Wasting time

I am sure you know the feeling: you have been toiling away all day long, yet, come nighttime you feel there aren‘t enough hours in a day to get everything done. And it’s in particular the household chores like cooking and cleaning that seem to consume a disproportionate part of our lives.

A recent study in Germany went to the bottom of questions such as how we spend our free time and how the different household chores are distributed amongst husband and wife. Whereas men seem to be spending almost 8 3/4 hours per day working (including the commute to work), women only spent just short of 5 1/2 hours that way. On the other hand men still are not pulling their weight as far as household chores are concerned, spending less than an hour per day helping around the home, while women spend 2 hours with household duties. And the same split, by the way, also applies to the time spent looking after children.

So which ones are the biggest ‘wastes of time’ according to the Germans? The biggest bugbear seems to be cleaning (I definitely agree with that), followed by visits to the doctor, grocery shopping and cooking. Besides the cost of living problem, I suspect that there is some correlation between the lack of interest in grocery shopping and cooking and the growing obesity crisis in our society. Interestingly it also seems that the car and the associated problems of congestion on roads and time wasted looking for parking are not one of the bugbears.

And how does the average German spend his free time? Now here it gets interesting, as the favourite pastimes since the last study 30 years ago have dramatically changed (and I presume this applies not only to Germany but all developed countries): While 30 years ago most free time was spent watching television, surfing the world wide web takes now most of our spare time. Watching TV is still in second place even three decades later. Revealing also is the fact that according to the latest survey a number of the top 10 activities such as using your computer or your smartphone (two distinct mentions in the study) and writing emails involve some sort of electronic device – and hence did not appear in the list of yesteryear. On the other hand activities such as working in the garden (in 9th place), ‘doing something with family’ (in 5th place) or ‘doing something with friends’ (in 7th place) are nowhere to be found in the latest survey. As far as the use of media is concerned, most of the German’s free time is spent watching TV and to a lesser extent on streaming services: A staggering 4 3/4 hours per day. Streaming music takes 1 hour of their time and reading a book a mere 25 minutes.

One thing seems obvious: Our activities move increasingly online. Spending actually time with friends and family other than seems to be the exception rather than the rule. Not cleaning or shopping for groceries is probably not really an option, but I wonder whether these necessary activities are really how we waste our time. Our society becomes increasingly obese, and I bet this has also to do with us being more sedentary, spending times in front of computers (I am currently typing this blog on my notebook), tablets and on phones rather than going outside and being active while enjoying the company of our nearest and dearest. In order to get out of this conundrum I suspect we need to rephrase the question: How can we make better use of the time not being spent at work and with inevitable duties?