What Americans Actually Do All Day Long | Hacker News Reader

What Americans Actually Do All Day Long

npr.org

67 pointshooande48 comments

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If you liked that, you'll love this:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/07/31/business/20080...

Divided by age range, gender, ethnicity...

This is amazing! Much more data-dense than the NPR piece.

Get up

Check email on phone / check HN / check reddit

Shower/get baby ready

check email / check HN / check reddit

prep backpack, get things needed for work

bike to bart (music)

check HN / check reddit (music)

arrive at embarcaderro

go to starbucks - order "large hot water" {free} - insert teabag supplied by office (restock once a week) [mighty leaf green tea tropical]

walk to client site

work / email / work / HN / reddit / meetings / work / email / txt / call wife / eat / HN / reddit / etc

wrap up

walk to bart

email / HN / reddit

arrive to home station

bike home

family time

dinner

family time

work / HN / reddit

family time

email / HN / reddit

sleep

rinse/repeat

this is me. HN /Reddit. i feel sad.

"The ride bike to BART then get off at Embarcadero" is what killed me. Here I thought I was a special East Bay flower.

I wish I could ride bart. East bay --> san jose is not a very fun commute.

Just what, 6 more years before the south bay bart lines are done?

They've been promising the Livermore line forever. I think it'll probably just be vapor forever, Livermore-ites may have just decided they're ok not having a direct line from SF, Oakland, and Berkeley funneling drug dealers, muggers, and the homeless straight to downtown.

i ride bart, dublin to embarcadero. sometimes i feel i'm wasting life, 1.5 hours per day.

It's not usually even productive time. I could bust out my MacBook Air and code or read, but more often than not I'm listening to podcasts and zoning out.

It's really remarkable how connected to everything I feel the nights I stay in the city. But I'm not sure I'm willing to give up an extra grand in rent a month, nor the space I have north of Berkeley.

Maybe startups should start taking root in East Bay.

Parenthood rocks.

Apart from the obvious point that it is mind-bogglingly fantastic in itself (far more rewarding than all of this computer stuff) it had a profound effect on my work life balance.

Gone are stupid hours at work; I changed my work hours to fit nursery drop-off/collection times and even dropped to a 4 day week so I could spend quality time with my daughter rather than her going to nursery for an extra day. My productivity has improved (both subjectively and measured objectively during formal job reviews/appraisals) which I put down to being more focused during the limited hours I am at work to do my job as I know that I can't just do it later.

Outside hours, I can only access work (including email) if I bring my laptop home, and I now only do that for one weekend a month when I volunteer to be on call.

And now that she's nearly 3 I spend a lot of the time I would have been checking banal stuff on the Internet with play time and bonkers discussions with someone soaking up everything that's going on around her and developing her reasoning and understanding of it.

It's been long enough that I really have no idea what I used to do with all of my spare time before I became a father. Wouldn't change it for the world though, as I said, parenthood rocks.

P.S. It just keeps getting better and better too.

P.P.S. I reserve the right to change this when she becomes a mardy 11 year old.

"It's been long enough that I really have no idea what I used to do with all of my spare time before I became a father. "

My little guy just turned two and I echo all your thoughts here, but this one is especially true.

What the hell did we do with all our time before??

Here's to parenthood. :)

Sleep.

Not really.

We were (extremely) lucky as she slept through 7pm-7am straight from 3 months. Now she's older and wants to push the boundaries and assert herself she's battling us (and herself) at bedtime. It's usually 8pm but can be 9pm before she conks out but she is rarely ever awake before 6am, most days it's 6.30am. She's probably up in the night two or three times a week but has never failed to go back to sleep within minutes once tucked back in.

Of course I can choose to not go to bed until 1am every night, but with a highly mobile wriggly vocal 6am alarm clock that is impossible to ignore or 'snooze' you quickly learn not to. I've only got myself to blame if I don't get my 7 or 8 hours of sleep a night.

It's more the wistful memories of lazy weekend afternoons I used to spend slumped on the sofa watching football and not really achieving anything of an entire day (or weekend). A day at work is easy compared to keeping an active two year old entertained (but work is a lot more dull and far less rewarding - and I like my job!).

Same here we're even luckier that our daughter will entertain herself in her own bed until she decides it's time to sleep. So it's in bed at 7:45, but sometimes she'll be up signing until 8:30 or 9. The biggest difference in our house is the lazy weekend mornings. No more staying in bed until 10AM or 11AM. A hungry 2 year old is motivation to make an 8AM breakfast.

Sometimes I feel like the only software engineer with a wife and child. Nice to know the field isn't entirely 20-somethings.

Agreed. We need to start a band or something. ;)

We can call it "My child's angel investor"

This is great to read.. I love the idea of "bonkers discussions", now I have that to look forward to in 3 years. :)

Is shopping left for the weekend? Also, where's the cooking? Is it included in dinner?

For anyone who is interested, the microdata is here:

http://www.bls.gov/tus/datafiles_2011.htm

Most of the questions people are asking can be answered with about 20 minutes of work and a little pandas-fu (or excel, if you are that sort of person).

If anybody gets a chance, a graph that isn't a spiral of circles would make for a slightly easier comparison. Seriously, a spiral of circles?

Clearly they take a weekly total and divide by 7. 7:48 of 'religious' time is just about 55minutes a week so I'm guessing an hour of church a week.

Would be interesting to do the multi-variable analysis across different factors like education, location, etc.

If these numbers were the result of dividing by 7, that would put the working/commuting number at 64 hours a week instead of 46.

40 minutes of non-weekend volunteering/religious activity sounds perfectly reasonable to me. I haven't seen the church part as much on the coast, but back in Texas there were a lot of people I knew who went to at least an hour's worth of in-week religious service.

An hour is not very much, in some churches and some places outside of the US church can go on most of the day.

I agree, with your observations, in California people might work 50 hrs a week and commute 15 hrs (90 minutes each way) Which is why it would be interesting to compare Texas vs Arkansas vs California vs Montana vs college degree vs no degree vs rich vs poor etc etc.

But the article says:

> Here's how the average American with a full-time job spends a typical workday

It mentions "workday" specifically, so it probably doesn't include weekends.

In which case 50 minutes a week becomes 10 minutes a day which doesn't strike me as unreasonable - a bit of prayer, bible reading, maybe a weekly group of some sort and you could see how they got to that number.

Plus I suspect this is one of the things people will over estimate (in the same way that they'll probably underestimate watching TV).

"The numbers are, of course, averages. So parents may spend much more time, say, caring for children, while people without children will spend no time at all."

Stuffed at the bottom, of course. Averages lie!

Just counted...

I wrote 169,020 lines of code in 9,691.25 hrs over 4 yrs from 2007-11 for a part-time job while going to school.

That's 17.44 lines per hour or 0.29 lines per minute, not including code written for school or leisure!

Where's exercise contained? I don't mean that I'm surprised it barely registers, but what category is it under?

"Playing sports" - under the Leisure details - is probably the catchall category for exercise.

And sex? Under Leisure? Other? Talking to people on the telephone?

I'd like to see what the difference in time spent 'grooming' is between the sexes, or alternatively what the breakdown is between basic things like showering, teeth-brushing and more advanced activities.

6 minutes of Education is pretty sad.

Statistics are just statistics. Nothing is sad about 6 minutes when the "average" American isn't in school.

the data is for "average American with a full-time job". This assumes that they have already completed their education. 6 min/day is about 36.5 hours of education, which seems quite a bit for a professional

6 minutes a day is impressive for a professional assuming it is not related to work.

Also, for some professionals, working at their job provides education for performing their job better. They should have split working and commuting from each other, or at least provided a split of the data.

You don't complete your education, just because you have a full time job. You should never stop learning new things (or revising your opinion/knowledge of things you were taught earlier).

They're not "just statistics", as they point to some interesting facts.

Americans for example travel less and work more compared to other countries.

"6 minutes of education" is definitively negative (although I would personally use "narrow (minded)" in place of "sad") when compared with "90+ minutes of TV".

"Education" may be just institutional. Personally, I don't have "education time" anymore, it's either during work, leisure or commuting, but I still learn daily.

My continuing education takes place at work and is part of work. I am also frequently being educated while reading, watching TV, browsing the Internet, or socializing. I don't see a description of what constitutes "education", do they mean purely "attending classes"?

How do Americans procreate?

Looks like they don't list activities < 5 mins.

I would like to see the biggest chunk "work" broken down into what most people are actually doing. Time spent on social media, checking email, phone etc.

It would be interesting to know how much of the "leisure" time is spent watching television. My guess is almost all.

TV: 1hr 35min

There is a second graphic with a breakdown of "leisure" and "cooking, cleaning, etc"

Thanks for correcting me. I missed the second graphic.

I still find it depressing that TV takes ~50% of an "average" person's leisure/discretionary time. 94 minutes per work-day is just over 407 hours per year, and weekends will add more.

Edit: Changed to exclude weekends. Assume 260 work days per year.

Holy fuck those numbers are depressing.

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