Numlock Sunday: Ben Casselman on what exactly we do with all our time The Numlock Podcast
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Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week, I spoke to Ben Casselman of the New York Times who wrote “The Pandemic Changed How We Spent Our Time” and “More phone calls, less shopping: how the pandemic changed American lives, down to the minute” with Ella Koeze. Here's what I wrote about it:
The American Time Use Survey for 2020 dropped, and needless to say it turns out people may have altered their behavior somewhat. Parents with kids in school spent an additional 1.6 hours per day providing secondary child care, while layoffs meant the average time spent working was down 17 minutes per day. The biggest winners of time were telephone calls (up 61.5 percent), lawn and garden care (30.8 percent), and relaxing and leisure (up 17.6 percent); the biggest losers were travel related to work (down 33.1 percent), shopping (21.8 percent), and socializing and communicating (16.1 percent). Somewhat distressingly, the average amount of time spent grooming fell 10.7 percent, from 41 minutes to 36 minutes. The survey didn’t break out the specific amount of time Americans spent saying, “You’re muted, Kevin, your mic is off,” but Numlock’s own preliminary estimates are forecasting a 200 percent increase.
Ben’s a favorite guest on the Sunday editions. We were colleagues at FiveThirtyEight and he’s one of the smartest people covering business and economics out there. This week, we talked all about his coverage of the latest data from the American Time Use Survey, a wild annual data collection carried out by the Department of Labor that shows how Americans spend their days. This latest edition includes the pandemic year’s data, so it’s an intriguing look at how people spent their time in 2020.
Ben can be found at The New York Times and on Twitter at @BenCasselman
This interview has been condensed and edited.
You wrote a bunch of really cool stories dissecting the latest from a very interesting American Time Use Survey. Can you tell us a little bit about what this survey is and what makes this year's particularly interesting?The time use survey is this crazy thing, it's kind of a goldmine for us data nerds. It's done by the Bureau of Labor Statistics every year. And they literally ask people, thousands of people to track one day of their daily life in extreme detail. Like, I woke up at this time, and I brush my teeth and wash my hair from 7:15 to 7:18, and then I eat breakfast until 7:23, or whatever. It's categorized in all sorts of different ways. It's a nationally representative survey, so you can break it down by sex, and race, and age, and all of these things. Normally we use it to understand the long, slow shifts in the economy, and in society, and in American life, right?We're spending more time on our screens than we used to, commutes have gotten longer, all of these sorts of things that we track over years and decades. And then of course, as with so many things, this year was an unusual one. The Time Use Survey actually stopped collecting data for a couple of months in the heart of the pandemic. You can kind of imagine why they maybe weren't so focused on that. But starting in May, they picked it back up again, and so we get this amazing picture of how life looked in the pandemic and the longer-running months of the pandemic and how that compares to normal. It's this amazing breakdown of all of the ways in which the pandemic disrupted our lives.
Yeah. You had two really good stories with your colleague and my former colleague Ella Koeze basically going into how different events and hobbies and things may have surged or whatnot. You wrote among some of the biggest increases were telephone calls, lawn and garden care, relaxing and leisure. What else kind of took a hit and what else really surged in the pandemic year?Look, some of the things are pretty obvious, right? We spent a lot less time commuting last year. We spent a lot more time taking care of kids last year, although that one's a little comp
Welcome to the Numlock Sunday edition.
This week, I spoke to Ben Casselman of the New York Times who wrote “The Pandemic Changed How We Spent Our Time” and “More phone calls, less shopping: how the pandemic changed American lives, down to the minute” with Ella Koeze. Here's what I wrote about it:
The American Time Use Survey for 2020 dropped, and needless to say it turns out people may have altered their behavior somewhat. Parents with kids in school spent an additional 1.6 hours per day providing secondary child care, while layoffs meant the average time spent working was down 17 minutes per day. The biggest winners of time were telephone calls (up 61.5 percent), lawn and garden care (30.8 percent), and relaxing and leisure (up 17.6 percent); the biggest losers were travel related to work (down 33.1 percent), shopping (21.8 percent), and socializing and communicating (16.1 percent). Somewhat distressingly, the average amount of time spent grooming fell 10.7 percent, from 41 minutes to 36 minutes. The survey didn’t break out the specific amount of time Americans spent saying, “You’re muted, Kevin, your mic is off,” but Numlock’s own preliminary estimates are forecasting a 200 percent increase.
Ben’s a favorite guest on the Sunday editions. We were colleagues at FiveThirtyEight and he’s one of the smartest people covering business and economics out there. This week, we talked all about his coverage of the latest data from the American Time Use Survey, a wild annual data collection carried out by the Department of Labor that shows how Americans spend their days. This latest edition includes the pandemic year’s data, so it’s an intriguing look at how people spent their time in 2020.
Ben can be found at The New York Times and on Twitter at @BenCasselman
This interview has been condensed and edited.
You wrote a bunch of really cool stories dissecting the latest from a very interesting American Time Use Survey. Can you tell us a little bit about what this survey is and what makes this year's particularly interesting?The time use survey is this crazy thing, it's kind of a goldmine for us data nerds. It's done by the Bureau of Labor Statistics every year. And they literally ask people, thousands of people to track one day of their daily life in extreme detail. Like, I woke up at this time, and I brush my teeth and wash my hair from 7:15 to 7:18, and then I eat breakfast until 7:23, or whatever. It's categorized in all sorts of different ways. It's a nationally representative survey, so you can break it down by sex, and race, and age, and all of these things. Normally we use it to understand the long, slow shifts in the economy, and in society, and in American life, right?We're spending more time on our screens than we used to, commutes have gotten longer, all of these sorts of things that we track over years and decades. And then of course, as with so many things, this year was an unusual one. The Time Use Survey actually stopped collecting data for a couple of months in the heart of the pandemic. You can kind of imagine why they maybe weren't so focused on that. But starting in May, they picked it back up again, and so we get this amazing picture of how life looked in the pandemic and the longer-running months of the pandemic and how that compares to normal. It's this amazing breakdown of all of the ways in which the pandemic disrupted our lives.
Yeah. You had two really good stories with your colleague and my former colleague Ella Koeze basically going into how different events and hobbies and things may have surged or whatnot. You wrote among some of the biggest increases were telephone calls, lawn and garden care, relaxing and leisure. What else kind of took a hit and what else really surged in the pandemic year?Look, some of the things are pretty obvious, right? We spent a lot less time commuting last year. We spent a lot more time taking care of kids last year, although that one's a little comp