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We talk about time at work as if its a fixed resource: something outside of us and something we either manage well or never have enough of. People genuinely believe the clock is the problem. But the more you look at how the brain processes experience, the less true this becomes. People dont feel pressured because they have too many tasks. They feel pressured because their brain is constructing time in a way that makes everything feel urgent or impossible to catch up with. Modern neuroscience has been pointing to this for a while. Our experience of timewhat feels fast, slow, overwhelming, or not enoughis not a reading from an internal stopwatch. Its a story the brain builds using prediction, memory, emotional state, and identity. In other words: your brain doesnt observe time. Your brain generates it. Or we can say it another way. The brain predicts time, not measures it. Instead of tracking time objectively, the brain uses patterns and context to estimate how long things take. It relies on memory and sensory information to create a timeline that makes sense. But the problem is that those internal estimates shift dramatically depending on whats happening inside us. When your system is stable and regulated, your internal sense of time widens. You can think clearly, make decisions from the part of your brain built for problem-solving, and move through your day without constantly feeling behind. In contrast, when youre stressed or mentally overloaded, the brain speeds everything up. Time contracts” and you lose the feeling of agency. Minutes disappear and even simple tasks feel rushed. The external calendar hasnt changed, yet your internal clock has. Stress and emotion distort the experience of time Under stress, the brain becomes hyper-focused on prediction: What might go wrong? What am I missing? What did I forget? Whats next? This pulls attention away from continuous processing and toward threat monitoring, making time feel fragmented and chaotic. Emotion does something similar. When youre anxious, your internal timeline becomes jumpy and inconsistent. On the other hand, when youre burdened by unresolved emotional patterns or past loops, the present feels compressed and the future feels far away. This is exactly why whole months can feel like they passed in a blurand yet individual days felt strangely heavy or stretched. We experience time not as it is, but as our internal state shapes it. Identity plays a bigger role than people think Your identitywho you believe you are right now, and who you believe you should already behas a direct impact on your sense of time. When theres a big gap between your current self and the self you think you should have become by now, the brain interprets this as lateness. People living with a strained identity often feel theyre constantly running behind, even on days where their workload is reasonable. It creates a quiet pressure underneath everything they do. It is important to acknowledge that this is not laziness or lack of discipline, but a distorted time experience shaped by identity tension. Why two people with the same schedule feel time differently Every leader has seen this but cant always explain it: two employees with the same deadlines, same workload and even the same tools, yet one remains steady and the other is overwhelmed. From the outside, they look identical, yet from the inside, theyre living in completely different time worlds. One persons nervous system is regulated enough to let their brain track time coherently. The other is in chronic predictive overdrive, experiencing time as something slippery and unforgiving. Attention shapes the texture of time Theres a reason deep work feels slow and spacious, while days full of interruptions vanish in an instant. That’s because attention gives the brain enough information to build a rich, continuous timeline. Fragmentation does the opposite. When your attention is scattered, time becomes thin. It loses its structure and feels shorter. This isnt just unpleasant. But it also changes how people remember their workday, how they evaluate their progress, and how capable they feel. When companies unintentionally design days full of micro-interruptions, they are not only lowering productivitythey are altering employees subjective experience of time. And people make very different decisions when they feel like time is disappearing. What this means for modern work If time pressure and overwhelm come from internal time distortion rather than external time scarcity, then our conversations about productivity need to shift dramatically. And this doesn’t refer to better time management. It is about reducing the internal states that warp how people experience time. Leaders can influence this more than they think by using the following strategies: 1) Reduce unnecessary chronic stressors to keep time perception from becoming distorted beyond usefulness. 2) Protect uninterrupted focus windows as the foundation for coherent time experience. 3) Be intentional with urgency: Constant urgency rewires the brain to live in a compressed and reactive timeline. 4) Offer clear, grounded futures: a stable sense of where I’m going helps people feel anchored, instead of feeling constantly behind. The real work is not to fit more tasks into a fixed number of hours, but to help people live in an internal timeline that isnt distorted by stress and identity pressure. Clock time will always move at the same pace. But the time that determines burnout, clarity, performance, and decision-making is the time your brain is constructing from the inside. Understanding that difference changes everything.
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E-Commerce
On Wednesday morning, local time, over one million Australian children discovered their social media accounts had vanished. And it may not be long before kids in other countries find themselves in a similar predicament. Under the new law, which was approved late last year, no one under the age of 16 in Australia will be allowed to set up accounts on platforms including Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Facebook, X, Snapchat, Twitch, and Reddit. Any accounts for people in that age category will be deactivated or removed. The law is meant to protect the mental health of children from the addictive nature of social media. Australia’s law goes three years beyond the de facto minimum age for social media limits in the U.S., where privacy legislation dictates that children under 13 are not supposed to be able to create accounts (though they easily end-run those restrictions). Anika Wells, the country’s communications minister, said those extra years will help children mature more before they take part in social media. We want children to have childhoods. We want parents to have peace of mind and we want young peopleyoung Australiansto have three more years to learn who they are before platforms assume who they are, she said earlier this year. The legislation is being watched carefully by other governments, which have struggled with the impact of social media on young minds. If Australian children show improvements in their mental (and physical) health, with reduced reports of depression, anxiety, attention deficit disorder, and more, the country’s policies could become a blueprint for other nations. Several have already put plans into motion. Denmark, Norway, Malaysia, and the European Parliament have all either announced plans to ban social media access for children, similar to the Australian law, or are in the process of creating new rules. Denmark has gone the furthest, announcing last month that it would ban access to social media for anyone under 15, noting 94% of the children in that country had profiles on at least one social media platform. Under the age of 10, half of all Danish children do. The country has not yet set a date for the ban to begin. Children and young people have their sleep disrupted, lose their peace and concentration, and experience increasing pressure from digital relationships where adults are not always present, the Danish ministry for digital affairs said. This is a development that no parent, teacher or educator can stop alone. As for the U.S., don’t expect similar legislation anytime soon. The Big Tech lobby is firmly against the policy. And tech leaders, including Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg, have a close relationship with Donald Trump. Even those whose relationship with Trump is contentious are seemingly protected. Last week, when the European Commission hit Elon Musk’s X with nearly $140 million in fines for violating its moderation law, the Trump Administration came out swinging. “The European Commission’s $140 million fine isn’t just an attack on X, it’s an attack on all American tech platforms and the American people by foreign governments,” Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on social media. “The days of censoring Americans online are over.” Some U.S. states, including Texas and Florida, have tried to enact bans, but those measures have either failed to pass the state legislatures or have been struck down by courts. Australia’s social media ban, meanwhile, passed with overwhelming support, though some critics warned it would be too blunt an instrument to address risks effectively. Social media companies were given a year to beef up their technology to confirm user ages and teens were encouraged to begin weening themselves off of the apps, so the formal ban wouldn’t come as a shock. Teens were even given a checklist to prepare for the shift.
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E-Commerce
Justin McLeod, founder and CEO of dating app Hinge, is consciously uncoupling from his app. Hinges president and chief marketing officer Jackie Jantosrecently named one of Fast Companys CMOs of the yearwill succeed him in the role of CEO, effective immediately. McLeod will stay on as an adviser through March to support the transition. McLeod, who founded Hinge in 2011, is leaving to launch Overtone, an AI-driven venture focused on facilitating connections between people; it will be backed by Match Group. In a blog post, he calls his departure a wildly bittersweet moment. This past year, I got higher conviction on two different things. One is that Jackie is the next right leader for Hinge. She’s an incredible strategist, he tells Fast Company. The other thing [is] I realized how much I miss and how much I love the early-stage part of building a company. That was where my heart was and where I wanted to focus. Jantos joined Hinge four years ago as CMO and took on the role of president in March. Shes behind the companys breakout No Ordinary Love campaign and has steered its outreach to Gen Z users, who now account for more than half of Hinge users. She also helped bring the app to new markets, most recently Mexico and Brazil. Ive been operating the business for the past year, since I stepped into this president role, so there won’t be much change, Jantos says. Hinge has been so successful because Jackie and the team understand their consumer, says Spencer Rascoff, CEO of Hinge parent company Match Group. They have [their] finger on the pulse of where the world is at with respect to human connection. DESIGNED TO BE DELETED Hinge has been one of the few bright spots amid a broader downturn in dating apps. Earlier this year, Bumbles struggles led to the return of founder Whitney Wolfe Herd, who has since laid off 30% of staff. Tinder, another Match Group property, has lost more than 1.5 million paying users since its 2022 peak. After Rascoff took over as CEO of Match Group in February, he trimmed headcount by 13%. In contrast, Hinge, which has 15 million monthly active users, saw its paying users grow by 17% year over year to 1.87 million in the third quarter of 2025. The app took in $550 million in revenue last year, and more than $500 million in the first nine months of 2025. McLeod laid the foundation for this success with a foresighted app relaunch in 2015. While other dating apps were prioritizing user engagement and addictive swiping, Hinge focused on creating positive outcomes: app interactions that convert into real-life dates. The company has even inserted deliberate speedbumps into the user experience to combat user behavior like ghosting. McLeods iconoclastic approach is embodied in the apps tagline, designed to be deleted. Jantos says Hinges mission will remain unchanged. We are very much working to help intentional daters find the relationships they’re looking for and get off the app into dates. THE MATCH GROUP ECOSYSTEM McLeods departure comes as Rascoff pushes to create more links between Match Groups different apps, allowing them to share insights around user behavior and how to incorporate AI in their user experiences. For example, a member of Chispa, Matchs Latino-focused dating app, might receive an invitation to join Hinge, which will autofill their profile. Rascoff even envisions that the matching algorithm behind these apps could be standardized I’m moving the company towards more cross-brand collaboration and knowledge sharing,” Rascoff says. He notes that Hinge has long embraced a “consumer-focused, product-led” mindset. “I’m trying to bring that attribute that has made Hinge so successful into all of our other brands, many of which have been more financially oriented, more short-term oriented, and less consumer-driven, Rascoff says. With more integrations on the back end, the distinctive user experience and marketing of each app could prove more important than ever. As CMO, Jantos has attracted younger users to Hinge by showcasing real-life relationships rather than the polished versions of love usually portrayed in media. This year, the company launched the second iteration of its No Ordinary Love campaign, which tells the complicated love stories of real Hinge couples, as well as the second chapter of the Its Funny We Met On Hinge video series. FOUNDER MODE McLeod remains coy about his new venture, Overtone, which a Hinge spokesperson describes as focused on using AI and voice tools to help people connect thoughtfully and in a personal way. We’re not going to talk a lot about that quite yet, McLeod says, except to say that there’s an opportunity to completely reimagine the dating experience and how technology can help facilitate people finding their partnerthat breaks the mold of the way current dating apps are designed. McLeod has been bullish on audio technology in dating apps: Hinge now allows users to record a 30-second audio introduction. McLeod began developing Overtone at Hinge, with Match Group providing early funding. Overtone will operate independently, but Match Group plans to lead the company’s initial funding round early next year and will have a substantial ownership position. Rascoff will join its board of directors. McLeod will serve as chairman and founder. I think for that zero-to-one stage of a company, where you have to move really fast, it made sense [for Overtone] to be its own independent public company, McLeod says. And I’m a founder and CEO at heart. There’s a piece of me that wants to be out there on my own, ultimately steering the ship again.
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