I thought they experiments would be less interesting than the ideas, but they tended to implicate preferences for the design of software.
The point of the paper is that after you control for all host of confounding factors, people understand that they are busy today and cannot afford to spend time today, but they assume they will be happy to spend time later, due to some form of belief that they will have more free time later than they do now.
The implications are numerous.
For a monetary cost, people are more likely to correctly calculate the total cost of something with up front cost and repeated later cost, such that the money today and the money later are relatively equally balanced. (Within reason, talking on the order of weeks or months.) (And one of my notes on this is about longer time spans.)
For a time cost, people will have some resistance to spending time on something now, and they will dramatically, hyperbolically, overestimate their willingness or ability to spend time on that thing later.
Commercial implications: If you have a service that requires 30 minutes of "startup" work, try as hard as physically possible to present it as 1 minute now and 29 or 45 or 90 minutes later. People think they'll have tons of time later that they don't have now.
Personal implications: You should expect your future time to be as busy as your present time, if not more. With money, it may be better to think long term when deciding what is a good investment of money. But with time, you're better off thinking "Am I willing to do this right now? Why not? Why would I be more willing to do it later?" This attitude will increase the perceived value of your future time, restoring a better balance than you would naturally have.
The authors discuss a number of potential reasons for this phenomenon (ability to plan ahead to reschedule competing priorities, failure to recall why things took a long time in the past or believing that prior project overruns were unique one-offs (familiar to software engineers), etc.). They discuss the fundamentals of fungibility and predictability. You cannot fluidly trade time now for time later, or vice versa. You have to spend the present now, it cannot wait. This is different than money, which you can save or borrow to stretch it across time. Relatedly, you struggle significantly to predict the nature of our time a week, month, year from now. It is relatively easy and common to predict with high accuracy the entirety of one's financial outlook in a week, month, or year.
This is worth taking as a general cause for evaluating one's time. Consider for another moment the time billionaires with billions of seconds left in life. (We'll ignore that the author completely misses the years-to-seconds calculations. Someone sent me this, I don't vouch for him.)
Every second can only be spent as it comes. It cannot be saved or borrowed. You can clear some things out of the queue by spending some money. You can spend some of the time to accumulate money. You can spend some time to accumulate some money that later you use to clear some things out of the queue at that time. But it marches on one second at a time.
I'm midway through 29 years old. I have more time in a given day now than I will in days future. (Assuming I have kids.) I have more seconds ahead of me than behind. (Assuming I am fortunate.) I should think at least as seriously about my time as about my money.
I have huge spreadsheets about my money. Hand-written programs. Stitched-together equations and graphs. I know my current income, taxes, spending, assets, liabilities... I know what those values will be tomorrow, next month, and next year... (barring personal tragedy (illness), personal luck (stock options), or ... checks E*Trade... economic backsliding).
I simply do not have that for my time. I don't know what my time really looks like. I don't know (and perhaps do not want to know) what I do with every minute slipping through gaps here and there. I don't know what I expect my time to look like 1 year from now. When will I get to the next stage of my Spanish learning? If I'm not progressing today, why or how will I progress next week or month? When will I start this side-business I daydream of continually? With all the free time I'll suddenly have tomorrow between 7pm and 9pm? The next day?
I have to get serious about this.
Fortunately, I have the entire catalog of Cal Newport loaded firmly into my long-term memory for retrieval at just a time as this.
Now is nearly 9:30pm, so I will read my silly sci-fi book and go to sleep. Tomorrow, I will allocate my seconds to their appropriate places.