Do you feel you have no more free time? it’s your phone’s fault

If you felt like a decade ago you had a lot more free time in your daily life and could devote yourself to enjoyable activities, and now you feel that 24 hours is not enough, you are not alone. However, before you rush to blame your work or the crazy pace of daily life, it would be good to know about the research of Adam Alter, a New York University psychologist.

Alter presented during a TED conference a collection of three graphics depicting how people spent their time in 2007, 2015 and 2017. Based on Bureau of Labor Statistics data , the graphs show us that sleep and work occupy 2/3 of a day, regardless of year. The same is true for survival activities such as eating, bathing, etc.

What has changed dramatically is the use of the remaining 24 hours of personal time. In 2007, using screens took minutes, not even hours of our personal time. In the diagram the use of screens is represented in red and as you can see, within a decade the situation has completely reversed. Now, screens occupy most of our free time, and since we had televisions in 2007, one logical conclusion is that the use of smartphones has increased dramatically. The little yellow line is that there is time left in our free time, ” where your freedom lives and is now in a very small box,” Alter notes.

Alter invites the public to rethink their relationship with mobiles, tablets and laptops. They may connect the world in a geographical sense, but distract it from the joys of life and enhance the feeling of isolation. It encourages them to find a balance between technology and their lives, either by limiting the use of social media or by reducing the use of a device.