How to Stop Wishing Time Away

I’m editing this essay on an airplane. We are somewhere between Philadelphia and Tampa right now, and while it is not a long flight, to be honest, I’d like it to be over. My first flight to Tampa was canceled so the travel process has already felt epic. I’d like to get where I’m going. I keep hoping the minutes will go faster.

That’s understandable on a flight, and particularly a bumpy one, but if you pay attention to the rhythms of daily life, you’ll notice that we actually wish a lot of minutes away. Commutes. Meetings. A stubborn child’s interminable bedtime routine.

Taken together, this can feel like a miserable bargain. Life is short, and here we are, encouraging the sands in the hourglass to move faster.

Not all life can feel as blissful as a dinner with old friends, of course, but I do think it’s possible to wish fewer minutes away. The key is recognizing how valuable minutes are, and making mindful choices to move minutes into happier categories.

There’s no question that time is ultimately limited. Oliver Burkeman’s recent book, Four Thousand Weeks, takes its name from the approximate span of a human lifetime. In one of my books, I calculated that according to actuarial tables, a woman born in 1978 like me could expect to live 78.0 years, giving me 683,760 hours of life. Should I make it to age 65, which I hope to do, the expected expiration happens at 83.4 years, giving me more like 730,000 hours of life. Either way, there’s a reasonable chance that more than half my hours are gone. Perhaps a big portion are gone for you too.

So how can we stop wishing that some of those remaining hours would fly by? The first step is to identify which hours feel particularly unpleasant. Look at your calendar. Pay attention. When do you keep looking at the clock? Few people love meetings, but some are no doubt much worse than others. Traffic-clogged drives and despised chores can be other culprits. Some parts of parenting are wonderful. Others, such as chasing a toddler around the sidelines of another child’s baseball game, can feel like the seconds have stopped moving entirely.

For each of these, ask if there is anything you can do to spend fewer minutes in this unhappy state. Maybe things don’t have to be done. Not all meetings have to happen. Maybe you can work from home another day or two per week and spend less time in traffic. If you find yourself wishing minutes away for most of your work day, that might be a sign it’s time to look into different jobs.

For things we’re not going to quit, sometimes we can change the circumstances. Spending money might help. If we have multiple kid games or practices at the same time on a weekend, sometimes my husband and I will hire a babysitter so no one has to chase the toddler on the sidelines (thus inevitably missing the other kid’s big play because the toddler has tried to run into the parking lot). Planning ahead might allow you to pair a fun activity with an un-fun one; packing enjoyable listening material, like a humor audio book or a great podcast, can make drives much less miserable. On planes, I do try to listen to good music, read good books, and if I don’t have to drive myself anywhere or be on stage, I’ll have a glass of wine. I try to enjoy the uninterrupted work time that’s hard to come by on the ground.

You can also feel free to daydream. If you are stuck in a meeting you can’t get out of but you don’t need to actively participate in, recall a happy memory. When have you felt truly excited? Or think about what you’re looking forward to. Pondering your upcoming beach vacation can allow you to feel some of the happiness you would on the sand even as you stare at gray conference room walls.

And if all that fails, you can turn your mind back to the preciousness of even annoying minutes by allowing yourself to picture them suddenly gone. Close your eyes. Imagine a situation where something happened that left you unable to go to that meeting, make that drive, chase a toddler, or travel by plane. Picture that scenario, and how much you might wish you could just go back in time to do those normal things again.

Then open your eyes. You’re there now! You got your wish!

It doesn’t make a stubborn kid go to bed faster but it might mean wishing fewer minutes away — and that can make life in general feel better.