A serious study looked at what really distinguishes an “ordinary” day from a successful day. And it all comes down to the number of hours spent at work…
We often fantasize about the perfect day as a moment without constraints, without waking up, without obligations. However, in reality, work remains essential for most people. Rather than eliminating it, the question becomes more pragmatic: how much time should we devote to it so that the day remains pleasant? This is precisely what researchers wanted to understand by analyzing very concrete data on the daily lives of thousands of people.
To achieve this, teams from the University of British Columbia in Canada and the University of Basel in Switzerland relied on the American Time Use Survey, a large American survey in which participants detailed their daily activities and then evaluated the quality of their day. Using machine learning tools, researchers sifted through more than 100 different activities to identify those that occurred most often on days deemed “better than normal.” The result draws fairly clear trends on the balance between work, leisure and social interactions.
First lesson: working doesn’t necessarily ruin the day, as long as you don’t overdo it. At the same time, other factors come into play. Seeing friends or family, for example, is strongly associated with a better day, but only up to a certain point. Social interactions seem beneficial when they last about two hours; beyond that, their positive impact no longer really progresses. Same logic for physical activity, which remains correlated with a better quality of day for up to several hours, probably due to the well-known effects of exercise on well-being. Conversely, spending a long time in front of a screen does not appear to be a lever for improvement, any more than household chores.
Then, by cross-referencing all the data, the researchers observed that the best-evaluated days were rarely those where work took up the majority of the time. From a certain threshold, the probability of having a “good day” decreased significantly. This threshold is six hours of work per day. Beyond that, people are less likely to consider their day successful. This figure does not mean that a strict rule should be imposed on everyone, nor that an ideal schedule exists. It simply reminds us that a balance is at stake in the distribution of time, between professional activity, social relationships and active leisure activities.
Note that Dunigan Folk, one of the researchers behind this analysis, made a point of specifying: “One of the key lessons is that people would benefit from spending less time on passive activities and more time on active activities. I hope these results will encourage people to think better about the trade-offs they make in their daily lives and the benefits of spending time on different activities.” Inspiring, right?
