Time Warped (30 page)

I am not saying that you should never watch TV, play computer games or spend a weekend doing very little. But if you really want to stop time speeding up, the answer is to devise an energetic timetable and only to watch TV when you know it will be memorable. Armed with this knowledge, it’s for you to decide which is more important to you. You might choose to spend less time in front of screens and to fill your time with memorable activities. This will give you copious memories, creating the impression that lots of time must have passed. Time will slow down. But perhaps you don’t want to do lots of new activities. Maybe part of growing older is having the option to spend more hours doing what you know you like best, rather than seeking out new experiences. Why learn to sail if you know you hate every other water sport you have ever tried? Why endlessly seek new restaurants if you live two minutes away from the
place that always serves a meal you really like? The choice is yours. Once you know
why
you have the sensation that time is speeding up, it might matter to you less than you think. Or you might decide that since time rushing by is a sign of a busy, happy life, that it doesn’t matter enough to sacrifice resting or watching programmes you enjoy. As Pliny the Younger wrote in AD 105, ‘the happier the time, the shorter it seems’.

PROBLEM
2:
MAKING TIME GO FASTER

Time has such a powerful hold over us that we both hate and fear wasting it. On days when I make radio programmes I have no spare time. Yet the fear that I might finish writing the script early and have nothing to do for an hour while I wait to go to the studio is so strong that I constantly email extra work to myself or carry extra reading with me, just in case.

This is one of the reasons we like to queue, to be certain that we don’t have to wait a moment longer than is fair. Many cultures regard it as democratic that they stand in line regardless of rank (with the exception of the advantages bought with a business-class airline ticket, of course). Barry Schwartz, a psychologist who has studied queuing, believes the reason we hate it if someone else pushes in is that we have resisted our own urge to push in and feel others ought to do the same. We know we all have to be saved from our worse selves.
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We judge the time we spend waiting to be longer than it actually is because we’re in anticipatory mode. Yet if
someone offered you a 10-minute rest doing nothing (which is effectively what queuing offers) in the middle of a busy day at work, you would probably welcome it. When waiting is forced on us in a queue we find it hard to savour the experience as the bonus of some time to do nothing. Expectations, experience and culture all influence our tolerance for queues. Having spent her young adult life in communist Poland, the writer Eva Hoffman says that because there was nothing to hurry for, queues did not present a problem. But after living in the United States and returning to Eastern Europe after the fall of communism in 1989, she found the queues intolerable.
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Sometimes we need to find a way to make time speed up, whether in a trivial situation like a post office queue or in grave circumstances like Alan Johnston’s. He told me that when he relates his experience to people (which is rare because, extraordinarily, he fears boring them) the hardest thing to communicate is the weight of having to fill all those hours locked in that room in Gaza. This is how he tells people they could understand it. Place one white, plastic chair in the middle of the room. Then sit there for three hours. Then for another six hours. Then for three hours more. Then remember that there are still four hours to go before you can allow yourself to fall asleep to relieve the boredom. If you were really to try this there would still be one major difference between your experience of time and his – you’d know you could give up at any point you choose. Alan didn’t have that option; he knew that tomorrow would be exactly the same. As would the next week. And the week after that. Maybe for years.

It was clear to Alan that in order to deal with his 18 waking hours each day, it was essential to harness the fact that we construct our own perception of time:

‘After about eleven days there was that shock-of-capture period, when you think this is absurd, you can’t go on. This isn’t going to happen. And then there are moments when you think, Christ, I’m the Brian Keenan of Gaza. I remember that eleventh night. I’d just had a wash. I sat on the chair and thought that I’d arrived on firmer psychological ground at that point. I thought, this is the long one. I could be here for three years. I’m generally quite pessimistic. If I can expect the worst scenario in my head then everything will seem easier. So I decided to be ready to take three years in captivity and that anything less than three years would be a huge bonus.’

Alan cleverly adopted a strategy of considering life through dual time-frames. While assuming he would be captive for three years, on a day-to-day basis he told himself the experience could end at any moment. ‘Every single evening when the call to prayer came I used to say to myself, almost out loud, this wasn’t your day, but maybe tomorrow will be.’

On 4 July 2007, after almost four months, the Army of Islam group holding Alan Johnston hostage handed him over to officials from Hamas. His ordeal had ended and soon he would be free to return home. It was at the start of his journey back to Scotland that he noticed that something had changed in the way he experienced time.

‘On the flight home from Israel somebody got a small dog through security. This woman sat there with a Chihuahua. When the staff realised the dog was there, we had an hour’s delay while they removed it. Everybody was so annoyed that it was slightly surreal. I couldn’t work out why they couldn’t bear waiting for just for one hour. Yet within six weeks of getting back to London I remember waiting at a bus stop and swearing because there weren’t any buses coming along. Already the old impatience had come back. I’d hoped I would avoid that. After everything my parents had gone through, and all that hassle for the BBC, I wanted to take something useful from it. It’s like walking on air when they let you go. Everything seems so fantastically good. If only you could hold on to just one per cent of that appreciation of freedom, but you very quickly see it dwindling away.’

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.