Can 8 Minutes Make Your Life a Little Better?

Two stories:

1. Over 10 years ago, I had one of the most productive meetings of my career. It is so memorable that I can recall exactly where I was sitting in the conference room, the terrible fluorescent lighting, the person I met with, and the way I felt in my heart and in my mind.

The meeting was 8 minutes long. I remember because I’d never had an 8-minute meeting before. We accomplished our goals in under 10 minutes, which was truly remarkable, as most meetings were scheduled for 60 to 90 minutes. The idea that we could do exactly what we needed to do in 8 was, well, shocking.

I think of this meeting often when I am stuck behind my laptop screen, in my Zoom box, for up to two hours, trying to stay engaged, focused, and productive.

2. Present day: I have to keep canceling social catch-up calls because I don’t have the time. This feels awful to put in black-and-white; how can I not have the time to connect with some of the people who are most important to me?

But, at this stage in life, my IRL obligations are significant, time-consuming, and exhausting. At the end of the day, which is when I used to schedule most social calls, I am completely useless, a bump on a log. I can hardly speak, much less listen well.

For a little while, I’ve been trying to squeeze in personal calls during my work day, and sometimes this works — but often enough, I also have to cancel these calls, as previously unseen needs arise and the time that I’d blocked off gets absorbed.

An 8-minute solution

When I read Jancee Dunn’s piece in the New York Times (admittedly in March, after I had planned to read it in January when it was published), her promotion of the 8-minute phone call called out to me (pun intended). I remembered my 8-minute meeting and all of the positive associations I still held so much time later.

Dunn writes:

I just had an eight-minute call with my good friend Tina, whom I’ve known for over three decades. I could never seem to connect with her (she has a very demanding job) until I sent her a text last week proposing an eight-minute phone call.

That seems weird, she wrote back.

Come on, I wheedled. You can do it. The president of the United States could probably do eight minutes! I promise not to go long. Name a time.

At the appointed hour, I gave her a ring. In short order, we talked about our mothers’ health, made birthday plans, gossiped about a friend who abruptly quit his job and moved to a tiny Mexican town, traded book recommendations and explored the possibility of an afterlife (verdict: we’re not sure). Intently focused, we knocked out subject after subject, before Tina announced that our eight minutes were up — and besides, she had arrived at the dry cleaner’s.

I hung up, smiling and humming a little tune. I had missed her, and didn’t realize it until I heard her voice. I was also surprised by how much ground we covered without the call feeling rushed. Our connection was brief, but it was real.

And then Dunn challenged Times readers to try it themselves:

...think of a person you love: someone you miss, someone you wish you connected with more often.

Send that person a quick text asking if they can chat on the phone for eight minutes — ideally today, but if not, schedule it for sometime this week.

You can even copy and paste the following:

Hi! I read this in The New York Times and it made me think of you. Want to schedule an eight-minute phone call this week?

After the eight minutes are up, decide together when your next such catch-up will be — and then honor your time commitment and sign off promptly. (Unless your friend is having some sort of crisis, in which case it’s good that you got in touch anyway.) Hang up and enjoy that little glow of well-being.

Dr. Bob Waldinger, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the author of the new book “The Good Life: Lessons From the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness,” said that most busy people “tend to think that in some unspecified future, we’ll have a ‘time surplus,’ where we’ll be able to connect with old friends.” That may never materialize, he said, so pick up the phone and invest the time right now.

Connectedness as medicine

In addition to all the positive associations I had with my 8-minute meeting, Dunn’s piece stood out to me because of the correlation between connectedness and suicide prevention. The more we feel a part of something, connected to others, less isolated, the less likely we are to die by suicide.

An 8-minute phone call seems like a simple thing to do, and I love how Dunn breaks down how to do it (simplifying it further for our overworked brains!), and provides some evidence to back up the assertion that it could be a good idea.

But it was the message from Waldinger, the psychiatrist Dunn quotes, that really resonated with me:

“...most busy people ‘tend to think that in some unspecified future, we’ll have a ‘time surplus.’”

Waldinger’s words really stuck with me, as I quite literally just texted a friend: “Time — I want more of it just for phone calls.”

Copyright 2023 Elana Premack Sandler, All Rights Reserved.