Answer this question without counting first before reading further. How many free hours did you have yesterday?
Something small, usually, such as an hour. Half an hour if it had been a long day. Others will laugh and say none at all.
Count. Go back through yesterday from the moment you woke up. The minutes in the queue, the twenty minutes on the sofa after dinner, the stretch on the phone before sleep. Be honest about the number.
For many, the second number will be greater than the first number. Not always. However, frequently enough to take notice of the difference between the two. There was more time in the day than there seemed to be.
That difference is the subject of this piece. Every year on the first Sunday of November, most clocks in the United States move backward by one hour. Everyone gets to have an extra hour in one day and most of us will hardly even notice the difference. By Wednesday, the days will feel short once again.
This piece is not here to offer you a way to fit more into your week. There are already lots of ways out there and most of them seem to compress your week further. Here, we will explore what some well-researched studies show about our feeling of time shortage and what might help make it a bit wider. After which, it will offer you one small idea to try, once, this week.
A shortage that is partly a feeling
Start with an oddity. People earn more than ever, yet feel short of time. The phenomenon is labeled by some scientists as a time famine. The day has not gotten shorter. But the sensation of scarcity has increased.
Note that there are two dimensions here. The first is real available time and the second is the perception of having enough time. Both these aspects are linked but are not one and the same. Two people with the same free evening can walk into it very differently. One will feel abundant in time while the other feels pressed for time. The bulk of time management literature focuses on the first of the two.
This kind of time management involves rearranging tasks and filling the gaps. This feeling can alter without gaining another minute.
The hour you can buy
Ashley Whillans, Elizabeth Dunn, Michael Norton and co-researchers, in 2017, posed a simple question. Could we use our income to get back the hours we don't enjoy?
They examined large-scale surveys involving 6,271 individuals in the United States, Canada, Denmark, and the Netherlands. The people who paid for saving their time reported being happier.
Since surveys could only provide correlation, an experiment was also conducted by the research team. This involved the distribution of $40 to working adults in Vancouver for two weekends. On one weekend, they used it for buying things that saved them time while on the other, they purchased a material thing. Every evening, they would report their feelings.
Following the time-saving purchase, individuals reported feeling more positively and less negatively, and had reduced time pressures. The lower the time pressure, the higher was their happiness.
The authors expressed their conclusion in one single line.
They wrote that "using money to buy time can protect people from the detrimental effects of time pressure."
There is one more interesting detail that I can mention. In one other experiment they conducted, when participants were asked what they would do with a cash windfall, almost no one responded that they would invest it in saving time. The helpful choice rarely came to mind.
Not too little, and not too much
Perhaps the obvious response would be to increase the availability of time. Free up the schedule, and the sensation of being scarce would disappear. But a second stream of research implies that things are not that simple.
In 2021, Marissa Sharif, Cassie Mogilner and Hal Hershfield examined the relation between free time and well-being using two major American surveys: one where people recalled in detail their activities throughout the past day and another one where adult working respondents evaluated their life satisfaction.
The result was a slow hill. Well-being increased with free time until a certain limit. The limit was at about two hours a day. It started to go downhill beyond five hours.
To test this idea directly, they conducted online experiments asking people to imagine themselves having a small, moderate or a lot of free time every day. People in the small-free-time condition and in the a-lot-of-time condition expected to feel worse than those with a moderate amount of free time.
But there is an interesting addition. A hobby changed that: people expected to feel about as good as the middle group. The difference was what filled the hours.
Think of it for a minute. Feeling like one has sufficient time appears to have more to do with what goes into the room than with its size.
The old letter about a short life
Seneca, almost two thousand years ago, mentioned this issue in his letters to his friend Paulinus. The people of that age, too, complained about life being short. But Seneca disagreed. Life is long enough, according to him, for people who know how to live their lives properly. What makes it seem like a short life is all the time spent while doing something else.
This is an ancient letter, which comes off as quite severe at first glance. When read in the context of the studies, it mellows down. Seneca was not advising Paulinus to be more productive. Rather, he was simply advising him to know where his hours were going and save a few for himself.
In an earlier piece on boredom, we saw how quickly the hand reaches for the phone when a minute feels empty. The moments are real time. They are simply that type of time which never felt like our own.
Giving time away
This is an interesting discovery that seems counter-intuitive at first glance. In 2012, Cassie Mogilner, Zoë Chance and Michael Norton conducted four different studies on the consequences of people spending some of their time helping others.
Time spent on others was contrasted with wasting time, time spent on oneself, and even with the gift of unexpected free time. Time spent on others made people feel as if they had more time, rather than less. The number of hours in the day did not change. But how they experienced those hours differed. They pointed out that when people give time to others, people feel competent and efficacious, and such feelings make time feel expanded.
The person who has just helped someone else does not perceive herself as a person without any extra time but as someone who had time to share.
The minute that stops the clock
One last paper, and the limitations. In 2012, Melanie Rudd, Kathleen Vohs and Jennifer Aaker investigated what would happen to people's perception of time when experiencing feelings of awe, which is described as the emotion experienced when one stands in front of something large. A waterfall. The night sky. The cityscape from a very high vantage point.
In three studies, the researchers created an experience of awe for their subjects. In one experiment, people were asked to watch a film about waterfalls, whales and astronauts. Others wrote an essay about one of their experiences that triggered feelings of awe, while others read a story about climbing Eiffel Tower and admiring the view of Paris laid out below them.
When compared with those feeling happy or neutral emotions, the participants who felt awe said that they had greater availability of time. They were less impatient. They were more inclined to sacrifice their time for helping others, but no more inclined to spend their money. They also felt more satisfied in that moment.
The authors related this to the present moment. Awe appears to make attention focus on the present moment, and when one is wholly in the present moment, time doesn't feel limited anymore.
What these studies cannot tell you
The virtue of honesty requires boundaries, and these studies have them.
The associations found are not the causes; the survey does not reveal cause-and-effect relationships. The field experiment with the $40 was conducted on a small sample, only two weekends in one city. The free time studies asked individuals to imagine their life rather than living it. The awe experiments measured feelings in the moment, in a laboratory or online, and not across the weeks of a real life.
There is also the question of money. The more money you have to spend, the easier it is to buy time; the authors themselves note that their research subjects were mostly not extremely poor. If you have a tight week because you have a tight budget, it just might not be feasible for you to pay someone to do an hour of work. There is nothing about this that requires pretending otherwise.
But none of this would change a harsh winter into a mild one. Whether you have a baby, you work two jobs, or take care of your parents, days are truly short. The research does not deny it. Some hours can simply feel wider.
One wider hour
Do this just once, this week.
First, pick an ordinary day and write down where your free minutes were spent. No need to criticize them. Just to see it. The sum total could turn out to be more than what you had imagined.
Second, delegate one task you do not like if possible. Buy it out, exchange it with your friend, or simply ignore it for a week. See how this liberated hour makes you feel in comparison to a normal hour.
Third, take a little bit of time for someone else. Ten minutes will be enough for that. Call up someone who will be pleased to talk to you, lend a helping hand with something heavy, send a little note. Mine reads: "Erdem, this hour is not for me." It takes the hour out of the race and gives it a purpose.
Fourth, take one minute to experience awe. Gaze into the sky at twilight, stand beside a body of water, or look at something big and slow. Make it the minute you're in, rather than the minute before the next thing.
Lastly, consider how the week went for you. You may discover that you have more time than you imagined. There could be the realization that there was actually none, which is equally important to know.
The extra hour
The clock hands will give you one free hour on the first Sunday in November. Most people would sleep through it.
Seneca wouldn't have cared. It had nothing to do with the value of the gift.
Which hour will you keep wide?