Incredibly counter-intuitive research out of Harvard suggests a novel way to make your employees feel more free: Give them more to do. Huh?

Sometimes scientific findings of such head-slapping obviousness--talking on the phone makes you a worse driver and men generally favor large breasts, for example--that they make the average lay person wonder how anyone ever got funding to investigate the question in the first place. But then every once in a while, you run into a research result on the opposite end of the spectrum--something so counter-intuitive you can hardly believe it's true.

Harvard Business School just produced one of the latter, and it's of particular interest to entrepreneurs hoping to help their busy employees feel less of a time crunch. Michael Norton, an associate professor of business administration, wanted to find out how bosses can help their teams feel like they have more time. Given that we can't slow the sun's crossing of the sky, the obvious alternative is to simply give employees fewer tasks. But it turns out this common sense response is actually the exact opposite of what Norton discovered.

To figure out what can relieve our sense of time pressure, Norton conducted a series of experiments that gave some study subjects an unexpected block of free time, by sending them home 15 minutes early from an experiment they were told would take an hour for example. Another group was instead told to fill the time with worthwhile activities to help others such as editing essays for low-income students. Which group reported back that they felt they had enough time for all the tasks in their day?

Surprisingly, the answer is those who spend time helping others rather than those who were given additional free time. By doing activities that make them feel useful, employees increase their sense of "time affluence," the researchers conclude, implying that the source of our perceived time famine isn't really lack of hours but a lack of a sense of purpose and accomplishment. Norton offered three suggestions for how managers could put thus insight to use to Business Insider:

Make employees participate in a company volunteer effort, particularly if they can use part of their workday to do it.

Let employees know how their day-to-day tasks are helping others. If they can hear how the employee helped a customer, this will also make them more satisfied with their job.

Use fun strategies to encourage team members to help each other. Norton tells of one experiment where salespeople were given $20 bonus money and told they had to spend on another team member. Those teams sold more than other groups that were told to spend the $20 on themselves.

This latest research finding of Norton's follows earlier studies showing analogous, counter-intuitive results. One finding, for instance, revealed that letting employees give bonuses to others is actually more motivating than receiving bonuses themselves.

Do you think forcing your team to spend time on worthy tasks to help others would relieve their sense of being time poor--or just start a mutiny?

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The founders of Skype and Kazaa have moved onto their next digital venture: Rdio, a streaming music service. Will listeners subscribe?

In 2008, Janus Friis and Niklas Zennström, the Scandinavian founders of Skype and Kazaa, started working on Rdio because they were convinced that music listening is shifting permanently from a download model (like iTunes) to one streamed on-demand from the cloud (like Pandora).

Initially with funding from Zennström's venture capital firm—when Skype was sold twice in recent years, Friis and Zennström reportedly earned close to $1 billion in the process—they set up shop in San Francisco. They also asked Drew Larner, a former movie executive with 20th Century Fox and Spyglass Entertainment, to be CEO. (Larner had met Friis and Zennström 10 years ago, when they were still working at Kazaa, the controversial online music-sharing service.)

Rdio users can now play any of 15 million songs from the likes of Justin Bieber, the Beastie Boys, and Coldplay—and never hear an ad—from the web or an app, and share (or discover) music in real-time with friends.

What distinguishes Rdio most is that—unlike many Internet publishers that rely heavily on advertising revenue—the company is going after a subscription model from the start instead. "It’s a very disruptive [music] experience to have to listen to an ad all of a sudden," says Larner. "We wanted to keep the experience clean and felt like we'd be able to offer something that was compelling enough to get people to subscribe."

Rdio users can listen on an Internet browser or Rdio desktop application. After hearing an undisclosed number of free songs (users see a meter "run out"), they are required to pay $5 a month. An additional $5 monthly fee applies to listen to music on the go with Rdio's iPhone, Android, Blackberry, and Windows 7 smartphone mobile apps. "Ten bucks is roughly the cost of an album, and with us, you're getting access to everything," says Larner.

But the subscription model still pins Rdio up against established behaviors. Consumers are not accustomed to paying for online content. Less than 10% of revenue in the Internet publishing industry comes from paid subscriptions, according to IBISWorld.

And if they're going to pay, says Jack Plunkett, CEO of Plunkett Research, "consumer preference is to own the music."

Larner attributes consumers' slow shuffle toward paid subscriptions to an emotional disconnection from digital content. "In the past you showed people that rack of albums you had in a milk crate and said, 'Look, this is who I am,'" he says. "We believe Rdio expresses that really well in the way the service is built, but getting people over that hump is a challenge."

Rdio is focused on overcoming that challenge. With a reported $17.5 million in financing, Rdio is trying to make finding and sharing new music easier. The company recently upgraded to a faster browsing speed and continuously-scrolling interface. Each user can display most-played songs and artists on a profile, "follow" friends and other members, and share music with Facebook friends. Says Larner: "Once people see that everything is there—they can listen to [Rdio] on any device, they can listen to it on a plane, they don’t need an iPod or iTunes—they’re hooked."

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