How Much Time Do You Spend Doing These Things In Your Lifetime?

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How much time people spend doing daily activities in their life?

Most people have some sort of routine that they follow each day. For some these routines are highly sophisticated. Other people have much less consistency in their day-to-day activities. But have you ever stopped and wondered how much time people spend doing daily events in their life?

We’ve all heard that we spend a third of our life sleeping, but what about other daily activities? From brushing your teeth to waiting in line at the grocery store, everything you do takes up some amount of time. It can be quite surprising to see how much time people spend doing daily activities in their life.

How Much Time People Spend Doing Daily Activities in their Life?

Personal Care Habits

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Whether your personal care routine is short and sweet or long and elaborate, we all spend a generous amount of time keeping our bodies clean and well-groomed. Below, you’ll find out how much time the average American spends on personal care and hygiene in a lifetime.

Teeth Brushing

Most dentists recommend brushing your teeth twice per day for two minutes at a time. Following this advice would lead to an average of 79 days spent cleaning their teeth over a lifetime. However, over the course of the average American lifetime, only about 38.5 days are spent brushing teeth. Keep in mind, neither of these figures includes flossing.

Getting Ready

Getting ready means different things to different people. In general, getting prepared typically consists of showering, dressing, and applying makeup. As might be expected most women spend more time getting ready than their male counterparts, but how much more time precisely?

One study showed that on average women spend 136 days of their life getting ready to go somewhere. In contrast, men only spend 46 days preparing themselves to go out. Of course, these values will vary slightly from person to person.

Keep in mind that these numbers don’t include how much time is spent picking out the clothes you’ll wear. Women spend an astonishing 287 days of their lives merely picking out outfits.


For many men, shaving is a crucial part of their daily routine. For men in professional settings or food service, it’s essential to keep facial hair in check. But how much time does the average man spend shaving? According to a Reader’s Digest survey, men spend around four months of their lives shaving.

Household Habits

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In addition to taking care of ourselves, most people follow some routine for keeping their home clean and organized. Most tasks don’t seem to take a long time, but just like with personal care, the minutes quickly add up.


In the previous section on personal habits, we mentioned that women spend nearly an entire year of their lives merely choosing outfits to wear. But how long do those outfits take to care for? According to Newstrategist data, people will spend an average of 3 years of their lives washing and drying clothes.

Kitchen Cleanup

According to this study conducting by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Americans spend a significant amount of their lives dedicated to kitchen and food clean-up. On average women spend 13 minutes of each day dedicated to cleaning up kitchen messes. In contrast, men use up only 4 minutes of their average day tidying the kitchen.

With a little simple math, we see that women spend about 80 hours per year cleaning up the kitchen. Men spend just over 24 hours in a year caring for kitchen messes. While lifespan varies from person to person, you can see that we dedicate quite a bit of time to cleaning up our kitchens.


While we spend between 4 and 13 minutes a day cleaning our kitchens, surveys have shown that the average American consumes only around 30 minutes a day cooking or doing meal prep. For the average adult, food prep equates to about 183 hours per year and a whopping 10,980 hours per lifetime. Or in other words, about 1.25 years.

Outside the Home

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For many people, leaving home is an integral part of their daily routine. Most adults will leave their house to go to work in the morning. Students across the world frequently leave home to attend school or classes. Even if you’re getting out of the house for a quick trip to the store or to connect with nature, most people leave their home daily.


In America, most households own at least one vehicle. Cars are used to get us where we want to go, and where we have to go. But how much time does the average person spend driving in their lifetime?

Well, according to a study conducted by AAA, American drivers spend roughly 294 hours behind the wheel every year. Taking into account minimum driving age and average life expectancy, we spend a little over two years of our lives going from place to place.


As one might assume,  work constitutes a significant portion of how we spend our days. On average, adults work forty hours per week from the time they are 20 until they retire at age 65. With that schedule, the average person works about 93,600 hours per lifetime or a little more than 10.5 years.

Spending Time In Nature

According to the EPA, Americans spend 90% of their time indoors. That statistic means only 10% of our life is spent outside in an open-air environment. Over the course of an average American lifespan, that means a little less than eight years is spent outside.

For much of the small fraction of the time we spend outdoors, we are merely moving from indoor setting to indoor setting. The amount of time dedicated to getting outdoors and interacting with nature is dismally low.

Health-Related Habits

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How we choose to spend our time can have drastic effects on our health. But how much time do we spend explicitly performing health-related habits?


For many people weight loss is a struggle that seems never-ending. Particularly for women, diets seem to be an ingrained part of existence, especially for those seeking cultural acceptance.

Regardless of what your personal view of dieting is, it’s a widespread practice among women. One study from the company Diet Chef revealed that on average, women spend about 17 years of their lives dedicated to dieting


We all know that regular exercise is vital for a healthy lifestyle. Some of us spend more time devoted to gym activities and other forms of exercise than others. The average person will spend approximately 180 days of their lifetime performing some exercise.

Sitting Down

We’ve heard it in the news; sitting is practically the next smoking. Being stuck in a seated position for extended periods of time is terrible for our health. To top it off, with increasing workloads and decreasing free time, the amount of time we spend sitting is vast.

An average person spends 7,709 days of his or her lifetime in a seated position. With a little quick division, that number equates to roughly 21 years spent sitting down!

Grocery Shopping

The foods we eat have a direct impact on our health, and the grocery store is where we get most of the foods we consume. On average, grocery shoppers visit their favorite store 1.5 times a week and stay there for around 43 minutes. All that time adds up to about 60 hours per year of our adult lives or roughly 360 hours in total.

Hobbies and Freetime

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In our fast-paced society, it can seem like we have insufficient time to dedicate to hobbies or other free time activities. According to the American Time Use Survey conducted by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, we spend a little less than 5 hours per day on “leisure and sports.”

Watching TV

It’s probably no surprise that Americans spend a lot of time watching TV.  In fact, over half of our leisure time is spent consuming our favorite shows. We spend 2 hours and 47 minutes watching television each day. That equates to around 42 days per year.


Socializing with friends and family is a crucial part of our existence. Creating a community around ourselves has been shown to improve overall health and happiness. In our everyday lives, we dedicate about 41 minutes to socializing per day. Over the course of a year that’s about ten days total and about 600 days over the course of adulthood.

It may seem that the small activities in our day to day lives are insignificant, but when taken over the course of a lifetime they add up.

How much time people spend doing daily activities in their life adds up to hours, days, and even years of our lives spent performing seemingly simple tasks. Of course, on the other hand, these numbers show just how significant the smalls things actually are.

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