The Lawyer’s Well-Being Brief

What does the average human do with the 24 hours in the day?

“If you are always trying to be normal you will never know how amazing you can be.”- Maya Angelou

McGill University researchers studied how human beings spend their time on an average day and the findings were a bit surprising. We all have 24 hours in a day. Across the global population of 8 billion people, this adds up to approximately 190 billion human hours per day.

How those hours are spent determines the impacts we have on our surroundings as well as how we experience life. To find out how people around the world use their time, a research team led by McGill University gathered and analyzed information about both economic and non-economic activities in order to estimate, for the first time, what a day in the life of the world looks like.

“We wanted to know — what does the time allocation of humanity look like, averaged over all people and across all countries?” adds William Fajzel, a Ph.D. student in Earth System Science at McGill University and the first author on the study. “In other words, if the world were a single average person, what would their day look like?”

To conduct this study, the research team analyzed national surveys, providing them with a snapshot of an average day for…