What To Do When You Feel Like You Don't Have Enough Time

Many of us feel like we don’t have enough time, so we rush through life, feeling scattered and dissatisfied. On the flip side, we put off things that matter to us because we think we have all the time in the world to get to them.

Dr. Diana Hill shares ideas about What science shows about happiness and free time.

Transcript

Do you feel like you don't have enough time or maybe you want to be using your time more wisely?

That's what we're going to explore today on The Wise Effort Show.

Welcome back.

I'm Dr.

Diana Hill,

And this show is all about helping you develop wise effort so that you can put your energy in the places that matter to you,

Enjoy your life along the way,

Savor the good,

And hopefully have a positive impact on the world around you.

So this is a practice episode.

Today is all about practice.

I don't want to just talk about this stuff.

I actually want us to be doing it.

And these practice episodes are going to be short,

Sweet,

To the point.

So I'm going to try and keep it under 15 minutes because I know you feel like you don't have enough time.

That's why you clicked on this one.

And actually,

That's one of the biggest complaints that I hear in my practice.

I don't have enough time.

If you put a camera in my kitchen,

You'd probably hear me saying the same thing.

I don't have enough time to go to yoga or work on the books that I want to write.

We have this time pressure and this time poverty.

What research shows is that time poverty is real,

Especially if you have financial challenges or if you're a single parent or a working parent.

Free time may be very slim,

Yet at the same time,

Our happiness is not necessarily correlated with the amount of free time that we have.

According to research by Cassie Holmes,

Which you can listen to the interview that I did with her a while back,

Who is at the Anderson School of Management at UCLA,

When you have more than five hours of discretionary free time on your hands or less than two hours of discretionary free time,

You are less happy.

And for folks that are in the middle,

Not at these two extremes,

Happiness is not correlated with time.

Today,

I'm going to offer you a skill called time flexing,

Which helps you shift your perception of time and also challenges what is free time really.

There's increasingly less differentiation between free time versus working.

My mom was just telling me the other day that one of her favorite times of the week is when she goes and she plugs in her electric car.

She sits in it for about half an hour,

Uninterrupted,

Answering all the emails that she hasn't been able to get to,

Making phone calls to friends she hasn't been able to call back.

She loves it.

Is that free time?

Is that work?

Is that leisure time?

I don't know,

But it's time well spent to her.

And I imagine that you have times like that too,

Whether it's at work or whether it's parenting or helping someone else,

There's times when you feel more engaged and it may not necessarily map on to quote free time.

So there's all sorts of podcasts,

Books,

Blog posts out there that will help you better manage your time,

Become more productive with your time,

And they can be very helpful.

But as an act psychologist,

I'm more interested in the why,

The what and the how of your values when it comes to time rather than trying to squeeze more productivity out of your time or squeeze more free time out of you.

Why?

Because think about how you act when you feel like you don't have enough time,

When you're really pressed for time.

You act in ways that aren't truly satisfying.

You end up rushing through your life.

You move over things instead of actually being in them.

And then on the flip side,

You may not like it,

But I'm going to say it.

There are areas of your life where you feel like you have an abundance of time.

And so you're putting off things that actually matter to you.

You think you have all the time in the world to take that trip or to hang out with that friend until a pandemic hits or your friend decides to move.

And then you realize,

Oh,

Wow,

I wish I used my time differently.

We actually don't know how much time we have and how you experience your time is all a perception.

So for example,

Cassie Holmes did some research that showed that how you spend your time impacts how you view how much free time you have.

She completed a series of studies and in one of them,

She assigned participants to give 15 minutes of their time to edit essays for at-risk public high school students.

Then she randomly assigned half of the participants either to be told that they can leave early.

You're all done for the day.

You don't need to do the editing.

We got it covered.

And the other half to stay and edit for 15 minutes.

What she found was the participants who spent the 15 minutes editing those essays actually ended up perceiving that they had more spare time than those who got the 15 minutes of extra time.

When you are using your time in meaningful ways,

You actually feel like you have more time.

So the skill that you're going to learn today is a skill called time flexing.

And it's a skill that helps you shift your perception around time so that when you're really,

Really,

Really pressed for time,

You can learn to expand it.

And when you feel like you have all the time in the world,

You learn to shrink it so that you can use your time in more values aligned ways.

But before we get to that skill,

I want to talk about three cognitive biases that are playing a role in trapping us into using our time so unwisely.

Cognitive biases are patterns of thought that are often unconscious that lead us to act in irrational ways or have errors in our judgment.

And there's hundreds of cognitive biases out there.

We don't notice them when they're happening.

But if we can be more aware of our cognitive biases,

We can catch ourselves when we're in them.

And the first cognitive bias that leads us to use our time less wisely is something called the mere urgency effect.

The mere urgency effect is our tendency to prioritize urgent tasks or what we perceive as urgent tasks over less urgent ones.

This is when you're in a conversation with your partner about their day,

Your phone lights up with a text about your dentist appointment for the next day,

And you feel this urgency.

You're compelled to open up your phone,

Go into your calendar,

And put in the appointment and you tune out from what your partner is saying.

Not that this has ever happened to me.

But then later in the week,

You complain,

I never have enough quality time with my partner.

Well,

You just lost it because of this mere urgency effect.

And in order to overcome the mere urgency effect,

You need to practice bringing up front and center what's more important here,

The dentist appointment,

Or my partner talking about their day.

The skill of time flexing that you're going to practice today will help you with that.

The next bias that gets in the way of us using our time wisely is something called the Zagarnik effect.

And I'm going to post all these biases on my Instagram so that you can reference them and be reminded of them.

But the Zagarnik effect is our tendency to remember incomplete or interrupted tasks more than completed ones.

This is why when you're making dinner,

You start thinking about all the things that you didn't get done that day.

And then the next day,

When you're trying to get those things done,

You can't stop thinking about the ingredients that you need to get at the store for dinner.

Our mind has this tendency to want to solve problems and complete tasks.

And it's not always so helpful when you're trying to focus on the task that you are in.

So in order to overcome the Zagarnik effect,

You need to learn how to refocus your attention,

How to get present.

The skill that we're going to do today with time flexing will help you do just that.

And then the third cognitive bias that gets in the way of using your time wisely is the complexity bias.

So I am so guilty of this one.

We have the tendency to give undue credit to complex situations over simple ones.

Oftentimes,

The most simple solution to the problem of feeling like you don't have enough time is just to show up in the time that you have.

If you have a value around caring for your body,

And you feel like you don't have enough time to go to the gym at five o'clock tonight,

You can still show up and care for your body in the time that you have right now while you're driving in the car,

Lengthen your spine,

Align your neck,

Drop your shoulders.

If you have a feeling that you don't have enough time to spend with your kids,

You can show up in the time that you have while you're driving them to school or helping them get dressed in the morning.

It doesn't have to be so complex.

So the skill of time flexing that we're going to practice will help you with this as well.

Here's the skill,

Time flexing.

The first thing that I want you to do is think about an area of your life,

A domain,

Where you'd like to use your time more wisely.

It could be an area either where you've been neglecting it because you feel like you have all the time in the world,

Or you're rushing through it so you're not tending to it the way that you want to be tending to it.

Domains can include things like friendship or parenting or health,

Community,

Spirituality,

Recreation,

Your work,

Your family,

Being a pet owner.

What domain of your life do you want to work on?

And first,

What I want you to do is if you feel rushed for time in this domain,

I want you to imagine that you could flex time.

You could expand it so that you had all the time in the world to spend in this domain.

Expanding your time like this helps you get more creative in your thinking and get over some of those self-limiting barriers of I don't have enough time.

And now I want you to answer these three questions.

If you had all the time in the world in this domain,

Why?

Why would you want to spend your time here?

Why is it important to you?

And second,

If you had all the time in the world in this domain,

What would you be doing that you're not doing right now?

What would you be engaging in?

And third,

How would you be doing it?

What qualities would you want to bring to this domain?

Maybe you'd want to be more spontaneous or adventurous or present,

Understanding.

Maybe you'd want to be more at ease or playful.

How would you want to show up?

So expanding your time and considering why would you want to spend your time here,

What would you be doing,

And how would you be doing it if you had all the time in the world?

And now we're going to do another form of time flexing,

Which is shrinking,

Narrowing down your time.

So imagine that time just shrunk and now you only have 15 minutes to engage in this domain and that this 15 minutes is the last 15 minutes that you will ever have.

Just 15 more minutes left.

Shrinking down your time in this way makes you more aware of impermanence and helps you focus your attention to what's happening right here and right now.

It sort of ups the urgency of what really matters to you.

If you only had 15 minutes left in this domain and this were your last 15 minutes,

Why would you want to spend 15 minutes here?

What would you be doing with just 15 minutes left?

Think about it.

What would you do if you only had 15 minutes left in this domain of your life?

And again,

How would you want to show up if these were your last 15 minutes?

Can you picture it?

Can you imagine yourself what you would be doing?

Your answers to these questions are about the why,

The what,

And the how of your values.

And unlike efficiency or time management or productivity hacks,

Your values can be enacted wherever you are in whatever amount of time you have.

And when you think about time flexing,

Where you flex your time to have an abundance of time,

You can get really,

Really creative.

You get free of that mere urgency effect.

And then when you flex your time to shrink down your time in this way,

You get more focused and present and get free of that zygarnik effect.

Because yeah,

There's all sorts of stuff that's unfinished,

But you wouldn't be focusing on anything else but this most important thing if you knew it was your last time.

And when you ask yourself about the why,

The what,

And the how of your values,

You get clear that it doesn't have to be so complicated.

It's about how you show up in the time that you have.

This is your practice for the week.

When you feel like you don't have enough time and you feel pressured,

You know,

You're behind that car that's going too slow and you're late.

I invite you to expand your time as if you had all the time in the world.

How would you want to act?

And then on the flip side,

When you're not prioritizing what's really important to you because you feel like you have all the time in the world,

I want you to imagine this is your last 15 minutes in this activity.

Get focused,

Get present,

Get more engaged with the time that you have.

So try out this skill of time flexing this week.

I hope that it's helpful for you in using your time more wisely.

Thanks for spending this time with me and I'll see you next week.

Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Wise Effort Podcast.

Wise Effort is about you taking your energy and putting it in the places that matter most to you.

And when you do so,

You'll get to savor the good of your life along the way.

If you would like to become a member of the Wise Effort Podcast,

Go to wiseeffort.

Com.

This podcast is for informational and entertainment purposes only,

And it's not meant to be a substitute for mental health treatments.

Reviews

This was very insightful and helpful. I look forward to practicing time flexing this week! Thank you!🙏

This was good and helpful. The “last” 15 minutes ever in a domain doesn’t work for me. I would have to tie things up in a way that’s different than the way ongoing things need done, e.g. in my work which is one of my most disorganized domains. Can’t wrap my head around it. Maybe only 15 minutes today left? I don’t know. It’s worth a ponder. Thank you.

Thank you for providing a new way to deal with my self induced stress of feeling I’m not making the progress I should be achieving.

Thank you so much. It was very helpful. Your voice was pleasant to hear. Thank you so much.