At the heart of this edition of Slow Futures is time.
Time is a pretty important thing, in the context of change and trends, for a couple of reasons:
Firstly, because it is so consistent. Everything else can change (but doesn’t always), sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly. But time: unchanging.1 Always seven days in a week, 24 hours in a day (or 1,440 minutes – if you’re conducting time use analysis).
Secondly, because it’s so universal. Everything we do is situated in time. Every activity takes a certain amount of time and fits into the day in a certain way. In this nature, it’s also zero-sum – more time on one thing means less time on another. We can’t add more time to the day.
This second point is especially important because it means that in each of our days, activities and behaviours are fighting each other for time to be spent on them. More time on this means less time on that.
This makes understanding time particularly useful for organisations and businesses looking for growth opportunities.
Share of wallet or share of spend are flexible concepts – you can grow the pie. But time is always zero-sum. You can’t add minutes without taking them away from something else.
At Trajectory, we’ve conducted Time Use studies, mostly in collaboration with the Centre for Time Use Research (CTUR), since 2011. In the UK, time use diaries have been collected for decades, traditionally on paper and more recently online. Participants in these studies record – for every 10 minute portion of the day – what they’re doing, where they are, who they’re with and how much they’re enjoying it. In recent years, detail on secondary activities and device use has been added as well. The result is a complete picture of the rhythms of daily life.
The chart above is from Trajectory’s 2020 time use study, conducted during the tail end of the first lockdown. It shows the distribution of ‘primary activities’ for every 10 minute portion of the day.
If you’re reading this in email, it looks much better if you click on it - and you can then explore the data too.
The Rhythm of Life
Those rhythms tend to change very slowly.
The time we spend eating is a good example. Eating is universal and pretty timeless – we all do it, every day, and have done forever – so it allows us to look back a long way.
The chart below uses data from two studies. The blue line is data collected by CTUR in 1974. The red line is data from Trajectory’s latest study, collected in June 2024 – a few months ago. Each line shows the proportion of the UK adult population who were eating or drinking as their main activity at that time of the day.
At first glance, it might seem that not much has changed. There’s plenty that hasn’t.
Both today and fifty years ago there are three obvious peaks in eating activity, correlating to breakfast, lunch and dinner. There’s not much going on between those peaks, and virtually nothing at all either first thing in the morning or late at night.
However, looking closer, it’s clear that a lot is different. While some of the change is quite minor, some it is profound, indicating our changing relationship with food and work, and demonstrating a market for entirely new food and drink opportunities.
There are seven major things we’d pull out of this one chart:
Sharper peaks. In 1974, the peaks of eating activity are much sharper. This indicates that more people were following the same routine. Rather than individual rhythms, most of the population marched to the beat of the same drum. Breakfast at 8am, lunch at 12:30pm, dinner at 5:30pm.
All day dining. But, today, things are very different. There are still discernible peaks around mealtimes, but the periods between feature more eating than before. Currently, between 6:40am and 10:30pm, no fewer than 3% of us (almost 2m people) are eating.
Brunchtime. That all day dining has created new, commercially relevant mealtimes for retail, leisure and hospitality. At 9.50am (bit early for brunch, to be honest) 8% of us are eating – twice as many were at the same time in 1974.
National lunch. Probably the most remarkable thing on the chart. In 1974, a quarter of people were eating lunch. A huge chunk of the UK population doing the same thing at the same time.
Notional lunch. Today, weekday lunches are very different. The peak occupies roughly the same amount of time (starting around 12pm and finishing at about 1:30pm) but never gets above 16%. People might be skipping lunch altogether – or more likely, lunch becomes a secondary activity, relegated behind whatever else we’re doing (work, usually).
Menu Rapide. In 1974, dinner / tea was a brief affair. The evening peak, where at least 10% of the population were eating, lasted only 90mins between 5pm and 6:30pm.
Menu Gourmet. But in 2024, dinner spreads itself over the majority of the evening – at least 10% of the population are eating between 5pm and 8:10pm.
What does this mean?
This change in eating habits has enormous impacts. It’s driven change in how we buy food – needing more convenience and on the go options – to when food occasions are relevant to us. Every restaurant, pub, café and hotel has all day menu options – because 10am and 2:30pm are now times when we’re pretty likely to be looking for something to eat. The map will continue to change in the future. It’ll take a long time, but a much flatter eating line - with much shallower mealtime peaks - isn’t impossible in the future.
But it’s also a particularly slow change. Looking back at our time use studies from 2020, 2016 and 2011, there isn’t nearly as much change between then and now as there is between the 1970s and now. It’s a glacial shift: barely observable in real time, but profound when we look back over decades.
The change is the result of a slow moving, but very important trend we at Trajectory call the Deregulation of Life.
Put simply, the Deregulation of Life means that we have greater flexibility in what we do, when we do it and how we do it. Sitting underneath are a mix of drivers…
Some of which typically change quite quickly – like technology, which makes it easy to order food to wherever we are, 24 hours a day
Some of which change quite slowly – like the evolution of a services-based economy, which means greater potential to be eating lunch at your desk.
Some of which change episodically, like the introduction of ‘24 hour drinking’ in the noughties or relaxing of retail trading laws in the nineties which make food and drink more accessible more of the time.
The way the Deregulation of Life develops – sometimes slowly, sometimes quickly - and the range of activities and behaviours it influences mean it should be on the radar of every organisation. It’s a positive trend too: at it’s heart it gives people more freedom to run their lives and routines how they like.
More than this
If you want more information on this trend or the amazing analytical power of time use studies – and you should! – here are some options…
If you’re a Trajectory Now & Next member… a full explainer on the Deregulation of Life macro trend is here, a trends deck describing it’s evolution is here and we also covered it’s impact in our recent work on Distraction here. Expect to see more analysis from our time use data on the site over the next few weeks and months too.
If you’re not a Trajectory Now & Next member… why not? More information on signing up is here.
If you’re after more information about time use and how you can use the data to understand more about how daily life is changing - and what it means - drop me a line at tom@trajectorypartnership.com. Eating is just one example of the hundreds of activities we ask about.
Yeah, leap years.
The way you describe it, changing eating habits DRIVE what the food market is offering. Isn't it the other way around: that more convenience and on the go options have changed our eating habits? There's an interaction between supply and demand, obviously, but I feel the profound changes on the supply side have driven changes in behaviour, i.e. that made new eating habits possible.