Manage your time and mind games

Despite all the tips of my favorite minimalist, we still sometimes have to manage your time well. And some have to do it more often, especially when deadlines are lit and the client requires. We are required to paint the actions of future projects on the clock. And then that the fun begins! We can become trapped in your own mind and do not meet the specified time. Why? All the matter in our own perception of time and "rubber clock".

© photo

Try to remember any of the projects or things that you have finished the last couple of weeks or a month ago. You remember? However, in your head immediately drew krasivenky list of completed cases, and you wonder how you managed to do so much?! Now try to recall the prescription of the project in six months. He does not seem so complicated, and it seems that 1 hour of the project 6 months old, you have time to much less than 1 unit of the working time of the project yesterday. It turns out that six months ago 1:00 <1 hours yesterday... psychologically, of course.

Quentin Alf (Alf Kanten) I addressed this issue in his paper published in 2011 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Quentin realized that it works in the opposite direction. According to research, when you think about something that is in far enough away from your future, your thinking more abstractly on this subject than when this event is closer to you at the time scale. That is, the farther away you are from the event, the shorter you think duration 1 hour. The closer an event, the more specifically you imagine things, and the longer you think one hour.

How does this affect our ability to properly assess the duration of the upcoming projects and the amount of work that you will have time to perform during this time?

In one study, participants were asked to estimate how long the project will take. One group was asked to imagine that they need to read the book and write a summary, another had to do the cleaning. Someone asked to imagine that things have to do tomorrow, and someone - some time (for example, in the following year).

Those who had to do the work in the next year we decided that it would take longer than those who must do their job tomorrow.

That is, if one o'clock in the future felt by us as a shorter compared with 1 hour tomorrow, it means that we are recording for future projects longer than they take in real time. For future projects, it is certainly good, and you may receive a reserve of time. If you vote the wrong time for the next projects, you may have a lack of time to complete the job. Therefore it is better to allocate a little more time than you think. After all, your sense of time can let you down, especially if you are focused on the week's projects - because you had so much during this time, right?