"Sleeping, working, and watching TV" is the short answer. The New York Times has increasingly been taking advantage of the powers of online presentation to offer some amazing interactive graphics, and last week they tackled how Americans over the age of 15 spend their typical days. The overall most time-consuming activities were:
Sleeping: 8 hours, 36 minutes per day
Working: 3 hours, 25 minutes
TV and Movies: 2 hours, 46 minutes
Household activities: 1 hour, 46 minutes
Traveling: 1 hour, 12 minutes
Eating: 1 hour 7 minutes
Personal Care: 47 minutes
Other Leisure: 44 minutes
Socializing: 43 minutes
Where is blogging, you ask? "Computer use" (presumably non-work related) was down at 8 minutes per day. But they went way beyond that, to break it down by time of day and by demographics. Various cheap shots suggest themselves, about how all that TV is rotting our brains, we've entered the late decadent period of our civilization, back in the old days everyone spent evenings composing piano sonatas and writing epic poetry, etc. But I think it's more interesting to simply appreciate the typical allocation of time during an average person's day. If you're wondering about the short work day, a lot of people are pre-employment, post-employment, or just unemployed. Also, "traveling" isn't mostly about flying to Paris; it's about commuting to work or school. And sex falls under "personal care," but if you break out a separate category of "personal or private activities," it adds up to 54 seconds per day.
