The necessity of knowing how individuals spend their time on various activities is crucial to understanding how they live their everyday lives, and the importance of such knowledge cannot be overestimated.

Around the world, many research avenues on the structure of time budgets are emerging. Some people are attempting to define gender differences and provide justifications for them. Why, for instance, do women in most countries spend more time taking care of children and doing household chores? A different area of study examines how information technology has affected how our time is organised. Researchers are trying to determine whether our everyday lives are getting more fragmented and multitask-heavy, and whether the importance of information technology is steadily increasing inside this block. The subject of subjective perception of time is covered in a great deal of research. Are we satisfied with how our time is spent, or are we stressed and constantly lacking it?

In contemporary Russia, these and many other research issues are poorly explored. Almost nothing is known about how Russians spend their time or what they think about it. I hope that our centre will further this conversation. To do this, we will create new empirical data and improve that which currently exists, build new methodological frameworks and theoretical models, and, in the end, work to popularise the body of knowledge related to the structure of the population's time use. Our initiatives will be carried out in an interdisciplinary manner with the participation of researchers from many fields, such as sociologists and anthropologists, economists and historians, psychologists and demographers.

Understanding the organisation of daily life, or how regular people's lives are structured, is key to the scientific application of the study of time use. The function of time budgets as a non-financial, objective, and comparative indicator of life quality has a practical application.

My involvement in the centre's programmes is primarily a chance for creative self-realisation in a really intriguing way. We can say that this will enable us to do scientific research that will benefit the nation and help improve people's daily lives. My responsibility is to provide a framework for evaluating and quantifying notions associated with time budgeting, such as “satisfaction with how we spend our time.

Today, human life is still developing, and this growth is happening at an ever-faster rate. This type of study and analysis has been conducted far less frequently in our country than in others, where interest in the subject is steadily rising.

Nevertheless, it must be acknowledged that information on time use is collected in Russia. Additionally, the study undertaken by Rosstat is one of the largest of its kind ever conducted. The methods used to gather and analyse this data are always evolving and changing. Together with our colleagues from Rosstat, one of the responsibilities of our centre is to take part in the design and establishment of current surveys. But we can't stop there; we need to look at time from different perspectives, collect alternative data.

In general, time is a special resource since it is the only one with the same constraints for everyone on Earth. There are always 24 hours in a day and seven days in a week, regardless of where a person was born or the sociocultural environment in which he or she was raised. The only thing a person can do is redistribute time within a day, week, or year. Humanity faces a growing number of obstacles each year as both the globe and each individual change. Science fiction writers predicted that the people of the future wouldn't have to work at all because robots and automata would take care of everything for them as a result of the Industrial Revolution's easing of physical labour. With the development of information technology, it was thought that artificial intelligence will take over all human duties, and humanity would spend that freed-up time on leisure and recreation. Let's monitor these trends in our research, then!

In certain countries, time use research is already used to rate people's happiness and quality of life. The study of time budgeting makes it feasible to raise living standards in Russia. And you may also find out how to better to spend your time in order to be a happier person, as well as what the most important thing in life is (or at least one of the most important things).

I am personally interested in comparative sociology and time use as a criterion for comparison. I believe that studying inequalities and stereotypes by how various groups allocate their time has a great deal of potential. Furthermore, a topic this large allows for methodological variations, which is always intriguing to researchers.