Many people can't wait for summer vacation, especially the half of Americans who cancelled their summer plans last summer due to the pandemic.Do you ever feel like your vacation is almost over?You're not the only one.Recent studies by Gabriela Tonietto and Sam Maglio, Eric VanEpps, and myself revealed that approximately half of those surveyed felt that the weekend would end just as quickly as they started.This feeling can cause ripple effects. This can have a ripple effect on how trips are planned. You might be less likely, for instance, to plan extra activities. You might also be more inclined to spend a lot on dinner to make the most of what little time you do have.Is this a natural tendency? Can it be stopped?All events are not created equalPeople look forward to things because they want it to be as soon as possible and for as long as possible.This attitude was first examined in the context Thanksgiving.We chose Thanksgiving because nearly everyone in America celebrates it. However, not everyone enjoys it. Some people enjoy the annual family gathering. Some people dread the annual family get-together because of the stress of cooking, cleaning, or dealing with family drama.We surveyed 510 people online on Monday, the day before Thanksgiving 2019, and asked them if they were looking forward or not to the holiday. We then asked them how far it was from their homes and how long they thought it would last. We asked them to move a 100 point slider, 0 being very short and 100 very long, to a place that best reflected their feelings.We suspected that the closer we looked forward to Thanksgiving, the shorter it felt. Ironically, the time it takes to long for something seems shorter in the mind's eyes.The mind's clock must be woundPeople believe that time flies when people are having fun. Research has shown that people often assume the task was engaging and enjoyable.We thought that people could be judging the length of events as a function of their assumptions about time and fun.People tend to assume that vacations and other fun events will pass quickly. The time leading up can seem slow if you are hankering after something. Our participants anticipated that the event they were looking forward to would have a short duration because their beginning was pushed further away from them.Another study asked participants to picture themselves going on a weekend trip they expected to be either fun or awful. Then, we asked participants how far the beginning and ending of their trip felt from each other using a similar scale of 0 to 100. The positive weekend was perceived by 46 percent as having no duration. Participants used the slider scale to mark the beginning and end of their vacations almost at the same place.Thinking in hours or daysWe wanted to demonstrate how these two perceptions of an event can almost eliminate the event's duration in our minds' eye.We thought that if we didn’t highlight these two pieces, and instead asked people about the duration of their event, a smaller percentage of people would say there was virtually no time for something they were looking forward to.In another study, we tested this theory by telling participants to watch two 5-minute-long videos simultaneously. The participants were asked to describe the second video as funny or boring and how long each would last.Participants predicted that the funny video would feel shorter than the boring and be farther away than the dull one. We also found that participants thought it would last longer than the earlier responses.This finding shows us how to change our biased perception by focusing on the actual length. Participants reported the length of the funny video and not its perceived duration. This made it less likely that they would assume it was over as soon as it began.Although it may sound obvious and trivial, when we decide how long a time period will feel like and how best to use it, we often rely upon our subjective feelings and not on objective measures of time.It's important to remember how many days you will be able to enjoy much-anticipated events such as vacations.You will get more from the experience and be better able to make the most of what time you have.Selin Malkoc is an Associate Professor of Marketing at The Ohio State University.This article was republished by The Conversation under Creative Commons. You can read the original article.
