The average day,
drawn round.
Pick a cohort. See how the average member spends 1,440 minutes. Sleep, work, screens, kids, and the spaces in between, rendered as a 24-hour clock. Built on the same BLS American Time Use Survey you've seen quoted but never seen mapped.
Thirteen activity categories. Twenty-three published cohorts. Click a different cohort, the clock redraws. Click "compare" and the second cohort overlays. Below, six findings that surprised me when I pulled the data.
Everyone gets the same 24 hours. What people do with them is the most under-examined statistic in American life.
Since 2003, the BLS has run a continuous time-diary study called the American Time Use Survey. Tens of thousands of randomly sampled Americans walk a trained interviewer through their previous day, minute by minute. The result is a public dataset that maps how 24 hours actually break down, by age, by employment status, by whether you have kids at home.
It is the closest thing we have to a national mirror. Most people have never looked into it. This page is a tool for doing so.
Each segment of the ring is one of 13 activity categories, sized by how many minutes the average member of the selected cohort spends on it per day. Hover any segment to see exact minutes.
Pick a second cohort. Differences of 15 minutes or more are highlighted.
Each finding is a single comparison. The numbers come from BLS ATUS published averages.
notebooks/time_use_lab.py ↗ reads the BLS-published series-ID list (a1-seriesid.xlsx) and queries the BLS public API for ~7,600 series spanning 23 cohorts × 13 activity buckets × 3 sex breakouts. Pools 2019–2023 averages. Writes cohorts.json.
The 116 ATUS activity codes are consolidated into 13 readable buckets (sleep, work, housework, etc.). The 24-hour clock renders activity totals as proportional ring segments. Compare view shows minute-deltas between any two cohorts.
Self-reported diaries underestimate phone and screen time. Childcare counts only when caregiving is the primary activity. ATUS doesn't include nonbinary gender. Pooled years smooth over COVID's durable shifts. Cells with under 50 respondents are suppressed by BLS, not by us.