U of T Scarborough study explains why extra time seems to slip away

Has this ever happened to you? Your last meeting ended 15 minutes early, yet with all that extra time, you still showed up late for your next meeting? Or maybe your flight was delayed by an hour, yet you still nearly missed it.

Sam Maglio and co-authors have an explanation in a new study about this psychological phenomenon — which is so strong that Maglio recently almost missed a delayed flight despite just helping write an entire paper about how that was probably going to happen.

“Just because you study how people use their time doesn’t always mean you’re good at it,” says Maglio, a professor of marketing and psychology at U of T Scarborough and the Rotman School of Management.

In a paper published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, Maglio and his co-authors found that when you gain time unexpectedly, that time feels subjectively longer than regular time. Across seven studies of both real and hypothetically gained free time, they found this mental time expansion changes how we behave: we’ll often spend longer doing the same things and choose activities that take more time.

“I see gained time as a blessing and a curse. If you feel chronically pressed for time, then gaining half an hour seems awesome. And maybe slowing down a bit is good for well-being. But when you take that not-so-pressed-for-time feeling and stretch it out too far, you can fall right back into time famine.”

The effect comes down to the reference points our brains use. Judged against an expectation of nothing, anything feels like a lot.

Maglio compares it to finding $20 in the pocket of a jacket you haven’t worn in a while. Because your expectation jumped from zero to 20, rather than staying at 20, you’ll feel like you just got $20 richer. Or, think of it like lighting a match in a pitch-black room versus lighting one in a room with all its lights on.

“Whatever free time opens up — five minutes or five hours — is going to seem bigger than it is because of that expectancy-violation snap from ‘I’ve got nothing’ to ‘I have something,’” he says.

The team found that this effect doesn’t hinge on feelings — time will feel expanded whether you’re relieved or disappointed that your plans were cancelled. They also found the effect compounds: the more unexpected time people gained, the stronger the effect became. And when participants were asked to compare ordinary free time to having no free time at all, the difference vanished; regular free time felt just as expanded as gained time.

In one study, people were asked how long they’d spend on a walk during their free time, and those who were told they got that time unexpectedly said they would walk about 10 per cent longer than those who expected the free time. In another, participants reported they’d pick longer versions of the same activity if their time was unexpectedly gained, such as choosing a coffee shop that’s farther away, or starting a 45-minute work task instead of a 30-minute one. The effect was the same whether they spent their new time on leisure or work.

In a real-life study, students who unexpectedly gained 10 minutes at the end of a lab session took about 14 per cent longer to simply leave the building than those who knew the time would be free. They packed up more slowly and were more likely to browse a box of trinkets and snacks the researchers planted in the hallway.

“When time feels long, you kind of just luxuriate in it,” says Maglio, whose research often focuses on time and well-being, including a previous study that found actively pursuing happiness can make us unhappy, specifically because it makes us feel pressed for time.

So is gained time a gift, or a trap? Maglio says it’s both.

“It’s totally a trap you could fall into,” he says. “When we gain time, we see it differently, and the behaviour we default to might not be in our best interest. We run the risk of thinking we can do more in that time than we actually can.”

Maglio’s practical advice is to outsource the clock-watching entirely, especially when the stakes are high, like his delayed flight — enjoy the extra hour, but set an alarm.

“A bit of intentionality can go a long way.”