Things are speeding up right? You’ve got no time to yourself and it feels like you’re always working. Perhaps not. A couple of economists have studied how people in the US spend their time and the results are shocking. People have considerably more free time than they did forty years ago. This verdict is at odds with various studies by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the US Census Bureau but their studies tend to focus on workplace trends. The findings looked at total time spent and found that the total amount of time spent ‘working’ has actually fallen consistently since 1965. There are problems of definition of course. If you are multi-tasking – listening to music while cleaning the house for example – is this work or relaxation?

Nevertheless, the technological revolution (for example, 24/7 services, home delivery, Internet banking) has delivered a more relaxed society where the average person has four to eight hours more leisure time each week than they did forty years ago. So why do we still feel so stressed out? The reason, apparently, is that we’ve got too much money! The growth in real incomes has made our time more expensive so lying in the sun for a day is much more expensive that it used to be.

The second reason is that we do too much. Connectedness means that we are ‘always on’ which also leads to a blurring of boundaries between work and home. Add a pinch of job insecurity due to outsourcing and you can see why we’re so rattled.