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When Time Stretches: How TimeSense Helped Me Reclaim My Minutes

Have you ever noticed how time seems to evaporate when you’re stressed? One moment it’s Monday morning, the next it’s Friday evening and you’re wondering where the week went. Or those times when you’re so absorbed in a project that three hours vanish in what feels like minutes? I’ve been there too—until I discovered TimeSense, an app that’s changing how I experience time itself.

What Is TimeSense and Why It Matters More Than Ever

TimeSense isn’t just another productivity app. While most tools focus on managing your schedule, TimeSense helps you perceive time differently. It draws from mindfulness research and time perception science—fields that have gained momentum in recent years.

In our fast-paced digital world, where “time poverty” affects nearly 80% of working adults (Rudd, 2019), tools that don’t just squeeze more tasks into your day but reshape your relationship with time are becoming essential. TimeSense intrigued me because it treats time not as a resource to ration, but as a flexible, lived experience we can consciously influence.

More Than Just Another Timer

The app operates at the intersection of mindfulness and time perception—a connection researchers have only begun to explore deeply in the past decade. Its three core components are:

  1. Mindful Time Tracking – Rather than passively logging hours, TimeSense prompts you to pause and notice how time feels in the moment. Is it dragging or racing? This aligns with findings that mindfulness can alter subjective time perception (Morin & Grondin, 2024).

  2. Personalized Mindfulness Exercises – Context-specific practices help recalibrate your perception. Feeling rushed? You might get a 90-second “time expansion” exercise that focuses on sensory details, a method shown to make moments feel fuller (Franck & Atmanspacher, 2009).

  3. Time Affluence Journal – A reflective log where you capture moments of feeling “time rich” versus “time poor,” revealing patterns over time. This draws from the concept of time affluence—linked to higher well-being (Porlier et al., 2016).

My Month With TimeSense

As someone who constantly battles the “time famine” phenomenon, I gave TimeSense a month-long trial.

By the end of week one, I noticed something surprising: using the “pause and perceive” feature during busy stretches made time feel slower. I’d check the clock expecting 15 minutes to have passed, but it was only five—a phenomenon consistent with mindfulness research (Morin & Grondin, 2024).

The game-changer, though, was the “transition ritual.” Before switching tasks, the app nudges you to take three mindful breaths and acknowledge the task you just completed. This created natural boundaries in my day, replacing the usual blur of back-to-back tasks with a sense of closure and reset.


Strengths and Shortcomings

What Works Well

  • Personalized Time Insights – After two weeks, my “time perception profile” showed I underestimate time during creative work but overestimate it in administrative tasks, mirroring established cognitive patterns (Block et al., 2010).

  • Smart Timing – The app predicts when I’m most likely to feel rushed and offers just-in-time micro-mindfulness prompts.

  • Effective “Time Expansion” Tools – The 60-second sensory focus genuinely made minutes feel richer, supporting research on attention’s role in time perception (Grondin, 2010).

Where It Could Improve

  • Steep Learning Curve – Concepts like “prospective vs. retrospective timing” (Block et al., 2018) could be explained more simply.

  • Integration Limits – Calendar syncing is basic; deeper integration with productivity tools would make insights more actionable.

  • Mindfulness Paradox – Ironically, the moments when I need it most are also when I’m most tempted to skip it.

Why It Matters

What excites me about TimeSense is its foundation in real science: our experience of time is shaped by how we allocate attention and encode memories (Grondin, 2010).

Morin and Grondin (2024) note that mindfulness might help people “feel at home in the present moment” and, in a sense, reclaim time. This has implications for students stuck in slow-motion study sessions, professionals caught in fast-forward meetings, and anyone navigating what Honoré (2005) calls “the cult of speed.”

Final Thoughts

TimeSense didn’t give me more hours in the day—but it gave me something better: the sense of enough. That shift from scarcity to sufficiency improved my focus, reduced stress, and helped me be more present.

The most powerful moment came from a simple prompt in the app: If time feels different based on how you pay attention, what moments are you rushing through that deserve to be felt more fully?

Maybe the solution to feeling time-starved isn’t squeezing more into our days—it’s learning to stretch the moments we already have.

References

  • Block, R. A., Hancock, P. A., & Zakay, D. (2010). How cognitive load affects duration judgments: A meta-analytic review. Acta Psychologica, 134(3), 330–343.
  • Block, R. A., Grondin, S., & Zakay, D. (2018). Prospective and retrospective timing processes: Theories, methods, and findings. In A. Vatakis, F. Balcı, M. Di Luca & Á. Correa (Eds.), Timing and time perception: Procedures, measures, & applications (pp. 32–51). Brill.
  • Franck, G., & Atmanspacher, H. (2009). A Proposed relation between intensity of presence and duration of nowness. In H. Atmanspacher & H. Primas (Eds.), Recasting Reality: Wolfgang Pauli’s Philosophical Ideas and Contemporary Science (pp. 211–225). Springer.
  • Grondin, S. (2010). Timing and time perception: A review of recent behavioral and neuroscience findings and theoretical directions. Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 72, 561–582.
  • Honoré, C. (2005). In praise of slowness: Challenging the cult of speed. HarperOne.
  • Morin, A., & Grondin, S. (2024). Mindfulness and time perception: A systematic integrative review. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2024.105657
  • Porlier, G., St-Louis, A., & Vallerand, R. J. (2016). Passion and the feeling of having time to act in sport: The mediating role of mindfulness and perceived competence. Journal of Sport and Exercise Psychology, 38(s1), S244.
  • Rudd, M. (2019). Feeling short on time: Trends, consequences, and possible remedies. Current Opinion in Psychology, 26, 5–10.

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