Data Underload  / 

How the American Work Day Changed in 15 Years

By Nathan Yau

The American Time Use Survey, an ongoing survey run by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Census Bureau, interviews thousands of people every year for a sense of how we spend our hours. It’s been running since 2003, and the data for 2018 recently went up. I had to ask: How has time use changed during the past 15 years?

Spending Time in 2003 vs. 2018

Average percentage of people 15 and older who did selected activities on a work day. Color represents activity category.

Notes

  • The data comes from the 2003 and 2018 American Time Use Survey. You can poke around at the government pages to get the data, but I downloaded the data via IPUMS.
  • For a clearer comparison, I focused only on the non-holiday weekdays, which provided survey results from 4,676 respondents in 2018 and 10,053 in 2003.
  • I also looked at average duration for those engaged with an activity. Using the view above, the contrasting hours were confusing. The duration values are more interesting when looking at each activity on its own.
  • I analyzed and prepared the data in R. I made the chart with D3.js.

Become a member. Support an independent site. Make great charts.

See What You Get

Learn to Visualize Data See All →

How to Make Line Charts in R

Learn to draw lines wherever and however you want, and you’ve got yourself some flexibility.

How to Animate Packed Circles in R

Pack circles, figure out the transitions between time segments, and then generate frames to string together.

How to Make an Interactive Bar Chart With a Slider

Provide a slider for the standard bar chart so that users can shift focus to a point of interest.

How to Make Bubble Clusters in R

Represent individual counts with grouped units to make data feel less abstract.

Favorites

How You Will Die

So far we’ve seen when you will die and how other people tend to die. Now let’s put the two together to see how and when you will die, given your sex, race, and age.

Visualizing the Uncertainty in Data

Data is an abstraction, and it’s impossible to encapsulate everything it represents in real life. So there is uncertainty. Here are ways to visualize the uncertainty.

One Dataset, Visualized 25 Ways

“Let the data speak” they say. But what happens when the data rambles on and on?

Interactive: When Do Americans Leave For Work?

We don’t all start our work days at the same time, despite what morning rush hour might have you think.