We were promised the machines would give us our time back. The last time the country measured, our free time was already falling

Here is a question with an actual answer, which is rarer than it sounds: how much free time does the average British adult have?

The Office for National Statistics has been keeping a diary of the country since 2020: a real survey, thousands of people recording what they do in ten-minute slices across a full day. It is the closest thing we have to a measured account of the founding question this paper keeps asking. When the machines give us our time back, the diary is where we will see it arrive.

The diary says it is not arriving. In its 2020 reading, the average UK adult spent about four hours and seventeen minutes a day on entertainment, socialising and other free time. By late 2023 that had fallen to three hours and thirty-nine minutes. Nearly forty minutes of daily free time, gone, over three years in which we were told, constantly, that technology was about to hand us more of it. Whatever the machines have been doing, they have not been depositing the hours into the account where you would spend them.

Look closer and it gets sharper. Of the free time that remains, the largest single block is television, well over two hours a day. And the load that eats the time is not evenly shared. The same survey finds women doing close to an hour more unpaid work a day than men: the housework, the caring, the arranging, the work that never clocks off and never shows up in a productivity statistic. So even the free time we do have is not shared out the way a fair story would have it.

I raise this because it is the quiet counter-evidence to the most hopeful version of our future. The augmentation promise (machines take the routine, you get the good hours back) has a testable prediction buried in it: free time should be rising. In Britain, on the only measure we have, it has been doing the opposite. Not because the promise is impossible, but because a freed hour does not automatically become yours. It can just as easily become another task, another shift, another evening spent catching up. On the diary's evidence, that is where it has been going.

The country is running the survey again this year. It is worth watching, because it is the receipt on the whole bargain. We are being asked to believe that the arriving machines will give us our time back. The last time we checked, our time was leaving. Before we accept the promise, we should at least insist on reading the meter, and notice that, so far, it runs the wrong way.