Two converging reasons in late 1970s started his work on time diaries: (1) my “After Industrial Society?” empirical work revealed a leakage of economic activity from the money economy to the non-waged production (“self-servicing”) and (2) his work on World Futures at Sussex University required speculation about 21st century lifestyles—1970s evidence was a good starting point. During the 1980s, working with John Robinson, he started to construct comparable cross-national and historical sequences of diary studies (which eventually became the Multinational Time Use Study, MTUS). In 1990 he approached EUROSTAT with a project that developed as the Harmonised European Time Use Study (HETUS). In 2003 he set up the Centre for Time Use Research (CTUR) at the Institute for Social and Economic Research (ISER), Essex University (where he was the Director of ISER and the Principle Investigator of the British Household Panel Study). CTUR followed him, first to Oxford in 2006, and then to UCL in 2019.