What happened to the hours? A breakdown of how people spend time.
The life expectancy in Malaysia is estimated at 74.75 years, as of 2015. Have you ever wondered how much time a regular person spends on mundane activities? Here are some numbers.
1. On average, an adult works 40 hours a week from ages 20-65, which means you will work for about 10.3 years in your lifetime, out of which you will spend approximately 5 years sitting at your desk and 2 years in meetings. That’s a whole lot of sitting around stuck to your desk. Imagine all the sunshine you’re missing out on.
2. About 2 years on TV commercials. A 30-minute episode has about 8 minutes of commercials. So if you watch 2 hours of TV, that’s about 32 minutes a day. By the time you hit 50, you would have watched over 400 days of commercials. Most of us watch more than that. Actually, nobody likes commercials as they cut into shows. Well, except for the really cool commercials. Still, many feel too much time is spent in front of the TV.
3. It has been said that most people will spend about 1.1 years of their life cleaning, unless you love dust and fungus. Women traditionally used to clean about 2 times more than men, but it is slowly changing now.
4. 90% of your time will be spent indoors. In a regular working day, you would probably only be outside during the drive to and from work. You eat meals indoors, work indoors, and come home after work. Even if you take an hour each way to travel, that’s only 2 hours out of 24 spent outside. Therefore some time outside would be beneficial. Go on a picnic, explore the world, or just go for a walk.
5. Most spend about nearly 38 hours a year stuck in traffic, or about 3 months of your life. Yup, just sitting in your car, on the road. Getting from point A to point B. Along with all the other drivers, all trying to go somewhere on time.
6. 70% of your waking life will be in front of digital media. So if you spend 16 hours awake per day, that’s about 11 hours glued to the screen. It’s not hard to see why, with people on their phones and computers most of the time. They can’t seem to leave it alone. It’s so hard to turn the devices off and spend quality time doing other things.
This surely puts things into perspective, doesn’t it? You may think it doesn’t take that much time while you’re doing it, but collectively they amount to a lot. Perhaps it is time to rethink how we allocate our time. Wouldn’t it also be great if we could have a job that would allow us more flexibility with our hours for more meaningful things? Wouldn’t you want something like that? If so, then it’s time to #MakeARealDifference.