Big things have been happening in the world of Australian aviation. A new budget airline recently took to the sky with its unpricey purple fleet of Boeing 737-8s named ‘Sheila’, ‘Shazza’ and ‘Bazza’. Qantas reported half-year profits totalling over $1billion, reversing a three-year trend of losses and cutbacks. The protoype cabin designs were finally unveiled for the ultra long-haul flight. Okay, fair enough if you missed that last one.

While everyone was ogling Qantas’ bottom line, the airline made another, less widely publicised press release, this one showcasing the sleek design and scientifically-optimised layouts of its new fleet of Airbus A350s – AKA the ‘ultra long-haul’ plane. This strange phrase, ‘ultra-long-haul’, was quietly snuck into our aviation lexicon last year and it’s probably one that fills you with a creeping sense of wonder or dread (or perhaps both).

Officially confirmed in March, Qantas will ferry passengers from Australia to London and New York… non-stop. Clocking in at a whopping 19-plus hours, this new journey (codenamed: Project Sunrise) will become the world’s longest duration commercial flight.

While it’s a historic leap forward in technical aviation and in many ways, a good thing for people too, it also presents a very big and unspoken problem: how will Qantas give hundreds of strangers a 19-plus hour non-stop, close-quarters experience that doesn’t feel like absolute hell?

The implications of this question reach far beyond The Flying Kangaroo and the aviation industry. Alongside death and taxes, ‘waiting around’ is an inevitable pain in the arse for customers of many other businesses and sectors, and in many ways, it can be every bit as painful. So what can businesses actually do about it?

The answer, of course, has everything to do with time.

The customer experience of time

When we think about time in the context of customer experience, we’re actually just thinking about ‘duration’, or how long a process is going to take to end.

This is the perfect definition when you’re trying to calculate something’s ‘total fuel requirements’ or ‘viable ticket pricing’, but it’s a pretty lousy starting point if your goal is to maximise people’s enjoyment levels. The latter KPI requires that you treat time less like a precise game of measurement, and more as its own kind of bona fide experience.

Consider the last 24-hours of your life. In objective terms, time passed by exactly as it always does and always will do. On the other hand, you probably witnessed several hours slip into a weird Youtube vortex, or several minutes of hard exercise stretch into an eon. Time may be a rock-solid fact of the universe, but our experience of it is anything but stable.

Unlike our other senses, there is no obvious system in the brain dedicated to tracking time effectively. Instead of ‘seeing time’ as it is, we loosely ‘feel our way around it’, based on the sort of things we’re doing and paying attention to in the moment. As the well-regarded time-enthusiast Albert Einstein tells it: “Put your hand on a hot stove for a minute, and it seems like an hour. Sit with a pretty girl for an hour, and it seems like a minute.”

Making good time
Other than being profound, the idea of ‘flexible time’ is also a highly practical one. It offers businesses or government service providers saddled with long wait-times a more cost-effective way to keep their customers happy. As (my ultimate boss) Sam Tatam points out in his recent book Evolutionary Ideas, perceived waiting time is actually a much better predictor of customer satisfaction than actual waiting time. So rather than spending oodles of money trying to speed up an essential process like food preparation, or answering noisy complaints with discounts and apologies, start by asking a much simpler question: can we make people’s experience of waiting feel much, much better?

Or, if you’re Alan Joyce: “can we turn 19 long hours of killing time into the feeling of time well-spent?” To help businesses engineer an experience that’s every bit as aerodynamic as Qantas’ sleek new planes, we’ve compiled three strategies proven to reduce time drag:

1. Distract
According to psychologist Marc Wittman, time slows down as our negative emotions ramp up. Negative states like boredom, low mood or anxiety make us pay closer attention to the passage of time painfully, stretching out the space between minutes.

To keep things humming along, businesses should look to offset long wait times with pleasant distractions. While early elevator ascents used to be akin to a slow and terrifying thrill ride, the simple addition of mirrors transformed them into the sly hairstyling/toothpicking interludes we relish today. If, like Qantas, your customer experience involves many, many hours spent trapped many, many more kilometres above the ground, then it might be wise to pack more than just the mirror. To keep your passengers satisfied, make sure to offer plenty of extra choice and variety (and probably food) to fill all those extra hours. Only one catch… these options shouldn’t feel all that new or exciting.

Curiously, it’s not just bad feelings which slow everything down, but excessively good ones too. When we cram a day full of little adventures and interesting detours, we slip out of our automatic routines and become more sensitive to time – something known as the ‘oddball effect’. While distracting your customers, don’t just shoot for a heightened experience, but a comfortingly familiar one. Less in-flight fine dining, more Netflix and microwave popcorn, please!

2. Motivate
Despite popular belief, time doesn’t really fly when we’re having fun – it flies while we’re in pursuit of pleasure. In 2012, a group of experimenters at the University of Alabama showed that moments pass more quickly when you’re moving towards a goal (in this case, a tasty dessert), rather than being merely happy.

So, instead of doling out free foot rubs and Chandon in the queue, look for clever ways to unlock your customers’ sense of motivation. Put the bored buggers to work, filling out preference sheets or pre-ordering the next day’s breakfast. Alongside Frank Sinatra’s Greatest Hits, try offering your 500-plus happy passengers some ‘not-so-easy-listening’ playlists, complete with Duolingo lessons and interactive itinerary planners. How about turning your list of circulation-friendly stretches into a fully gamified jetlag-busting erxercise class? Hell, give us plebs in economy a chance to game our way to a first class meal!

3. Sedate

If all else fails, the research suggests you can hurry time along with enough good booze and a warm blanket. Salut!

Stop spending just to save time

It’s true: in many ways, time is money. We’re sad to see it slip away and particularly loath to waste it. But unlike our money, it’s not really ‘saving time’ that leaves us feeling satisfied, but having a more enjoyable experience of it. It’s the difference between an agonising 10-minute wait for supper and the 20-minute thrill of watching it sizzle away in front of you.

Instead of spending many thousands of dollars each year shaving minutes off a customer’s painful wait, we’re better off inventing new ways to make it less painful. Time, after all, is a terrible thing to waste.