--On days that they worked, about 1 in 5 employed persons did some or all of their work at home.
--Adults in households without children spent about 1.4 hours more per day engaged in leisure and sports activities than those with children.
....The "Average Day"
On an "average day" in 2003, persons in the U.S. age 15 and over slept about 8.6 hours, spent 5.1 hours doing leisure and sports activities, worked for 3.7 hours, and spent 1.8 hours doing household activities. The remaining 4.8 hours were spent in a variety of other activities, including eating and drinking, attending school, and shopping. The average day measures for the entire population reflect the average distribution of time across all persons, whether or not each person engaged in that activity on their diary day. (See table 1.)
Average day measures for the entire population provide a mechanism for seeing the overall distribution of time allocation for society as a whole, but other measures provide additional insights. Many activities typically are not done on a daily basis, and some activities only are done by a subset of the population. For example, only 44 percent of all persons 15 years and over reported working on an average day because some were not employed and others were employed but did not work on their diary day. For this reason, some of the analysis that follows uses time-use estimates that are restricted to specific population groups, such as employed persons or adults in households with children.
Working (by Employed Persons)
--Employed persons worked 7.6 hours on average on the days that they worked. Work hours were longer on weekdays than on weekend days--7.9 versus 5.7 hours. (See table 4.)
--Many more people worked on weekdays than on weekend days. About 82 percent of employed persons worked on an average weekday, compared with 33 percent on an average weekend day. (See table 4.)
--As noted earlier, on the days they worked, employed men worked about an hour more than employed women. This difference partly reflects women's greater likelihood of working part time. However, even among full-time workers (those usually working 35 hours or more per week), men worked slightly longer than women--8.3 versus 7.7 hours.
(See tables 4 and 5.)
--Multiple jobholders were twice as likely as single jobholders to report work on an average Saturday or Sunday. Weekend work also was more often reported by self-employed workers than by wage and salary workers. (See table 4.)
Article comments
1 - Jim Carruthers
Lemme see, uhm, working to bring back Cthulhu from the city of R'lyeh, and trying to organize an anarcho-syndicalist soccer league. And then there's the grow-op, but we don't talk about that. As for child-care, those thieving street urchins are almost as much bother as the revenue they bring in, so I'd have to call that a break-even.
2 - Eric Olsen
Say, do you know a guy named "Artful Dodger"?
3 - Jim Carruthers
But I do know about food, glorious food. But, yah, I might have seen him. Who wants to know?
4 - Eric Olsen
his mum misses him