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Making Time by Steve Taylor: Book Notes and Verdict

Roman Kalugin

TL;DR

  • The core claim holds: subjective time really does bend with age, novelty, and attention. Taylor got the direction right, and he wrote it well before the strongest lab evidence landed.
  • The fix is half-true: more novelty and presence change how richly you remember a stretch of life, less how a Tuesday feels while you live it. The book blurs the two.
  • The «fifth law» is speculation: time dissolving as consciousness expands is transpersonal metaphysics, not measured psychology.
  • «Control time» oversells: you can shift how time is encoded and recalled. You cannot slow the clock.
  • Verdict: take the three perception findings that matter and leave the mysticism on the shelf.
Making Time by Steve Taylor — cover

Verdict

Half of this book is a clean, readable tour of why time speeds up as you age and slows down when you are somewhere new. That half is broadly correct and still useful nearly two decades on. The other half drifts into Taylor’s larger project — spiritual awakening, expanded consciousness, the ego loosening its grip — where the evidence thins to anecdote.

You do not need to buy the whole package to keep the good parts. We lay out the working toolkit below, with sources Taylor mostly did not have in 2007. Our rating: «Read our notes instead».

The big idea

Physical time is steady. Felt time is not. Taylor’s thesis is that your mind runs on «psychological time», a rate set by how much you notice, how new the input is, and how absorbed you are. Change those inputs and you change the felt length of your days.

From this he builds a promise: if novelty and attention stretch subjective time, you can deliberately «make» more of it. A richer, more present life feels longer from the inside — and, he argues, that is the only length that matters.

Key ideas

  • Time accelerates with age. Each year is a smaller fraction of the life behind it, so it registers as shorter. Taylor treats this «proportional» intuition as the engine of the whole book.
  • Novelty slows the felt clock. A first trip to a new city feels long and detailed. The tenth identical commute vanishes. New input demands processing, and processing reads back as duration.
  • Absorption makes time vanish, then feel long in memory. Deep engagement erases the passing hours but lays down dense memory, so the period feels large afterward. This is the split that most readers miss.
  • Boredom and discomfort drag. When nothing new arrives, attention turns to time itself, and watched time crawls. The «watched pot» is a real perceptual effect, not a saying.
  • Attention is the lever. What you attend to, you time; what you ignore, you lose. Taylor makes attention the practical hinge of every technique in the book.
  • The «fifth law»: consciousness can suspend time. In deep meditation or peak states, Taylor says ordinary time perception drops away entirely. This is where the psychology hands off to his transpersonal beliefs.
  • The prescription: novelty plus presence. Vary your routine, travel, learn, and pay closer attention to expand felt time. Sound advice — for reasons partly different from the ones he gives.

What holds up

The age effect is real and measured. Wittmann and Lehnhoff surveyed 499 people aged 14 to 94 and found that the felt speed of time does rise with age, confirming the common intuition (Wittmann and Lehnhoff, 2005). Taylor’s instinct here matches the data.

Novelty and memory density hold up too. Claudia Hammond named the «holiday paradox»: a week away feels long as you recall it, because new places pack in fresh memories, even though it flew by in the moment (Hammond, 2012, «Time Warped»). That is exactly Taylor’s absorption point, sharpened.

The attention-and-emotion machinery is well established. A large review shows that emotional and arousing events distort felt duration, and that where you point attention changes how long an interval seems (Droit-Volet and Meck, 2007). Fear stretches seconds; distraction shrinks hours. Taylor’s «pay attention» lever has a mechanism.

What doesn’t

The neat «proportional» story is shakier than the book implies. When Friedman and Janssen tested it directly, the raw ratio-of-a-lifetime idea explained little; felt speed tracked time pressure and busyness far more than simple arithmetic (Friedman and Janssen, 2010). Even Wittmann’s own age effect was modest — age accounted for at most 10 percent of the variance, not the tidy curve Taylor leans on.

The absorption claim is muddled at its center. Taylor slides between «time felt long while it happened» and «the period feels long in memory». Those are opposite experiences, and the flow research shows the in-the-moment side is not even consistent. A meta-analysis of 63 studies found flow’s link to time distortion real but weak, and not a reliable one-way «time flies» effect (Hancock et al., 2019). Absorption can make time feel fast, slow, or absent, depending on the task.

The «fifth law» is where the book leaves science. Taylor is a transpersonal psychologist whose main body of work concerns spiritual awakening and higher states of consciousness (Steve Taylor, Leeds Beckett University). Time «stopping» as the ego dissolves is a belief from that framework, not a finding. Treat it as the author’s worldview, not evidence.

And the title’s promise overreaches. Perception research lets you change how time is encoded and recalled. It does not let you «control» time — the correlational leap from «novelty slows felt time» to «engineer a longer life» is Taylor’s, not the studies’.

Why the tools outlive the theory

The advice works even where the explanation wobbles, because two separate mechanisms are doing the labor. First, memory density: novel, varied days lay down more distinct memories, so a period reads as long in hindsight. That is the holiday paradox, and it is the honest core of «make more time».

Second, attentional presence: when you actually notice an experience, you time it and store it; when you run on autopilot, it never registers. This is close to what reaching a flow state trains — full attention on the task in front of you. It will not slow your watch, but it stops whole weeks from disappearing unrecorded. Keep the tools. Hold the metaphysics loosely.

Who should actually read it

Read the full book if you want a gentle, well-written popular tour of time perception and you are relaxed about a spiritual detour in the back half. It reads easily and it will make you notice your own days.

Skip it if you want current evidence — the field moved on after 2007, and these book notes carry the parts that survived. Skip it, too, if the phrase «expanded consciousness» makes you reach for a citation. You will spend the last chapters arguing with the author.

One thing to try

The shift: stop trying to slow time and start refusing to let it go unrecorded. The goal is not a longer clock but a denser memory — a week you can actually recall a month later.

First move: today, break one automatic routine and give it real attention. Take a different route, cook something unfamiliar, or have one conversation with your phone in another room. One deliberate novel act, fully noticed, is a single data point of felt time you will keep.

Get the book

Find «Making Time» on Amazon — as an Amazon Associate, The Boring Work earns from qualifying purchases (disclosure).

The boring bottom line

Taylor is right that felt time bends and that novelty and attention are the levers. He is wrong to promise control, and he mixes solid perception science with his own beliefs about consciousness. The usable part fits on an index card: notice more, repeat less, and judge your weeks by what you remember, not by how fast they passed. For the metaphysics, you are on your own — and that is a question about how you think, not about the clock.

Sources

The Russian-language predecessor of this article (2010) is preserved in the archive.

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