Visualizing Every Week of Life: A Guide to How We Spend Our Time

How does the average human spend that time? Surprisingly, the answer can be broken down into fairly definitive numbers. That’s because all humans must dedicate a certain amount of their time to the things that are necessary to stay alive — sleeping, eating, and so on. 

For example, the average individual will spend about ⅓ of their life — about 23.6 years — sleeping. 

You can’t decide not to do that. Well, you can, but you will die. 

In the below infographic, we break down how the average individual will spend their time.

But first! A quick note on how we made this. Making 25,915 dots to represent every day of life was a little impractical. First, it would have taken us forever. Second, the dots would be so small that you wouldn't be able to see them.

So we made 3,692 dots to represent the 3,692 weeks of life.

And where it was possible, we used figures that were related to global averages. However, data was sometimes only available for specific nations. And even where a global average was available, there’s obviously a pretty big range depending on where one lives.

This is just to say that these figures are a solid estimate, but there will obviously be variability between individuals. 

And here is a list of the sources that we used to make this infographic.

• Global life expectancy = 71 years / 3,692 weeks

• Spend 1/3 of life sleeping (or trying to) = 23.6 years / 1230 week

• Online =13.3 years / 695 weeks
• Being sick = 11.9 years /618 weeks
• Spend about 90,000 hours at work = 10.27 years / 535 weeks
• Spend 38,000 hours commuting = 4.3 years / 226 weeks
• 67 minutes per day eating and drinking = 3.4 years / 177 weeks
• You spend 17,280 in school = 1.9 years / 103 weeks
• Everything else = just 2.3 years

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