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Can giving away your time get you more time?

Does giving your time away really make you feel as if you have more time for yourself? Could being more charitable with our time be the secret to being more productive at work?
Written by Gery Menegaz, Contributor

The research on time conducted by Cassie Mogilner, of University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School of Business, suggests that, “spending time helping others leaves people feeling as if they have more time, not less.
Mogilner assigned subjects to assist another person, while instructing  another group of subjects to "do something else." In one study, a group wasted time by counting the letter 'e' in a Latin text; in a second study the subjects did something for themselves, and in a third the subjects simply left the lab early.
In each experiment the subjects who were helpful toward others, either writing a letter to a child or grading a paper for a child at risk, felt as though they had more time than the subjects who did noting or wasted time.
There are several aspects of giving time away, with regard to application in the enterprise, that are interesting from a technology perspective.   
The first activity or task to come to mind for me was mentoring. Many of us in technology are tasked with mentoring junior resources, as part of our job descriptions. Mentoring may include reviewing a resume (a neat tie to the researcher's work of grading a paper), advising on possible training, or simply chatting with a mentee about their possible career paths.
Any of these activities ought to leave the mentor feeling that they had more time, not less. And they ought to create a reinforcement system, where, given positive reinforcement, we as mentors seek out more mentoring opportunities. So, as a mentor, we feel we have more time, we feel good about ourselves, and seek out more such opportunities.
Sadly, while I feel good about helping someone moving up the ranks, I have not had the experience of feeling like there was more time in the day. Has this been your experience, or am I alone in this?
Another area that came readily to mind for me was creating intellectual capital for an organization. In this regard, I am thinking of white-papers, or technical architectures that would be shared internally and would help the organization move forward.
I have created a good deal of this over the years but I did not get a sense that I was gaining time as a result of the work. However, this may be because I was not directly helping someone, as in Mogliner's research.
Along these lines, I would not expect that creating Wikipedia entriesor  writing some code as part of an Open Source project would give someone the sense that they were gaining time -- as they are not directly assisting another person.
Mogliner's experiments focused on tasks such as writing notes to sick children, or editing a high risk child's essay -- tasks that do not map directly to creating a driver for Linux, for example.  Mentoring, or activities which directly 'give back' to individuals in your organization, should leave you feeling 'time rich'.  
Objectively, they had less time”, admits Mogliner, as time is a finite thing. Though people who give time feel, “more capable, confident, and useful”.
She noted that her subjects felt as if they had accomplished more and had more to give.  Mogliner also noted that you need not spend hours at this helping thing...you need only spend 10 minutes to get the full effect.
Lastly, she and her cohorts found that simply thinking about the present, rather than the future, was sufficient to make her subjects feel less hurried. She attributes this to the slowing of the “perceived passage of time”.
Let's conduct an experiment, shall we. I challenge you to help someone today. Just for 10-15 minutes and reply back by way of comment and let me know if you:


A: Feel that you had more time after helping someone.
B. Did not feel that you had more time after helping someone.

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