Instant Genius - The psychology of making the most of your time

Episode Date: August 21, 2025

Be it due to an increasingly demanding workload or responsibilities that need fulfilling at home, these days many of feel that there isn’t enough time in the day to get everything we need to get done. For many of us this can have a significant impact on our health and wellbeing. So, what can we do to improve our relationship with time? In this episode, we’re joined by Dr Ian Taylor, a psychologist based at Loughborough University, to talk about his latest book Time Hacks – The Psychology of Time and How to Spend it. He tells us how relying on willpower alone is never the best way to be more productive, why we should be getting the most important tasks on our to-do lists completed early in the day and how breaking larger intimidating goals down into smaller micro-goals can have a huge impact on our motivation. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Every Monday and Friday, you'll hear world-leading scientists and experts talking about the most fascinating ideas in science and technology today. I'm Jason Goodyear, commissioning editor at BBC Science Focus. Be it due to an increasingly demanding workload or responsibilities that need for filling at home. These days, many of us feel that there isn't enough time in the day to get everything we need to get done. For many of us, this can have a significant impact on our health and wellbeing.

So what can we do to improve our relationship with time? In this episode, we're joined by Dr. Ian Taylor, a psychologist based at Loughborough University, to talk about his latest book, Time Hacks, The Psychology of Time and How to Spend It. He tells us how relying on willpower alone is never the best way to be more productive, why we should be getting the most important tasks on our to-do lists

completed early in the day, and how breaking down larger, intimidating goals into smaller micro goals can make a huge impact on our motivation. So welcome to the podcast. Thanks very much for joining us. Thanks for having us. So today we're talking about your book, Time Hacks, The Psychology of Time and How to Spend It. So earlier on in the book, you talk about the kind of notion of busyness and our emotional connection to time. So I bet pretty much everyone listening will have said that they're too busy at some points in their lives. So how has this relationship with time arisen? It's a great starting question. I think over time, and in the introduction of the book I talk about how our relationship with time has evolved.

And the way it's become almost omnipresent in our lives. And I give the example of, you know, I could look at my wats, my sports watch, tablet time, my desktop time. And, you know, time is everywhere. And then I have a meeting at these set times. In the grand scheme of humanity, that's a new, a very new thing, this being wedded to time. And I think that's probably the primary cause of us now feeling this pressure that comes from sticking to deadlines, sticking to time, and things like that. So I think it's primarily the fact that we're so obsessed with time. And I speak about different cultures in the book

and how they're not so obsessed with time or at least have different perceptions of time. But in Western industrialized countries, like the UK, like the USA, culturally we've become obsessed with time and time is money and things like that. And I think that's the cause of this overriding busyness. And then playing into that are other things

that are influencing our well-being. You know, the number of major events that's happened in the last five years, is incredible. And all those play into our well-being, then further erodes our healthy relationship with time, and the way we perceive time becomes skewed. Yeah, so I think sticking with busyness, for some people, it's kind of a badge of honour. You know, they say things like, oh, I need to stay busy, etc. Like you said, time is money, time waits for no man. So, you know, what are your views on that? You know, is that a healthy attitude is like a wide question?

For some people, they can live their life being extremely busy and it has no impact upon their well-being whatsoever. They function very well. What the book's more about is those that are feeling overly busy and are not functioning well. So it's not that they want to be, they feel frantic, they feel out of control. It's that sort of element that the book concerns, or certainly the early chapters. And that's what I talk about in one of the early chapters is that there's very little or no relationship between how busy people actually are and how they feel busy. When you look at people, there are people who are extremely busy and function effectively

well on high psychological well-being because they're not feeling out of control and they're not feeling busy. They've set up their systems and the way they live their life and their habits to function effectively. And yet, if you look at other people objectively, you would say they're not particularly busy, but they feel very busy and they feel out of control. And it's that feeling that you have to change. And you can't really change it by being less busy. It's the underlying emotional well-being and psychological well-being that's causing that franticness, not how busy you actually are. So taking things out of your diary might help a little bit.

but that's not the main. There's more significant things that we can do. So let's have a look at some of those. So one thing that I think is really interesting is the idea of establishing routines. So how important is that? And what should we consider? Like what are the headline points when we're trying to form a, you know, for better want of a word, a healthy routine?

Yeah, routines are really interesting because, again, unfortunately, psychology, a nice balance. There's rarely one answer at one end of extreme to the other. So routines are good, okay, generally speaking. But equally, people approach their routines differently. And for some people, really, strict routines would be good. But generally, you want a routine, but the psychological flexibility to, if that routine doesn't happen, that you've still got the resilience to adapt and so forth.

So routines are really interesting because generally speaking, they will reduce the mental demands of making decisions. Okay. So if you've got a decision to make about, let's say, when you exercise, and I do a lot of research in exercise settings, so I'm going to use that example. Okay. And you've got a decision to make about, oh, well, I could do it then just before my kids have gone to school, or I could do it after, but then I've got to prepare lunch. And there's a lot of cognitive processing going along, and there's cognitive demand. Whereas routines remove that cognitive load and that cognitive effort. So if you know on a Tuesday, you're going to the 8 o'clock

exercise class, there's not the associated cognitive load to going. So that's one of the reasons why routine works. Like I intimated at the beginning of this of my answer, though, psychological flexibility is usually a good thing. So it's like your routines are the foundation, but equally we know that life is going to throw some curveballs. So having plans, if this is going to happen, if this obstacle comes, I can do that. I can exercise another time, for example. Or if this happens, it doesn't matter. I won't suddenly become amazingly unhealthy.

If I don't exercise that day, I'll just do it again tomorrow. So it's a nice balance between having those set routines and the psychological flexibility to adapt them when necessary. I think is absolutely essential. So you also talk about something really interesting. That's willpower. So often we'll see this as a personal failing. And you'll say, well, you know, such and such and compare ourselves to others. Such and such is so disciplined. You know, they wake up at say six o'clock in the morning, go for a five, 10K run. Why can't I be like that? You know, where am I going wrong? And you're quite right there. A lot of people will put that down to willpower. Well, actually, what willpower is is a really, poor quality motivation. If you're relying on willpower every day, and we'll stick with the exercise example, if you're relying on willpower every day to exercise, then eventually you're going to fail and not exercise. So willpower is bad. And the reason is that is because it's not

designed to be robust. It's designed to break every now and again. Okay. So if we go back in humanity and prehumanity, all our ancestors were concerned. learned with were satisfying immediate urges. That's all they did. But then as we developed into social groups and things, you had to learn or we had to develop a system where actually there needs to be a balance between satisfying our immediate urges or resisting those urges for the long-term game. And that's when the early versions of willpower started to develop. And the implication of that is that willpower is sometimes need to. to break. If we continually sacrificed our immediate needs for hunger, as an example, for the long-term

needs of the group, then we would die of starvation. And so willpower needed to break to say, look, you're over-prioritizing these long-term goals. You need to look after your immediate self. And that willpower, that's what it was primary function was, to provide a balance between immediate urges and long-term goals. Unfortunately, Our brain is really, really slow at evolving compared to the current environment. Over the last 200 years, our environment has completely changed. If you walk down any high street, there's immediate temptations to buy the latest outfit. There's immediate temptations to eat a burger or a kebab or fish and chips.

We're bombarded with these immediate temptations and were not designed to resist that level of temptation. So in other words, willpower is problematic because A, it's designed to break every now and again, but also it's not designed for a constant bombardment

of temptation. And so, to summarize, you can feel when you're using willpower. So it doesn't feel very pleasant. You know, it's like, oh, I really want that cake, but I'm on a diet. So willpower doesn't feel very unpleasant. If you're feeling like that consistently,

then you're going to fail in the diet or whatever. and you need to seek other more robust types of motivation, or you need to develop more robust types of motivation, which I talk about later on in the book. Yeah, so that was going to be my next question then, this whole idea of motivation. It's the same thing you can sort of criticize yourself and say,

well, you know, my friend Pete or whatever, he's really motivated to do things. Why don't I share that? Motivation's really not as simple as it's generally portrayed. Okay, so people just think motivation, high or low motivation. Whereas actually we've got a range of different motives and there's different motivational processes

and some are better than others. Okay, so I'll take two ideas from the book. The first one is that immediate benefits and outcomes are much more motivating than long-term benefits and outcomes. That's because the motivational power comes from the outcome or the reward. Okay. People diet to lose weight. Okay. So the motivational power is losing weight. Okay. The problem with losing weight is it typically doesn't occur till weeks or months in advance of your diet or you exercise routine. Okay.

So you're motivated to lose weight, but you're not motivated to diet. Whereas if you've got an immediate benefit, you actually really like the taste of healthy food. Okay. That's an immediate benefit. benefit of eating healthy foods. Okay. You're more likely to sustain that diet because the power of that outcome, the enjoyment of the taste, can easily be transferred and linked to the actual eating healthy. So immediate motives are much more motivating.

That's not to say you can't have long-term goals. Okay. But long-term goals are not going to motivate you. on a daily basis. Okay, so if you're training for a marathon in three months time, brilliant. That's a good long term to go to have. But if you're just looking for some outcome associated with that time period,

then it's not going to motivate you to get up off the sofa and train for it. You've got to either enjoy the training or you've got to value the training or you've got to have some social benefit, some immediate outcome of that training to then motivate you to get to the outcome. And the second really robust motivational process is in the book, what I call about be goals. Be goals are much more motivational powerful than other goals like have and should goals. Humans like to demonstrate who they are and who they want to be.

That helps with forming social groups. It helps you get on with life. so it's a very powerful motivational process. Whereas doing things because you want to have something is stored much lower in the motivational components of the break. It's not as powerful. So rather than thinking, I want to set up a business, for example, it's more robust to think about it in a sense

I want to be a good business person. I want to be a business person. And then you think, okay, what do the business people do? they do this, this, this, and they act like this and they do this. And that is much more motivational powerful. It's the same with exercise. People who identify as being an exerciser don't have as many problems getting up when it's rainy and cold and stuff

because it's a beagle. They are an exerciser. It's part of their character. Whereas people who exercise just because they want to have a better body that have goal is much motivationally weaker compared to a be goal. And so they're more likely to give up. When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsored jobs.

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and unforgettable listening experiences at home. Try it for yourself at a focal powered by name boutique. Visit focal powered by name.com for more information. How about, I guess you'd call it task management? So it's a bit of a dreaded word for a lot of people. That's the to-do list. A lot of us will think, well, you know, I'll get the easy tasks out of the way first. And then I'll come to the more difficult ones later. What's the kind of psychology there? Rather than think about it as easy or difficult, I would look at your tasks and your goals as personally important or not personally important. Okay. now typically you've got more resources cognitive mental often physical resources in the morning okay so i would get the personally important stuff done first if possible okay now they going back to you're easy and difficult it's probably best to get the difficult stuff done okay because you do the easy stuff and it just takes mental resources away and so you're tired and fatigue by the time you get your

difficult one but i don't necessarily think about in terms of easy and difficult, I think about it as personally important. Get the personally important goals done first. Don't clear the decks and do the faf and do the house chores first. Do them later. Do the personally important first. And another thing, going back to easy and difficult goals, one of the best things you can do is make difficult goals easy.

I talk a lot in the book about how effort flows over time and there's this idea called motivational inertia where the effort required to start a project or start a difficult task is huge but when you get the ball rolling it eases off a little bit so we can overcome motivational inertia and there's more inertia with difficult goals because they seem green with really turning it into

micro goals. So an example, when I was writing the book, there was quite a few days where I was like, oh, I haven't really got the energy to write something for the book. So what I did was like, okay, but that's not the goal. Okay. It seems too difficult in my head. So you need to reduce the goal. Okay. So my goal became, open the laptop. And that has made a difficult, a relatively difficult because I didn't have the energy about writing a book. And I've made it easier. into this micro goal of opening a laptop. And when you've opened the laptop, you've more times than not overcome this motivational inertia

where you can then, well, okay, well, the laptop's open now. I can just write a sentence, and before you know it, you're tapping away at your keyboard. And it's the same with exercise. You know, I think new people to exercise often set two bigger goals. You know, the thought of getting home from work and running 5K, for example, is it, oh, that would be a really difficult goal. But if you say, look, when I get home from work, the goal is to put my trainers on and get out

the door, then suddenly you've reduced the motivational inertia, you've made a difficult goal, an easy goal. Once you've got your trainers on, you're out the door, you're probably going to go for a job. And so you've overcome that inertia. So how about, you sort of touched in this earlier, but the notion of concentration and distraction. So these days, we're bombarded by emails, text messages, all sorts of things that can take our attention away from the task at hand.

So how can we cope with that? It's interesting. And now I appreciate my answer is going to be not suited to everyone's occupation. And some of my friends, after reading the book, have said, yes, but my role requires me to do certain things. You can be really harsh on how you reduce your distractions. okay so it's only a few clicks to turn off you know the little email the sign that you've got an email and it pings up and it's only a little thing and you like but it's it you see it every time and it's it's oh i'll just look who's emailing me because someone wants that wants my attention

it's a few clicks to turn them off okay and so they you know it sounds easy you know turn your phone or at least turn it on silent or you know don't answer your e don't have your emails on i particularly go against emails in the book but don't have your emails on when you're trying to do real difficult work. It's just a distraction. So with these distractions, I think a lot of it is to do with planning. Now, you've got to really want to turn those distractions,

because those distractions are tempting for a reason. Do you really want to turn them off, or do you really want a message every two minutes, you know, to distract you from work? But if you really want to remove those distractions, you've got to remove them from your area, if you like. As I said before, willpower, is weak. Okay, so do not expect yourself to be able to resist the sound of a WhatsApp message

coming off. You won't be able to do it. You'll automatically go for it. So it's a lot of it is planning and thinking ahead and going, right, do I really want to be distraction-free, then you need to find a place where distractions don't exist, turn off the technology, and so forth. So coming off the back of that, you mentioned in the book the importance of solitude, And now, a lot of people say, oh, loneliness is a serious problem in the modern era. But you're saying solitude can be a good thing. You know, could you explain that? That's an interesting distinction, actually, between solitude and loneliness.

Okay. And I'll give you an example to demonstrate that distinction. People are lonely when they're in a big group. Okay. So solitude is seeking out when no one's around. But if you're on your own, let's say you've gone off on a solo trek somewhere in the Himalayas, okay, you might have solitude, but you know back home there's a loving family, your friends are great, your friends are only a phone call away and so off.

So you can have solitude and you're not lonely. Equally, as I said, you could be at a party surrounded by 40, 50 people, okay, and you can feel incredibly lonely. So solitude and loneliness are not the same thing. Loneliness is almost always bad, okay, and bad for our well-being. Solitude is quite often very, very beneficial. The problem is, people get those two things confused, solitude and loneliness. One of the, one of my favorite things about writing this book is finding out about some of the research that's been done. One group of researchers told, asked people, would they rather spend 15 minutes alone with their thoughts? Or would you like to receive an electric shock? Okay. And I can't remember the exact percentages,

but a staggering number of people chose the electric shop. Because in solitude, they think they will be lonely. They think they will be anxious. And solitude sometimes does facilitate those thoughts. But once you get through that and get used to solitude, good things happen. Your mind gets very creative and starts developing new ideas and new things. So yeah, one of the chapters in the book is about solitude and just little snippets and going through those fears about solitude and letting your mind wander and get creative. And that links into what I was saying about be goals. When you start using solitude well, you start to develop these ideas about who you want to be in the future. And that's a really powerful process. So another thing that you talk

about sort of related to this that I thought was really interesting, is that the idea of boredom. So we all say, oh, we haven't got enough time in our busy lives. But then so many people say, oh, I'm bored. There's kind of an interesting dichotomy there. Yeah. I mean, it's strange in one of the introductory chapters. You look at national surveys and levels of boredom are going up. And yet levels of busyness are going up as well. And there's almost dual problem with our relationship with time. And boredom is a really good topic because I've got another really interesting study that scientists did is they made their experimental participants bored and then they counted how many maggots they wanted to grind up with a coffee grinder, which is, I don't know the people

who created this study, but it's very imaginative. No maggots were actually killed. It just looked like they were grinding up maggots and actually there was a little safety compartment. So the maggots were fine. So boredom is, yeah, it's a really interesting thing. And it ties nicely in with sort of the digital worlds that we live in now. When people get bored, they read often, more often than not, they'll reach for the phone. And yet there's some really nice new evidence out there that actually, when you do that and you start scrolling through social media or whatever, you end up being more bored than you were before.

So like solitude, people are scared of boredom. But there was some interesting philosophy that I discussed in the book about there's different types of boredom. and the boredom associated with feelings of frustration, I think that typically are not very adaptive, but there's these ideas about radical boredom. You have to be bored for these really radical ideas to come out of your mind and things like that. So boredom was a really interesting topic to research. So sort of one final question then, other than buying the book, what sort of headline things would you like somebody listening to take away from our conversation?

I think one of the points was earlier that we spoke about about your relationship with time and how attached to being on time and going from meeting to meeting and maybe just reappraising your relationship with time would be a good one to start. Thinking about how time impacts motivation is really useful because generally speaking societies promote the wrong types of motivations more and they're not. Okay, so trying to re-evaluate what are you motivated by. And in the book, I give a range of these options about what motives to use, I think, would be a good one. Yeah, and the be goals that we spoke about, try not to emphasize having things so much and just try

and think about be goals and what are your core values of your character and let that drive your actions, and you'll get, I think, a lot more benefits for your well-being and have a much healthier relationship with time. Thank you for listening to this episode of Instant Genius, brought to you from the team behind BBC Science Focus. That was Dr Ian Taylor. To discover more about the topics we've just discussed, check out his book, Time Hacks, The Psychology of Time and How to Spend It.

If you liked what you just heard, then please do consider subscribing to Instant Genius on your preferred podcast platform. If you'd like to see our guests and hosts in person, then please also check out our YouTube channel at Science Focus. The current issue of BBC Science Focus magazine is out now. Pick up a copy wherever you buy your favourite magazines or download us on your app store of choice. You can also find us on Apple News or online at sciencefocus.com.

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