How we humans spend our time might be one of the most historically significant questions we can explore. After all, what we do with our days says a lot about who we are, individually and collectively. And, hoo boy, has that changed a lot over the past few generations.

A bar chart race video from the YouTube channel Data is Beautiful illustrates the top 15 things people spent time on from 1920 to 2026. The charts exclude sleep, work, and other “activities with minimal variation,” with the goal of seeing what’s changed significantly over time. (If you’re wondering where the data came from, the creator, Sasha, shared a lengthy list of her sources and methodology in the video description.)

The biggest shifts in the last 106 years

In 1920, Housework, Cooking, Eating, and Meeting Friends took up the top four spots, followed by Doing Nothing and Reading Newspapers. Those activities (or lack thereof) continued to dominate the list through the 1920s, until radio became more popular. Listening to Radio shot to the top of the list through the 1930s and stayed at No. 1 through the ’40s.

Housework had another fleeting moment at the top just before television came along. Watching TV quickly dominated, grew, and stayed dominant from the ’50s all the way to the turn of the millennium. While Housework time diminished........

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