I was reading the paper today when I ran into a disturbing piece of statistics; according to Hesari (apparently quoting the Finnish Pulmonary Association, from where I was unable to find the original source for this) people in Finland spend on average 87% of their time indoors. The remaining time is split between commuting and being in transit (8%) and only 5% for outdoors. 5% translates to 1 hour and 12 minutes spent outdoors, which I feel is a very short time, even shockingly short (says the guy who is writing this indoors with a perfect spring day outside). Here I was thinking that Finns spend relatively much time outdoors, but clearly that’s not the case.
So I was convinced that the time spent outdoors must be significantly higher in countries that have a climate more conducive to outdoors activities. Like, say, in Australia. But it turns out people in Australia are not much better – even there people spend only an average of of about 1.5 hours a day outdoors (incidentally, people in Melbourne are more outdoorsy than those in Sydney), which is unbelievable considering the plentiful outdoors opportunities there. Somewhat surprisingly, a study from US revealed that people spend more time outdoors there, especially those over the age of 60.
From my small sample it seems that the time spent outdoors is horribly short in all industrial countries. Work and sleep are obviously indoor affairs for most people, but still.. Wow. No wonder people have coined terms like nature deficit disorder. The television is one of the main culprits here since people spend a LOT of time watching TV every day; 169mins in Finland, 156mins in USA – seriously, apparently Finns watch more TV than Americans!
But now, in the interests of improving the Finnish figures, I’m going to quite literally get out of here.
References & resources:
- Finnish Pulmonary Association (Heli): Air quality
- Australian government: BTEX personal exposure monitoring in four Australian cities
- Australian government: Human settlements
- Chodick, G. et al: Agreement Between Contemporaneously Recorded and Subsequently Recalled Time Spent Outdoors: Implications for Environmental Exposure Studies
- NY Times: Growing up denatured
- Leech, JA et al: The Canadian Human Activity Pattern Survey: Report of Methods and Population Surveyed
- Bureau of Labor Statistics: American time use survey.
- Finnpanel Tutkimustuloksia (time spent watching the TV in Finland)
Haha, I hope you improved the statistics a bit. With such a nice weather even I wanted to go out for walk in the Finland Talo area but I was plain lazy.
Yep, it is about time to start having walking meetings in the Central Park of Helsinki. I have different routes for 15min, 30min, and 45 min meetings there, next to my office.
Walking meetings are definitely a good idea, I’ll have to try to arrange some. Powerpoint presentations can be a bit difficult, but they’re overused anyway