America has a time problem. About half of us tell pollsters that we don't have enough time to do what we want. Another survey found that most people would prefer two more weeks of vacation than two more weeks of pay. And every new "labor-saving" technology -- e-mail, smart phones -- seems to make things worse, not better.Books for the time-starved and productivity-challenged would fill a small library. Beyond the books, there are the seminars, videos, apps and "methods" (like "Getting Things Done") that feature books, videos, and seminars.
Yet for all the advice that has been offered, I doubt anyone has come up with the bit of wisdom on offer from a professor at Harvard Business School: Spend more time doing things for other people.
This is, of course, completely absurd. How could taking on another task possibly help?
The answer has to do with the important distinction between time -- that thing that can be measured with atomic clocks, that marches on, merciless -- and subjective time, our experience of the flow of events. And this is why the advice, the product of recent scientific study, is both unexpected and wise.
"It is not so much how much time you have," says Harvard Business School's Michael Norton, "as how you feel about what you can get done in the time that you do have."
Norton, working with Cassie Mogilner at the University of Pennsylvania and Zoe Chance at Yale, arrived at this conclusion through a series of investigations into our perception of time. Students were asked to either give time away (writing an encouraging note to a gravely ill child) or waste time (counting instances of the letter "e" in a Latin text). Afterwards, the letter writers felt that they had more time, according to a survey.
But maybe, the researchers reasoned, doing the time-wasting task was simply unpleasant, and this bad mood made people feel they had less time. So they did another experiment, asking students on a Saturday morning to do something they hadn't planned to, either for themselves or for someone else. They found that the people who did a good turn for another felt like they had more time.
Finally, they did an experiment that got right to the heart of the matter. They told a class that, at the end of a lab session they would be helping at-risk students from a local high school by editing an essay they were working on. When the time came, half were given the essays to work on, and the other half of the class was told that there were no more essays to work on, and they could leave early.
