The empty Saturday

There's a reason the Saturday didn't weigh anything on the pavement, and it's more than the fact that it wasn't in the room. It looked empty. "A week on Saturday" nearly always does.

Gal Zauberman and John Lynch studied this in a series of seven experiments. They asked people about their spare time and spare money now, and about how much they expected to have at various points in the future. People expected to have more slack later than they have today. That's the researchers' word for spare capacity. The effect was stronger for time than for money. Most of us know roughly what we'll earn next month. We're vaguer about our hours, and the vagueness runs in one direction. Next month we'll be less busy. Things will have calmed down.

They don't calm down, of course. Next month turns out to be about as full as this one, and its contents are the same sort of thing. There's work and shopping, a relative's birthday, a form that has to be in by Friday and a cold. You couldn't see those from four weeks away because they hadn't arrived yet. A car park at six in the morning is empty too. That isn't because nobody's coming.

So when your neighbour said "a week on Saturday", you consulted a mental diary and found a clear day. It was clear in the way the car park was. By the time it came round it had a week of tiredness behind it and a Sunday's worth of chores leaning on it, the same as every other Saturday you've ever had.

This gives you a test that I find more useful than any amount of resolve. When someone asks you to do something in the future, ask yourself this.

Would I say yes if it were tomorrow?

Tomorrow is a day you can feel. You know how tired you are and what's already waiting to be done. If someone asked you to spend tomorrow running a tombola from eight till four, you'd know at once whether you were willing, and you'd find it much easier to say so. "Tomorrow? I can't, I'm sorry" comes out without a struggle. The tomorrow test borrows that clarity for a date that's still too far off to have any weight. If the answer for tomorrow is no, the honest answer for a week on Saturday is no as well. A week on Saturday will be tomorrow when it arrives.

An objection. "Some things really are easier later. I'm in the middle of a house move this month and I won't be next month." That's fair, and the test allows for it. What matters is whether you can name the specific thing that will be different. "The move will be over by the 20th" is a reason. "It should be quieter by then" is the car park at six in the morning. If all you have is the general feeling that the future has more room in it, that's the very feeling Zauberman and Lynch measured, and everybody has it all the time.

There's one more thing about that Saturday. It wasn't empty even on its own terms. You had a plan for it, and the plan was rest. I think a lot of unwilling yeses happen because "nothing" doesn't feel like a proper entry in the diary. If you'd had tickets for something, you'd have said so without effort. "I'm sorry, I've got something on" is one of the easiest sentences in English. But the first slow Saturday in five weeks is something on. You need it as much as you'd have needed the tickets, and you're allowed to defend it in the same words.

In practice, when a request has a date on it, move the date to tomorrow in your head before you answer. It takes about two seconds, and it's the quickest way I know to make the far side of the scales weigh something.