This is one person’s Monday.
At 4 am, they were asleep. At 6 am, they woke up.
This little figure stands for a real diary in the 2024 American Time Use Survey.
By 7 am, they were working. Their diary also records short trips, meals, and time to relax.
But one day cannot tell us how everyone spends their time.
So let’s bring in 160 people. Each one reported a full day, from 4 am to 4 am.
These are different days, put on the same clock. They did not all happen at once.
Click a person to read their day.
At 4 am, 147 of these 160 people were asleep.
The other 13 were doing something else. Even at this hour, there is more than one kind of day.
Now it is 8 am. The crowd changes colour.
51 people were still asleep. 22 were working. Others were eating, travelling, providing care, or doing something else.
A weekday and a weekend can look very different. So can a day with paid work and a day without it.
There are 40 diaries in each group here. We chose equal groups so you can compare them. This is not a national estimate.
By noon, only 5 people were asleep. 30 were working, and 20 were eating.
“Other” includes housework, shopping, personal care, study, exercise, and more. It does not mean that nothing was happening.
At 5 pm, 20 people were travelling and 19 were still working.
Watch the same figures move. Each colour comes from what that person reported at this time.
At 9 pm, 87 people were doing leisure activities. 26 were asleep, while 4 were still working.
A shared clock does not mean a shared routine.
By 1 am, 149 people were asleep.
We have returned to a mostly sleeping crowd. But every person took a different route through the day.
Now try your own comparison.
Choose a time and a way to group the people. Click any figure to see their full diary.
The figures keep their identity as they move. Their appearance is illustrative, not a record of their age, race, or gender.
Methodology
Data: American Time Use Survey, 2024 public-use files, from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Each figure represents one respondent’s recorded day, in local time. The diaries cover different dates.
The display uses 160 records: 40 in each weekday/weekend and employed/not employed group. Records were selected by a stable hash of respondent ID. Survey weights are not applied. Counts describe this selected sample only.
Sleep uses ATUS code prefix 0101; work uses 05; care uses 03 and 04; travel uses 18; eating uses 11; leisure uses 12. All remaining activities are grouped as Other. Care includes reported primary care activities; it does not measure all care done at the same time as other tasks.
Each diary covers 1,440 minutes. Adjacent activities in the same display category are combined. The person detail view retains the activity codes.
Design and animation adapted from A Love Story by Alvin Chang / The Pudding. This course example uses the original open-source code, walking figures, and scroll interaction under its MIT license. The story and data have changed. It is not a new Pudding publication.
Original clay figure clothing: Amanda Sakuma.