Imagine you have six months to travel—free time to go anywhere you want, do anything that pleases you.

Where would you go and with whom? What experiences would you seek out? What parts would you enjoy the most?

I have several friends who recently fulfilled this fantasy. One—I’ll call her “Arlene”—spent six months with her husband and four children in Bali, Indonesia. Another, “Marc,” sailed a catamaran with his wife and two children, first in the Caribbean, then across the Atlantic to Europe.

Different people, different choices: Yet when I asked each what they treasured most about the experience, their responses were identical. They didn’t focus on the beautiful landscapes, the adventures, the people, the food, or the activities. Those things contributed to their experience, but what they treasured most was a precious gift that snuck up and surprised them: the luxury of time.

“We’ve been married more than 15 years,” Arlene told me, “and yet this was the first time we ate three meals a day together, every day, for weeks on end. It was a delight.”

Marc, speaking of his children, said, “At first they were bored, confined to a small boat. But soon they began to evolve. My daughter baked fresh breads. We all stretched into the abundance of time.”

Here’s what’s amazing: The most precious experience we would get from living out that six-month escape fantasy is available to us right here, right now, without the travel.

We can reclaim the luxury of time.

I know what you’re thinking: We already have more to do than we have time for. With hundreds, sometimes thousands of friends on Facebook, and a continuous flow of emails, texts, and tweets, we’re overwhelmed with data and underwhelmed with our lives.

Yet with all of our activity, we are actually less productive. Try this three-minute quiz, derived from my own time-management failures, to see how productive—or unproductive—you are.

We need to rethink how we manage our time. The problem with most time-management advice is that it’s not really about managing time, it’s about organizing work. The premise is that if we just organize ourselves better, we can get it all done.

But that’s a fallacy. We can’t get it all done. There is simply too much to do.