The Surprising Reality of How We Spend Our Time

Editor's Note: This story originally appeared on Boldin.

Each of us has 24 hours a day, every day, to use however we see fit. And we all deploy those minutes and hours differently. We have different goals, and how we use our time is a reflection of what is important to us as individuals.

Multiply the choices for how we use time by the 8 billion people across the world, and you get a fascinating picture of the human species.

We talk and think a lot about how much money we have. And the corollary is time. You probably have a sense of how much you have of these resources, but what about the world?

How Much Money Is There in the World?

This can be a difficult question to answer, but experts estimate that by the end of 2024, there was approximately the equivalent of $123 trillion in cash, savings, and money market funds worldwide.

So, what percent of that money is yours? Here are a few interesting facts:

• If that $123 trillion were divided among the 8 billion people in the world, each person would only have $15,000.
• If you have $1 million dollars, you have about 0.00000081% of $123 trillion. Put another way, $1 million is roughly 8 ten-millionths of one percent of $123 trillion.
• Pundits believe that the world will have the first trillionaires within the next decade.

How Much Time Is There in the World?

Estimates suggest that we have over 8 billion people on planet Earth right now. Those people represent 192 billion hours every single day, or more than 70 trillion hours a year.

You have:

• 24 hours a day
• 168 hours per week
• 8,760 hours every year
• 262,800 hours to spend over the next 30 years

A Look at the Global Human Day

Scientists from McGill University recently did an unprecedented analysis. They aggregated data on time use from 145 different countries.

The researchers assembled a complete estimate of what humans are doing, averaged over time and across the entire population, to provide an aggregated high-level view that we refer to as the global human day.

The results may seem surprising. Researchers categorized all human activity into four categories. Keep reading to see how much time we spend on each in a day.

1. We spend 9.1 hours on sleep and bedrest

Across the globe and all humans, sleep accounts for 9.1 hours of a 24-hour day. As a species, this takes up most of our time.

This might seem like a lot, especially for those of us who wake endlessly through the night for various reasons. But the difference is due to the inclusion of children in the estimate and also the time spent in bed without sleeping.

2. Activities that have direct human outcomes take up 9.4 hours

The largest amount of collective time is spent on activities that have a direct impact on human beings, activities like eating, grooming, playing, watching television, socializing, caring for children, education, and religion.

These types of activities take 9.4 hours a day and include:

• 4.6 hours in passive leisure or social activities
• 1.6 hours at meals
• 0.4 hours in active recreation
• 1.1 hours in hygiene and grooming
• 0.3 hours in childcare
• 0.2 in healthcare
• 1.1 hours in schooling or doing research
• 0.2 hours in religious practices

3. Activities that result in external outcomes take up only 3.4 hours

Only 3.4 hours are collectively spent on activities that result in external outcomes.

These are things that change the physical world: all food provision (including farming, raising livestock, and manufacturing and cooking things we eat), mining, logging, oil and gas extraction, cleaning, construction, telecommunications, and manufacturing of physical goods.

• 0.9 hours in food preparation
• 0.8 hours in food growth and collection
• 0.1 hours in food processing
• 0.8 hours maintenance of our inhabited environment
• 0.01 hours in waste management
• 0.7 hours in technosphere creation (construction, civil engineering, telecommunications and manufacturing of all physical goods)
• 0.1 hours in nonfood provision (extraction of natural resources)

4. We spend 2.1 hours on activities with organizational outcomes

The smallest block of communal time is spent in organizational activities. These endeavors include: transportation, government, military, trade and commerce, real estate, and the financial industry.

• 0.9 hours in human transportation
• 0.9 hours in allocation (trade, commerce, government, finance, law, etc.)
• 0.3 hours in material transportation

Observations and Insights on Collective Time Use

In their report, the researchers had some interesting observations about our use of time. Keep reading for their insights.

See Also:

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Material wealth has a negligible effect on some activities

Surprisingly, time spent on activities like meals, daily travel, hygiene and grooming, and food preparation doesn’t change with the material wealth of a population.

And material wealth has a negligible effect on travel time at the population level. Faster cars and access to air travel don’t reduce the amount of time we spend getting from place to place.

However, the time spent growing and collecting food varied strongly with wealth, from over one hour in low-income countries to less than five minutes in high-income countries.

The decrease of approximately 1.2 hours in food growth and collection in rich countries is counterbalanced, perhaps unsurprisingly, by an increase in the time spent engaged in experience-oriented activities – entertainment – and on infrastructure, construction, and maintenance activities.

Some activities take less time than you might think

Given how incredibly dependent we are on natural resources, globally the time spent directly extracting materials and energy from the Earth system is small, on the order of 5 minutes per average human day.

Because the global supply of energy and materials is currently provided with a small fraction of the total time (amounting to approximately 3% of the global economic time), the time allocated to these activities could be altered to a relatively large degree without necessarily having a large impact on the time allocated to other activities.

This assessment suggests that climate change solutions, such as shifting labor away from fossil fuel industries and into the construction of global renewable power infrastructure, are highly feasible in terms of the global time budget, in that there exists a clear physical scope for humans to reallocate time among the relevant activities without significantly disrupting the overall distribution of time at the population level.

The time directly dealing with waste is on the order of 1 minute per day

It seems plausible that many waste problems, including the accumulation of ocean plastics and water contamination by toxins, could potentially be greatly alleviated through a relatively small reallocation of the total human time budget.

Make the Most of Your Time and Money

As the research team behind this study on collective time use points out, how we spend time determines the impacts we have on our surroundings as well as how we experience life.

It is critically important that you make the most of your time, and that probably involves thinking about how much time you spend making and allocating money.

The Boldin Retirement Planner is a tool that gives people the ability to make better decisions, build wealth, and find their path to a secure and happy future.