“Sleeping, working, and watching TV” is the short answer. The New York Times has increasingly been taking advantage of the powers of online presentation to offer some amazing interactive graphics, and last week they tackled how Americans over the age of 15 spend their typical days. The overall most time-consuming activities were:
- Sleeping: 8 hours, 36 minutes per day
- Working: 3 hours, 25 minutes
- TV and Movies: 2 hours, 46 minutes
- Household activities: 1 hour, 46 minutes
- Traveling: 1 hour, 12 minutes
- Eating: 1 hour 7 minutes
- Personal Care: 47 minutes
- Other Leisure: 44 minutes
- Socializing: 43 minutes
Where is blogging, you ask? “Computer use” (presumably non-work related) was down at 8 minutes per day.
But they went way beyond that, to break it down by time of day and by demographics. Various cheap shots suggest themselves, about how all that TV is rotting our brains, we’ve entered the late decadent period of our civilization, back in the old days everyone spent evenings composing piano sonatas and writing epic poetry, etc. But I think it’s more interesting to simply appreciate the typical allocation of time during an average person’s day. If you’re wondering about the short work day, a lot of people are pre-employment, post-employment, or just unemployed. Also, “traveling” isn’t mostly about flying to Paris; it’s about commuting to work or school. And sex falls under “personal care,” but if you break out a separate category of “personal or private activities,” it adds up to 54 seconds per day.
Comments
10 responses to “How We Spend Our Time”
I think we need to leave a shuttle in orbit when they are decommissioned.
Since we will be dismantling our launch capabilities we will no longer be able to put one in orbit, should it become needed. A shuttle would be able to evacuate the Space Station and would offer flexibility in our orbital abilities. Astronauts could transfer to the station and the shuttle could then be remotely controlled to a holding orbit. Another shuttle could pick them up and return to earth.
Please let me know what you think and any information on how to let more people know about this idea.
Jim Buck
boisetech @ msn .com
These reported results are not even close to how I spend my time.
It’s interesting to see that time for eating almost exclusively cuts into working time.
Also, I wonder how they treated overlaps, such as eating while watching TV, or socializing while traveling.
And why are almost three hours missing?
How is work 3.5 hours a day?? Shouldn’t it be the massive part, like 9 hours a day? Even if you multiply it by 5/7 because of 5 workdays a week, it should be way more than 3.5 hours… That just sounds way off.
Edit: I just saw that it was mentioned in the post. I guess it could make sense with unemployed (That means there are quite a bit of unemployed folks..). Employed people use 5 hours a day working, *7/5 that comes out to 7 hours a workday working, and maybe plus 1 lunch hour, so yeah, I guess that could work…
Whew, I’m a big outlier in this (probably like most of your readers). 8-10 hours of work a day, hour and a half of commuting, couple hours of leisure (bicycling, working on car, building rocket engines, whatevs). Socializing is part of the leisure time, generally, or meal time. Probably not good.
This one got me though: “While only about 5 percent of people have trouble falling asleep, those who do are lying awake for 70 minutes, on average.”
I’m one of those pooching that average. Usually takes 2-4 hours to nod off, get a solid 5 hours a night. Invest about 8 hours in the sleep thing, but I definitely don’t get it. Stupid 5%.
That is an awesome graphic.
54 seconds for sex? How do you make it last that long?
Think of England.
The break-out on travel says that only about a fifth of that time (16 minutes) is related to work, which seems pretty low to me. I guess people are going to Paris, after all. (Not really, I know, but it’s nice to imagine.)
Spiv’s comment about being an outlier makes me think: Isn’t practically everyone an outlier in this data set? Everyone with a regular job works way too much, retired people work way too little and golf way too much, babies spend way too much time chewing on non-food items (how’s that categorized — personal time?), the blog-writing and -reading crowd watches way too little TV and uses way too much Internet, etc.
I’d like to see an average day lived by this average person. Bet Michel Gondry could make it into a great music video. Done in a single take, of course.
Sean
It’s better if I think of Wales nowadays
Peter