Our first task was understanding why we manage and distribute our time the

way we do.

Numerous studies prove that face to face relationships with people we care

about are disappearing in favor of online interactions. It seems that, since we

can’t find the time to meet our loved ones in person, we feel forced to find

alternative ways. But little by little even control over that time erodes away

without much resistance from our side… why is that? Why don’t we place a

valuation on how we spend our time?

To truly understand this, we teamed up with psychology expert Rafael Sant

Andreu to comprehend human beings relation to and perception of time. We

found that human brains are programed to avoid thinking about the time we

have left to live, which is why we often postpone important things…things we say

we value over the immediate. We are in essence programmed to have the

impression that we will always have time to do what truly makes us happy.

This is when we had our existential “aha moment.” We asked ourselves this one

question: if you knew exactly how much time you have left with the people you

love, would you keep on living the way you are living now? This simple yet

powerful question, prompted us to figure out a way to make that prediction with

a very simple calculation and a lot of data. To provide an answer, that would

compel a behavioral change in how people valued and spent their time.

The idea: The Time We Have Left

Would people change their behavior and find more time to see each other if they

knew exactly how much time they had left together? We knew we had to create

a bulletproof algorithm against sceptics, so we gathered data from the National

Institute of Statistics on life expectancy as well as studies related with the

likelihood of maintaining the frequency of our encounters over time. From this, we

built a fairly accurate tool that predicted how much time you had left with

someone in terms of days and hours.

To compel people to completely re-assess their perception of time and resultant

behavior, we created a film that proved our hypothesis. A film that simply

captured real people’s reactions when confronted with the algorithm’s results.

People who, for one reason or another, loved each other dearly but only saw

each other from time to time. The stark reality of their current behavior and

valuation of time created a series of powerful emotional portraits that

transcended advertising.