His research for the religion spread gave Dykman another idea: a spread on the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ American Time Use Survey itself. Readers, he thought, would want to know how the average American spent time, and how their own priorities compared.

He was also interested in Americans’ impression that they had so little time. “I’ve always been fascinated by the perception that we work more than ever and have less time for leisure,” he says. “The opposite is actually somewhat true. We have more leisure time than we… did 100 years ago, 50 years ago, and even 30 years ago.” He was convinced that the notion of the “time crunch” was related more to the choices people made than to the shortage of hours in the day. “We never have time to read a book,” he notes, “yet we have time for six hours of television a day.”