How we really spend our time

Time, it seems, is what we are all short of these days. One reason, perhaps, why there are thousands of studies every year into how we spend our time and how we could spend it better. Some of the results are startling. Did you know, for example …?

Although people all over the world are working longer and longer hours, we also have more leisure time than ever before.

After sleeping and working, watching TV is by far the most popular leisure activity the world over. Several decades ago people spent more time walking outside or doing sports.

According to the recent research, the British watch more TV than any other nation in Europe, but they also read more. The vast majority, eighty-five percent, regularly read newspapers, and fifty-four percent regularly read books.

Although up to two thirds of modern European women work full-time, they still do the main share of the housework, too. Husbands help more in the house than they did in the past, but in the UK, for example, men do an average of just six hours a week compared to their wives, who do over eighteen hours. No wonder that the vast majority of working women in the UK say that they are stressed and exhausted!

According to the latest survey by supermarkets, the average British family spends just eleven minutes preparing the main evening meal, that is six times less than it used to, and prefers ready meals and takeaways to home-cooked food. Almost half of all families in the UK eat together only once a month or less.

More than half-young people in the UK have a full-time job by the age of nineteen, but the majority of young Spanish and Italian people do not start full-time work until they are twenty-four.

Teens, who half a century ago were playing football in the backyard, are now surfing the Internet all the day round. The average American fourteen-year-old spends only half an hour doing homework, and less than a fifth of young people participate in sports, clubs, music or other traditional hobbies. Instead, sixty-five percent say they spend their time chatting on their mobiles and hanging out with their friends in shopping malls.

In the UK, pensioners are almost twice as active as teenagers, according to recent research. People over sixty-five spend nearly two hours a day doing physical activities such as walking, cycling, gardening or sport, while teenagers spend only seventy-five minutes. However, surprisingly, people who use the Internet regularly do more sport than people who never use it.

The Swedes and Finns are the sportiest nationalities in Europe. Seventy-three percent do some kind of sport at least once or twice a week.

People may spend more time at work these days but are they always working? The latest research reveals that each day the average British employee spends fifty-five minutes chatting, sixteen minutes flirting, fourteen minutes surfing the Internet and nine minutes sending e-mails to friends.