Something for the weekend

Financial Times:

The lamentation that there are not enough hours in the day is a familiar one. Busy working schedules combined with family life often mean that individuals feel unable to commit to additional duties such as joining a committee at work or volunteering at the local school.

But new research from academics suggests that by spending time on others – helping a failing student to edit an essay or helping out at the local club for the elderly for example – can counter-intuitively create a feeling of expanded time.

Cassie Mogilner, a professor of marketing at the Wharton school at the University of Pennsylvania, with colleagues Michael Norton, an associate professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and Zoe Chance, a post-doctoral student at Yale School of Management, say that spending time on others increases an individual’s perception of time affluence.

“The reason that this happens is that helping others makes us feel more effective and therefore we feel like we have more time because we can do more with our time,” says Prof Mogilner.

Read the whole story: Financial Times