Making Peace With Time
People have strange relationships with time.
Generally, we perceive time as something we either don’t have enough of or have too much of. How often do you have a day when what you do lines up exactly with the time you have? Even those skilled in time management may be able to align their available time with a specific set of activities, but they may still have a long to-do list that never makes it into the daily schedule.
For many people, the workweek is a race against available time. But in certain circumstances, or at a certain age, the balance may shift the other way. You may feel the hours stretching out in front of you with no meaningful way to fill them.
Is it possible to influence your perception of time passing?
Fitting It In
Most people, beginning at a young age, have too little time and too much to do. It starts in school, when children wake early, spend a full day in class, participate in sports or other after-school activities, and then, with what little time is left, study and do homework.
This continues into college, when there is more flexibility but also more expected of students. They are told that employers look for well-rounded individuals who can carry a full course load, participate in extracurricular activities, and begin testing the waters of a potential career through internships.
Finally, a career and a family arrive, and many people commit themselves to commuting, being perpetually available to employers, engaging in children’s activities, and maintaining a household.
It seems we are programmed from a very early age to cram as much as we can into every moment of our lives and to view time as a commodity we need to manage, budget, and spend wisely as we work through our long lists of tasks and responsibilities.
The Long Rainy Afternoon
At some point in our lives, we graduate from many of our earlier obligations. Our kids may go off to college, we may move into positions where we can delegate more work, and we may have honed our passions enough to focus on fewer priorities.
You may find yourself facing days when you have nothing on the calendar and can do with the day what you will. But because you have spent so much of your life believing you must use every second productively, you may have no idea how to handle an abundance of available time.
You may try to engage in activities that were not possible in the throes of a busier life. You might read a book, pursue an old hobby, or take up something new. But even then, nothing may feel meaningful or fulfilling.
Instead, you look toward the hours ahead with dread and anxiety. You may feel directionless and adrift.
The Tempo of Time
Why does time feel different in different circumstances?
One reason is related to proportional theory. When you are very young—say, five years old—a year is a much larger proportion of your life (20 percent) than it is when you are fifty years old, when a year represents only two percent. With each passing year, each year feels smaller relative to the life you have already lived.
Also, when you are young, everything is new and novel. Childhood is full of firsts: new ideas, places, people, and experiences. As an adult, you have seen and experienced much more, and even experiences that are technically new may not affect you as intensely. As a result, time often seems to pass more quickly.
Neuroscientist David Eagleman suggests this experience is less about time itself speeding up and more about how memory records novelty [1]. A year filled with new and emotionally vivid experiences leaves a thicker memory trace. A year filled with routine may leave a thinner one, which can make it seem to have passed more quickly in retrospect.
Time Management
Paradoxically, time management is not really about managing time. It is about managing what you do with the time you have. Even though our perception of time changes depending on what we are doing and the context of the moment, we can still use past experience to estimate how long tasks are likely to take and plan accordingly.
Time management, then, is about assessing the activities that could fill your time and choosing which ones deserve your attention. It’s less a matter of controlling time itself and more a matter of prioritization.
What must get done? What should get done? What would be nice to get done?
Prioritization is a skill you must develop if you want to handle a time deficit in a world where countless responsibilities, opportunities, and distractions vie for your attention.
Perceived Time and Dimensional Time
Human time and time as understood by physicists are two very different things wearing the same name.
Perceived time is the one we live in: a felt sense of “now” flowing from past into future, built by the brain out of memory, attention, and expectation. It stretches and shrinks depending on mood, novelty, engagement, stress, and age. It is subjective and one-directional. We remember the past, not the future, and that asymmetry feels fundamental to being conscious.
Time as a dimension in spacetime, as understood through relativity, is something else entirely. It is treated as a fourth axis alongside the three spatial dimensions. In this view, the whole four-dimensional block of spacetime exists, with past, present, and future understood as points within it, somewhat like north and south both existing on a map.
No universal “now” exists that everyone shares. Two observers moving at different speeds, or experiencing different gravitational conditions, can genuinely disagree about the timing or duration of events. In physics, time doesn’t flow the way we feel it does. It is more like a direction we move through, and how we move through it changes measurably with speed and gravity.
Perceived time is a story your brain tells about a single, flowing “now.” Spacetime treats time as a structural dimension with no built-in flow. The sense of flowing seems to be something our minds add, not something physics requires.
Like place, time is something we live in and must navigate. If we are intentional about our priorities, aware of how context shapes our perception of time, and grounded in the present moment, time can become less of an enemy and more of an element of life we learn to understand.
We cannot control time itself, but we can shape our relationship with it. We can anticipate how time may feel in different circumstances, choose what deserves our attention, and work with our perception of time in ways that are productive, peaceful, and fulfilling.
[1] Eagleman, D. M. (2008). “Human time perception and its illusions.” Current Opinion in Neurobiology, 18(2), 131–136.
Artwork by MSM Illustrations
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