A DAY IN THE LIFE

The life expectancy for Americans is

How are Americans using their time?

Well, it depends.

It depends on who you are - your age, for example, or maybe your employment status. Depending on who you are, you might spend your time on different activities than others. Let's visualize some of these differences and explore the nuances of time in America.

Age Affects How Americans Spend Their Time

Click a colored square to see a time breakdown for that activity. Hover over the bars for more details on the selected activity.

Losing Time: The Implications of Different Time Usage Among Groups

On a day to day basis, we lose countless minutes on day-to-day tasks, from running errands to transportation to answering emails. Over longer periods, these minutes add up to take on days, then weeks, then months of our time! Different individuals spend their time very differently, but particular demographic groups tend to spend their time differently. Scroll to explore what these differences look like over the span of a year and why these differences arise.

Gender & Domestic Labor

Play the animation to see how time use builds up over a year. Hover over the saturated squares to see how much time is spent in a year on this activity. Hover over the lighter squares to see amount of time lost.

While more women have joined the workforce and the gender pay gap has narrowed, studies show that the “housework gap” has largely stopped narrowing. ⁵ There may be additional explanatory factors, such as employment or family status, that can explain gender differences in housework. We hold these constant by limiting our sample to only full-time currently employed individuals with a spouse and children present in their household. With these constraints, women in this group spend an average of 89 minutes a day on childcare and 112 minutes a day on housework, compared to 60 minutes and 51 minutes respectively for men.

Location Type & Transportation

Play the animation to see how time use builds up over a year. Hover over the saturated squares to see how much time is spent in a year on this activity. Hover over the lighter squares to see amount of time lost.

Different geographic locations have vastly different experiences with transportation. access to public transportation is often concentrated in urban areas. At the same time, cities are facing rising traffic congestion across the United States with little possibility of policy solutions.⁶ Drivers in Los Angeles, for example, were found to spend an extra 80 hours a year in traffic. ⁷ For those who commute for work, who spends more time on transportation and how much more time is lost in the traffic?

Labor Market Status & Leisure Time

Play the animation to see how time use builds up over a year. Hover over the saturated squares to see how much time is spent in a year on this activity. Hover over the lighter squares to see amount of time lost.

Oftentimes, we think of leisure in contrast to work; we work so that we can play and people with different relationships to work thus may have different opportunities for leisure. We explore leisure time in relation to employment for those who are currently employed compared to those who are "Off the Labor Force" The Census category of "Off the Labor Force" applies to anyone who is neither working nor actively seeking work, including retirees, caregivers, and other groups. Rather than viewing retirement as a "finish line," 88% of retirees consider it an opportunity for new beginnings, with more time to pursue non-work interests. ⁷ Others, however, may be off the labor force but still have responsibilities at home or challenges without the economic security of work that make it difficult to pursue against pursuing leisure.

Lifestyles

Are you a student? Employed? A parent?
Wondering how you spend your time compares to someone with a different lifestyle?.

How does my lifestyle compare to another's?

Are you a student? Employed? A parent? Wondering how you spend your time compares to someone with a different lifestyle?

Click on the checkboxes to visualize the time spent on daily activities for two different lifestyles.

The farther the circle is from the center, the more time that group spends on an activity.

Hover over the circles for tooltips, and over the activity labels for descriptions to appear below.

The circles represent the average time spent on an activity, and these averages are ranked in the whole population of survey respondents. For example, an orange circle with a percentile of 90 for sleep means that on average, respondents in the orange group spent more time on sleep than 90% of all respondents.

Sex	Employed	Multiple Jobs	In School	Parent
Male Female	Full Time Part Time	Yes No	Yes No N/A	Yes No
Male Female	Full Time Part Time	Yes No	Yes No N/A	Yes No

Note: if all the boxes under a category (e.g., "Sex") are unchecked, this is the same as though all have been checked (e.g., "Male" and "Female").
If there are no respondents that meet the selected criteria, the tooltip value for average minutes will display "NaN" or "Not a Number."

About the American Time Use Survey (ATUS)

WHO

The American Time Use Survey is sponsored by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. The Census Bureau collects and processes the data. Households that have completed their final (8th) month of the Current Population Survey are eligible for the ATUS. From this eligible group, households are selected that represent a range of demographic characteristics. Then, one person age 15 or over is randomly chosen from the household to answer questions about his or her time use. This person is interviewed for the ATUS 2-5 months after the household's final CPS interview.

HOW

ATUS data are collected via telephone interviews. Census Bureau interviewers use Computer Assisted Telephone Interviewing, a system that automatically advances interviewers to the next question based on a respondent's answers to previous questions. Respondents receive an advance letter and pamphlet explaining the purpose of the ATUS and notifying them of the day they will be called. The main part of the ATUS interview is the 24-hour time diary. This part of the interview is used to collect a detailed account of the respondent's activities, starting at 4 a.m. the previous day and ending at 4 a.m. on the interview day. For each activity reported, the interviewer asks how long the activity lasted. For most activities, the interviewer also asks who was in the room or accompanied the respondent during the activity and where the activity took place.

WHAT

The dataset measure how individuals divide their time between different activities, including work, childcare, and leisure. Each entry in the dataset corresponds to one individual, and captures their demographic data and their exact time breakdown over a 24-hour period.

The 2017 ATUS Resondents

Hover over the visualization to learn more about the demographics of ATUS respondents!

References

1. American Time Use Survey by Bureau of Labor Statistics
2. Cover Image by Robert Wallis
3. 'Did you know ?' from American Time Use Survey Summary
4. The Truth About How Americans Travel from Telegraph
5. Dirty Secret: Why Is There Still A Housework Gender Gap? from The Guardian
6. Traffic: Why It's Getting Worse, What The Government Can Do from Brookings
7. The Worst Day and Time To Drive on Every Los Angeles Freeway from Curbed LA
8. Leisure in Retirement from Merrill Lynch
9. Who is Out of the Labor Force? from The Hamilton Project
10. Photos from Lonely Planet and One to World

Who we are

Emily Zhu | _LinkedIn

Emily is a junior at Harvard College pursuing a joint concentration in Studies of Women, Gender, and Sexuality & Sociology, with a secondary in Ethnicity, Migration, and Rights.

Hyeon Ji Im | _LinkedIn

Hyeon Ji (Claire) is an architect and researcher, currently pursuing her Master in Design Studies at the Harvard Graduate School of Design with a concentration in Technology.

Muniba Ahmad | _LinkedIn

Muniba is a Master in Urban Planning candidate ‘19 at the Harvard Graduate School of Design concentrating in urban analytics.