Time Warped (31 page)

Research on future thinking has revealed that deadlines do strange things to our experience of time. In the same way that a building looks further away when you’re carrying a heavy suitcase, the psychologist Gabriela Jiga-Boy found that an event seems more distant the more you need to do before you reach it.
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But only when there’s no deadline. When there’s a firm deadline everything changes; it makes the event feel closer. So if you are house-hunting, the actual day of the move may seem far away because you know there’s so much to do beforehand, but if you have a deadline like trying to move house before the birth of your baby, the date will feel much closer.

Deadlines do strange things to the mind. They can even reduce the attention-residue problem, which can occur when moving from one task to another. When you complete a task up against a deadline, you are forced to narrow your
options and to make decisions that are cognitively less complex. This in turn decreases the hangover from that first task, allowing you to put it behind you and get on with the next job. So an approaching deadline not only concentrates the mind, but allows it to clear more easily after it’s passed, leaving us to worry about the next deadline instead.

If, after experimenting with the use of deadlines and monochronic versus polychronic work, you still find yourself with too much to do and too little time to do it, then you have a choice. Either slim down your commitments or accept that you are busy and are likely to be so for a long time to come. We tend to kid ourselves that if only we can get through this week or the next month, things will be calmer in the future. This might be true if you have a big one-off project, but experience probably tells you that it’s not. Forever yearning for that calm future where everything is perfectly organised sets you up for disappointment. You probably won’t reach this imaginary period of order and relaxation. Unforeseen events will continue to happen to members of your family, computers will go wrong and something in your home will always need mending. And if you do find yourself with that longed-for, undisturbed stretch of time in which to relax, it might not even make you happier. Research on British ex-pats who had moved to south-west France found that once people had finished working on their houses they became less happy because they had nothing to do. They were now living in the
gîtes
or chateaux they had dreamed of and worked so hard to restore, but time hung heavy. Maybe there’s only so much pleasure to be had relaxing with a glass of rosé on the
perfect terrace. As the researcher put it, if you’re moving abroad for that place in the sun, the lesson is: never finish your house. So, unless you feel you can’t cope, maybe it is best to come to some accommodation with time, to accept that your timetable is full and will continue to be so. And think of the advantages instead – a full schedule will create plenty of memories on which you can look back, reducing the impression that time is rushing by.

Or maybe you decide that you do need more spare time, in which case I like Philip Zimbardo’s recommendation that you start viewing time as a gift and choose whom to give it to. If time feels scarce, choose to give it to two sets of people – those who gain the most from spending time with you and those whom you most want to see. Refuse some invitations. I have to confess to liking the episode of
Friends
where, faced with someone needing help moving house, Phoebe simply said, ‘I’d love to help, but I’m afraid I don’t want to.’ Not very generous perhaps, but honest, at least.

If you do make a decision to clear more time in your diary, there is one other factor to take into account. Mark Williams, a clinical psychologist at Oxford University who researches the psychological benefits of mindfulness, has noticed that when people feel stressed and overwhelmed by their busy lives, they often choose to give up the one activity that most benefits their well-being. It is easy to see why. They can’t choose to give up their families or their jobs, but they can stop singing in a choir, taking exercise or going to evening art classes. These are added extras that might seem hard to justify time-wise, but in fact have been demonstrated to reduce stress and increase well-being.

One final word on this topic. With all today’s talk of work-life balance and 24-hour schedules, it is worth remembering that the pressures of time are not confined to modern life. In 1887 Nietzsche described a feeling that seems familiar now: ‘One thinks with a watch in one’s hand even as one eats one’s midday meal while reading the latest news of the stock market.’ A compilation of five different measures of time taken over the past 50 years indicate that the average American man has six to nine hours
more
free time every week than he had five decades ago. The American Time Use Survey from 2010 revealed that men have 5 hours and 48 minutes of spare leisure time each day, while women have a little less (funny, that), with 5 hours and 6 minutes of leisure time each day. The survey also reveals that if people find their leisure time increases – perhaps they have found a way of working more efficiently or have reduced their commitments – then there is one chief way in which they use that longed-for extra free time. They watch more TV. So if the political scientist Robert Putnam was correct in his assertion that each extra hour people spend watching TV is associated with lower levels of social trust and group membership, then could more free time counter-intuitively result in lower levels of social engagement?
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PROBLEM
4:
FAILING TO PLAN AHEAD

Sometimes, however organised you are, however much you slim down your commitments, you cannot meet your deadline, even when you chose the date yourself. Here the
Planning Fallacy is at work and it means the deadline you set was never realistic. The Planning Fallacy is the tendency to believe that a job will take less time than it eventually does. If you spot that this is something you are prone to, you can avoid it. Combining the findings of all the research that’s been conducted in this area, here’s how to devise a realistic time-frame for a task: list every concrete step and estimate how long each will take; think of past events and look for similarities and differences and add on some more time if they took you longer in the past; add on some more time for anything you can recall that disrupted you last time and finally include some extra hours (or days, depending on the total duration of the project) for the unexpected to happen. Then look at your diary and calculate precisely how many hours you have available to devote to the project, bearing in mind you will have no more free time in the future than you do next week. Only after all that can you come up with a realistic deadline. The hardest part is resisting the temptation to give in to the optimistic idea that you will have more spare time in the future. Even the idea of cooking supper for friends one night next week will seem easier time-wise than the idea of doing it tonight. As a final check, since research has shown that
other
people make more accurate judgements about
our
time, describe the task to a friend and ask them to guess how long it will take you. The more skilled at deadline-setting we become, the less we are forced to rush because we stop over-committing and then fearing we’ll let other people down when we can’t keep up.

When we plan ahead, the major finding from the work
on future thinking is the tendency to ignore the inessential features of an impending event. Again there’s a simple way round this. If you feel you are someone who takes on too much (and this might not apply to you – I’m not saying everybody should turn down every request), then before you commit to an event later in the year, imagine it is happening next week. If it seems out of the question that you could fit it in, then ask yourself what steps you would need to take to be free to do it in six months’ time, remembering once again that you are unlikely to have more free time. By imagining it is next week you are more likely to consider the practical feasibility of the whole event, instead of focusing on the main part of it.

Consciously deciding to plan ahead in detail in your mind can even bring feelings of calm. The happiest people tend to imagine a greater number of separate steps in their future plans, even in something as trivial as a trip to the supermarket. They seem able to picture every detail of the trip in their minds.

This book has focused on the way we – as individuals – experience time, and how that can change our lives. But the same principles can be applied to the bigger picture. There are many examples where the ideas discussed in this book could be used to shape policy decisions. To prevent expensive over-runs on capital projects, part of the procurement process should involve a third party who analyses the factors that held up previous projects, assesses their similarity to the current project and then estimates the completion date for the project. They should be entirely neutral and separate from the bidding process. This would minimise
the tendency of companies to give over-optimistic predictions of completion dates. It might feel like a waste of money to employ a consultant to do this, but when the evidence reveals our inability to make these judgements for ourselves, it could save millions or even billions.

If, as an individual, you have a tendency to plan, but then forget to actually do the things you meant to, then research on future thinking suggests a simple way of remembering that really does work. Imagine yourself carrying out those tasks and the steps you will need to follow in order to do them. So if you need to post a letter on the way to work and to buy some washing-up liquid on the way home, rather than trying to remember that you have two tasks to do, picture yourself actually doing them. Imagine which post box you will visit and when, and picture yourself putting that exact letter into the box. This only need take a second while you put the letter in your bag. Then decide where you will buy the washing-up liquid, visualise yourself finding the correct aisle, choosing a brand, picking it up and queuing to pay. This is far more effective than repeating the words to yourself in your head. It won’t work every single time, but you’ll be surprised at how often it does.

This technique can also help you to keep to any resolutions you make. If you not only make a plan, but imagine yourself carrying it out, you are far more likely to stick to it. Researchers have found it even works for encouraging people to eat more fruit. Given the goal of eating extra apples and bananas over the subsequent seven days, the students who were told to visualise when and where they
would buy the fruit, and how they would prepare it, increased their fruit consumption by twice as much as those who simply set out to eat more fruit. The crucial element in successfully using imagery is to imagine the process and not just the result. Imagining holding the trophy high won’t help you win Wimbledon, but envisioning how you will approach playing perfect shots could.

It is clear from the experiences both of Alan Johnston in captivity in Gaza and Victor Frankl in a series of Nazi concentration camps, that imagery can bring solace in the most extreme situations. I’m struck by the fact that they both made active decisions to retain mastery of the one element of their lives over which their captors did not have complete control – the state of their minds. They were both determined to use their own thinking as a mechanism for coping. In 1945 Victor Frankl wrote his memoir of his time in the camps,
Man’s Search for Meaning,
in just nine days. It has sold more than 9 million copies worldwide, a figure which he found somewhat perplexing. Up until the last moment he had been intending to publish it anonymously and was puzzled that of the dozens of books he wrote, this should be the one which made him famous. Frankl’s preoccupation with controlling his own mental state gave rise to a type of talking therapy called logotherapy. Frankl reasoned that if a person experiencing the terror of the holocaust could find a way of controlling their mind then this must be possible in everyday life as well.
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Frankl wrote, ‘Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.’

While he was in the concentration camps, Frankl deliberately escaped the horrors of the present by throwing his mind forwards into the future. There was one type of suffering he found worse than any other. Although he was constantly cold, aware that he was slowly starving and lived with the continual fear of death, it was time that terrified him the most. He found not knowing how long he would be there to be intolerable. This lack of a time-frame for the future was ‘the most depressing influence of all’. The moment people arrived they said they knew they had no future. Some coped by closing their eyes and perpetually living in the past, but Frankl was convinced that the only way to survive was to plan – to somehow find goals, however small, which could give him a semblance of a future. In one of his lowest moments when he was marching in the bitter cold with sores on his feet, he forced himself to imagine he was in a warm lecture theatre giving a talk on the psychology of the concentration camp. This imagined future enabled him to complete the walk. He was manipulating his own mind time in order to survive.

PROBLEM
5:
A POOR MEMORY FOR THE PAST

It is inevitable that memories fade over time, and for people whose memories are as traumatic as Frankl’s this can sometimes be welcome. But it is the flexible nature of memory that gives us such a strong power of imagination, so when we do forget positive memories too, we should not be too hard on ourselves. However, there are occasions when we wish we could remember more, and the research on the
psychology of time perception does give us ways of improving both our memory for events and our ability to guess the date of those events correctly. The issue of dates is easier to remedy. By looking at the mistakes people made when they were tested on the contents of their daily activity diaries, I have devised a three-part system for estimating the date of an event more accurately – useful for everything from the trivial, such as finding out whether a broken kettle might be under guarantee or guessing when you last visited a friend, to the more serious, such as retrieving an old piece of work or giving reliable testimony in court.