The Value of Time: Insights into Daily Life Choices

Everyone gets the same 24 hours each day. Multiply that by 8 billion people, and humanity collectively spends roughly 190 billion hours every single day. The way we use those hours reveals a great deal about what we value—and what brings us happiness.

A major global study (Fajzel et al., 2023, published in PNAS) tracked how people around the world actually allocate their time. The findings challenge a widely held assumption: that human existence centers on work.

1. We Spend Most of Our Day on Rest and Self-Care — Not Work

If you were to blend every person on Earth into a single “average human,” here’s what a typical day would look like.

More than 20 hours each day are spent worldwide on rest, connection, and personal care—time that never makes it into economic output. But that doesn’t mean it’s wasted. Sleep is what keeps our memories intact and our emotions steady. Time with friends, family, or even ourselves satisfies a deeper need to connect and feel competent. Recovery, not constant productivity, is what we’re wired for.

2. Why We Feel Busy Even Though We’re Not Working That Much

If work only takes up 2.6 hours a day on average, why does life feel so rushed? Two reasons stand out.

For one, that figure includes children, retirees, and people who don’t work. Employed adults obviously put in far more hours—around 40 a week.

But there’s a deeper issue: work has taken over our identity. Even outside office hours, we carry the mental weight of our jobs—constant notifications, deadlines looming in the back of our minds, the nagging sense that we’re never truly “off.”

Psychologist Therese Macan studied this back in 1994 and found something surprising. Classic time-management techniques like to-do lists, prioritizing, and scheduling don’t directly reduce stress. They only help if they make you feel more in control of your time. That sense of control—not the tools themselves—is what lowers stress and burnout and improves performance.

The takeaway? Time management isn’t about cramming more into your day. It’s about feeling like you’re the one steering your own life.

3. Not Everyone Gets an Equal Shot at “Time Affluence”

Researchers Ashley Whillans and Elizabeth Dunn draw a useful distinction between what they call time affluence — the sense that you have enough time for the things that matter — and time poverty, the nagging feeling that there is never enough. Time poverty tracks closely with anxiety, depression, and lower life satisfaction. What’s curious is that earning more money tends to make the problem worse, not better.

The strain isn’t evenly distributed, either. Worldwide, women take on nearly three times as much unpaid domestic and care work as men — roughly 1.1 trillion hours a year. In more gender-equal countries like Norway, leisure time is fairly balanced between men and women. But in places with wider gaps, such as India, Mexico, and Portugal, women are left with far less time of their own.

4. Can You “Buy” More Time — and Does It Actually Help?

Whillans, Dunn, and their colleagues surveyed more than 6,000 adults across four countries and found that people who spend money to save time—say, by paying someone to clean or do laundry—tend to feel happier. The effect wasn’t limited to the wealthy; it held up across income levels.

In one experiment, they gave participants $40 and asked them to either buy a product or use the cash to free up time. Those who chose the time-saving option reported feeling happier and less stressed that same day.

Still, many people are reluctant to hand over these tasks. Nearly half of the millionaires they interviewed said they never pay for chores, often out of guilt or a fear of seeming “lazy.”

Employers are starting to take notice. Stanford’s medical school, for example, offered busy doctors vouchers for cleaning and meal delivery rather than cash bonuses. The result: doctors felt they had a better work-life balance, accomplished more, and were 20% more likely to stay at the school.

The Big Idea

What you give your time to quietly teaches your mind what matters. Over time, that shapes your habits, your sense of self, and the direction your life takes. So the more useful question isn’t “How do I get more done?” but rather: “What is my daily time training my mind to value?”