To Be More Productive, Hack Your Sense of Time

Understanding how stress warps your time perception can help you plan a calmer, more focused workday

The clock is almost never your friend. It was true the other day, when you watched the minutes slip away at terrifying speed as you frantically typed your way through a work deadline, fielding Karen’s increasingly aggressive Slack messages about when you’d be done. It’ll be true tonight, when you check your phone three times in five minutes while waiting for the bus, amazed each time that you haven’t been standing there longer.

In fact, if you’re paying attention to the clock at all, it probably means that it’s being a bit of a jerk. There’s a ton of research dedicated to unpacking time’s unruliness, and it backs up what we already know: We might all have the same amount of hours in the day as Beyoncé, as the (controversial) meme goes, but those hours feel dramatically different depending on what you’re doing and your state of mind. But by learning more about how the brains warps the passage of time, you can learn how to manipulate your experience of it to have a calmer, more productive day.

Blame your caveperson ancestors

You know that feeling when you’re stuck in traffic on your way to a job interview…