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Pelican Books #25
What We Really Do All Day: Insights from the Centre for Time Use Research
How has the way we spend our time changed over the last fifty years?
Are we really working more, sleeping less and addicted to our phones?
What does this mean for our health, wealth and happiness?
Everything we do happens in time and it feels like our lives are busier than ever before. Yet a detailed look at our daily activities reveals some surprising truths about the social and economic structure of the world we live in. This book delves into the unrivalled data collection and expertise of the Centre for Time Use Research to explore fifty-five years of change and what it means for us today.
358 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
June 26, 2020
The Centre for Time Use Research at University College, London, has provided an analysis here of comparisons over time, by gender and by social background, of time use, based on a series of detailed diary surveys, including some early ones by the BBC. From the 1980s these diary surveys were funded by the research councils and are seen as more objective than surveys based on respondents’ recollections of how much time they spend on tasks. Comparisons over time are particularly hard to gather, and so this is an interesting record of how much social change there has been and, often, of how little social change there has been. In a series of essays by different researchers at the centre, they offer insights into trends over time, both nationally and internationally, and changes in family life.
This quantitative approach can make for pedestrian reading – and for numerical evidence for statements of the blindingly obvious. For instance, retired people who have some structure in their day and volunteer or look after others, may be healthier and enjoy life more, and find it less of a shock when they retire. But you can’t always tell whether it is the healthier people that do more, or the people that do more that stay healthy. No sweat, Sherlock!
But the quantitative approach also offers some objectivity in fraught discussions about the gender divide, especially about the overall burden of domestic responsibilities and the wage divide at work. The division of domestic tasks has become a more equal, just as women’s paid work has increased. Totals worked, both paid and unpaid, have fallen for both sexes, but faster for men. In 2015, women worked 10 minutes more a day than men. Women had more leisure in the 1960s, and by 2015 men had half an hour’s more leisure than average than women, although women also spent more time in bed. Unpaid work still makes up 50% of women’s work time, compared to 30% of men’s work time. It does seem like a double burden on women, who also report more multitasking and fragmented days. It could be worse – in Spain and Italy there is a gap of around five percentage points between the amount of work women do and the amount of work men do – women are shouldering the burden clearly.
We can see big trends in the minutiae of daily life – in 1961 for instance the BBC survey showed almost nine out of ten of us were eating within an hour of peak meal times of 1pm and 5.45pm. By 2015 we were not eating to this common beat, or watching the same TV programmes. Just over 4% went to church on Sunday in 2015 – 25% went shopping. Childcare has become much more valued and more time is spent on it – in 1961 it hardly signified but by 2015 was a significant weekend activity for both men and women. Over thirty years from the 1980s, the amount of time spent on childcare has increased, among both men and women, and this is one of the reasons why leisure time has not increased as much as might be expected. Educated women are working longer in paid work than less educated women and spending more time on childcare, as part of a philosophy of intensive parenting.
The standard working week has been eroded. Although 77% of working hours are between 8am and 6pm on weekdays, around 7 out of 10 of us reported some working outside this period – unsocial hours - in any given week.
One of the key insights from quantitative analysis over time is that the popular myth that we are becoming more rushed and more driven by multi-tasking, is not borne out by comparison of time diaries over many decades. Between 2000 and 2015 there was a large reduction in the % of people reporting feeling ‘always rushed’ especially among the middle class. Rather, it may be that a particular group in society – mid-life professionals, often with two adults combining working and childcare - feels far more rushed than they did earlier on in their lives. This group is dominant in society – influencing the kind of discussion that you get in the media. We may feel we have to respond instantly to messages and there is less down time. But overall, we have in fact reduced our overall working hours and are spending slightly more time in bed – although we may be looking at our smartphones rather than sleeping.
There is less analysis of the impact of caring for elderly parents in an ageing society – but a commentary too on how the valuation of unpaid work could help challenge policies such as austerity which place burdens on voluntary effort inside and outside the family.
There is interesting reassurance on teenagers’ use of their smart phones and computers, suggesting that it is often as an adjunct to other activity including studying rather than a replacement for exercise or conversation. We should also feel happy for computer gamers – in a ranked listing of activities and how enjoyable people find them, computer gaming came just after sleep and going out to a restaurant in terms of enjoyment and just ahead of knitting or going to a party. Feel happy for knitters too – they are having as much fun as going to a party or visiting friends. Diarists are not asked to rank their enjoyment of sex – ‘sleep etc’ may be the nearest we get to that.
This quantitative approach can make for pedestrian reading – and for numerical evidence for statements of the blindingly obvious. For instance, retired people who have some structure in their day and volunteer or look after others, may be healthier and enjoy life more, and find it less of a shock when they retire. But you can’t always tell whether it is the healthier people that do more, or the people that do more that stay healthy. No sweat, Sherlock!
But the quantitative approach also offers some objectivity in fraught discussions about the gender divide, especially about the overall burden of domestic responsibilities and the wage divide at work. The division of domestic tasks has become a more equal, just as women’s paid work has increased. Totals worked, both paid and unpaid, have fallen for both sexes, but faster for men. In 2015, women worked 10 minutes more a day than men. Women had more leisure in the 1960s, and by 2015 men had half an hour’s more leisure than average than women, although women also spent more time in bed. Unpaid work still makes up 50% of women’s work time, compared to 30% of men’s work time. It does seem like a double burden on women, who also report more multitasking and fragmented days. It could be worse – in Spain and Italy there is a gap of around five percentage points between the amount of work women do and the amount of work men do – women are shouldering the burden clearly.
We can see big trends in the minutiae of daily life – in 1961 for instance the BBC survey showed almost nine out of ten of us were eating within an hour of peak meal times of 1pm and 5.45pm. By 2015 we were not eating to this common beat, or watching the same TV programmes. Just over 4% went to church on Sunday in 2015 – 25% went shopping. Childcare has become much more valued and more time is spent on it – in 1961 it hardly signified but by 2015 was a significant weekend activity for both men and women. Over thirty years from the 1980s, the amount of time spent on childcare has increased, among both men and women, and this is one of the reasons why leisure time has not increased as much as might be expected. Educated women are working longer in paid work than less educated women and spending more time on childcare, as part of a philosophy of intensive parenting.
The standard working week has been eroded. Although 77% of working hours are between 8am and 6pm on weekdays, around 7 out of 10 of us reported some working outside this period – unsocial hours - in any given week.
One of the key insights from quantitative analysis over time is that the popular myth that we are becoming more rushed and more driven by multi-tasking, is not borne out by comparison of time diaries over many decades. Between 2000 and 2015 there was a large reduction in the % of people reporting feeling ‘always rushed’ especially among the middle class. Rather, it may be that a particular group in society – mid-life professionals, often with two adults combining working and childcare - feels far more rushed than they did earlier on in their lives. This group is dominant in society – influencing the kind of discussion that you get in the media. We may feel we have to respond instantly to messages and there is less down time. But overall, we have in fact reduced our overall working hours and are spending slightly more time in bed – although we may be looking at our smartphones rather than sleeping.
There is less analysis of the impact of caring for elderly parents in an ageing society – but a commentary too on how the valuation of unpaid work could help challenge policies such as austerity which place burdens on voluntary effort inside and outside the family.
There is interesting reassurance on teenagers’ use of their smart phones and computers, suggesting that it is often as an adjunct to other activity including studying rather than a replacement for exercise or conversation. We should also feel happy for computer gamers – in a ranked listing of activities and how enjoyable people find them, computer gaming came just after sleep and going out to a restaurant in terms of enjoyment and just ahead of knitting or going to a party. Feel happy for knitters too – they are having as much fun as going to a party or visiting friends. Diarists are not asked to rank their enjoyment of sex – ‘sleep etc’ may be the nearest we get to that.
October 2, 2022
What We Really Do All Day: Insights from the Centre for Time Use Research is the third book I've read from this Pelican paperback series - the other two are Social Class in the 21st Century and Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything, both very good. I really like this compact paperback format for text, but it makes interpreting graphs rather difficult. This was an issue with Social Class in the 21st Century and unfortunately is again here. I begin with this point because there are so many graphs in What We Really Do All Day: Insights from the Centre for Time Use Research and I found some near-impossible to understand. And I did a quantitative social science PhD, so have a lot of experience with graphs! It's a big challenge to clearly distinguish up to nine variables in monochrome on small pages. I think Gershuny and Sullivan make as good an effort as possible within the format constraints. Still, colour and more space would have the graphs so much easier to read.
This problem aside, I found What We Really Do All Day: Insights from the Centre for Time Use Research a fascinating collection of academic yet clearly written survey data analysis. It employs time use diary data collected over decades to compare how behaviour varies across time and demographic variables. As the diary data is detailed and extensive, each chapter focuses on a different topic. These include gender differences in time spent on paid and unpaid work, how time spent with family has changed over the decades, and whether technology use contributes to a feeling of being rushed. The analysis is largely descriptive and written in the pleasingly measured and qualified academic style. Hypotheses draw upon media panics, such as children spending too long online and work taking over our lives, while time use data provides a means to test them quantitatively. I work as a survey statistician, so would have liked more detail on how the sampling design and weighting minimise bias (for example, is data collection spread randomly across time and geography?). I wouldn't necessarily expect that in a book for general audiences, though, as it's pretty technical.
All chapters include thought-provoking insights into social change as revealed by time use and cohere well into an informative and interesting whole. Two that particularly struck me were on time spent eating and whether we really are busier in the 21st century. The former found significant differences in the number of meals and time spent eating by age and social class. Younger and working class people have fewer meals:
I find it oddly paradoxical that social groups seemingly eating less are likely to have higher BMIs! Perhaps the association between frequency of eating and BMI is explained by those with higher BMIs dieting? Depressing, if so. The book doesn't have time to get into this any further, but the time use data certainly suggests that intermittent fasting diets are a bad idea for multiple reasons.
Regarding the pace of 21st century life, I was interested to find quantitative evidence for something I've observed and read about elsewhere:
This phenomenon comes up in Lordon's Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire and is particularly rife in academia, in my experience. What We Really Do All Day: Insights from the Centre for Time Use Research provides an intriguing and useful new angle of approach to current socioeconomic inequalities by age, gender, class. It also examines how daily life has changed since 1961. The usefulness of such longitudinal comparisons makes it surprising that this approach wasn't (to my recollection) mentioned by Lefebvre in Critique of Everyday Life, although that was a much more theoretical than empirical book. The ways in which time use have and have not changed over the decades sometimes prove counterintuitive, making this an enlightening read.
This problem aside, I found What We Really Do All Day: Insights from the Centre for Time Use Research a fascinating collection of academic yet clearly written survey data analysis. It employs time use diary data collected over decades to compare how behaviour varies across time and demographic variables. As the diary data is detailed and extensive, each chapter focuses on a different topic. These include gender differences in time spent on paid and unpaid work, how time spent with family has changed over the decades, and whether technology use contributes to a feeling of being rushed. The analysis is largely descriptive and written in the pleasingly measured and qualified academic style. Hypotheses draw upon media panics, such as children spending too long online and work taking over our lives, while time use data provides a means to test them quantitatively. I work as a survey statistician, so would have liked more detail on how the sampling design and weighting minimise bias (for example, is data collection spread randomly across time and geography?). I wouldn't necessarily expect that in a book for general audiences, though, as it's pretty technical.
All chapters include thought-provoking insights into social change as revealed by time use and cohere well into an informative and interesting whole. Two that particularly struck me were on time spent eating and whether we really are busier in the 21st century. The former found significant differences in the number of meals and time spent eating by age and social class. Younger and working class people have fewer meals:
These class disparities in the average duration of meals might either reflect a time spent in each meal or having fewer meals over the day. In fact, in the case of the UK data, it is both. Working-class individuals spend, on average, less time on each meal occasion and also eat significantly fewer meals per day. [...] The number of meals per day has been linked with individual weight status: more frequent eating, whether it is meals or snacks, has been found to be positively related to lower BMI values. Sometimes snacks are consumed in place of meals, but in the case of the UK working class, that is not the case.
I find it oddly paradoxical that social groups seemingly eating less are likely to have higher BMIs! Perhaps the association between frequency of eating and BMI is explained by those with higher BMIs dieting? Depressing, if so. The book doesn't have time to get into this any further, but the time use data certainly suggests that intermittent fasting diets are a bad idea for multiple reasons.
Regarding the pace of 21st century life, I was interested to find quantitative evidence for something I've observed and read about elsewhere:
In response to the general conclusion that time pressure is a phenomenon experienced primarily by specific groups of the population (in particular those with high educational qualifications and high-status jobs), we have previously advanced the 'busyness as badge of honour' hypothesis. This states that busyness may have more to do with higher socio-economic classes self-representation as busy, rather than any objective reality. The words 'I'm terribly busy at work' act as a means of status enhancement, signalling importance and indispensability. The most privileged now spend more time at work than the less so, and busyness has therefore become a symbolic marker of social status.
This phenomenon comes up in Lordon's Willing Slaves of Capital: Spinoza and Marx on Desire and is particularly rife in academia, in my experience. What We Really Do All Day: Insights from the Centre for Time Use Research provides an intriguing and useful new angle of approach to current socioeconomic inequalities by age, gender, class. It also examines how daily life has changed since 1961. The usefulness of such longitudinal comparisons makes it surprising that this approach wasn't (to my recollection) mentioned by Lefebvre in Critique of Everyday Life, although that was a much more theoretical than empirical book. The ways in which time use have and have not changed over the decades sometimes prove counterintuitive, making this an enlightening read.
April 27, 2020
I've had this book on my shelf since last year, and I figured now would be a good time to read it since most of us have nothing BUT time right now. Plus, I want to read more non-fiction, and it just sounded interesting, which is why I picked it up to begin with. I really like the idea of this book, and thought it was going to be a nice informed exploration of the way we structure our days and how that's changed over the past few decades, and don't get me wrong, it definitely is, but that's ALL it is. Most of the book is findings from various scientific studies explained alongside some rather technical graphs, with little interesting discussion beyond what the data objectively shows. I was expecting a little more history or cultural discussion or even just a little bit of personality amid all the scientific data analysis and technical jargon. Most of the time, What We Really Do All Day feels more like I'm reading a research paper, as opposed to an interesting book. I don't want to say this is a worthless book, because it definitely isn't: it's clearly well-researched and I'm sure some sociology student or data analyst would have a much better time with it than I did, but as it stands, it's just not a particularly interesting or engaging read, which I'd argue is probably the most important factor in enjoying a non-fiction book.
February 27, 2023
This was one of those books, where I loved the idea of the title, but I soon found out as I got into it, that it wasn't what I thought it would be at all. From the opening tempograms I could see that we were already in trouble early on. You can't really get away with such graphs and charts when they are in black and white, they just don't work as cleanly or effectively as the authors would like to think and as a result over the length of a book you simply lose interest and stop paying attention in the way that you should.
Yes of course there were some interesting moments in here, but there just wasn't enough to make this truly engaging. I usually get so much out of Pelican books, but this just didn't work for me at all. This was easy enough to read, though I couldn't say the same for the many graphs and charts, and overall this was a bit of dud for me and a disappointment overall.
Yes of course there were some interesting moments in here, but there just wasn't enough to make this truly engaging. I usually get so much out of Pelican books, but this just didn't work for me at all. This was easy enough to read, though I couldn't say the same for the many graphs and charts, and overall this was a bit of dud for me and a disappointment overall.
August 26, 2020
I'm quite disappointed by "What we really do all day".
Yes, the book does answer the question. Yes, it's what I should have expected.
I guess finding myself looking at graphs and reading explanations of those wasn't enough. I would have loved a more sociologistic approach to an explanation of the phenomenona highlighted throughout the book.
I ended up being quite bored and overwhelmed with numbers and statistics, and too little exploration of the causes and factors.
Also, I felt the chapters on time used on digital devices were written by people who are quite remote from that area of knowledge.
Yes, the book does answer the question. Yes, it's what I should have expected.
I guess finding myself looking at graphs and reading explanations of those wasn't enough. I would have loved a more sociologistic approach to an explanation of the phenomenona highlighted throughout the book.
I ended up being quite bored and overwhelmed with numbers and statistics, and too little exploration of the causes and factors.
Also, I felt the chapters on time used on digital devices were written by people who are quite remote from that area of knowledge.
January 25, 2020
Turns out you've got more leisure time and you're working A LOT less than you would have done in the 1960s or 1980s. And yet we're constantly 'busy' and 'stressed.' Why? First, influential people use busyness as virtue-signaling. Second, economic precariousness.
October 11, 2019
A good book for research references. They go through time use research and discuss change over the last century by categories and by age, gender and socioeconomic class. It is quite helpful as many stats are being used in other types of research, definitely references to this within feminist literature.
Good to see time use data in context.
One thing that I did find annoying was what seemed inconsistent ideas of what differences are considered small or big. Such as children spending 1/3 of their phone time alone was described as a small amount, but then 15min difference in time spent on an activity in another piece was seen as a big difference. It is not that the two data sets are comparable, however there was a lack of insight in why one thing is perceived as a big difference and another isn't.
Good to see time use data in context.
One thing that I did find annoying was what seemed inconsistent ideas of what differences are considered small or big. Such as children spending 1/3 of their phone time alone was described as a small amount, but then 15min difference in time spent on an activity in another piece was seen as a big difference. It is not that the two data sets are comparable, however there was a lack of insight in why one thing is perceived as a big difference and another isn't.
June 12, 2023
The data is really interesting, but that's all there is: data. Countering common misconceptions about exercise or the role of men and women in domestic work is interesting, and the part about eating was a fun micro-representation of different cultures at large.
However: no synthesis, personality, comment, exploration of the implications of the data, or so on. It's like reading a very well-researched sociology paper, but a sociology paper nonetheless.
However: no synthesis, personality, comment, exploration of the implications of the data, or so on. It's like reading a very well-researched sociology paper, but a sociology paper nonetheless.
December 1, 2020
One long, verbose essay.
Some interesting findings, but most of these could have been summarised in far fewer words, allowing for some more space for meaningful reflection.
Nothing mind blowing here.
Some interesting findings, but most of these could have been summarised in far fewer words, allowing for some more space for meaningful reflection.
Nothing mind blowing here.
January 20, 2021
Some interesting insights, but full of academic waffle. With better editing, this book could be half the length and much better for it. Also, and unforgivably for a book based on academic research, there are frequent errors in the labelling of the charts and graphs.
October 4, 2021
I was reading this cover-to-cover but it got kind of tedious that way as it's really a collection of essays by different people on various aspects of how we spend our time. It's full of interesting facts all the same, and a lot of bits that go counter to popular opinion. I just found it better to pick a chapter and read it for a bit than to read it all in one go. I'm moving it off my currently reading pile but haven't really finished it and will dip back into it in the future. Overall, I just think it could have been a more coordinated and edited better.
July 24, 2024
Most just a presentation of graphs with no thought-provoking analysis or insight.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews