Researchers conducted a comprehensive study to understand how people across the globe allocate their time. Analyzing data from 2000-2019 and covering 87% of the world’s population, the study revealed that human-centered activities dominate daily time allocation, while just 2.6 hours per day are dedicated to economic activities, suggesting potential for shifts in time spent on certain tasks.
New research reveals how humans around the world spend their time on an average day.
Everyone has 24 hours per day. Multiplied by the world’s population of 8 billion, this amounts to roughly 190 billion human hours every day. The way we allocate these hours influences our environment and shapes our life experiences. To gain insights into how global citizens utilize their time, a team from McGill University conducted a comprehensive study. They collected data on various economic and non-economic activities, presenting an unprecedented glimpse into a typical day on Earth.
“At present, we are struggling to come to terms with global challenges, and that calls for fresh perspectives on how the world works,” says Eric Galbraith, a professor in Earth System Science at McGill University and the senior author on the study published recently in PNAS. “If we are to sustainably navigate climate change and biodiversity loss, adapt to rapid technological change, and achieve global development goals it is crucial to understand the big picture of how the global human system functions, so that we can see where there is potential for change.”
A holistic, birds-eye view of our collective efforts
“We wanted to know – what does the time allocation of humanity look like, averaged over all people and across all countries?” adds William Fajzel, a Ph.D. student in Earth System Science at McGill University and the first author on the study. “In other words, if the world were a single average person, what would their day look like?”
To find out, the research team looked at time use and labor data gathered for the period from 2000-2019 (to avoid any impacts from the COVID pandemic) from over 140 countries (representing 87% of the world’s population).
The global human day, including both work and nonwork activities. Credit: McGill University
Activities and their desired outcomes
The researchers categorized all the things people do in a waking day, including both work and non-work activities, according to what the purpose of the activity was. They used 24 categories that fall into three broad groups:
- Intended to alter the external world (including the provision or modification of food, energy, buildings, the maintenance of surroundings, etc.)
- Focussed directly on human minds or bodies (including caring for the cleanliness, appearance, mood, and health of self and others, as well as education, religion, hobbies, socializing, sports, media, resting, etc.)
- Organizing activities within society (such as transportation, trade, finance, law and governance, etc.)
They then manually classified nearly 4,000 unique activities. And made some surprising discoveries.
Most of each day is focused on ourselves and others
The researchers found that the single largest chunk of time goes towards activities that are human-centered – a little more than 9 hours. Sleep or being in bed accounts for an additional 9 hours (the global estimate includes youth who tend to sleep longer hours). Of the remaining 6 hours, growing and collecting our food, preparing it, commuting and moving around, and allocational tasks (such as trade, finance, sales, law, governance, policing) each occupy around 1 hour. Waste management accounted for just 1 minute of the global day, in stark contrast to the 45 minutes spent tidying and maintaining our dwellings. All infrastructure and building construction is accomplished in about 15 minutes.
The global economic day shows the average time spent in employment, averaged across the global population. Credit: McGill University
Surprisingly, time spent on activities like meals, daily travel, hygiene and grooming, and food preparation doesn’t change in a systematic way with the material wealth of a population. In contrast, the time spent growing and collecting food varied strongly with wealth, from over 1 hour in low-income countries to less than 5 minutes in high-income countries.
Just a tenth of the day is given over to economic activities
Since the study includes both economic and non-economic activities, a portion of the total time in each of the categories described above represents people engaged in economic activity – e.g., doctors and nurses, cooks and agricultural laborers, etc.
The team estimated that the entire global economy occupies around 2.6 hours of the average human day. This economic activity is dominated by agriculture and livestock production, followed by allocational activities like trade, finance and law, and manufacturing. While the total of 2.6 hours may seem small, for the two-thirds of the world’s working-age population (ages 15-64) who make up the labor force this equates to about a 40-hour work week.
The results of the study provide a unique perspective on how economic activities fit into the overall fabric of human life at a global scale. They also suggest that there is plenty of scope to shift time allocation around certain activities, such as extracting materials, provisioning energy, and dealing with wastes, all accomplished within about seven minutes.
Reference: “The global human day” by William Fajzel, Eric D. Galbraith, Christopher Barrington-Leigh, Jacques Charmes, Elena Frie, Ian Hatton, Priscilla Le Mézo, Ron Milo, Kelton Minor, Xinbei Wan, Veronica Xia and Shirley Xu, 12 June 2023, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2219564120