Where the 24 hours go

The message

The sentence we wrote before drawing anything: Americans spend more of the day asleep than on anything else, and leisure comes second, ahead of work. That last part surprises people, so the piece has to make it believable at a glance.

Why two charts for one dataset

Time use is a part-to-whole problem. The day has exactly 24 hours, and every activity takes a slice. The thin strip at the top shows that whole: you can see that sleep fills more than a third of it before you read a single label.

A strip is bad at precise comparison, though. Household activities and eating are both thin slivers, and nobody can tell 1.99 hours from 1.21 hours by eye in a stacked bar. So the second chart is a plain ranked bar list with direct labels in hours and minutes. Readers who glance get the whole; readers who stay get the ranking.

We skipped a pie or donut. With ten slices, several of them under an hour, a pie turns into a guessing game about angles.

Color

Only two categories get the accent color: sleeping and leisure, the two that carry the message. Everything else is a neutral gray. Coloring all ten activities would have meant ten hues, a legend, and no clear point. The highlight color tells you where to look.

The number that needs a caveat

The work figure, 3 hours 19 minutes, looks low until you know what it averages. The survey counts everyone 15 and older and every day of the week. Retirees, students, people out of work and weekend days all pull the average down. BLS reports that full-time workers worked about 8 hours on the days they worked. The deck line under the headline ("workdays and days off alike") is there so nobody reads the chart as "Americans work three hours a day."

That one line of context is cheaper than a footnote, and it sits where the reader is already looking.

Small decisions

• Hours appear as "9 h 02 min" rather than "9.03". Decimal hours are easy to misread as minutes.
• "Everything else" groups three small categories (civic and religious activities, phone calls and mail, other) so the list ends cleanly instead of trailing off into slivers.
• TV gets a note inside the leisure row. It is about half of all leisure time, which is the most quoted number from this survey.