Introduction
 
This white paper is about understanding our changing relationship with time and how we can thrive in a speeded-up world through identifying, claiming and enjoying our ‘25th Hour’.
 
To celebrate 40 years of providing easy, doable weight loss, SlimFast - the UK’s leading meal replacement brand - has commissioned this report to better understand our modern relationship with time in our faster paced, accelerated world and how we can take more control over how we spend it.
 
Since SlimFast launched in the UK 40 years ago our pace of life has dramatically changed. Over that time SlimFast has continually innovated to ensure it meets the needs of busy people who want simple, nutritious and tasty products to help them lose weight.
 
With a keen eye on how it can continue to be relevant for the next 40 years and beyond, SlimFast commissioned this report to understand our changing relationship with time in our accelerating world and how we can adapt to reap the rewards of a faster pace of life.
 
Contents:
 

1. Over the last 40 years our relationship with time has changed
2. We are living faster-paced lives than ever before
3. Fast is GOOD: 4 reasons why living a fast life is good for you
4. Saving time and gaining the 25^th hour
5. Tips on how to lead a good and fast life and how to claim your 25^th Hour from our 3 experts

 
This report is based on interviews with four leading authorities on our changing relationship with time:
 

• Robert Colvile, author of “The Great Acceleration: How the World is Getting Faster, Faster” (2016)
• Tony Crabbe, psychologist and author of “Busy: How to thrive in a world of too much”
• Professor Dale Southerton, sociologist at Manchester University, a specialist in time-use data studies
• Frances Mason RNutr., BSc (Hons), Registered Consultant Nutritionist

 
Experts and studies outside of these interviews are cited with footnotes.
 
(i) Our changing relationship with Time
   
But the positive reward of being less synchronized with our peers is we have much more choice and freedom over how we spend our time. Professor Dale Southerton argues: “One of the most distinctive features of last 40 years is the growth in choices, freedoms and opportunities which technologies and more flexible social structures have afforded us.”  
 
This should be a great thing – we should be in control of time and our days. But it’s sadly not the case.  Despite having more autonomy over our time, we end up working longer hours and continuing working at home. Office of National Statistics show that since 2011, working hours in the UK have been on the rise, reversing 15 years of decline. ^[3] And technology has only compounded this: 60% of those who use smartphones are connected to work for 13.5 hours or more a day. ^[4]
 
We, humans are evidently terrible at self-regulating and managing our time; as Professor Julia Brannen, UCL puts it: “The more autonomy employees are given over organising their own time at work, the longer they spend at work, or working.” ^[5]
 
It’s evident that today’s tech-fuelled and service-driven world has made our relationship to time complicated. This think piece argues that the solution is not to be nostalgic for 40 years ago, or try to reverse the clock and slow down.
 
This would be going against the grain of modern life - the process of acceleration of our lives doesn’t show any signs of stopping, nor should we be aiming to put the brakes on according to Robert Colvile author of “The Great Acceleration: How the World is Getting Faster, Faster”: “I don’t think we are going to see a slower pace emerge because it is the most exciting process in the world, and one that will make all of our lives better.”
 
But recent debate has focussed so much on slowing down and digital detoxing. This may well be counter-productive, and we may well be facing ‘the death of the detox’; our experts agree that to thrive in a speeded-up world, it’s not just about knowing when to go slow.
 
Crucially we need to know how to lean into ‘fast’ more intentionally, by finding the ways to managing our pace better and enjoy the rewards of a faster-paced life.
 
(ii) Life moves faster than ever… and it’s not going to slow down any time soon
 
If you want to see proof that life is moving faster today than ever before just look around you the next time you are walking in a busy city centre.  Psychologist Richard Wiseman and the British Council followed up an experiment first conducted in 1994 by Dr Robert Levine to measure the time it took people to cover the same stretch of pavement in cities across the world and found that the overall pace of life had increased by 10% worldwide since the mid-90's^[6].  If you look at the predictions of how our cities are growing – the Office of National Statistics expects that the number of Londoners will rise by 1.17 million to reach 9.71 within a decade, Manchester will grow by 550,000^[7] – then this looks like a pace that’s only going to accelerate.
 
Robert Colvile, author of “The Great Acceleration: How the World is Getting Faster, Faster” argues that it’s not just city living that makes life feel faster but what we are watching unfold on our screens.  “Older films look more sluggish today because the average length of a shot has gone down from 10 seconds in the 1940’s to less than 4 seconds now.”
The growing rate of technological change is of course central to this gathering pace. It took 30 years for electricity and 25 years for telephones to reach 10% adoption but less than five years for tablet devices to achieve the 10% rate^[8].  Engineering advances mean internet speeds have in many places increased 50-fold in the last decade. 
 
One of the biggest changes in the last 40 years, according to Professor Dale Southerton’s study of time-use diary data over that period, is the increase in time “hotspots” which are the moments of the day which feel like they are moving the fastest.  On average these are the hours that bookend the day: the 7-8am slot getting kids ready for school and preparing for work and then the 6-7pm period which is a whirr of coming home, feeding the children and preparing them for bed. 
 
According to Professor Southerton: “These hours feel the fastest because they are more intense and dense with activities.  They feel more intense now because more women are working than in the past and we pack more into them for example checking emails before the start of the day.”
 
Working women with young families are feeling these hotspots most intensely.  They are the most likely to be engaged in periods of numerous activities in these times, multi-tasking a number of things simultaneously (cooking, cleaning, childcare, getting ready for work). 
 
These hotspots are partly the cause of the decline in taking time over breakfast and lunch, as breakfast coincides with the morning hotspot and we spend less time over lunch so work gets done in time to help with the evening hotspot.
Today the average time taken to eat lunch - usually in front of the computer - is roughly 15 minutes, according to researchers at the University of Westminster.^[9] Professor Southerton believes that innovative forms of healthy fast food like SlimFast can play an important role in these ‘hotspots’.
 
“SlimFast can be something that facilitates care in a healthy and quick way for those people who are rushing around because it is quick, nutritious, helps you lose weight and doesn’t take up much time so frees you up to get other stuff done.”
   
(iii) Fast is Good! Why we should be leaning into fast, and enjoying the rewards of a faster-paced life
 
Of course, a faster pace of life has brought with it anxieties about how to keep up.  This is nothing new.  And it is often too simplistic to equate a faster society with an unhappier one, as Robert Colvile explains “Anxiety and happiness levels among adults have remained pretty flat over the last 10 years.  We’re not having the collective nervous breakdown we’re supposed to be having.” 
 
Instead, our experts identified 4 key reasons why we should avoid the temptation of turning back the clock to so-called simpler times and lean into fast. According to them, embracing fast can bring  significant benefits to our lives.
 

1. Fast is no longer a compromise. Fast is quality and fast can be healthier.
2. Fast fuels creativity and invention
3. Fast feeds our brains
4. Fast can makes us fitter

 

1. Fast is no longer a compromise. Fast is quality and fast can be healthier.

 
Consumers increasingly want faster AND better.  The likes of Uber, Amazon and Google have created expectations of everything being easy, frictionless and quick without compromise on quality.  Branding guru Adam Morgan calls this phenomenon the “age of the unreasonable consumer”^[11].  The products and brands which live up to this are the ones capturing busy consumers’ attention and finding a meaningful role in their hectic lives. 
 
This race to save time is particularly true of the UK. London has given birth to 12 ‘unicorns’ — technology firms which are valued at over a billion dollars. London trumps Sweden and Germany put together in terms of its unicorn count. As Robert Colvile writes: “a disproportionate number of their products are based on making our lives quicker and more convenient, on getting us the things we want, faster: think Wonga, or Deliveroo, or ASOS, or Zoopla.”^[12]
 
Robert Colvile argues that this is a good thing for consumers as it will over time force producers to push quality up to meet these growing expectations: “there is a limit to the amount of info and choices we can absorb, so the options that we are choosing from need to be really good to stand out.  If you are trying to grab people’s attention when they have less attention, quality needs to go up.”
 
It used to be that fast was a compromise and convenience was a unsatisfying short-cut but this is no longer the case, especially in the food category.
 
“Since new enhanced regulations, never have we been more informed of the nutrition of our foods via enhanced labelling and a plethora of information available” adds Frances Mason, a Registered Consultant Nutritionist.
 
Professor Dale Southerton has seen a significant shift over time in how convenience foods have dramatically improved in quality and nutritional value: “One of the biggest shifts compared to the 70s and 80s is that back then fast food was bad quality – ready meals, poor quality fast food etc.  Now convenience and pre-packaged food bought from a supermarket can be tasty, delicious, and nutritious.  ‘Convenience’ and ‘care’ used to be two different things; now they can be the same thing.”
 
Some of the most innovative food brands out there combine both convenience and care. 
 
“A growing consumer demand for fortified foods provide key nutrients whilst still containing the right amount of calories to support safe and healthy weight loss” adds Frances Mason.
 
Soylent, for example, is a range of food products engineered to be healthy and convenient and, according to their website, to “strive to create a world where access to affordable complete nutrition - one of the most basic human needs - is no longer a challenge but a means of empowerment”.
 
SlimFast is the original ‘meal replacement’ brand and has been providing millions of consumers with ‘complete nutrition’ in quick, easy and tasty formats for 40 years. Soylent may be the ‘new kid on the block’ in terms of offering complete nutrition in a 'fast fuel' format but the truth SlimFast spearheaded this development in weight loss.
 
Balanced nutrition and great taste are essential parts of SlimFast's meal replacement formulations which offer an effective weight loss solution. The SlimFast meal replacement portfolio of powders, ready-to-drink shakes and meal replacement bars provide a third of the Nutrient Reference Value (NRV) of 23 vitamins and minerals. Plus the SlimFast ready-to-drink shakes and powders contain no added sugar.
 
Rates of obesity and type 2 diabetes are rising rapidly, a huge public health concern in the UK cites Frances Mason who went on to add that “meal replacement weight loss plans, like SlimFast, with their enhanced nutrient composition can go some way in helping thousands of people to lose weight healthily, helping to tackle obesity and its complications.”
 
As Professor Southerton explains, these kinds of products represent an easy way to eat nutritionally - especially for time-harried working mothers who find it hard to otherwise eat healthily: “products like SlimFast help us control our diets, are tasty and are more nutritious and sustainable than many options we currently have.  Look at the growth of Nutribullets and shakes more recently substituting one meal a day with a liquid, you could argue that SlimFast were way ahead of the game here.” 
 
 

2. Fast fuels creativity and invention

 
This acceleration in both our growing cities and technologies can perhaps at times feel dizzying but the bigger outcome is that society is becoming more productive.  As Robert Colvile puts it: “Put someone in a city twice as large as their hometown, and they become 15% more productive.”  He cites work by British physicist Geoffrey West which argued that the increase in social interactions in large communities  –  where we are moving more quickly and bumping into each other more frequently - results in the size of a city's economy scaling up much more rapidly than its population^[13].  
 
New businesses built on the premise of fast are driving this forward.  One of the measures of a faster world is just how many of the biggest companies in the world are less than a decade old: billion dollar businesses such as Uber, Whatsapp, Airbnb didn’t exist 10 years ago.  Patent registrations have been growing by about 11% a year for the past half-decade, compared with a long-term average of 6%^[14]. 
 
This proliferation and acceleration of competition means that businesses have to think of new ways to keep up and faster is increasingly the solution because it leads to more productive and creative solutions.  Producing concepts quickly, testing them in beta and making rapid iterations has been at the heart of the success of many of the tech companies in the list above.  ‘Agile’ working and ‘failing fast’ has become a mantra for many businesses who are putting experimentation and learning from the mistakes along the way at the centre of their innovation processes. 
 
 

3. Fast feeds our brains

 
As described by Professor Southerton, one of the biggest differences between life today and 40 years ago which creates the perception of a faster life is the sheer range of choices, opportunities and activities on offer to us.  This injection of novelty and variety in turn has its own rewards for the brain.  
 
Stimulated by novelties our brain releases dopamine, or our “reward chemical”.   This feels good, it gives us a buzz.  But the benefits go beyond pure pleasure.  
 
Going back to our primitive roots, being hard-wired to react to novelty aided survival: “evolutionary psychology tells us we are designed to respond fast to novel situations like the snake in the grass. It gives us a competitive advantage.”(Tony Crabbe).
 
But there is also a much more forward-looking benefit too, which is as much about thriving as surviving.  Studies have also shown that novelty and dopamine aren’t simply rewards in themselves but motivate us to continue exploring our environments for more rewards^[15].  So a faster world not only rewards our brains as we experience more novelties but feeds our thirst for curiosity and motivation to seek out more variety from life.
 
 

4. Fast can make us fitter

 
Studies at the University of Pittsburgh showed that walking more and faster contributes to health and vitality.  The researchers found that walking faster than your peers was a better indicator of longevity than age or gender.  The work published in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed that the faster someone 65 years or older covered a short distance, the longer he or she could expect to live^[16]. 
 
This invitation to not stop moving is not necessarily helped by the sedentary lifestyles that many people are leading today.  Professor Southerton remarks that “we can travel faster and further than at any time in history yet we are probably the most stationary human beings ever”.  But innovation in both the food and exercise categories aims to help busy consumers keep fit and healthy by offering quicker solutions to fit into their hectic lifestyles and get people moving.  For example, the recent popularity of high intensity interval training (HIIT) which involves short bursts of intense exercise as a more time-efficient training plan has helped many overcome the excuse of ‘not enough time’ as a barriers to exercise. 
 
In the food category, healthier snacks are increasingly driving growth in the on-the-go sector. Frances Mason adds, “improved labelling and enhanced formulation of products, means it’s easier to spot foods which are lower in calories, fat, salt and sugar – all nutrients of concern when it comes to weight loss and health. Choosing food on the go doesn’t have to mean compromising on health.”
 
The Grocer’s ‘On the Go Category Report 2015’ says: “Food on the go is on a health kick. Sprouted grain bread, SlimFast Snack products, protein-packed popcorn and wholefood energy balls are popping up in retailers’ lunchtime meal deals, as the supermarkets remove confectionery from their tills and sales of baked snacks overtake those of fried potato chips for the first time.” ^[17]
 
 
(iv) The 25^th HOUR: we’re gaining an accumulated set of moments which could give us an extra hour in the day.
 
Our faster-paced life has helped us save snatches of time. We complete tasks quicker than we did 40 years ago with the help of technology, machines within the home and the rise of services and apps to help us get what we want, quicker.
 
Take the dominance of Google in our lives. Google’s chief economist Hal Varian says search saves us 3.75 minutes a day (2011) and since then Google has claimed auto-complete has saved the world 3.5 billion seconds a day^[18]. And Google’s speed has turbo-fuelled our appetite for instant gratification. We’re so used to having the world’s information available to us instantly through search, we lack tolerance for any kind of delay on the net.
 
Professor Ramesh Sitaraman, UMass Amherst, examined the viewing habits of 6.7 million internet users^[19]. Patience levels of waiting for online videos to load before drop off were at just two seconds, after which people started abandoning – after 5 seconds, abandonment rates are 25%, after 10 seconds, half are gone. We’re saving time through our collective impatience.
 
We’re also saving time also through multi-screening. We consume more technology during the same time span through toggling across different screens, saving us time in the long run. Those aged between 16 and 24 cram nine and a half hours’ worth of media into six and a half hours of actual time, potentially saving themselves three hours. ^[20]
 
Our eating habits also contribute to a time saving. We are spending less time cooking and the average time spent cooking an evening meal is now only 34 minutes, compared to people spending a full hour in 1980.^[21]
 
All of this builds evidence for the idea that we have a collection of moments, minutes, even hours we save over the average week. These moments make up a metaphorical “25th hour” – the time we gain through moving faster and completing tasks quicker.
 
This should be an amazing bonus of a faster-paced life: the reward we should all reap through leaning into speed. Yet, so many of us feel time-harried and rushed. The problem is we’re not BANKING our saved time.
 
We are not recognizing the time we have saved, we are not ring-fencing it and claiming it for something we would rather be doing, something that matters to us. Instead we are mindlessly filling our saved time with more and more information, distraction and endless ‘to do’ lists.
 
Robert Colvile agrees with this diagnosis: “the 25^th hour is a great idea as currently we have lots of little moment fragmented of saved time throughout the day, but we just don’t notice them.” The reason why we’re not noticing them is often due to the creep of technology – we fill moments of free time as soon as we create them. Apple says the average iPhone is unlocked 80 times a day^[22] – a clue to our tendency to suck technology into any vacuum of time we save. Colvile observes: “the slack and the boredom has to a large extent been taken out of our lives”.
 
These habits can impact on our energy levels and wellbeing. 47% of internet users said they had missed out on sleep or were tired the next day due to ‘connectivity creep’ (OFCOM)^[23]
 
It’s not just rest and sleep, any sort of downtime is susceptible to the invasion of technology. 37% of adults admit to texting during meal-times (Bank of America, Trends in Consumer Mobility Report, 2015)
 
Tony Crabbe likens our relentless need to fill ‘saved’ time to the metaphor of having an empty room in your house. “If you have an empty room, it doesn’t stay empty, it gets filled with stuff. The same is true of time. Our default response if we free up time is to fill it immediately. In order to avoid the ‘empty room syndrome’, we need to reclaim the 25^th Hour.”
 
Tony Crabbe believes the act of identifying your own 25^th hour and saying what you would use it for helps you own that time and protect it from technology creep. “It’s about being intentional and claiming that time for yourself. This gives you back the power over time.” Otherwise you fall victim to what he calls the ‘treadmill of reactivity’, whereby we are a slave to the demands of life, filling every slow moment with more and more activities. 
   
Crabbe continues: “Defining your 25^th hour is hugely valuable and everyone’s will be different.  The very act of definition will give you back control. It’s a profound question and it taps into what really matters to you in life.”
 
Says Crabbe: “the 25th hour will only happen if you make it happen. Don't think about what you want to do less of, think about what you want to do more of. Then the promise of that activity (whether it’s playing Lego with your kids, walking in the forest, writing a book) will give you the motivation to protect your 25th Hour”.
 
Importantly, the 25th hour doesn't happen by simply going faster and getting more efficient. We need to consciously define it, grab it and enjoy it. Otherwise you are simply getting things done quicker in order to free up more time to get more things done quicker. As Tony Crabbe puts it: “it’s speed for speed’s sake. And that’s pointless. If by using SlimFast you free up 30 minutes each day, my advice to you would be decide what to use those minutes for.”
 
 
(v) Tips and tricks: how we need to LEAN into FAST and reclaim our 25^th hour
Back in 1930, JM Keynes predicted that his generation’s grandchildren would work only around 3 hours a day, and probably only by choice.^[25] This evidently hasn’t come true. More recently William L.C. Wheaton, director of University of California’s Institute of Urban and Regional Development, predicted that by 2000, technological and economic advancements would have freed most us up to live however we want. 16 years after Wheaton predicted people could take half the year off every year, most Americans are still working more than 40 hours a week.^[26]
 
To avoid the mistakes that these future-gazers made, we need to take back control over time and our experts have given us their 4 tips and tricks to help us master time and claim back our 25^th hour.
 
Tony Crabbe:
1. If a task is complex and demanding, go a bit slower and have unifocus, lock yourself away, turn off the internet, avoid distractions. Carve out the time to go slow and don’t worry about output.
2.  If the task you need to complete is easier, a repeat behaviour, not reinventing something from scratch – go for speed, and have a clock visible to you are aware of time passing. Business psychologist Tony Crabbe says innovative companies use principles of going faster to make workplaces more creative and productive: “it could be standing up for 10 minutes to blast through emails, or making quick progress on starting a report rather than over-deliberating it, we need as much of these moments of ‘fast conversion’ as we do slow and deliberate planning.”
3. We need rapid recovery to alleviate the stress of going fast all the time. We need to do something completely different with our attention to replenish ourselves. Recovery via 5 minutes of walking around the block is better that 30 minutes of Facebook as Facebook uses exactly the same kind of attention you use for work. i.e. staring at a screen. Remember rapid recovery can come through using the FAME model

• Food - refuelling
• Attention – switching it to something different
• Movement – walking, standing up
• Energy – switching mood, laughing, lightening the mood

4. Make space for slowness in the evening. Find that restorative hour, that sacred space: it may be a long conversation with a great friend, it may be dinner with the family.
 
Robert Colvile:
1.Make time for flow-experiences, which are immersive and all-encompassing (for example getting into a box set). They help us cope with a speeded-up world
2. Pay attention to your own body e.g. the times you are sluggish and the times you are productive and work to maximize your energetic times
3. Develop the willpower to hold back on some things, to pause sometimes instead following the instinctive rat-like need to do more and more. For example, don’t answer the telephone until it has rung 3 times.
4. Just taking the time to standing up and breathe out gives you a fragmentary moment of peace to help you feel on top of things
 
Dale Southerton:
1. Enjoy the ‘hot spots’ as time intensive times, knowing you can later enjoy those things that are slow
2. Set particular times of the day or week for particular activities and give them time limits (e.g. only reply to emails between 4 and 5 pm on weekdays)
3. Force yourself to have slow and empty time (take an hour for lunch and, if you have nothing to do, read a book!)
4. Shared household routines (dinner time etc…) are not boring, they create space for other more spontaneous things and remove the sense of speed. So cherish routines
 
Frances Mason:

1. Get label savvy. Take a moment to look on the front of pack for the traffic light label and the claims (high in protein, low in fat etc.) Food manufacturers must, by law, prove that their products have fulfilled specific requirements to make a claim
2. Opt for products low in calories, fat, sugar and salt and higher in protein and fibre to support your weight loss
3. Losing weight doesn’t equal deprivation. You don’t need to feel hungry to lose weight. Initiate a sensible, do-able plan, eating little and often with snacks
4. Be positive! Set yourself up for success by believing in yourself and looking forward to the future. Don’t dwell on the past or even on a ‘bad’ day. Draw a line under it and move forward with your plan to transform your health!

 
Following the SlimFast 3.2.1 Plan and using our 10 minute recipes you can save up to 1 hour a day. SlimFast meal replacement products help you save 36 minutes each day^[i]  and the 10 minute recipes you save 24 minutes compared to average evening meal.

More information and motivation to encourage people to defining their own metaphorical 25^th hour can be found on the SlimFast website – www.slimfast.co.uk.