How Setting a Schedule Can Make You Less Productive

It can seem like there’s never enough time - not enough for sleep and not enough for play, and not enough for exercise.

There’s a relatively new term to describe this feeling: time famine, or the sensation of having too much to do without enough time to do it.

To structure what little time we feel we have, one strategy is scheduling. The idea is that scheduling will make us more efficient. But scheduling can sometimes backfire and actually make us less productive. In one study, attendees of an academic conference were asked whether they would go to the presidential address taking place about an hour later. Some said they would, and others said they wouldn’t. Those who planned to attend the address reported the hour leading up to it felt shorter. So the presence of an upcoming activity seems to have shrunk how much time people felt they had.

Why might this happen? It’s believed that when there’s an appointment coming, we direct our attention to it, whether it’s mentally preparing for it or simply dreading it. This makes the future appointment feel more substantial (重大的); as a result, the time interval leading up to the scheduled activity feels limited and insufficient. Time famine may partly lies in our own perception of what we feel can be done with the time we have.

But you still have the same amount of time leading up to a scheduled event, so time famine shouldn’t really matter, right? But it does. This feeling by itself can influence what people decide to do. When something is scarce, people consider it more valuable and are less willing to part with it. The same is true for time. If time feels limited, people are less likely to use it - even when it’s in their best interest.

If you love scheduling and planning out your days, a trick could be to schedule events or tasks back-to-back (连续地), which leaves you with larger amounts of unscheduled time. Several uninterrupted hours of unscheduled time will feel longer, especially if there’s nothing scheduled coming.

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Plan for Domino Effects on Sustainability Goals

Climate change is causing ever-more-extreme events, from storms and droughts to floods and violent windstorms, and these risks interact across many environmental and social systems. A heatwave can spark forest fires, which lead to air pollution. Drought-wrecked harvests can result in food-price unpredictability.

Yet these domino effects are barely considered in most countries’ strategies for achieving the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) by 2030. Many countries that are working hard to reach these goals insufficiently consider the impact of extreme weather. Take Germany as an example. Its 2018 strategy on sustainable development runs to 60 pages yet the word ‘disaster’ appears only once. There is no analysis of the consequences of an increase in such events.

Although many people are now aware that climate change is making fires, floods, heatwaves and storms more frequent, more severe or both, this knowledge isn’t changing policy or research enough. Part of the problem is perception. Future disasters feel unreal to decision-makers, as we’ve experienced with so many governments’ lack of pandemic preparedness, despite years of warning that something similar to COVID-19 was a case of when, not if. Other obstacles are inadequate national and international governance, and communication challenges. The research community has not yet provided effective guidance.

As a consequence, many efforts to achieve the SDGs will, like a house of cards, fall at the first shaking. Our global efforts need to be much more vigorous to the changing and interconnected nature of risk in a warming world.

What now? Researchers must create models that are more understandable and useful to policymakers. When possible, SDG targets and indicators should be redesigned to capture weakness to heatwaves, fires, droughts, floods, hurricanes, mudslides and more. And politicians need to be convinced to invest in precautionary measures and adaptation.