“Heigh ho, heigh ho, it’s off to work we go”*…
Researchers often look at the number of hours worked, but rarely do they ask the question of when. Fortunately, the government conducts an annual study called the American Time Use Survey that tracks how people spend their days…
The interactive graph pictured above (and available live here) shows the share of workers who say they’re working in a given hour, grouped by occupation. The tabs at the top allow one to focus on different job categories to see how their average workdays differ from one another. For example, servers and cooks have a schedule that’s essentially the opposite of all other occupations; their hours peak during lunch and hold steady well into the evening.
Explore more at “Who’s In The Office? The American Workday In One Graph.”
###
As we breathe a sigh of relief that these studies don’t extend to what one does at work, we might recall it was on this date in 1929 that panicked sellers traded nearly 16 million shares on the New York Stock Exchange (four times the normal volume at the time), and the Dow Jones Industrial Average fell 12%. Remembered as “Black Tuesday,” this was the conclusive event in the Crash of 1929, and is often cited as the start of the Great Depression.
