My Foolproof Method to Make Good Times Last Longer

I don’t know if it actually slows time down, but it sure feels like it

It started when I was in college. I was in a long distance relationship for four years with the man who would become my husband. I was a student at at University of Chicago, he was managing a 5-star hotel in Paris. We would see each other every 3–6 months for a week or two or three.

What I found was that, when I made a one-week trip to Paris and we just did the same thing every day, the week would be over before I knew it. (Spend the day in bed, go out for dinner, go home, go to sleep, repeat.) The days blurred together and it felt like it could have been as easily three days as thirteen. I had no way to really recall the different days.

But then there was the time I went to visit him for a week and we went to three countries in 7 days. We spent three days and two nights in Barcelona, then two nights visiting my friend in Germany, then back in Paris for the last few nights. When I looked back on it, this trip felt like it had lasted at least a month!

This was the first time I recognized the power of breaking a time period up into multiple segments. Since then, I have used the concept of “time segments” to milk the most mileage out of so many good things. Whether it’s…