Without question the most memorable holiday I've ever been on – and I mean that in a bad way – involved a four-berth motorboat, the Dutch canal system, and my family (I must have been 14). Regrettably, what it didn't involve was anybody with anywhere near enough expertise at piloting motorboats on Dutch canals, which is why two moments in particular are lodged in my memory. One concerns a shockingly narrow escape from the path of a massive industrial barge; the other resulted in significant damage to a blameless Dutchman's dinghy. I also recall a seafood dinner on the final night, after we got back to the boatyard, that was sublime – and not solely, I think, because we were safe at last, having successfully evaded both death and the Netherlands police.

I'd dined out on this story for years before I learned that it's a textbook example of the "peak-end effect", a now well-established psychological phenomenon whereby we remember and judge our experiences, whether good or bad, not in their entirety but according to how they felt at their emotional peak, and at the end. No doubt our Dutch holiday included moments of enjoyment, boredom, hassle and low-key relaxation, but all I remember are the worst bits and the last bit. In one excruciating-to-think-about study by Daniel Kahneman, the economist who coined the term, and others, a group of colonoscopy patients had their endoscopes left in place for several minutes at the end, causing continued pain, but less than during the procedure itself. As a result, they suffered for longer – but actually rated the overall experience as less painful than those who had the device immediately removed, apparently because the last part was less bad.

The broader principle at work here seems to be that, when it comes to recalling experiences, intensity matters more than duration. As a society we fixate on duration and generally assume that the way to have more positive experiences is to have longer ones: we chastise ourselves for not spending more time with children or friends; we convince ourselves that a "proper" holiday requires at least a week off. But as the American psychologist Thomas Gilovich told the Boston Globe recently, "If you have to sacrifice how long your vacation is versus how intense it is, you want shorter and more intense." And don't worry about spending more time with your kids; worry about spending more memorable time with them.

The implications of this are reassuring: in a world where time seems forever in short supply, the message is that you don't need as much of it as you thought. But it requires a fundamental shift in how we think about positive experience, towards recognising that much, perhaps most, of the value of a holiday, or time spent with favourite people, isn't in the experience itself but in its recollection – and therefore that planning such events should focus as much on how they'll be remembered as how they'll be enjoyed in real time. Meanwhile, I like to imagine that something fantastically wonderful happened to that Dutchman the same afternoon we broke his dinghy, so that these days he can barely recall the incompetent British tourists who crashed into his beloved boat, then sped shamefully away, zigzagging, because they still hadn't figured out how to steer.

oliver.burkeman@theguardian.com