Lately I’ve been thinking a lot about time—about its elusive nature, its short supply, and its too-rapid passage.

So far no one has invented an app to add more hours to the day. But we can change our relationship to time. How? Through meditation. By adding a formal mindfulness practice to your agenda, you can slow your pace or heighten your awareness of even the briefest moments to get the most bang for your temporal buck.

I came to this discovery recently during a meditation practice. On weekdays, I usually I try to meditate as soon as I arrive at the office. I don’t like to feel rushed, and I get in early enough to give myself plenty of time.

But on this particular day, I needed to answer emails and couldn’t fit in the practice before my first appointment. So, I decided to squeeze it in during a break. I set the timer for twenty minutes and began to focus on my breath, as I do nearly every day.

What I noticed was this: I found myself hurrying, trying to get through the exercise as quickly as possible. I wasn’t cutting short the time—twenty minutes is twenty minutes, no matter how you may try to speed it up—but I remained acutely aware of the clock until the bell I’d set to mark the end of my practice (there is an app for that) rang. I found the process frustrating and unsatisfying.

We often dash through our days in just the same way, rushing to complete one activity so we can move on to the next. Focusing on the end product rather than the process of getting there takes away from what’s happening in the present moment—so much so, in fact, that we often can’t even remember what we’ve just experienced.

When my son was in high school, he had his own epiphany about time. Now a college senior majoring in music performance, back then he’d already begun to get serious about his trumpet playing and, under the guidance of an outstanding teacher and mentor, was finally learning how to practice. Until that point, he’d put in the requisite fifteen or twenty minutes, speeding through his scales and embouchure drills so he could get them over with and play video games. But after reading The Inner Game of Tennis and discovering how to focus, he started playing longer and with a greater sense of presence.

Although 15-year-old boys aren’t typically known for their ability to verbalize complex internal processes, he summed up his experience with an uncharacteristically Yoda-like observation: “When I used to practice, 15 minutes felt like an hour. Now an hour feels like 15 minutes.”

Of course he didn’t realize he’d achieved the enviable mental state called “flow.”

Most of us overly scheduled people would seriously question adding yet another task to our already excessive daily To-Do lists. Between going to work, looking after a family, attempting to maintain a semblance of fitness, and maybe even having a social life, how can we find the time?

It’s possible to make room in your agenda for a mindfulness practice, even though it might mean playing fewer games of Angry Birds or Tweeting less frequently. By including twenty minutes of meditation—or even just five, for starters—you might find you accomplish more throughout the rest of the day. Or, as my son realized, you might even enter The Zone: that sweet spot where you connect effortlessly with your experience and don’t even notice the passage of time. You’ll still have only twenty-four hours at your disposal. But it could feel like all the time in the world. Or like no time at all.