This time-distorting effect may be purely evolutionary in nature. During our human evolution, whenever we were in danger, it would have been more advantageous to assume that the threat was closer than it really was, just to be on the safe side. If you were a caveman and heard a rustling in the bush, it would be safer to assume that a lion was stealthily closing in on you and about to eat you than to merrily keep going your way and assume the lion was too far to catch you (and end up being eaten)! If you exaggerated the proximity of danger, you would be able to defend yourself more efficiently, in case the threat turns out to be real. Therefore, evolution has wired our brains in such a way as to instinctively perceive a potential loss as nearer in time than a gain, which explains why time feels like it is running faster when you are anticipating a loss. This brings us to the other major factor that influences our experience of the future, which is how we see ourselves in relation to time.
Time and space are intricately related in our mind. We used that relationship to explain why “empty durations,” like empty rooms, appear shorter than “filled durations.” The space-time relationship is also useful in explaining the motion of temporal events in time. As we saw in Chapter 1, when we think of Christmas or the weekend as “fast approaching,” we perceive future anticipated events as moving towards us in time. But our emotions play an additional role in affecting how we see ourselves in relation to time. It is normal to approach the things that we like and move away from the things we dislike. When we desire something, we are attracted to it but when we fear something, our instinct is to withdraw. We do the same thing when it comes to approaching temporal events. This is how we psychologically manage the distance between us and pleasant or unpleasant events. 142 If we are looking forward to a pleasant event, like a wedding or graduation day, we will see ourselves as moving towards that event, as in the ego-moving metaphor that we saw in Chapter 1. We are on a direct collision course with that event. We will naturally be more alert and excited and this boosts the speed of processing information and the speed of our internal clock, so that the perceived duration stretches and time seems to slow down. Furthermore, because the anticipated event is seen as a gain, we will be eager for it to occur sooner and will focus more on the time leading up to it. As a result, that additional attention we devote to the passing time will make the waiting period seem longer. Time drags when we anticipate Christmas or the weekend arrival. Such pleasant anticipated events always appear further in the future than they really are. Positive anticipation draws our attention to time and causes it to run slowly. In contrast, time speeds up when we are dreading a negative outcome. If we are worried about a future event, like a surgical operation or a dentist appointment, we would naturally see ourselves standing still, or even running away, as the negative event approaches us. We are more focused on the event and less on the time leading up to it. This inattention to the passing time causes it to pass swiftly and the dreaded event arrives faster than we hoped for.
In brief, how we feel about the future affects our perception of time. Emotions that come from anticipating pleasant or unpleasant events can change the way we think about time and how it is moving in relation to us. Our experience of the future is influenced by how desirable the anticipated events are. When the future outlook is positive, time slows down and when it is negative, time speeds up. A practical tip to take here is that if you want to slow down time, you should always try to create pleasant anticipation in your life. When you imagine something wonderful is going to happen in the future, you create hope and excitement, both of which can make the present slow down and make it even more pleasant. We will later see that you can sometimes derive more pleasure from anticipating a pleasant event than the actual event itself. Similarly, experiencing negative feelings when dreading an unpleasant future event can sometimes be worse than when the event actually occurs.
Time and Expectations
Our expectations of when things will get done can create mixed feelings too, and these also affect our perception of time. We live in a society that is ruled by fairly rigid time schedules, such as planned appointments, the start of TV programs, and schedules for public transport systems. We look at our watch and can tell how much time we have until the next train arrives or how long until the next meeting starts. We know how much time needs to be spent on certain activities and can predict when they should be completed so we can move on to other things. In most situations, the duration of these events occur in line with our expectations. But in some cases we become upset that the anticipated event is taking longer than expected, or we may be pleasantly surprised that it took less time than originally anticipated.
Researchers found that the experienced speed of time depends on how our expectations are met. For example, say you are ordering fast food at a restaurant and you are informed that, due to a technical problem in the kitchen, your food will be ready in 10 minutes when it usually only takes two. Because your expectations were not met, those 10 minutes will feel longer than they really are. In contrast, let us say you have regular appointments with your doctor where you have to arrive 30 minutes ahead of the appointment before he can take you in. However, on that particular day, a patient did not show up and, to your surprise, the assistant informed you that the waiting time is only 10 minutes. Because your expectation has been positively exceeded, those 10 minutes will pass very quickly. The same 10-minute duration feels differently depending on how your expectation was met.
When you have to wait, lowering your expectations of time will make waiting feel shorter and more pleasant. You will face fewer disappointments and you will more often be pleasantly surprised. We are all more than happy to take a 10-minute break at work but feel we are wasting time when we have to wait 10 minutes in a queue. So try and change the way you look at waiting time.
“Lowering your expectations about when things will get done will make your waiting time experience more pleasant”
The Optimistic Future
When we think about our past, we have mixed emotions. There are some “highs” and some “lows,” warm memories and some bad ones. But when we think about the future, we are free to imagine any scenario or outcome that we like and it tends to be optimistically biased. Research has shown that we all have a natural tendency to envision a positive future. It is what causes smokers to believe that they are less likely to contract lung cancer than other smokers. One reason for that positive bias is that it is easier and nicer to imagine. You can, for instance, easily imagine yourself driving a nice Ferrari but it will be much harder to imagine yourself in a hospital after crashing it. Positive outcomes make us feel good and are therefore desirable, whereas negative outcomes involve more intense emotions that are more difficult to summon and which we general avoid.
Our natural tendency to be optimistic about the future has many benefits. When you think positively, you will persevere in the face of difficulties. Your mind will be open to creative thinking and you will be better at solving problems. And, with a positive attitude you are more emotionally prepared to cope with failure. Optimistic thinking is also beneficial to your mental and physical health. People who think positively about the future tend to be less susceptible to depression, alcoholism, and obesity. There is also evidence that the immune system is much more effective in fighting disease when the attitude is positive, making recovery from illness faster, too. This was confirmed in a study showing how optimistic patients recovered faster after coronary artery bypass surgery and returned to full-time work earlier than patients with a more pessimistic outlook. 143
However, not all future thinking is beneficial. Take, for instance, self-help books that emphasize fantasies for achieving personal goals. The widely popular book The Secret by Rhonda Byrne, is a typical example that is based on the superstitious “Law of Attraction” and claims that imagining a future positive outcome can create life-changing results, such as increased wealth, health, and happiness. According to that approach, simply imagining an outcome will somehow cau
se it to occur. If you want to be a successful businessman, all you have to do is imagine yourself in that role and it will be yours. If you want to lose weight, simply imagine that you have already lost weight and the universe will somehow conspire to fulfill your desires. Another example is the book Visualization for Change by Patrick Fanning, which claims that in order to become rich, all you need is to imagine all the things you would do when you are rich. You should see yourself enjoying your favorite activities, surrounded by loved ones and friends, popular and relaxed, wearing stylish clothes, driving a new car, and playing with a new tennis racquet. 144 The claim is that if you fantasize about these things, your positive thinking will attract them and the universe will devise a way to make them yours. While all of that sounds fantastic, it is far from true. The universe does not know that you exist, does not care that you exist, and is not really interested in your desires. No matter how hard you think about something, it will not be yours if you do not do anything about it. Having optimistic expectations is very different from having positive fantasies. Convincing someone that pure fantasies can change their reality is not just harmless wishful thinking, it can be detrimental. First, there is no scientific evidence supporting the amazing claims of the ‘law of attraction’. Simply imagining a favorable future outcome does not create the circumstances for that outcome. If that was true, people would stay young forever and no one would ever get sick, grow old, or die. But we all know that ageing and death are not optional. Likewise, if you can get a nice Ferrari car by just imagining it in your future, then why is everyone not driving expensive cars? Why are millions of people still dying of starvation? Can they not imagine a nice home delivery meal magically appearing in their house? Positive fantasies are very nice, but they do not change the basic fact that you simply cannot get something out of nothing.
Fantasies and Positive Expectations
There are, therefore, two different ways of thinking about the future; the first as a positive expectation and the second as pure fantasy. Each has a different effect on your motivation and the action you will eventually take. When you use memories to visualize a future outcome, your expectations are more grounded in reality as they rely on past experiences. You expect to do well in an exam because you did well in previous exams. You expect to find a new job because you always managed to find a good job in the past. Having high expectations of success increases your motivation to act. In contrast, daydreaming creates fantasies that help you escape reality. Fantasies involve imagining something you hope will happen in the future, but are not experiencing right now. You fantasize about having achieved success and start consuming its rewards, which in turn reduces your motivation to work harder to succeed.
“Positive fantasies are very nice, but they do not change the basic fact that you simply cannot get something out of nothing”
In a fantasy, you start experiencing a very bright and joyful future, ahead of time. As a result, you do not feel that you need to act and you will easily overlook difficulties you might face in realizing that fantasy. You will not be motivated to focus on an action plan and this lack of mental rehearsal reduces your chances of success.
Research has found that people who fantasize about an idealized future are more likely to feel depressed. In contrast, positive expectations focus more on the process needed to achieve success. This was demonstrated in a study conducted at the University of California, with 77 students who were recruited one week before their midterm exam. One group of students was told to focus on the outcome and imagine that they were “standing in front of the glass case where the midterm exam grades are posted, holding their breath, moving their gaze horizontally to find their score, learning that they had received an A, beaming with joy, and feeling confident and proud.” Another group of students were told to focus on the process and “visualize themselves studying for the exam in a way that would lead them to obtain a grade A.” All students practiced this mental simulation for five minutes each day for about a week leading up to the exam. The results were clear: the students who focused on the process and imagined the steps required to pass the exam obtained higher grades than those students who focused on the outcome and imagined they had already passed the exam. 145
The Planning Fallacy
Have you ever missed an appointment because you miscalculated the time it takes to get there? Have you ever renovated your home and realized it was taking longer than originally anticipated? Have you taken lots of office work home intending to complete it over the weekend, knowing that you haven’t completed much on previous weekends, only to return most of it back to the office again? Do you predict that you can complete tasks, such as submitting a term paper or returning tax forms, well before the deadline when you know that in the past similar projects were finished very close to the deadline? If that sounds all too familiar, then welcome to the “planning fallacy.”
The planning fallacy was first proposed by Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky in 1979. It is essentially a biased internal conviction that a current project will go as well as planned, even though similar projects from the past have failed to fulfill their planned outcomes. The future is perceived to be rosier than the past. Lessons from the past fade from our attention in light of optimistic plans about the future. Research has shown that people, on average, underestimate how long it takes to do things by a 40 percent! 146
In 1974, during the U.S. oil crisis, a study was conducted on drivers waiting in line to buy gasoline. It found that most drivers underestimated the length of time they expected to wait and the underestimation increased the further away the driver was from the beginning of the line. In a 1994 study, 37 psychology students at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, were asked to estimate how long it would take to finish their senior theses. The average estimate was around 34 days. They were also asked to estimate how long it would take “if everything went as well as it possibly could” and the average response was 27 days. Finally, they were asked to estimate how long it would take “if everything went as poorly as it possibly could,” and the average response was 49 days. After the students completed their theses, researchers found that the average actual completion time was 56 days! Only 30 percent of the students managed to complete their thesis in the amount of time they originally predicted. 147 We all simply underestimate how long a task will take.
This optimistic bias in future thinking applies to major construction projects as well. The famous example is the Sydney Opera House, which in 1957 was originally planned to be completed by 1963 at a cost of $7 million. It was actually completed ten years behind schedule and at a cost of $102 million. The Channel Tunnel connecting Britain and France was due to open between London and Paris in June 1993, with a budget of 2.6 billion pounds. The real cost ended up being 4.6 billion pounds, and it was formally opened in May 1994. A building can be completed on time, if there are no delays regarding the delivery of material, labor strikes, severe weather conditions, funding problems, last minute design changes, or a host of other unforeseeable issues for which no provisions are considered. We are not only optimistic about how the future will turn out, but we also tend to be very optimistic in our predictions of the time required to complete future tasks, even though we know that similar tasks have taken longer than planned in the past. The planning fallacy is at the root of many of our hopes, fears, and disappointments. It is the main reason why many people are chronically late to meetings or cannot consistently meet deadlines. It is therefore important to understand how it works.
One reason why we tend to construct an optimistic scenarios is that we tend to ignore the memories of how long similar tasks have taken in the past. We construct in our imagination a story about how we will achieve our goal, and by doing so, we forget to consult our past. We tend to neglect the results of similar plans from the past because prediction is, by its very nature, a focus on the future rather than the past. This future orientation prevents us from looking back.
We normally think of planning as the p
rocess of developing a series of steps that have a clear start and which will eventually lead to a successful conclusion. This is called the narrow “inside” view of predicting the time it takes to achieve a future goal. In contrast, the “outside view” is when you deliberately avoid planning the various steps you need to complete your project and just consider how long it took to finish similar projects in the past. This sounds counterintuitive since the “inside” view is supposed to be more detailed and should give more accurate predictions. Both views are essential, however research has shown that predictions are more accurate when you put more weight on the “outside” view, i.e. past results.
At the Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo Ontario, researchers wanted to test the anecdote that people are always late in their Christmas shopping. A group of undergraduates were asked to describe highly specific plans for their Christmas shopping—where, when, and how—while another group was simply asked when they expected to finish their Christmas shopping, based on previous experience. On average, the first group optimistically expected to finish shopping more than a week before Christmas, whereas the group that made no plans estimated they would get it done four days before Christmas, at the latest. Both groups actually finished, on average, three days before Christmas, which demonstrates that the group that did not think of a plan and relied on past experience had the more accurate predictions. 148
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