How To Play Where Does the Day Go
You are not filling in your own Tuesday. You are guessing an average day for people in the United States who are 15 or older.
Seven sliders sit in a list: sleeping, leisure and sports, working, household activities, eating and drinking, other personal care, and everything else. Move them until they add up to 24 hours. The line at the top tells you how many hours you still have to place. A slider will not go past the hours you have left.
When the day is full, press Show the real day. Each row then shows your guess next to the survey number.
What Your Score Means
The score starts at 100. Every hour you put in the wrong row pulls it down. Because a wrong hour is missing from one row and extra in another, the game counts that pair once.
- 90 or above: you know the shape of an average day. Sleep is the biggest slice, and work is smaller than a shift because many people are not at a job that day.
- 70 to 89: the big pieces were close and one or two rows drifted.
- Under 70: a chunk of the day landed in the wrong bucket. Look at sleep and leisure first. They are the wide ones.
Your best score stays in the browser.
Tips To Improve
- Give sleep the morning. Most of a day is not spent at a desk. The surveyโs sleep row is a little over nine hours.
- Shrink the workday. Three-something hours sounds low until you remember weekends, students, and people who are not employed.
- Leave room for everything else. Shopping, school and looking after someone do not get their own slider here, but they still take time.
- Use the leftover hours last. Fill the rows you feel sure about, then park what remains.
The Survey Behind the Bars
The numbers are from the American Time Use Survey, 2023 annual averages, published by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics on 27 June 2024. They are average hours per day for the whole civilian population age 15 and over. People who did not do an activity that day still count, as zero hours, which pulls the average down.
Sleeping was 9.07 hours. Leisure and sports was 5.15. Working was 3.26. Household activities were 1.92. Eating and drinking was 1.20. Other personal care, the rest of the personal-care group after sleep, was 0.77. Everything else is the remaining 2.63 hours so the rows add to 24.
The survey also notes that on an average weekday they worked, full-time workers spent 8.5 hours working. That is a different question from the one this game asks.
