I’ve been kicking around this idea about how long it takes to do almost anything. A recent example came when I visited a friend who bought a house a few miles outside of the city. The house is a short walk from the train and I live a short subway ride from South Station. Easy trip, right?
Door to door, it took ninety minutes. An hour and a half! It was a stunning revelation. A soccer game could have started and ended in about that much time. For some reason, I’d never thought of the distance between our homes in such simple terms before – we live an hour and a half apart – but it made me feel a little better about not seeing each other as much these days. I don’t know about you but I don’t consider someone who lives ninety minutes away as being ‘close by’. I think I finally came around to this point of view because, again, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how long it takes to do things.
It’s possible that I’m simply arriving late to this crowded party. People seem to value speed, especially in terms of how they assess the merit of a product or a service, and maybe this is because everyone else knows how long things take and understands the importance of fast. We don’t have a lot of time on this overheating planet – why waste even a second? But I think there is another side of this coin – broadly speaking, we probably don’t really know how long it takes to do most things. I suspect that when we don't know how long something will take we usually underestimate the time commitment. Therefore, because we tend to underestimate, we end regularly surprised when 'quick' tasks (like riding the train to visit my friend) eat up half an afternoon.
I’m still considering various explanations for this tendency to underestimate the time involved in a particular task or project. My current theory is that our estimates reflect more about the effort involved than the time. The trip to visit my friend involves mostly sitting on trains or walking down the street – almost no effort at all, and thus it might explain my surprise about the length of the trip. The same goes for a lot of the routines in my life. Is it hard to wash the dishes, take a shower, and dress for work? It isn’t, and thus my surprise when I walk out the door five minutes late.
This brings me to a related idea that I don’t think about quite so much but still consider interesting – most of the things we do are pretty easy. In fact, I would say most of the things we do have no degree of difficulty. The rare occasions when I overestimate the time a task will take almost always involve something I don’t do very well. A common variation on this theme is a new task – if I’m involved for the first time, I generally overestimate the time commitment. A friend inadvertently helped me understand this a few weeks ago when we were talking about some computer skills in the context of a job application. It was reasonable that someone with my background and experience would have these skills but I had never used the program in question. My friend said ‘it would take you ten seconds to learn it’ before he corrected himself and said that the actual length of time would probably be an hour. I nodded, thinking as he said this that it would probably take me an entire day to learn the skill. I haven't told him yet that when I got the job, learning the very skill in question took me all of an hour.
If I roll all of today’s nonsense into one big idea, what I end up with is a broad explanation for why life seems to zip by as we get older. Here’s how I suspect the process works. At first, we aren’t good at anything so the simplest things take ages - tying shoes, standing up, doing math, and so on. Early on, everything is new and takes such a long time that I suspect the average kid overestimates how much time is spent doing most things. I remember summer afternoons as a little kid, going swimming long enough to wrinkle my fingertips into little topographic maps of World War I battlefields, and being astonished to come home and find it wasn't quite three o'clock. It was like I had a sixteen hour day filled with an itinerary totaling twelve hours.
Eventually, we get better at things and the endless days don't stretch and drag through the eternity of mid-afternoon quite so often. By the time we reach some semblance of adulthood, our calendars are jam packed with an endless list of simple chores – putting on pants, making coffee, buying groceries – and we start underestimating how long it will take to complete all these inane tasks. In a sense, we expect sixteen hours worth of a day to take twelve hours. Is it any wonder that most evenings we shake our heads and wonder where all the time went? Most of us will do this for five or six decades.
The conclusion to this piece – which has taken up almost all of the last hour – is obvious depending on your goals. If you want the day to seem longer, start doing new or difficult things. If you want to get better at organizing your time, start correcting for the underestimation tendency. My goal is to get more done with my time so what I’m doing is looking for opportunities like the one my friend inadvertently pointed out about learning the job skill – doing easy things that I misperceive as hard things. There is probably a huge list of things out there that I currently estimate would take me all day yet with some focused effort would probably use up closer to an hour. Those opportunities are where I suspect lurk the biggest returns on my time (and the dirtiest corners of my apartment). Doing more of these things might not necessarily make the day move any slower but I’m sure the sense of accomplishment will bring an end to that unsettling sensation of wondering where all the time has gone.
