The human ‘chronome’ aims to build a multi-dimensional, population-level assessment of human existence over time.
It describes how societies partition their available time between activities, environments and social contexts, seeking to create a high-level, quantitative overview. The framework is applicable to any point in time, enabling comparisons of 21st century civilization to other periods in human history.
Filling in the chronome is a highly interdisciplinary endeavour and draws on various aspects of natural and social sciences. Data are drawn from heterogenous public, private and academic sources, and include time use surveys, labour force statistics, input-output tables, small-scale observational studies, and new technologies.
The Global Human Day
Our first contribution to the chronome combined global data on economic and non-economic activities to provide an estimate of the average time use by all living humans circa 2019.
Published by Fajzel et al. (PNAS, 2023).
Data are available on Zenodo.
