Time Travel is Real. Here’s How to Use It.

What if I told you that you could slow down time to get more done, or quicken time during boring sections of the day? Believe it or not, it’s possible.

Yes, it’s true — physical time travel is not possible. But the idea of our perception of time is something which can be altered. Have you ever gotten to the end of a day and felt that it either went by so quickly or took absolutely forever? These feelings might feel outside of your control, but when you understand what causes them you can use these changes in perception to your advantage.

Psychologists define time perception in four different categories: short-short, short-long, long-short, and long-long. Short-short and long-long we aren’t really worried about: this is simply short periods that feel short, and long periods that feel long, respective. Short-long and long-short are where things get interesting.

Short-long time perception is when the time is physically short (say, 10 minutes) but mentally long (feels like an hour). An example of this might be waiting in line at the DMV. It doesn’t actually take too long, but since there’s nothing to do and you’re in a horrible environment, you cannot wait until it ends — therefore it feels longer than it is. Long-short, on the other hand, is the opposite — physically long but mentally short. This one is more common, especially in the social media age: how often have you started scrolling through TikToks, only to realize an hour has passed? This is long-short time perception in action.

So now that you understand time perception, you can start to think about how to use it to your advantage. A convenient way to do this is to use one perception to cancel out another. Let’s go back to that DMV line example — if you were instead on TikTok the whole time while in line, the feeling would revert back to the 10-15 minutes it usually takes. So as it turns out, time-wasters are not so bad after all! Anytime you have time to kill — a doctor’s lobby, a plane trip — you can use long-short to speed things up.

The benefits of short-long are more complicated, but also more rewarding. Think about the days that felt long, but good. They’re likely the days you spent doing a lot of meaningful tasks back to back to back. A family vacation, finishing a valuable project, or cleaning up the house. All of these tasks have to do with committing to a variety of high value and/or experiential tasks that are usually complex and long. The ideal is to maximize this rewarding short-long time since it serves to also maximize your time on Earth — but this is an ideal, and while you should strive towards it you likely won’t hit it everyday. Still, with these time perception tips in mind, hopefully you use them to skip the dreadful parts of life and stretch the exciting ones.

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