How do humans spend their “day?”

What would that day look like if all 8 billion humans and their 190 billion hours in a day were to be viewed as a single person with 24 hours in a day? That is a question a research team from McGill University decided to answer, and they did so by looking at time usage and labor data from 2000 to 2019. The data came from 140 countries, or about 87% of the world. Here are the findings.

• Sleep or being in bed accounts for an additional 9 hours.
• The entire global economy occupies around 2.6 hours of the average human day. That’s one-sixth of waking hours over the average lifetime.
• Time spent growing and collecting food varied strongly with wealth, from over 1 hour in low-income countries to less than 5 minutes in high-income countries.
• Waste management accounted for just 1 min of the global day, in stark contrast to the 45 minutes spent tidying and maintaining our dwellings.
• 2.1 hours are devoted to organizing social processes and transportation.
• 5 minutes per human day is spent directly extracting materials and energy from the Earth.