Free Time

Why can an hour-long meeting feel endless, while a week-long holiday disappears in a flash? Why do the moments we want to end last forever, while those we want to hold on to disappear quickly? And when was the last time you did absolutely nothing? We are living in an age of time poverty. We measure success by how busy we are, see empty time as wasted time and our spare moments are swallowed by our screens. The result? Many of us feel desperately short of time and stuck in a distracted loop. But what if we could make the bad times feel shorter and the good times last longer? We think of time as fixed: sixty seconds is sixty seconds. Yet our experience of it is anything but. Time stretches, shrinks, races and crawls according to what we are doing, thinking and feeling. In Free Time, Professor Ruth Ogden, Professor of the Psychology of Time, reveals the fascinating science of how our brains construct time. Exploring how emotions, technology, work, ageing and culture shape our internal clocks, Ogden shows us how to make difficult moments pass more quickly, hold on to the good times for longer and carve out time that is truly free. Free Time shows us why having time of our own is not a luxury, but essential to our health and wellbeing – giving us the tools to move from time poverty to time affluence, reclaim our most precious resource and live richer, happier lives – now and in the future.