Spend time on others to feel time-rich
Giving time away can paradoxically make you feel you have more of it.
Key takeaways
- What it is: 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.
- Evidence: Backed by randomized trials / meta-analyses.
- Avoid: Hoarding every minute when feeling rushed, which can deepen the sense of scarcity, rather than testing the counterintuitive move of giving some time away.
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
- 1Deliberately give a small block of time to help someone, even briefly.
- 2Notice the effect on how time-pressured you feel afterward.
- 3Treat giving time as a counterintuitive remedy for feeling rushed, not an extra burden.
What the evidence says
RCT / meta-analysisExperiments found that spending time on others increased participants’ feeling of having more time, compared with spending it on themselves or wasting it.
Honest caveat: 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.
- — Mogilner, Chance & Norton (2012), giving time gives you time, Psychological Science
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.
IX Coach can suggest small, deliberate acts of giving time when you feel time-starved, framed as a tested counter-move against the rushed feeling rather than one more obligation.
Practice this with IX Coach →