focusing on the main part of it.
Consciously deciding to plan ahead in detail in your mind can even bring feelings of calm. The happiest people tend to imagine a greater number of separate steps in their future plans, even in something as trivial as a trip to the supermarket. They seem able to picture every detail of the trip in their minds.
This book has focused on the way we – as individuals – experience time, and how that can change our lives. But the same principles can be applied to the bigger picture. There are many examples where the ideas discussed in this book could be used to shape policy decisions. To prevent expensive over-runs on capital projects, part of the procurement process should involve a third party who analyses the factors that held up previous projects, assesses their similarity to the current project and then estimates the completion date for the project. They should be entirely neutral and separate from the bidding process. This would minimise the tendency of companies to give over-optimistic predictions of completion dates. It might feel like a waste of money to employ a consultant to do this, but when the evidence reveals our inability to make these judgements for ourselves, it could save millions or even billions.
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