The idea is that scheduling will make you more efficient: When you allocate your time, it organizes your day into a series of appointments, meetings, and calls while blocking off free time for other activities or tasks.
An Appointment Approaches—and Time ‘Shrinks’
Much of scheduling’s downside has to do with the anticipation of a meeting or appointment. When we know a scheduled meeting or phone call is looming, it can make us feel like we have less time to do what we need to do.Those who were told to imagine that a friend would be coming over reported that the hour leading up to the visit had only 40 usable minutes for reading. Those who were told to imagine they had no plans felt as if they had 49 minutes to read.
So the presence of an upcoming activity seems to have shrunk how much time people felt they had to do something.
Why might this happen?
Free To Do … Less?
But in the end, you still have the same amount of time leading up to a scheduled event.So feeling like you have less time shouldn’t really matter, right? But it does. The feeling by itself can influence what people decide to do.
The same is true for time. If time feels limited, people are less likely to use it—even when it’s in their best interest.
We then gave participants an opportunity to participate in a second study. Everyone made a choice between participating in a 30-minute online study that would earn them US$2.50, or signing up for a 45-minute online study to receive $5.00. Each would take place during an hourlong window.
On our end, we strategically chose the hourlong window for the participants. We told half of them that the study would take place within an hour of an event they’d scheduled. The other half would take the study during a time period that concluded with a half-hour cushion before their scheduled event.
We found that participants in the first group were much less likely to choose the longer but more lucrative study—despite having more than enough time to complete the study.
Before beginning an unrelated study, we told half of the participants that they would have about five minutes to do whatever they wanted. We told the other half they had about five minutes before we would “get started.”
You’re Less Famished Than You Think
Some might think that time famine arises because they have too much to do and not enough time to do it.While this may certainly be the case at times, our results suggest that the fault also lies in our own perception of what we feel can be done with the time we have. In other words, it’s important to realize that we might be contributing to our time famine.
If you love scheduling and planning out your days, a trick could be to schedule events or tasks back-to-back, which leaves you with larger chunks of unscheduled time. Several uninterrupted hours of unscheduled time will feel longer, especially if there’s nothing scheduled looming.
It can be effective to remind yourself that time isn’t as short as it feels. Even if you don’t think you’ll have enough time to complete something, you can still start a task and finish it later.
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