How to find more time

Want to add some hours to your day? OK, you (probably) can’t alter the fabric of time. But a new study suggests that the way you feel about your goals can alter your concept of time – and that some simple strategies could make you feel less rushed. In a series of experiments, Jordan Etkin, a professor of marketing at Duke, and her co-authors, Ioannis Evangelidis and Jennifer Aaker, looked at what happens when people see their goals as conflicting with one another. In one, they asked some participants to list two of their goals that they felt were in conflict, and others simply to list two of their goals. Those who were forced to think about conflicting aims felt more time pressure than those who weren’t.

The hurry may be in your head

In another experiment, the researchers gave participants a similar prompt regarding goal conflict, but this time measured their anxiety as well as their attitudes toward time. They found that participants who thought about conflicting goals had more anxiety than those who didn’t, and that this, in turn, led to feelings of being short on time. “Stress and anxiety and time pressure are closely linked concepts,” Etkin explained. “When we feel more stress and anxiety in relation to our personal goals, that manifests as a sense of having less time.” Technological advances that allow people to do lots of things at once may exacerbate the feeling of goal conflict, she said. “On our phones, we can flip or toggle back and forth between dealing with family members and friends and colleagues, making appointments for our pets, making appointments for our kids.” “I think the easier it is for us to try to tackle a lot of these things simultaneously,” she said, “the more opportunity there is for us to feel this conflict between our goals.” She isn’t the first to suggest that actual busyness isn’t the only thing that can make us feel busy. In The Atlantic last year, Derek Thompson wrote that “as a country, we’re working less than we did in the 1960s and 1980s.” One reason some Americans still feel so overworked, he wrote, may be the disappearance of a distinction between work and free time, which “creates an always-on expectation that makes it hard for white-collar workers to escape the shadow of work responsibilities.” As Brigid Schulte writes in her 2014 book, Overwhelmed: How to Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, some researchers believe “our perception of time is, indeed, our reality.” Fortunately, Etkin and her team did find ways of making us feel better about time – or, at least, of mitigating the negative influence of goal conflict. When participants performed a breathing exercise that reduced their anxiety, the impact of such conflict on their perception of time was less pronounced. Reframing anxiety as excitement (by reading the phrase “I am excited!” aloud several times) had a similar effect. “A lot of our emotional experiences are subject to the lens that we put on them,” said Etkin. And stress “actually has a lot in common with emotions like excitement.” Breathing and reframing may not solve everyone’s time problems – Schulte writes that some Americans are indeed working more than they used to. She cites the work of the sociologists Michael Hout and Caroline Hanley, who have “found that working parents combined put in 13 more hours a week on the job in 2000 than they did in 1970. That’s 676 hours – about 28 days – of additional paid work a year for a family.” Sometimes, we may feel short on time because we actually are. However, Etkin believes her findings suggest we may “have the ability to influence our experience of time more than we think we do.” “We’re all going to have times in our lives or in our days when our goals seem to be in more conflict than others,” she said. But with techniques like the ones her team tested, “we really can help ourselves feel like we have more time.”