Every year, the American Time Use Survey asks thousands of Americans to record a minute-by-minute account of one single day. For many “prime-age” adults, those between the ages of 25 and 54, a significant chunk of time on weekdays is taken up by work. But for the almost 30 million prime-age Americans who don’t work, a typical weekday looks far different.
Nonworkers spend much more time doing housework. Men without jobs, in particular, spend more time watching television, while women without jobs spend more time taking care of others. And the nonemployed of both sexes spend more time sleeping than their employed counterparts.
One way to see these patterns is to look at what the “average” nonemployed person does with his or her time. That’s the view you see in the charts above. But averages are by nature a simplification, one that can sometimes obscure reality. For example, in the chart above, you can see that from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., about 10 percent of men are consistently spending time on education. That could mean that many men spend a small portion of their days — albeit at different times — on education, or it could mean that about 10 percent of men spend nearly all of their time on education. (The reality is much closer to the latter, as you’ll see below.)
To get a different view of this data, we have also taken a closer look at a single day for each of the prime-age nonworking men and women who returned a complete survey. We have grouped them by the activity they spent the most time doing between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m.: searching for a job, for instance, or watching television. All of their circumstances are real; we’ve assigned pseudonyms to make it easier to follow the data. (And see here for a new look at employment rates of women and men in every census tract in the country.)
It shouldn’t be surprising that for some of the nonworking, a primary activity was looking for work. These are the people considered unemployed by the standard definition. Their stories — the bones of which you can cobble together from census microdata — are familiar:
There is the woman we’re calling Emily, who is now raising her 15-year-old son alone after the death of her husband. She was recently laid off, and she reported that her employer had no plans to call her back to work. Eric’s story is different. He is re-entering the labor force after spending some time outside it, and for more than a year has been unable to find work. He spent most of his waking hours on this day looking for work — a continuous block from 7:15 a.m. to 2 p.m. Emily most likely qualifies for unemployment benefits, but such benefits are usually unavailable for people like Eric who recently spent time outside the labor force, neither working nor looking for work.
Watching television and movies is a significantly more common activity for the nonemployed than looking for work. For every one person whose main activity was job searching, there were almost six whose main activity was television and movie watching.
The gender breakdown is striking. Of the 65 people who devoted more of their daytime to watching TV and movies than any other activity, 46 are men versus 19 who are women.
Other leisure time can encompass a wide range of activities but most commonly consists of relaxing, reading for pleasure or surfing the Internet.
Twenty-three of the 294 people in this data spent most of their time between the hours of 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. asleep. It’s not necessarily the case that they spent an inordinate amount of time sleeping; it was sometimes when they slept. Zach, for example, slept for eight hours, but from 5 a.m. to 1 p.m. But on average, the prime-age nonemployed spend slightly over an hour more sleeping than their employed counterparts.
Housework encompasses a broad swath of activities, including cleaning, cooking, lawn care, paying bills and working on the car. Over all, women are far more likely than men to devote a significant portion of their time to housework. Housework combined with our next category (caring for others) occupied almost six hours of the average woman’s day in our sample, compared with less than three hours for that of the average man.
About one-fifth of nonworking women spend a majority of their day caring for someone else. Nearly all of the women in this group have children. Laura, age 31, has seven of them. Janet, 34, just had her first, a son. Among all women in this data, care of others peaks around 4 p.m. (Janet, not yet affected by a school schedule, took a 27-minute nap around that time.) This category also includes those caring for parents or others: Catherine, Sara and Tammy do not have any children under 18.
Beyond the two large clusters of TV/leisure/sleeping and housework/child care, some smaller well-defined clusters emerge, one of the clearest being education. Education may take up little time in the day for the “average” nonworking person, but it occupies a very significant chunk of the waking hours for a minority of the sample. Only 11 people in our sample spent the majority of their time between 8 a.m. and 8 p.m. on education, but over the course of the day, those 11 spent a lot of time on it: more than nine hours on average.
Men and women without jobs spend about one and a half times as much time socializing as the average employed person. Socializing includes spending time with family or friends; attending a book club; visiting an adult in the hospital.
For everyone whose day was not dominated by one of the above activities, a grab bag of pursuits topped the list.
Susan spent almost 17 hours on personal care, a category that includes bathing, grooming and — as in Susan’s case — health care. She, like many of the nonemployed, is out of work because of a physical disability: She has serious difficulty walking.
A few of our nonworking people, somewhat confusingly, even reported spending a good amount of time working. These answers could mean that some people don’t think of informal work, such as babysitting or lawn-mowing, as employment. Or the answers could simply reflect the fact that large surveys typically contain a small number of unusual answers, because not everyone responds to a survey accurately.
Viewed together, the contours of the lives of the nonemployed begin to take shape. Below, the days of all 294 people in the sample, all at once.
By
