The New York Times has published an interactive graph visualizing data from the latest American Time Use Study, which asked thousands of Americans to recall how they usually spend the 24 hours of a day. The graphic is cool, because the data can be broken down by gender, age, race, employment status and education inter alia.

But I find the statistics quite surprising. Living in Europe, I can’t tell first-hand how Americans spend their days, but personally I spend much less time watching TV and movies than those people who have been asked in the study. For example, the study says that around 6pm almost 20% of all Americans would watch television. On the average, almost three hours a day is spent on sitting in front of the TV. In my personal experience, I would say the time spent talking to people (on the phone, for example) and the time spent on the Internet actually surpasses the time spent on watching TV. According to the study, however, computer use only accounts for eight minutes of a day. I don’t know about you, but if you were asking me, I’d say the numbers are way off base here.

The only explanation I can come up with, is that, since people have been asked to recall their daily routine and have thus relied on their subjective perception when answering that question, most people underestimate the time spent using a computer. It may be that computers and the Internet, which can also be accessed from mobile devices, has become such an integral part of everyday life that we don’t actually think about using computers anymore. Every time you use your iPhone to browse Twitter or when you use your Blackberry to check emails, that’s actually use of a (small) computer, but we don’t really think “Hey, I’m using a computer now”, because we’re doing it on the train or while on the move. Computers, and especially the Internet, have gone mobile and by that they have been ingrained even deeper in our lifes than we might think at first.

Anyway, the numbers are still quite interesting, especially when looking at the stats for different groups of people. You should really give them a look when you have a bit time left (to use your computer).