Spend time on others to feel time-rich

Giving time away can paradoxically make you feel you have more of it.

Why it works

Spending time helping others appears to increase the sense of time affluence rather than deplete it. The proposed mechanism is that prosocial time use boosts feelings of competence and self-efficacy, which expand the subjective sense of how much time you have.

How to do it

1. Deliberately give a small block of time to help someone, even briefly.
2. Notice the effect on how time-pressured you feel afterward.
3. Treat giving time as a counterintuitive remedy for feeling rushed, not an extra burden.

Evidence

Experiments found that spending time on others increased participants’ feeling of having more time, compared with spending it on themselves or wasting it. Mogilner, Chance, and Norton (2012) traced the effect to a boost in felt self-efficacy — helping others left people feeling more capable, which expanded their subjective sense of available time. (rct)

The effect is intriguing but the effect sizes are modest and the finding has had limited replication; it is unlikely to help when you are already genuinely overloaded and exhausted.

Sources

• Mogilner, Chance & Norton (2012), giving time gives you time, Psychological Science
• Mogilner, C., Chance, Z., & Norton, M. I. (2012). Giving Time Gives You Time. Psychological Science, 23(10), 1233–1238.

Common mistake

Hoarding every minute when feeling rushed, which can deepen the sense of scarcity, rather than testing the counterintuitive move of giving some time away.