How do people in different countries spend their time?

[noahlt]

Fascinating statistics. I wish the charts had been designed in a way that made it easier to compare the numbers: for instance, I want to visually compare the number of hours that each country spends sleeping, but these charts force me to read the numbers instead of interpreting the graphics.

[pmjoyce]

A classic example of a poor choice of visualisation. Pie and donuts aren't always useless but they're very awkward to interpret here.

I made a quick'n'dirty replacement using a stacked column chart if anyone is interested:

https://demo.geckoboard.com/dashboard/CF6225A8BF97972D/

[stralep]

Pie charts are mostly useless...

I really don't see any reason for their usage here, except of their resemblance to the shape of the sun (and analog clock).

[aslakhellesoy]

If only the world would stop using pie charts. They are inherently broken. http://blog.jgc.org/2009/08/please-dont-use-pie-charts.html

[lell]

Agreed --- looks like the rankings of the variables are the same for each country, and even the ratios vary only slightly. This information would be better presented in a table (with standard error reported) or a bar graph. The original OECD[1] report presents this information much more lucidly. When The Economist filtered the OED report, they should have paid more attention to clarity of presentation.

[1] http://www.oecd.org/document/24/0,3343,en_2649_34637_2671576...

[silentbicycle]

Among other complaints (pie charts?), it seems odd that "eating / sleeping" are combined. Seeing each individually would be far more useful.

The actual report (not the Economist summary) has better graphs and more info, though - perhaps that should have been linked instead?

[igrekel]

I can't support this enough. The economist's summary had me just saying "so what", but after reading this comment I started looking at the actual report and I must say it is much much more interesting.

http://www.oecd.org/document/24/0,3343,en_2649_34637_2671576...

[Jach]

They all look mostly the same, sure the French spend nearly double the time on "Personal Care" as Americans but when you're talking about 0.7 hours vs. 1.3 hours that's really not a big difference. I'd be a lot more interested in countries like Russia, China, and various places in the Middle East, Africa, and South America. More precise age groups would also be interesting.

[mkuhn]

I think the number on "Paid work and study" had quite significant differences (Japan 6.3, Germany 3.9 (which is less than France and surprisingly low)) and was very interesting.

But I definitely agree that numbers from a more diverse country sample could be very interesting.

[brunt]

What exactly is "Other", and why does Germany do it so much more than other countries?

[tybris]

Conquering other countries.

More seriously, I can imagine it includes travel to work, which tends to be an epic journey through traffic jams in densely populated countries like Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands.

[briandon]

Lumping in information gathered about people spanning such an enormous age range (15 through 64) is a bit curious.

[Derbasti]

How does the 'paid work' part relate to the average salaries in these countries?