The Remote Control Experiment: Skipping Life's Mundane Moments

Have you ever wished you could fast forward through life?

Imagine you had a universal remote, courtesy of Christopher Walken in a Bed, Bath, & Beyond, enabling you to fast-forward minutes or hours of your life with no consequences.

You still get the results from what you did, you just wouldn’t experience it.

Well, three psychologists set out to find out. They conducted an experiment involving 8,500 individuals to gauge happiness/contentment.

Their method was intriguing.

Periodically, they pinged each participant’s phone, prompting them to record their ongoing activity and its duration, followed by a crucial question:

“If you could, and it had no negative consequences, would you jump forward in time to the end of what you’re currently doing?”

The outcome would be the same as if you’d done the thing. But you would be able to skip the experience itself.

Consider students bypassing lengthy lectures, office workers fast-forwarding through seminars, or laborers avoiding unloading heavy cargo.

The possibilities are endless. But the answers to the survey surprised me:

On average, people chose to skip 40% of their waking hours, indicating that almost 6.5 hours each day wasn’t worth experiencing for them.

These results got me thinking. How much of my day would I choose to skip given the option?

Here’s a quick list of activities I’d gladly fast-forward through:

Making my bed
Doing the dishes
Cleaning the coffee maker
Taking out the trash
Making dinner

The insight here is that there are plenty of things we do each day that don’t actually enjoy. When you add up those 6.5 hours per day and multiply it out to a year, we’re spending roughly 99 days per year on undesirable tasks.

Life is unfortunately always going to be filled with things that suck, but the bills still need to get paid and the cavities need to get filled.

The key is finding moments of joy amidst these experiences because those fleeting instances compile to form a fulfilling life. A few hours of annoyance daily can compound into a lifetime of misery if your perspective remains unchanged.

So what can we do to turn those annoying activities into things we can find a little joy in?

Make it Fun. Before you roll your eyes, there are plenty of ways to make it fun. Lauren and I hate making our bed in the morning, but alas it must get done. Instead of fighting about who’s going to do it, we make it fun. The rule is that the last person to get out of bed has to make it. Now it adds a fun little challenge of who wakes up earlier.
Avoid it / Delegate It. Lauren and I also dread cleaning. Now that we live in a house, cleaning the first and second floor with bedrooms takes multiple hours vs. when we lived in a tiny NYC apartment. We have two choices – we could either avoid it and choose to live in a pig sty, or we could delegate it – which we ended up doing. We now pay a cleaning service to come every other week and clean our entire house. Sure, it’s yet another expense but it’s worth paying to avoid the annoyance of doing an activity we hate doing.
Shift Your Mindset. When I’m doing an activity that I don’t particularly enjoy (i.e. going to the antique store with Lauren), rather than submit my impulses – which would be to sulk, complain, and get it over with as quickly as possible, I try to shift my mindset. I love spending time with Lauren, and in this moment, I get to spend time with her. So rather than sulk and complain that I’m in a musty antique store with stuff we’ll never buy, I change my attitude to appreciate the fact that I’m spending quality time with my wife. I might as well enjoy it.

Before you go Adam Sandler mode and try to get through life as quickly as possible, try transforming mundane tasks into enjoyable challenges. Consider outsourcing tasks like laundry or lawn care when possible, and try to find silver linings in each moment.

By changing the way we look at those annoying tasks we inevitably must be present for, we can infuse joy into life’s otherwise dreary moments.

-KB