The research says we have more free time than people did a hundred years ago. Your gut says that you’re running from the moment your alarm goes off until your head hits the pillow. What gives?
Although we do work shorter hours than many generations before us, the time we have left is broken into fragments that give us few long stretches for true rest or productivity. This is known as ‘time confetti.’ Let’s dive deeper into the concept of time confetti and what you can do to reclaim your free time.
What is ‘time confetti’?
In her book Overwhelmed: Work, Love, and Play When No One Has the Time, author Brigid Schulte coined the phrase ‘time confetti.’ She describes it as the fragmented pieces of free time scattered throughout the day. Unlike longer stretches of leisure time, these moments are too short to be meaningful, and they can keep you from ever feeling fully present or relaxed.
So, while a few ten and fifteen-minute breaks throughout the day hypothetically give you an hour, they don’t give you the same options as one uninterrupted hour. The more your leisure is split by messages, work, household tasks, and other interruptions, the harder it becomes to settle into anything meaningful.
The consequences of time confetti
Every interruption requires you to stop one activity, shift your attention somewhere else, and hope that you eventually find your way back. Research on attention residue shows that some of our attention remains attached to the previous task when we switch. On average, it takes 23 minutes to fully refocus after a distraction. As a result, the transition ends up costing a lot more than the few seconds it took to check a notification.
Over the course of a ‘relaxing’ night at home, these small interruptions add up. Author and professor Ashley Whillans gives us a visual representation of what this can look like in practice. Although our ideal chunk of free time is shown in Figure 1-1, most of our nights end up looking like one of the examples in Figure 1-2.
Source: https://behavioralscientist.org/time-confetti-and-the-broken-promise-of-leisure/
While you technically had free time, it may not feel like you enjoyed much of it.
Why an hour doesn’t always feel like an hour
Time confetti isn’t only created by interruptions. Sometimes the shape of the time itself makes it more prone to fragmentation.
An open hour and an hour before your next commitment contain the same 60 minutes, but they don’t necessarily feel the same.
Research shows that when you know your free time is limited by a hard stop, you’re less likely to engage in relatively productive tasks. Even if you have a reasonable chunk of time in which you could knock a few things out, the time feels shorter than it actually is. In scientific terms, we describe this as temporal contraction.
This phenomenon changes how you use the time you do have. Longer activities can start to feel like too much of a commitment, even when they technically fit. You gravitate toward shorter start-and-stop activities that fit with the fragmented time you think you have.
Instead of starting a 45-minute workout, reading a few chapters, or folding that pile of laundry sitting in the basket, you check your messages. Then your email. Then social media.
None of those choices takes much time on its own, but together they turn that usable block into a handful of smaller, mostly unproductive ones.
This is where temporal contraction and time confetti work together to really drain your free time. The hour feels short, so you fill it with quick activities. Those activities fragment the hour even more, making it feel even shorter than you originally perceived it.
How to find + reduce your biggest sources of time confetti
In her book, Brigid Schulte reminds us:
“Change is hard. Our very human nature pulls us back to the status quo, not because it’s better, but because it’s familiar. However, I learned a few things about change as I visited bright spots: The unspoken culture we operate in trumps any policy on the books or nice speech by the boss. We create that culture by the stories we tell ourselves. And change gets a little easier when it’s visible.”
You can’t get rid of every interruption that eats away at your free time. But you can identify the ones that keep breaking up the longer leisure periods you get and decide if they’re worth the distraction. Change may be hard, but it’s far from impossible.
Start with your technology
It’s easy to assume that one app (i.e. your favorite social media platform) is the culprit of 95% of your time confetti, but assumptions are based on perception, not data.
To identify and reduce the apps that are fragmenting your time, look at your screen time habits. One forty-minute block scrolling Instagram is less disruptive to your time than 40 minutes of Instagram scattered across dozens of checks throughout the day.
With the new RescueTime app, you can see how many shifts you’re making in a day and which apps you most often switch to. From there, you have a range of options. For most people, they go something like this:
Less drastic → More drastic
Turn off notifications → Set app limits → Delete the app → Delete your account
Start with the least drastic option and work your way up if you need help bolstering your self-control. This one action alone could return an hour or two to your day.
Watch for work sprinkled into your leisure time
There’s a difference between choosing to work for an hour at night and unintentionally completing 5 different work tasks throughout the night at home.
You never really feel like you have time off when you’re constantly responding to Slack messages or client emails. Even if you only spend 20 minutes actually working once you leave the office, you can spend hours just thinking about work. It goes back to the concept of attention residue. Each work-related interruption reminds us of everything else we could or should be doing. With work on your mind, the quality of your leisure time immediately declines.
This is another area where RescueTime data can come in handy. Just look at each day’s activities to see when Teams, Slack, Gmail, and other work tools keep popping up.
If they do, think about whether those checks are intentional. If they are, great. But if you keep checking work when you meant to be off, it’s time for a clearer boundary. Mute your notifications or pick a time at night to check your work apps once, instead of 6 different times throughout the evening.
Batch the household and life admin
Staying on top of your home can feel like you’re reenacting If You Give a Mouse a Cookie.
You go get the mail and see a bill that needs to be paid. When you get inside, you grab a check to mail in. That reminds you that you need to order more checks. While you’re on your computer ordering another checkbook, you remember that summer camp registration opened up. Et cetera, et cetera.
Each task is pretty innocuous on its own, but that’s the problem. Every ‘little’ task is still a disruption to the relaxing day you’re supposed to be enjoying, and you end up sacrificing your large chunks of leisure time.
The easiest way to avoid life admin time confetti? Stop dealing with every small task the moment it appears. Keep a running list of bills, forms, appointments, reminders, orders, emails, and other five-minute tasks, either on your phone or a notepad. Then, handle several at once.
Decide which interruptions you let in from other people
At home, especially if you’re a parent, you may be subject to a steady stream of questions, conversations, requests, and ‘while I’m thinking about it…’ interruptions. Add that to the 19 different forms of communication that our phones provide, and someone constantly wants something from you.
Some interruptions from others are unavoidable, but others have more flexibility. It’s up to you to discern between the two and decide how you respond.
For example, in my house, we have a ‘no yelling from the other room’ rule. If my kids need something, they can find me and have the conversation face-to-face. I’m not interrupting my dinner prep or reading time to run across the house because someone wants to know what’s for breakfast on Sunday.
I’m also not at a point where I can set my phone to Do Not Disturb and spend a couple of uninterrupted hours working on a home project while the kids are with their grandparents, because of said kids and a general concern for the state of their wellbeing. My workaround that limits interruptions? Setting my phone to Do Not Disturb, but adjusting the settings so that I still get calls and texts from my kids’ other caregivers.
You get to decide how much weight interruptions from other people have, and there are thousands of choices you can make. Maybe you batch reply to texts a couple of times during the evening, or you set a 20-minute timer at night where everyone is self-sufficient and unable to ask mom for anything.
You don’t have to make yourself completely unavailable. Just take the time to set some boundaries and stop treating every request as equally urgent.
Look at the shape of your schedule
Sometimes, no single distraction is causing the problem. Your free time is simply wedged between too many other things. You may get thirty minutes before pick-up, then 20 minutes at home before you need to leave for soccer practice.
When your leisure time is constantly bounded by a hard stop, it feels shorter than open time. And as Brigid Schulte asserts, ‘Our perception of time is indeed our reality.”
Look at when your free time actually occurs, not just how much of it you technically have. If a lot of evenings are made up of a few small gaps, start looking for ways to batch those activities. Maybe you can have one long day of practice and classes, or move a flexible commitment to a different time.
Giving yourself larger blocks of free time can give you the perception of additional leisure time, even if it’s the same number of minutes you had before.
See where your free time is going
Time confetti is hard to notice in the moment because so many interruptions seem too small to matter on their own. But that’s exactly how they end up derailing your leisure time. The pattern won’t become obvious until you look back at how your attention actually shifted.
So, start with one evening that felt way too short. Open your RescueTime data and look for the moments when your attention was shifted away from your target task. Which apps, work tools, or small tasks kept showing up?
Then, pick the one interruption that happened most often and change just that one thing the next night. Kendra Adachi encourages readers of The Lazy Genius Way to ‘start small,’ because small changes are almost always more sustainable than huge leaps. In a podcast about the principle, she said,
Small changes make a huge difference. And the more you accept that and notice when you can and let them hold the value that they do, the collection of those small changes over time really create a beautiful life that still goes upside down and wonky and still has tragedy and hormones and all kinds of things that cause chaos, but your regular, daily, rhythmic things feel smoother because of all these small changes.
Life will still be full of interruptions and distractions and all the little things that get you off task, but each small change can have a lasting impact that improves the quality of your leisure time. What are you changing first?
