Feeling crushed for time is a common struggle in our fast-paced world. Let's delve into practical strategies to regain control, manage time effectively, and alleviate the pressure that comes with the ticking clock.
Quit worrying whether time is money and start appreciating its true value
Ashley Whillans, a behavioral scientist, says we can fight back. Her new book, Time Smart: How to Reclaim Your Time and Live a Happier Life, shows us how.
- If there’s something in your life that’s not working for you around time and money trade-offs, the best time for dealing with that is the current moment. Think about how you can incorporate more time for better social relationships, fitness, hobbies, or volunteering.
What contributes to our sense of time poverty beyond our psychological ticks?
There are a lot of organizational-cultural factors that push us to be constantly working
- The most pressing factor now is the economic recession
- Not only does the economic situation mean that people are worried about losing their jobs, but it also creates a subjective feeling of financial instability and precarious employment, which can lead us to focus more on time and less on leisure pursuits
- This general instability in the world creates this need to overcome our anxiety by being productive, making sure we’re doing a good job at our jobs
Don’t Give Up on Facts
Are You a Naïve Realist?
Kostadin Kushlev:
If you ask parents to turn off their email notifications while they’re at a science museum with their kids, they enjoy the activity more than when they had their alerts on.
- When they have the alerts on, they start thinking about the opportunity cost of that leisure.
Psychological Mechanism of Time-Poverty
We value and think about time and money in different ways
- Money is concrete, tangible – we value it now as much as we do in the future
- Time is abstract, hard to quantify, and hard to realize spontaneously what we would do with more time
- Undervalue time because we don’t account for small losses of free time to the same extent as we account for losses of money
- Feelings of time-stress are driven by increases in income
- As our income goes up, our time becomes more valuable, and anything that’s valuable is perceived as scarce
- These economic trends manifest themselves at an individual level, such as we start feeling more pressed for time as we end up getting more money
