ConclusionPressing Questions for Our Time

Jonathan Gershuny

Oriel Sullivan

As we have shown throughout this book, time can be valued in many different ways. We are used to hearing that time is money, and we have presented ways of accounting for the monetary value of our time. But, crucially, time is also about subjective experience. The previous two chapters have addressed, directly and indirectly, two central and pressing questions of our time, about our time: 1) are we speeding up and feeling increasingly pressed for time?; and 2) how happy are we as we go about our daily lives – and can time-use data provide us with an alternative to standard economic-based accounts of social progress?

Unlike the other chapters of this book, these questions relate primarily to the way in which we experience time – the different ways that we are feeling as we move through our daily sequence of activities. We have shown that time-use data provide a challenge to the idea of an inexorable increase in time pressure; simple measures of time fragmentation and multi-tasking do not show any general increase over the years of the 21st century. At the same time, measures of time spent in ‘constrained’ activities (employment and family care) are more strongly associated with reported feelings of rushedness than anything else, including ICT use. That we are able to provide these, perhaps unexpected, answers to questions about the subjective understandings and experience of our time underlines the future potential for time-use diary studies.

Were the data available, we would be able, for example, to compare the experience of time enjoyed by the Flintstones and the Jetsons. Did the Stone Age Flintstones actually experience a less stressful pace of life than the space-age Jetsons? Did they juggle fewer things simultaneously, enjoying more leisure, and slower cooking? And did the Jetsons spend more time speeding around in their space-age transportation, exposing themselves to greater levels of environmental hazards such as solar radiation? Did more advanced technology contribute in any way to a more gender-equal division of labour? And, crucially, did their space-age way of life make them more or less happy overall than the prehistoric Flintstones? Time-use diary data gives us a means of providing answers to these questions for contemporary societies on a historical, cross-national basis.

The chapters of this book have documented some important consistencies and changes in the way that the UK population has been using its time over the past half-century. Our analyses of general time-use trends in some respects run rather contrary to expectations. True, women’s core housework has been reduced, men’s and women’s unpaid work totals have converged somewhat, and IT use has grown explosively. But the broadest summary result is of a certain consistency in time-use patterns. The totals of (paid and unpaid) work, the amount of sleep, and hence the total of leisure/consumption time – over a 50-year observation window – all changed much less than was expected by the futurologists of the 1960s.

By comprehensively summarizing the information provided by time-use diaries, the minutes of the Great Day provide a time-based metric allowing direct empirical comparison across the full range of human activities, social contexts, locations and feelings of enjoyment, only a very few of which may be accounted for in money terms. This points the way to a new approach to social science, more inclusive than either traditional economics or traditional sociology, capable of integrating accounts of what goes on in ‘the economy’ with information on the division and balance of the ‘extra-economic’ activity more usually studied by sociologists.

To conclude, the Great Day, gathering together everything done by everyone in the society, provides the evidential basis for various new sorts of accounting for historical change. It allows us to produce economic accounts, extended to include the product of work that is not undertaken as part of any sort of exchange activity, and the value of the consumption that takes place outside the broadly drawn sphere of work. It provides the raw material that allows us to estimate the extent of time devoted to nutrition and to all the various sorts of exercise and sedentary activity. It allows us to consider feelings of wellbeing and enjoyment, and their relationship to all the things we do during our days and nights. And we can in principle use these historical accounts and descriptions, in turn, as the base material for grounded speculation about the future – in the hope that in doing so we might help to promote better health, more wealth and greater wellbeing. We are now turning our minds to some serious economic and sociological futurology. But in this book, we seek merely to provide the prequel to this future: the most concrete and comprehensive recent description of each of the elements of time use that come together to constitute the society’s Great Day.