How to find the time

Short version:

-Our brains are bad at measuring time and recalling timelines.

-Actually recording how long things take will surprise you and help motivate you to get them done.

-Set a deadline or a assign a date/time to your task. Without a deadline you don’t have to engage in change until “later”.

Long version:

In my dementia clinic, I am often reminded about the expectations people have for their own or others memory. I will later do a whole post or two about dementia, an excellent thing to prevent.

In short, there is a disconnect between how we think our brain should work and well, reality. I spend more time reassuring people that they don’t have memory loss based on their concerns that others remember event details or when things happened better than they do. In fact, as people recollect exactly the times when they forgot something it tells me more about their anxiety about forgetting than concerns me about memory loss.

It is, in fact, normal for people to struggle to answer how long ago things happened and to predict how long something will take or how much time left until we leave the house.

In this context-feeling too busy to find time to do a task is an emotion, a story we tell ourselves that is very powerful.

Procrastination is one response to things you do not want to do, is to overstate how long it will take you and therefore convince yourself you don’t have the time.

Too busy to do something? Sorry to burst your bubble, but this is a post about finding time so I figured you are at least curious why if you have read this far.

The fix- awareness. Without being aware of this, you are the problem. So am I.

Planning– I mentioned this one before- the actual time it takes to fill or empty a dishwasher is probably less than 3 minutes. Sometimes less than 1! yet it’s no fun and we can put it off all day and be annoyed every time we walk by dishes in the sink. Compare this to how quickly we can whirlwind clean if we know someone is going to stop by in the next 20 minutes. The only difference is we added a deadline.

I am going to really burst your (my own) bubble. It takes less than 10 minutes to fold and put away a basket of laundry. Yet I can put that off for days.

Moral of the story is that you actually have no idea how long things actually take. I am not picking on you (or me) I am calling out our false expectations of timing based on this limitation of our brains. You dilate the time you expect things to take when you don’t feel like doing them. You also feel like good things happen or pass by very quickly, like a great vacation or family dinner. The other side is also true. Parkinson’s law generally states that “work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion”, ie the longer we have to complete something the longer it takes.

Alternatively we can tell ourselves the opposite story too. Such as; ‘It will only take me 5 minutes to pack. ‘ ‘I only need 10 minutes to leave the house in the morning so I can hit snooze.’

Recall– The best way to recall when something happened in the past is to associate it with a timepost in your own history. Did something happen pre pandemic? That was 4 years ago. When you lived in a certain apartment? Or after you moved. Before your nephew was born or after. That’s how your brain makes a timeline.

This is why you can’t remember if you had that surgery in 2015 or 2010. Thats ok, I don’t worry if people cant come up with exact dates. I worry only that they don’t or can’t attempt it. In clinic I don’t worry when people use external triggers like their watch, phone or wall calendar to keep track of the current date and planned appointments. There is no internal calendar, only associations. Even when testing patients, if they look at their watch or phone it tells me their brain is problem solving.

The upshot is that we have very unreliable internal time clocks but are very swayed by the stories we tell ourselves. In therapy it is called reframing, changing how you think of something so that you can suffer less about it. Hopefully knowing this helps you not avoid emptying the dishwasher or starting your tax preparation.

But really this is how you find that you have plenty of time. Sometimes the things we don’t feel we have the time for, may just be things we feel anxious about. Schedule time to worry about something- I mean that. Decide when you will worry about/start to work on something you have been putting off, and then make sure you plan for a reward after.