We asked 400+ people the following question:
Thinking about your day yesterday, during your waking hours how much time (in hours) did you spend in the following categories?
The answers were a bit surprising.
Some of our high level takeaways:
- People who work full-time tend to average very close to 8 hours per day; nothing more, nothing less.
- Hobby time beats out eating/cooking time solidly. Americans value their TV and not their stove.
- Look how low exercise time is! We’re spending more time commuting than in the gym.
Now for the interesting part. We wanted to ask the question not only because we are deeply curious how people spend their time, but to set up our next question:
Thinking about your day yesterday, during your waking hours how much time (in hours) would you ideally have spent in the following categories?
Now for our takeaways here (buckle up!):
- Wow, people would actually choose to work, just a shorter amount of time
- People really want more social time, as this had the highest jump from 9% to 12%
- Those poor children! We expected a much higher jump here, but basically people didn’t want to allocate significantly more time here
- Who are the 5% of people who want to do chores??
- People would rather do chores (5%) than service (3%), such as volunteering.
Now, these are just averages. I’m sure you, like us, are balking at some of the results. You may be a foodie and would ideally spend 50% of your waking time eating. Or maybe you wish you could have more time with your kids. Maybe you’re the weirdo who likes to do chores.
Either way, the results show a common thread. We’re all in a quest for harmony between these things.
We acknowledge we can’t do it all. There’s likely many categories we overlap intentionally, such as hobbies and social time, or time with children and eating.
What if we thought about the biggest category (work) in the same way? How could we better overlap working time with these other activities we would rather be doing?
Some ideas:
- Work with people who you like to spend social time with. We literally chose to work together in our day jobs and sit next to each other. When hiring people to our teams we ensure they’re the type of people we’d be okay being stuck in an airport with. Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s CEO, has famously said that he only hires people he would enjoy spending time with socially or if roles were reversed someone he would feel comfortable reporting to. This feels like a wise maxim to follow when evaluating candidates.
- Work from home. This obviously cuts out commute time, but also unlocks more crossover time with family. For single people you can still get together with friends to work together. We both work hybrid schedules (in office twice per week and work from home the other three days) and have found this also makes us more productive, as we maximize time at home for deep work and time at work for in-person meetings. The mix has worked well for us to maintain relationships both at home and work.
- Eat with your family. Think about breakfast as an essential time, just like you might already for dinner. Use the time to talk, set goals, and laugh. We feel there’s too much pressure on a traditional family dinner and family breakfast time is often overlooked. Could you do better at eating breakfast with loved ones?
- Travel with your family. Can you take someone with you on that work trip and extend it by a day? Or if not, how can you “take your family with you”? Perhaps, like what we have written about in 6 Ways to Make Business Travel Actually Fun, you can share your experiences with your family throughout your trip so it feels like they are with you.
You likely have other takeaways, which is fantastic, and generally we encourage you to challenge the status quo. Do you really need to go to that 8am meeting? Could it be pushed to later so you could have breakfast with your family? Do you really need to spend so much time on chores? Is there any way you could outsource that?
Your time is your greatest asset. Use it wisely, and live your life in your ideal state as best as you can.
