You Maximized Your Time, But Are You Enjoying It?: Dr. Selin Malkoc (Transcript)

and we all know exactly what that stands for.

Similarly, time is also a measurement tool. It allows us to measure the amount of time. So on Saturday, I can tell you that we’ll have one hour together and everybody understands that that’s 60 minutes or 360 seconds.

These are all functional uses of time. These are the ways in which we navigate this invisible force that’s around us.

However, in the recent decades we started to think about time in a third way. We think about it as a resource.

It’s the resource that helps us achieve certain goals. Just like money allows us to buy things we want, time allows us to do the things we want to do.

It is just like money and we actually say time is money. But it really isn’t. Is it?

Time is a very unique construct. Time, we cannot save. It’s been about two and a half minutes since I started talking and none of us will ever get that two and half minutes back. It’s gone.

As an outcome, time always feels scarce. If you ask Americans, 41% of them will tell you that they do not have enough time to do the things that they want to be doing in their lives. We want to control it but it keeps on slipping away from our fingers.

We do not dare waste it. We want to make the most of it. We want to maximize that as a resource. And we have every right to. This is a very important precious resource that we all have.

Now what I want to tell you today is this resource maximization of your time is more American than universal, than there is parts of the world that doesn’t see time like that.

Now I’ve been living in the U.S. for almost 20 years but I was born in Turkey. And I spent the first half of my life there.

I actually traveled back there all the time. My family is there and at any point in time I’ve got at least one Turkish or pair living with me. This gives me the vantage point to be able to compare the cultures in a very specific way and understand how they approach time.

And unlike the Americans who think time as a resource to be maximized, Turks see it as a medium through which they live their life.

And this is true if you think about it. The moments that we have add up to our days, to our weeks, to our years and that is our life. We are simply what we do in life and nothing more.

Now if we think about time in those means, we tend to behave differently. We tend to do things in a different way.

I’m going to try to explain that to you with three examples.

Now the first time I took my now husband, then boyfriend to Turkey, he was there to meet our family — my family, my friends and he’s trying to impress everyone. And he’s doing splendidly.

When my Turkish friends give him this big Turkish liquor rakı, very strong, he acts like he likes it although he hates it. When he gets stuck in the mosque on a Friday prayer in a very hot Friday, he actually tells stories about it and makes fun of it and doesn’t tell us how much it bothered him.

So everybody’s impressed, my family’s happy, I’m happy, and I’m thinking nothing can go wrong at this moment. We are actually going to go on a vacation to places that look like this. Except that we walk into one of these beaches and my husband looks at me and says, “What are we going to do here?”

I’m like what do you mean? There is the beach, the Sun, the chairs. We are going to relax.

He’s like, no, no, you don’t get it. Where are the things to do? Where is the volleyball, the frisbee, the watersports? Why are we not doing anything?

Now that really messed up with my mind, because to me vacation is relaxation and relaxation is everything. But he wanted to be productive and not being productive somehow did not resonate with him.

Now I’m a behavioral scientist. So when things bug me, I study them scientifically. And in this case, I have the added benefit of trying to prove my husband incorrect, wrong, right?

So I go to the lab and I try to examine this. The first thing I wanted to do was to try and understand if this group of people actually existed. Were there other people that thought leisure was actually wasteful.

So we asked them to indicate their statements with questions like this. The time spent on leisure activities is actually wasted, people who can engage in leisure have too much time in their hands in a way to understand whether there are some people that really think that leisure might be wasteful.

It turns out there is a good chunk of people that believe in this. And not only in the US, we have done these studies in France and India as well, and we find these people everywhere, although to a different extent as you might guess not so many in France. Right?

Now we identified these people. We have to study what they are doing in life. To be able to do that we brought them into the lab. So these are my undergraduate students at OSU. They’re going to come and do my studies. They do that all the time. Normally these are mind-numbingly boring surveys for 20 minutes.

This time, though, I’m going to give them a chance. I’m going to give them a choice to choose a task for them to complete. They can either choose a documentary from BBC Earth or they can watch funny talking animals.

Enjoyably, most people should be picking the funny animals, but instead those who think leisure was wasteful, actually were predominantly more likely to pick the documentary.

Now you might be thinking, so what? These people are different. They want to be productive, they want to learn things. There is nothing wrong with that.

And you’d be absolutely correct if that was the end of the story. But it is not the end of the story.

Instead we brought these people back or other students really, and we asked them to actually watch the video without giving them an option. We said you’re here to do enjoyable things. This was one of the stimuli we used. They also did puzzles and other enjoyable tasks.

And then we asked them how fun was this? We found that those who endorsed the belief that leisure is wasteful actually did not enjoy these as much. They were doing fun stuff but they were not enjoying it.

We wonder if there is anything else going on. So we started to study other outcomes and we found that these individuals are more stressed, clinically anxious, and depressed, right?

So if you actually believe that leisure is wasteful, it has got negative consequences on you above and beyond choosing documentaries over funny videos.

Now you might be thinking, I’m not that person, right? I actually have got a lot of leisurely stuff I want to do. I’m not the person who thinks it’s wasteful. And you’re not alone.

There’s a lot of us who have a list of things that we want to do waiting for the correct time to do it. We wish for more time so that we can do all these things that we want to do. I thought this was universal.

I really thought so. Until a few years back, I went back home having lunch with my best friend. She’s busy. I’m busy. We’re talking about being a wife, having kids, busy careers, life.

And then I realized I’m complaining but she’s telling me other stuff. She’s telling me that she started a new Plata’s routine. She discovered new restaurants in Istanbul. She’s enjoying her life in a way that I’m not.

I find myself saying, wow, only if I had the time, I would do all those things.

Then it dawned on me why don’t I have the time? Why am I not doing those things? Right? Another puzzle.

Back to the U.S., back to the lab, I need to understand this.

This time I asked a group of people: okay, if you have time an extra hour in your life, what would you do?

Now not too surprisingly, people did not say things like they would be grocery shopping or answering emails or paying bills or doing the laundry.

Indeed only about 25% of the people said this is what they would do if they had an extra hour in life.

Instead they said they would pick up a hottie like gardening. They might be meeting up with friends or streaming a video or playing a game.

Now make sense. What we want in life is time. What we are going to do with it leisurely things, except that that when I change the frame, things got different.

I asked them: imagine that you have an extra hour today in your life today, what would you do then?

Now almost twice as many people said that they would do work tasks. Now 40% of the people said that they would use this extra hour to do the laundry and not watch a show.

We dug deeper into this: why are people doing this? and realized that there’s this intuition that we will get done with the work and then get to the leisure.

Only if I can finish my chores, then I can relax. Except that the chores and the errands and the work never end and the leisure never comes.

This is another way in which when we are thinking about our time as a maximally used resource, we are actually shooting ourselves in the foot. We are doing something that we are not intending to do.

Now you might be saying that’s all good. But actually I have things that I want to do and I do them sometimes.

And I’m going to ask you about how? Most of you would probably say that you schedule those things, right?

I want to make sure that I get to see my friend or I’ll get to watch that movie. So I’ll go and schedule it a priori. This is the way to make sure that I’m going to get it done.

That’s what the time management gurus tell us, which is again also fine. But in the U.S., we tend to over schedule. We schedule things we shouldn’t be scheduling most of the time.

And I got into that habit as well, but this got us into trouble when we went to Turkey traveling with my husband a few years back.

Mainly because in Turkey, people still show up unannounced in each other’s house. It is fine to knock someone’s door saying hi I’m here and the person says come on and here’s tea. No problem. Right?

So when we go back and try to make a plan with my good friends, they say OK, we’ll meet after dinner and I’m like when are we going to meet?

And they go, chill, we’ll figure it out tonight.

So I’m getting anxious when are we going to be meeting? What are we going to be doing? My American husband is really getting anxious. He wants to know what our plans are and we’re in this conundrum. They want to be relaxed and we want to be planned.

Again another puzzle. Why is there this difference? Why are we scheduling and they are not? And do they know something better?

Back to the lab, but in this case we are actually going to Shakespeare in the Park. This is like summer event where you can actually sit outside and watch some Shakespeare.

We asked these playgoers whether they scheduled being there. We asked them whether they had plans more than a few hours in advance that they made or was this more like a last-minute thing?

And then we asked them what kind of adjectives they would associate this event with Shakespeare in the Park?

We found that those who planned it thought that this was felt like work, it was effortful and it felt like a chore.

Think about that for a second. It’s a summer night, your outdoor is beautiful whether you’re watching Shakespeare presumably something you would enjoy and you think it feels like a chore. Something is wrong with that picture, right?

WHY DO WE DO THAT?

It turns out when we schedule things and put it into a list of to do’s, it becomes like any other thing in our to-do list. It doesn’t feel any different than a dentist appointment or a car wash. It’s something that I have to be doing.

Now if that’s the case, then it is also possible that I also enjoyed these activities, to some extent less.

To be able to figure that out this time we ask the moviegoers to tell us the last time they went to the movies and this time they’re going to classify it into three, not two.

They told us whether they had scheduled this up priory or they did it unplanned or like my Turkish friends maybe they had rough plans. They kind of made plans to go to the movies but they didn’t really specifically plan it. They didn’t have the specifics down.

What we found is that if you schedule it you truly enjoy this activity less. You get less out of watching your movie just because it was scheduled, versus unplanned.

Now there’s good news here, because if you are roughly planning, you’re as good as unplanned. So if you can make plans and leave the end a little bit more flexible, you’re not losing anything and you’re gaining something. So that’s the biggest takeaway.

Nonetheless, though, this is another instance in which we’re trying to maximize the resource of time by scheduling it and we are getting the opposite effect, we’re enjoying the things we want to enjoy less than we would have otherwise.

So today I want to leave you with this note.

Next time you feel like you think about the time you have as a resource to be maximized, push that into the back of your head. Try to reframe it as the medium through which you live and see whether it makes a difference.

With some luck and if my research is correct, you will actually make some better choices. You will enjoy them more and you will be happier at the end.

Thank you.

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