To Feel More Productive, Take a Break to Do Something Selfless

New York Magazine:

The problem with time is that it typically does exactly the opposite of what you want it to do. There are a handful of exceptions — vacation days, for example, tend to pass more slowly than those spent on your normal routine — but for the most part, the clock tends to speed up precisely when you want it to slow down. It doesn’t matter how many hours are in a day if they all seem to fly by before you can get anything done.

But in a recent column in The Wall Street Journal, behavioral researchers Cassie Mogilner Holmes and Michael Norton (of UCLA and Harvard Business School, respectively) offered a surprising way to stretch out the time you have: Donate some of it to someone else. In a study published in 2012 in the journal Psychological Science, the two found that spending a few hours on something altruistic warped people’s time perception for the better, making them feel as though they had more of it left in the day.

Read the whole story: New York Magazine