The old saying goes that everyone gets the same 24 hours a day. What we do within that time shapes our life. While large parts of our day are spent sleeping and working, there are hours where we get to pick our actions. In a recent article on MIT Press, author Michelle Drouin notes that the average amount of available leisure time has increased. However, there is one activity that dominates this free time.

The average American spends 22 minutes a day participating in sports, exercise, and recreation; 32 minutes per day socializing or communicating; and 26 minutes per day relaxing or thinking. In contrast, they spend 211 minutes per day watching TV. That’s 2.6 times more time watching TV than exercising, relaxing, and socializing combined.

This huge devotion to screen time limits our productivity and also makes us unhappy. In order to get out of this rut, we need a new tool.

But research also shows that by taking steps to make sure our social compromises are our own choices — not based on the way technology makes us feel — we can employ the best time hack of all. It’s called social economizing, and it means we make active decisions about how we spend our time, and we then save and invest our time where we want.

To learn more about how this hack works, I encourage you to read the rest of the article.

As well, check out Michelle Drouin’s book Out of Touch: How to Survive an Intimacy Famine.