Remote work does make more time for work-life balance. Here’s the data

There’s no debate that remote work is here to stay, but the question is what shape it takes and how different types of workers are changing the amount of time they work. My new research shows that remote workers have reduced their time at work and increased their time in leisure substantially between 2019 to 2023, and these trends continued into 2023.

How to measure time spent working

To explore the effects of this shift, I used data from the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), restricted to employed, full-time respondents aged 25 to 65, providing a comprehensive measurement of time allocated to various activities with minimal measurement error.

This data set offers more reliable insights than other labor supply surveys, such as the Current Population Survey or the American Community Survey, due to reduced recall bias. Furthermore, the analysis focused on non-self-employed workers, as their occupational classification is clearer.

One of the major benefits of the ATUS is that it measures a wide array of activities, not just time at work, like many existing surveys, allowing me to track time across work, leisure, household chores, childcare, and more. Leisure is defined as time spent socializing, passive and active leisure, volunteering, pet care, and gardening.

Since the ATUS collects detailed 24-hour time diaries in which respondents report all the activities from the previous day in time intervals, the records are also more reliable than standard measures of time allocated to work available in other federal data sets that require respondents to recall how much they worked over the previous year or week. These diaries contain much less noise than typical survey results.

To measure remote work, I used the “remotability” index from professors Jonathan Dingel and Brent Neiman’s 2020 paper in the Journal of Public Economics, which is based on the Department of Labor’s O*NET task-level data on how many tasks in an occupation can be done remotely.

Updated 2023 time use patterns

My recently updated research compares how people have changed their time allocation between 2019 and 2023 when they work in remote jobs versus hybrid or on-site.

While remote workers tend to spend 28 minutes more per day than their non-remote counterparts in 2019, remote workers drastically reduced their time at work over the pandemic: 32 minutes per day less in 2020, 41 minutes less in 2021, 57 minutes less in 2022, and 35 minutes less in 2023. Conversely, workers in more remote jobs allocated more time toward leisure over these years.

Do these changes in time use simply reflect differences in the type of worker within remote jobs over time? All my results control for demographic factors, such as age and education, hourly wages, and differences across industries and occupations. I also studied changes in the composition of more versus less remote jobs over these years, finding minimal differences.

Interestingly, the time spent on home production (household chores, caring for household members) and shopping did not increase significantly. What did, however, is a slight increase in other activities not otherwise classified. Overall, remote workers are not merely reallocating their work time to household activities but are genuinely engaging in more leisure.

Labor and leisure changes varied across different demographic groups, and these trends diverged in some cases in 2023. In particular, men reduced their time at work by 33 minutes per day in 2021 and 58 minutes per day in 2022, relative to 2019, but only 13 minutes per day in 2023.

In contrast, women reduced their time at work over these years, but that intensified in 2023 when they reduced their time at work even more by 76 minutes per day, relative to 2019. Singles and those without children also showed a steeper decline in labor and an increase in leisure activities, though the effects were less significant in 2023.

Crucially, these declines in time at work are not driven by the role of commuting. While commute times have declined overall, the bulk of the decline in time at work has been driven by actual time working—not commuting.

These results provide insights into the ongoing debate about quiet quitting, where employees may be dissatisfied with their jobs and reduce their efforts. While the data does not directly measure job satisfaction, ATUS includes some information on subjective well-being. Remote workers reported slightly higher life satisfaction and felt more rested than their in-office counterparts in 2021, suggesting they are not necessarily quiet quitting. Instead, they might be reallocating their time to activities they prefer, enabled by the flexibility of remote work.

Understanding why

Why such a large change in how much men and women work in 2023? Women who typically work in remote intensive jobs work 46 minutes per day more than their less remote counterparts, consistent with my writing last year that did not yet include 2023 data. However, the decline in time at work accelerated more in 2023 for women in remote jobs.

One possibility is that more women have reported burnout than men, although they decreased their time at work in 2022. Another possibility is that there has been some switching back to in-person work, which may be harder to do for some women who have more caregiving responsibilities, particularly in light of prior research of mine with Chris Herbst and Ali Umair documenting the significant effect that state regulations had on the availability of childcare during the pandemic. In this sense, men in more remote intensive jobs may have returned to work more in 2023 with their hybrid jobs, whereas women did not.

I find that time spent in childcare for women with children grows by 28 minutes per day in 2022, but only 15 minutes per day in 2023, relative to 2019. While the same patterns do not exist for men, and are part of the explanation, it is not the full story.

Could preferences over in-person versus remote work explain the differences in time use? In companion work, I found that men dislike full working-from-home arrangements, whereas I do not see the same for women.

The data also suggests a preference toward remote work among women, so if these jobs have fewer opportunities and/or requirements around work, then the gradual return to office would result in fewer hours.

Coupled with all of these patterns are findings from Gallup surveys, which show us that only 33% of employees are engaged, so burnout—or low engagement— may be a very real phenomenon.

What are the consequences on productivity? Time will tell, but the positive effects of greater flexibility may have offset the negative effect of lower labor. However, much more work, including understanding differences in time use among all genders, still has to be done.