But when a vacation approaches, do you ever get the feeling that it’s almost over before it starts?
If so, you’re not alone.
This feeling can have a ripple effect. It can change the way trips are planned—you might, for example, be less likely to schedule extra activities. At the same time, you might be more likely to splurge on an expensive dinner because you want to make the best of the little time you think you have.
Not All Events Are Created Equal
When people look forward to something, they usually want it to happen as soon as possible and last as long as possible.We first explored the effect of this attitude in the context of Thanksgiving.
Winding the Mind’s Clock
Most people believe the idiom “time flies when you’re having fun,” and research has, indeed, shown that when time seems to pass by quickly, people assume the task must have been engaging and enjoyable.We reasoned that people might be over-applying their assumption about the relationship between time and fun when judging the duration of events yet to happen.
As a result, people tend to reflexively assume that fun events—such as vacations—will go by really quickly. Meanwhile, pining for something can make the time leading up to the event seem to drag. The combination of its beginning pushed farther away in their minds—with its end pulled closer—resulted in our participants’ anticipating that something they looked forward would feel as if it had almost no duration at all.
Thinking in Hours and Days
Our goal was to show how these two judgments of an event—the fact that it simultaneously seems farther away and is assumed to last for less time—can nearly eliminate the event’s duration in the mind’s eye.We reasoned that if we didn’t explicitly highlight these two separate pieces—and instead directly asked them about the duration of the event—a smaller portion of people would indicate virtually no duration for something they looked forward to.
We found that the participants predicted that the funny video would still feel shorter and was farther away than the boring one. But we also found that participants believed it would last a bit longer than the responses we received in the earlier studies.
This finding gives us a way to overcome this biased perception: focus on the actual duration. Because in this study, participants directly reported how long the funny video would last—and not the perceived distance of its beginning and its end—they were far less likely to assume it would be over just as it started.
So when looking forward to much-anticipated events like vacations, it’s important to remind yourself just how many days it will last.
You’ll get more out of the experience—and, hopefully, put yourself in a better position to take advantage of the time you do have.