Research Shows You’ll Feel Less Busy If You Give Your Time Away

Research Shows You’ll Feel Less Busy If You Give Your Time Away

It sounds counterintuitive, but if you feel you don’t have enough time in the day, you should start spending more time on other people. According to a new study, doing so will make you feel like you have more time on your hands.

In four experiments conducted by researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, Yale and Harvard, volunteers’ sense of “time affluence” increased when they did small, selfless acts for others, such as writing an encouraging note to a child. By giving time, they felt they had more time to spare, compared to other participants who wasted time, spent time on themselves or even gained a windfall of “free” time (e.g. they were able to leave the experiment early).

We can’t create more than 24 hours in a day, of course, but the study suggests that giving someone as little as five minutes of your time may be one of the best ways to feel less busy, perhaps because you did something useful for someone else.

Hit up the link below to read the research report or sign up to a service like Good Deed Time to put this time hack into practice with weekly emails of small good deeds to accomplish.

Giving Time Gives You Time [Scribd via Experience Life]

Picture: Janet Ramsden/Flickr


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