On average, people spend more than nine hours a day in bed. A further nine and a half hours are spent on social contacts, gainful employment, consumption of media and leisure activities, among other things. On average around three and a half hours are devoted to finding food and household chores in the broader sense. The remaining two hours are left for organization and transport. This is roughly the summary of a research group led by Earth system researcher and climate expert Eric Galbraith from McGill University in Canada after evaluating data sets from 145 countries.
Because people’s daily routines are so different – for example, while in many wealthy countries the day is broken down by wage work, in other regions the procurement of food is central – the team first had to identify and classify 3956 activities. In their work, the researchers decided to appear in the science journal PNAS was published, for three categories of motivation – motivated by direct human impact, motivated by external impact, and motivated by organizational impact.
There is clear leeway to redistribute time between activities
The fact that typical paid work in this scheme comes to just over two and a half hours (exactly: 158 minutes) of the average human day is perhaps the most astonishing result of this approach to recording the human day at first glance. The researchers emphasize that working for money can fall into any of the three categories. If you are a doctor you are humanly motivated and you are in the first category, as a caretaker you are responsible for infrastructure that falls under the external impact. The researchers write that the number of hours spent in paid work seems small, but only around 66 percent of the world‘s population is of working age. According to this, two-thirds of the people on this planet work an average of 41 hours a week. The evaluated data sets were collected from 2000 to 2019 in order to rule out distortions caused by the pandemic.
At just under nine and a half hours, the average person spends most of the day doing activities from the first group of direct human impacts. Everything related to health, hygiene, social interactions and experiences falls into this category: consuming media, combing your hair, going to the museum, meeting friends for a glass of wine and learning. But also some work.
Globally, sleep and bed rest account for a good 9.1 hours. Galbraith’s team explains this high number by the fact that on the one hand the total time spent in bed was considered and on the other hand babies and children who need more sleep than adults are included in the statistics.
The second set of activities includes “external impacts,” as Galbraith’s team calls it. These take up about 3.4 hours of the average day. Among other things, the scientists include procuring and preparing food, tidying up, cleaning and supplying energy.
In this group in particular, the researchers were able to identify significant differences between countries with high and low gross domestic product (GDP). On average, poorer countries spend more than an hour a day cultivating food, while countries with higher GDP spend less than five minutes on it.
When it comes to food preparation or hygiene, the differences between countries are disappearing. In the third group of organizational impacts, no GDP-dependent difference can be discerned. Selling and buying goods and transporting both people and goods takes around 2.1 hours a day.
The aim of the data analysis was to find out how time could be reallocated to ensure sustainable global development. ‘Global outcomes arise from the sum of individual actions. It is therefore crucial to understand how global activities affect local changes and vice versa,’ writes the group in their paper. There is clear leeway to redistribute time between activities. However, it will be difficult to set the political and economic framework for this.