Find something to do, because the feeling that we have too much to do is much more pleasing than the feeling that we have nothing to do.
A philosopher once noted that people long for immortality but run out of things to do on a rainy afternoon. If we planned out our time in long chunks, say twenty years, we would never consider penciling in five or ten of those years for wasting time.
Yet during the average day, we often let a few hours slip away.
Time is a strange commodity, because we seem to have so much of it, until the moment we have none at all. We often complain about having too much to do. Yet having too much to do is a positive problem of abundance, while having too little to do is a negative problem of shortage.
Metro Plastics Technology in Indiana tested out this principle by cutting the length of the workweek for its employees from forty hours to thirty hours. And do you know what happened after the switch? The quality of the company's products improved, and the company actually made more money.
Management found that giving workers more to do in less time made the workers more efficient, energetic, and enthusiastic and gave workers more free time outside of the workplace.
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In studies of college students, those with more demanding schedules were 15 percent more satisfied with life. Despite the more demanding schedules, the individuals studied did notexperience any more stress than those with less to do.
Bailey and Miller 1998
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