What the Study Found
- Unexpectedly gained time feels subjectively longer than equivalent free time, across seven experiments with 243 to 504 people each.
- The illusion holds whether people are relieved or disappointed by a cancelled plan, ruling out mood as the driver.
- Gained time changed behaviour: people planned to walk about 10% longer and chose longer versions of the same task.
- People who gained 10 spare minutes took roughly 14% longer to leave a real lab session, though that raw effect was marginal.
The meeting was cancelled, the hour was suddenly his, and Sam Maglio had just finished helping write an entire paper about what happens next. He dawdled anyway. Nearly missed a delayed flight, in fact, which could be tough to admit when your job is studying how people handle their time. “Just because you study how people use their time doesn’t always mean you’re good at it,” says Maglio, a professor of marketing and psychology at the University of Toronto Scarborough.
He’s not alone in this. Time you didn’t expect to have behaves oddly once it lands in your lap.
Maglio and three colleagues, Gabriela Tonietto, Selin Malkoc and Kun Wang, ran a series of randomised experiments to pin the effect down, published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research. Their claim, drawn from seven studies in all, is that a gained hour feels longer than an hour that was simply free all along. Same hour on the clock, but the gained one stretches. And because it feels roomier, we treat it as roomier, spending longer on whatever we do and reaching for the version of a task that eats more of the day.
The Reference Point Your Brain Picks
Why would identical intervals feel so different? The trick, they reckon, is in the reference point your brain settles on.
When a meeting is on the calendar, you expect zero free time in that slot. Cancel it and you jump from nothing to something, and that jump is what your mind measures, not the something itself. Maglio compares it to finding a twenty-dollar bill in a jacket you haven’t worn in a while: because your expectation leaps from zero to 20 rather than sitting at 20, you feel twenty dollars richer. Or picture lighting a match in a pitch-black room, versus lighting the same match with all the lights on.
Whatever opens up, Maglio says, five minutes or five hours, seems bigger than it really is. He puts it down to an “expectancy-violation snap” from having nothing to having something.
The studies chip at the idea from several angles. In one, people recalled a past hour they had either gained unexpectedly or simply had free; the gained hour was remembered as longer, even when it had actually been shorter. In another, participants imagined a cancelled plan and rated how the freed-up hour felt, and it felt expanded whether they were relieved or disappointed the plan fell through, which is a neat way of ruling out mood as the cause. The effect also compounds: the more time gained, the more swollen it feels. And when researchers forced people to compare their free time against having no free time at all, the gap vanished. Ordinary free time suddenly felt just as generous as the gained kind, exactly as the reference-point story predicts.
If you feel chronically pressed, half an unexpected hour is a gift, and slowing down for a bit may do you good. Stretch that unhurried feeling too far, though, and you land back in what he calls time famine, late for the next thing despite having started with time to spare.
When a Longer Walk Starts to Look Tempting
Then the behaviour. Asked how long they’d spend on a walk in a free hour, people who were told the hour was unexpectedly gained planned to walk about 10 per cent longer than those who simply had the hour. Offered a choice between a shorter and a longer version of the same job, coffee from down the hall or coffee from the shop a couple of blocks away, a 30-minute task or a 45-minute one, they opted for the longer option during gained time, whether the task was work or leisure.
The most telling test used real minutes rather than imagined ones. Students finished a lab session either knowing they’d have ten spare minutes at the end, or discovering the ten minutes only when the session wrapped up early. Those who gained the time unexpectedly took about 14 per cent longer to actually leave the building, packing up slowly and browsing a box of trinkets the researchers had planted in the hall. Worth a caveat here: on the raw timing that difference was only marginally significant, firming up once the team accounted for how long each session ran. A small effect, then, but one that showed up in bodies leaving a room, not just in survey sliders.
None of which makes gained time simply good or simply bad. It is, Maglio says, “a blessing and a curse.” If you feel chronically pressed, half an unexpected hour is a gift, and slowing down for a bit may do you good. Stretch that unhurried feeling too far, though, and you land back in what he calls time famine, late for the next thing despite having started with time to spare. “When we gain time, we see it differently, and the behaviour we default to might not be in our best interest,” he says. “We run the risk of thinking we can do more in that time than we actually can.”
His fix is almost comically low-tech: outsource the clock-watching entirely when the stakes are high. Enjoy the surprise hour, but set an alarm, so the expanded feeling doesn’t quietly swallow the flight you still need to catch. “A bit of intentionality can go a long way.” Whether the same snap governs the opposite case, the meeting that overruns and eats the free time you were counting on, is a question the team leaves open for now.
- Study type: Seven randomised behavioural experiments (recall-based, hypothetical, and one real-behaviour lab study); peer-reviewed, published in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research (University of Chicago Press)
- Sample size: Seven separate samples, 243 to 504 participants each (studies 1 to 7: 314, 153, 400, 302, 504, 400, 243); undergraduates plus Prolific and MTurk online panels
- Exposure: Time framed as unexpectedly gained (a cancelled or rescheduled plan) versus expected free time
- Comparison group: Participants told the same interval was simply free, not gained
- Follow-up: Single-session measures; subjective duration on a 0 to 100 scale, plus predicted and actual time spent
- Funding / conflicts of interest: Not reported in the published article text
- Preregistration: Studies 1 to 3, 5 and 7 preregistered on AsPredicted; data and materials posted on OSF
- Main limitation: Author-stated that time-use behaviour is complex and multiply determined; the sole real-behaviour effect was only marginally significant on raw scores, and samples were mostly students and US online panels, so real-world windfalls may behave differently
Reference
Tonietto, G. N., Malkoc, S. A., Wang, K., & Maglio, S. J. (2026). Gained Time Is Expanded: Examining the Psychological and Behavioral Consequences of Gaining Time. Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, 11(3), 292–303. https://doi.org/10.1086/740288
Frequently Asked Questions
Why does gained time make me more likely to run late?
Gained time makes you more likely to run late because an unexpectedly free interval feels longer than the same amount of time you planned to have, so you spend it more loosely. The researchers found people dawdle, pick slower options and generally act as though there is more time than the clock actually shows, which is how a surprise free hour quietly turns into a near-miss.
Is it true that a gained hour feels longer than an hour that was free all along?
It is true that a gained hour feels longer than an hour that was free all along, according to seven experiments in the study. Because a cancelled plan jumps your expectation from no free time to some free time, your mind measures the jump rather than the hour itself, and the interval feels stretched even when it is objectively no longer, or even shorter.
How does the reference point actually work?
The reference point works by giving your brain a baseline to compare against, and for gained time that baseline is zero. Maglio likens it to finding twenty dollars in an old jacket: you feel twenty dollars richer because your expectation started at nothing. When people were instead asked to compare their free time against having none at all, ordinary free time felt just as expanded, and the difference disappeared.
What can I do to stop gained time from backfiring?
To stop gained time from backfiring, the study’s advice is to hand the timekeeping to something outside yourself when it matters, such as an alarm. Enjoying the surprise hour is fine, but because the expanded feeling can swallow the next thing on your schedule, a small bit of intentionality, as Maglio puts it, goes a long way.
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