Question

Want to add some hours to your day? Ok, you probably can't change the fabric of time. But a new study suggests that the way you feel about your goal can change your concept of time and that some simple strategies could make you feel less rushed.

In a series of experiments, Jordan Etkin, a professor of marketing at Duke, and her co-authors, Loannis Evangelidis and Jennifer Aaker, looked at what happens when people see their goals as conflicting with one another. In one, they asked some participants to list two of their goals that they felt were in conflict, and others simply to list two of their goals. Those who were forced to think about conflicting aims felt more time pressure than those who weren't. In another experiment, the researchers gave participants a similar prompt regarding goal conflict, but this time measured their anxiety levels as well as their attitudes toward time. They found that participants who thought about conflicting goals had more anxiety than those who didn't, and that this, in turn, led to feelings of being short on time.

"Stress and anxiety and time pressure are closely linked concepts," D. Etkin explained. "When we feel more stress and anxiety in relation to our personal goals, that manifests as a sense of having less time."

Technological advances that allow people to do lots of things at once may increase the fe'eling of goal conflict, she said."I think the easier it is for us to try to deal with a lot of these things at the same time," She said"the more opportunity there is for us to feel this conflict between our goals."She isn't the first to suggest that actual busyness isn't the only thing that can make us feel busy At the Atlantic, Derek Thompson wrote that "as a country, we're working less than we did in the 1960s and 1980s." He offered a number of possible reasons some Americans still feel so overworked, including "the fluidness ffl±) of work and leisure." As he put it:"The idea that work begins and ends at the office is wrong. On the one hand, flexibility is nice, On the other, mixing work and leisure together creates an always-on expectation that makes it hard for white-collar workers to escape the shadow of work responsibilities."

And Brigid Schulte writes in her 2014 book Overwhelmed: How to Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time that some researchers believe "time has no sharp edges. What often matters more than the activity we're doing at a moment in time, they have found, is how we feel about it.Our concept of time is indeed,our reality.”

Fortunately, Dr. Etkin and her team did find ways of making us feel better about time—or, at least, of reducing the negative influence of goal conflict. When participants performed a breathing exercise that reduced their anxiety, the impact of such conflict on their perception of time was less pronounced. Reframing anxiety as excitement (by reading the phrase "I am excited!" aloud several times) had a similar effect.

Breathing and reframing may not solve everyone's time problems—Ms. Schulte writes that some Americans are indeed working more than they used to. She cites the work of the sociologists Michael Hout and Caroline Hanley, who have "found that working parents combined put in 13 more hours a week on the job in 2000 than they did in 1970. That's 676 hours of additionally paid work a year for a family. And that's on top of all the unpaid hours spent caring for children and keeping the house together." Sometimes, we may feel short on time because we actually are. However, Dr. Etkin believes her findings suggest we may "have the ability to influence our experience of time more than we think we do."

"We're all going to have times in our lives when our goals seem to be in more conflict than others," she said. But with techniques like the ones her team tested, "we really can help ourselves feel like we have more time."

1.What makes people feel rushed today?

A.Goal conflict. B. High pressure.

C.Too much expectation. D. Lack of exercise.

2.Which of the following statements is TRUE according to the passage?

A. Most people are having less work to do nowadays.

B. People under a lot of stress have a better sense of time.

C. Technological advances allow people to feel less stressed.

D. The flexibility of work increases white-collar workers' pressure.

3.The underlined sentence "Our concept of time is, indeed, our reality." means_______

A.we should make full use of time

B.we value time more than the way we live

C.we can feel better about time if we want to

D.we don't have the time to enjoy life in reality

Answer 1