Enjoying the fullness of time

Our free time is undervalued and becoming contaminated, says James Wallman. In his new book, Time and How to Spend It, the bestselling author and futurist examines how to claim back our leisure time and learn to relish our most valuable asset

Would it surprise you to hear that we have more leisure time today than ever? Most of us think we have very little time, but the truth is we actually have a lot – on average, five hours, 49 minutes each day. Of course, no person or day is exactly average, but this means we typically have somewhere between 36 and 40 hours of disposable time every week to spend however we want. So why don’t we feel time-rich? It’s something that economists have been puzzling over and they’ve identified several reasons.

One is that we earn more, so time feels more expensive. Then there’s the way we’ve come to see busyness as a status symbol: important people are busy, so we want to be busy, too. Add to that the flood of incoming emails, texts, tweets and 24-hour news and gossip updates, along with the endless ocean of possibilities, both digital and in the real world, and it’s easy to see where time goes.

A second factor is the comparison we make between what we can do and what others are doing, making us anxious. So we try to push back the tide and keep up by multi-tasking. This fools us into thinking we’re being more productive with our work time, so we try to do it with our leisure time, too. When we’re playing with our kids, we check Facebook. When we’re hanging out with one group of friends, we post pictures to show another. This is something sociologists call ‘contaminated time’.

We’re also addicted to our devices. In 2007, the amount of leisure time we spent on devices like smartphones could be measured in minutes. Now, we spend on

average 3.5 hours a day online. Compare that with five or so hours of disposable time and we’re spending way more than half of it glued to our screens. No wonder people say they’re too busy to see friends, exercise, sleep.

You might be wondering why you need help deciding how to spend your free time – after all you know the sort of things you enjoy, so what could be so difficult? Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has a surprising take on it. “The popular assumption is that no skills are involved in enjoying free time, anybody can do it. Yet the evidence suggests the opposite; free time is more difficult to enjoy than work.”

When you’re on holiday, do you ever wonder if you’d be just as happy at home? Do you ever catch yourself at the tail end of a YouTube or Facebook binge and wish you could get that time back? Worryingly, scientists have found that people are often no happier after a holiday than if they’d never taken one. And almost all of us – 96% – admit to living much of our life on autopilot, doing things without even thinking whether they’ll be good or bad for us.

So, how can we learn to spend time in a way that’s more likely to lead to happiness and success? In a bid to tackle the problem of wasted, unfulfilled free time, I’ve consulted happiness researchers and trawled through the latest science to identify seven factors that will help get more out of every day (see right). Use it as a checklist and you’ll have fewer empty experiences and far more that are worthy of your precious time. Think of it like an audit for your most valuable asset – your time. Adapted from Time and How to Spend It by James Wallman (WH Allen). He is also the author of Stuffocation, a reminder that memories live longer than things.