Data Underload  / 

Cycle of Many, a 24-hour snapshot for a day in the life of Americans

By Nathan Yau
Available as a limited edition print. Order through the FlowingData shop.

This is a 24-hour snapshot for a day in the life of Americans. Each ring represents an activity with a color. More dots means a greater percentage of people doing the respective activity during a certain time of day.

If you start at the top of the circle, you’ll be at 9:00am when most people who work are already working. Move clockwise, and you see the flows of the day. People break for lunch at noon, get off work around 5:00pm, shift to dinner and then relax. Most people are sleeping by midnight but a small percentage of people are work at night.

Focus on the inside rings versus the outer rings for a rough comparison between work life and home life, each with its own responsibilities.

Source

The data comes from the American Time Use Survey 2020, which is run by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. I downloaded microdata via IPUMS.

 

Chart Type Used

Packed Bubble Chart

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

See What You Get

Favorites

How Much the Everyday Changes When You Have Kids

I compared time use for those with children under 18 against those without. Here’s where the minutes go.

Watching the Growth of Walmart

The ever so popular Walmart growth map gets an update, and yes, it still looks like a wildfire. Sam’s Club follows soon after, although not nearly as vigorously.

Think Like a Statistician – Without the Math

I call myself a statistician, because, well, I’m a statistics graduate student. However, the most important things I’ve learned are less formal, but have proven extremely useful when working/playing with data.

Life expectancy changes

The data goes back to 1960 and up to the most current estimates for 2009. Each line represents a country.