How we Spent Our Time at Home

Cool Infographics: Charts and graphs can communicate data; infographics turn data into information.

2020 was a year of changes. One example is explained in the infographic, How we Spent Our Time at Home by Nathan Yau at FlowingData.

From FlowingData:

We had to do a lot more from home in 2020. Based on the American Time Use Survey, we spent about 62% of our waking time at home. In contrast, we only spent about 50% in 2019. Above is the breakdown by activity on a weekday.

For each year, I counted the total minutes for each activity and divided by total waking time to estimate percentages. For privacy reasons, the where is not provided for when respondents were sleeping, grooming, or doing personal activities. I suspect the total percentage of time spent at home for both years would increase if these times were included.

For a better sense of how everything shifted, above is a different view that shows the percentage of time spent at home, by activity, on a weekday.

With the exception of household activities, which already happened mostly at home, there was an increase in every category. Work from home went up 142%. Education at home more than doubled. Good times.

I really like using the stacked bars of dots to show the breakdown of different activities. There are so many, the use of categorical colors for each different activity is necessary, but does start to get confusing.