Chris's Blog

This week, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released its annual American Time Use Survey. This provides incredibly interesting (and somewhat frightening) data about how we spend our time. For example, here’s a direct quote  from the Bureau’s press release:

Conversely, individuals ages 15 to 19 read for an average of 5 minutes per weekend day while spending 1.0 hour playing games or using a computer for leisure.

The same demographic watches more than two hours of television per day.

After doing some quick math from Table 11, this means that:

In a given weekend, an American teenager will spend more time watching TV than he spends reading leisurely in an entire month.

If you’re interested in checking out the data, you can check out the two links above or:

• -Wall Street Journal has a great mini-app that allows you to visualize this year’s survey data.
• -New York Times also created a great mini-app visualizing last year’s survey.

I also threw Table 11, the data about how we spend our leisure time into Excel and played around a bit. Below are two charts I found interesting. What I find most interesting is that the amount of time spent using the computer for leisure is much lower than I would have expected. I’m curious if anyone has a good explanation?

I know that half of US online adults access the internet while watching TV (Forrester 2009), and double counting isn’t allowed in this survey. Or maybe it’s because people are actually spending most of their leisure computer access time during work hours?