Do you waste time? I know I do, deliberately dithering over a task in order to delay something less interesting, filling in wasted time by doing something pointless, procrastinating because there’s something I really don’t want to have to do.

But when you know the actual statistics of how we spend our time, measured over a lifetime, it’s really quite disturbing.

Did you know that in an average lifespan of 75 years, we will spend 26 years soundly asleep, seven years waiting to fall asleep, more than four years eating, 11 years working, three years washing clothes, 11 years watching television, five years surfing the internet, five months complaining about bad service, 20 weeks listening to music while on hold on the phone, two months at the checkout and 27 days waiting on platforms for trains or at bus stops. Women spend 136 days getting ready to go out and 17 years dieting, while for men, they will use up 46 days getting ready to go out and 11 months ogling women. And on a more cheerful level, six minutes of our day is spent laughing.

If you add up the things we have to do – sleeping, eating and working – that accounts for 41 years, and the rest is by choice, although choosing whether or not to wash clothes is a decision not to be taken lightly. The other activities listed above take up another 25 years or so, excluding the 17 years women spend on a diet but including queuing at the checkout, complaining about bad service and waiting on train platforms.

So how much time does that leave us? Add 41 and 25 and it equals 66. Subtract that from 75 and you’re left with nine years.  What a paltry proportion of 75 for the rest of a life.

When you know the figures, which force you to assess exactly how you are spending your life, your one and only life, it not only makes you look at yourself and reassess how you are living your life but, for me, it makes my blood boil to realise how often our time is at the mercy of other people and organisations.

If you depend on public transport, you wait in vain for a bus or a train only to find they all come along at once or not at all – and by then your valuable time has been wasted, time you could have spent with your children, your other half or your parents, or getting a chore done earlier to bank time to do something you want to do. Your two months at the checkout can only mount up as a result of the person ahead of you deciding to pay for a week’s shopping entirely by vouchers, or staff failing to put a barcode sticker on a melon.

Time stolen from you can never be repaid. When it happens repeatedly, such as my experience for several years when my journey home from work on the bus was taking up to two hours compared with 15 minutes by car, you can see your life flashing before you as you stare at the bus timetable trying to convince yourself that yes, you were right, the bus should have arrived half an hour ago, and then enviously at the cars whizzing by. Getting a car reduced that two hours a day to 15 minutes, allowing me to transfer the other hour and 45 minutes per day (that’s seven hours per week in my part-time four-day working week) from my must-do 41 years to my precious nine years of ‘me’ time.

Time-wasting is a bizarre mix of the banal and the profound – it’s the banality of the everyday repetition of queuing versus the bigger picture that shows us how vast tracts of our lives are used up. And oddly, as we are idling our life away as we wait for a train or a bus, we rarely spend that time pondering the bigger picture and how we can change things to end the waste. If we did, perhaps we would allocate more time than the five months we spend in our lifetime complaining about bad service – because it would in the end be time well spent.

The Argus: Michael Gove MP

The EU referendum debate seems to have been going on forever - and now the vote itself is the day after tomorrow.

I suspect that a great number of people will vote quietly against the mainstream public opinion, which is that to vote for Brexit is to be inherently racist. Just like in the last General Election, when the result defied all the polls,  the loudest shouters in society give a false impression of the overall sway of opinion throughout the country because they simply don’t represent it accurately. In this important debate, the views of the majority of the electorate have mostly not been sought, and even when they have been, they have been shouted down if they don’t comply with the only view acceptable to the shouters.

The problem is that this approach doesn’t work, because the silent majority in a democracy always has the final say - expressed with an X.

I could be completely wrong, of course, and the Remainers will have their day on Thursday. After months of boredom about the whole issue, I am now getting excited and, yes, apprehensive about the result. It’s a once-in-a-lifetime vote and I can’t remember a time when we didn’t belong to the EU (or the EEC, to give it its original acronym). Better the devil you know? Or will a radical shake-up be good for Britain. We’ll soon know.