Savor time to make it feel more abundant

Be fully present in activities so time feels fuller, not just faster.

Why it works

Rushing and divided attention make time feel scarce and forgettable; savoring — attending fully to an experience — slows the felt sense of time and increases the satisfaction drawn from the same hours. Time affluence is partly perceptual, so how you attend changes how rich your time feels.

How to do it

1. Pick one daily activity to do with full attention, no multitasking.
2. Slow down deliberately and notice the details of the experience.
3. Resist documenting or rushing through it; let it be the only thing you are doing.

Evidence

Savoring and present-moment attention are linked to greater wellbeing in positive-psychology and mindfulness research, and mind-wandering is associated with lower momentary happiness. Killingsworth and Gilbert (2010) sampled real-time experience from thousands of people and found minds wandered nearly half the time, with wandering predicting lower happiness even during unpleasant activities. (observational)

The present-attention/happiness link is well-replicated but correlational; whether savoring specifically increases felt time abundance is more of a reasonable extension than a direct finding.

Sources

• Killingsworth & Gilbert (2010), a wandering mind is an unhappy mind, Science
• Killingsworth, M. A., & Gilbert, D. T. (2010). A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind. Science, 330(6006), 932.

Common mistake

Trying to feel time-rich purely by doing fewer things, while still rushing distractedly through the ones you keep, so the hours still feel thin.