As anyone trying to spark some motivation likes to tell us: we all have the same 24 hours in a day, even Beyonce, and it’s up to you to make the most of them.
But, now, researchers have found exactly how the average human spends those hours and have released their results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Researchers from more than 140 countries used time and labour force surveys from 58 nations (about 60 per cent of the world’s population), conducted between 2000 and 2019, to get a glimpse of how almost 8 billion people on Earth experience day-to-day life.
The study excluded data from 2020 because of the profound “economic and social disruption” the Covid-19 pandemic had on everyday life. It also filled in the blanks for countries with incomplete or missing surveys.
From this, researchers were able to estimate how the average human spends their day according to four broad categories: sleep and bedrest, direct human outcomes, external outcomes and organisational outcomes.
How does the average person spend their day?
The research shows the average person spends 9.1 hours – 38 per cent of our time – asleep or in bedrest and the remaining 14.9 up and about.
That may come as a surprise to many of us who feel we could to with a few more hours.
In fact, researchers found the sleep estimate was “significantly larger” than the global 7.5 hour average of sleep per day recorded among adults wearing smart devices.
But they attribute this to two factors: the inclusion of children – perks of having an enforced bedtime – and the time spent in bed not sleeping.
Once we get out of bed, though, our waking hours are spent chasing “outcomes”.
More than nine hours a day (9.4 hours) are dedicated to ourselves and directly engaging with, caring for, and learning about the world around us – including taking care of our appearance, hygiene and health, studying, and socialising.
Almost half of that time (48 per cent) of that time is spent on “passive, interactive and social activity”, including reading, watching screens, playing games, going for walks, socialising, or sitting around doing nothing.
Eating took up 1.6 hours of the day, and we dedicated as much time to schooling and research as we did to hygiene and grooming behaviours (1.1 hours a day).
External outcomes were the next biggest use of our days, meaning activities that produce “physical changes in the world outside humans themselves” – like extracting energy, producing food, building things, and maintenance.
These outcomes take up 3.4 hours of the day, most of which is dedicated to growing, preparing and processing food (1.8 hours), maintaining our surroundings (cleaning and disposing of waste, 0.8 hours), and building (0.7 hours).
The smallest amount of time is spent on organisational activities (2.1 hours) — those that modify locations of humans and materials, and those that “allocate the time use and access rights of humans” – like grocery shopping, paying bills, all things administrative.
The research found the average human spends as much time shopping or doing admin in a day as they do getting to and from places (0.9 hours each).
How does Australia stack up?
Interestingly, the research team found some of the activities and the time spent doing them were “universal” – like the amount of time we spend preening ourselves to face the day.
And, for the most part Australians are on-par with the global average.
Based on the time surveys, Australians spend as much time in bed as the global average but even more time socialising and doing the activities that spark joy (5 hours each day, compared the 4.6 hour average).
But, perhaps a worrying sign of our priorities, we spent slightly less time on hygiene and grooming than the global average.
The data shows Australians spend about 0.9 hours grooming themselves each day, compared to the 1.1 hour the global average. And our New Zealand neighbours across the ditch spend even less – only 0.8 hours.
So, please, for the sake of the national average, get out of bed and take a shower.