Lack of time is an unfortunate consequence of modern life for many of us. But what if we told you that it’s entirely possible to create more time for yourself – and not just by making to-do lists and saying ‘no’ to invitations?
The fact is, with a little shift in attitude, perspective or even surroundings, you can make more time in your day. Here’s how:
Do you find your weekends or evenings rush past? Then do a few things you’ve never done before – even eating a new food or walking a different way to the gym counts.
“As soon as you vary routine you’re forced to be mindful. You notice more things around you and this novelty tricks you into experiencing that time as slightly longer in retrospect,” says Claudia Hammond, in her book Time Warped.
Oddly, the time you’re doing that new thing will go faster – especially if it’s something fun – but when you look back at the weekend or evening, you’ll feel like you had a longer break than normal.
You’ve taken on a little bit more than you can handle and the stress is building. Don’t start panicking, start doing maths. According to Professor James Kellaris from the University of Cincinnati, you can make the amount of time you have to do a task seem longer if you break it into a microscopic frame of reference like minutes or seconds.
You don’t have eight hours to get your report finished, you have 480 minutes. And it works just as well when you’re relaxing. For example, “My morning tea is not a quarter of an hour, it’s 1000 seconds to do with what I like,” he says.
According to Dr Steve Taylor, psychology lecturer at Leeds Metropolitan University and author of Making Time, one of the best ways to slow down the seconds is to live in the present.
“Most of us spend a lot of our time thinking about the future and the past and pay little attention to what we’re doing right now. But paying attention to ‘the now’ means our minds take in more information – and that stretches time in exactly the same way a new experience does,” he says.
Try it for yourself. Next time you walk to the sandwich bar at lunch, don’t go on autopilot. Do a sense audit. What colours can you see? What can you smell?
Notice every sensation under your feet as you walk and the sounds around you. Your walk will take the same amount of time but it’ll feel much longer – and you may even notice a few things that make you smile.
This is the idea that a task will expand to the amount of time you give it and, according to time management expert Miriam Castilla, it’s one of the biggest reasons why we run out of hours in our day.
“It’s particularly common when doing anything boring or difficult where we have a tendency to procrastinate. These tasks can then swell and take over the day.”
If this sounds like your work day or weekend, a time-management tool called the Pomodoro Technique could help. This sees you dividing your work into 25-minute chunks, calculating how many chunks you think the job will take. You set a timer for 25 minutes and focus completely on this task until it rings. Then take a five minute break before starting another set. Repeat until you’ve done the job.
“By working in sprints you beat distraction – and by allocating a set number of Pomodoros in which to complete a task, you also use Parkinson’s Law to your advantage,” says Castilla.
This might sound odd – after all, if you don’t think you’ve got enough hours in the day, why would you want to add another item to your to-do list? Because, according to research at the University of Philadelphia, when we give up time to help others we feel we have more time to spend on ourselves.
It works because doing something for others gives us a huge sense of accomplishment. The more we feel we accomplish in a period of time, the longer that time feels. This causes our perception of what we can do with time in the future to expand as well.
You’re just home from work and you have 10 minutes to yourself before you have to get ready to go out again. It can make you stressed enough that you end up cancelling your next commitment. But don’t. Put on the stereo and play a song you truly love, and listen to every note.
Why? According to a study by Professor Kellaris, time goes slower when we’re listening to songs we love. “Possibly because if we’re allocating all our cognitive resources to music, the amount our internal clock has to draw on is reduced,” he says.
Numerous studies have found the cooler your body temperature, the longer time seems to take to pass. We’re not saying you should spend your day shivering, but if you’re under pressure from a deadline, taking off a layer might help stop some that time-related panic.
According to Stanford University research, experiencing awe makes our perception of time slow down. It works because you get so wrapped up in the experience that you’re totally in the present. And, as Dr Taylor told us, being in the now slows down time.
You might wonder where you find awe in the average day, but it’s remarkably easy: notice the sunset, spend a moment marvelling over a fascinating news story or simply update your screensaver to a breathtaking nature scene like the Alps or the Grand Canyon.
So you’ve had a terrible day. You don’t want it to last longer – Professor Kellaris’s time-warping tip helps to stop you thinking about it, freeing up your time to do happier things. He suggests you look at today or even the hour you had that row with your partner as a percentage of your life.
“If I live to 84, the worst hour of my life is only 0.00000135899 of my total life span. That’s a blip on life’s radar,” he says.
Text: bauersyndication.com.au