A group of scientists from the University of British Columbia, in Canada, and the University of Basel, in Switzerland, made a investigation on what makes a happy day different from a typical one. They determined more than 100 variables to answer that question, and the length of the working day occupied a prominent place.
«How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives»defined the novelist Annie Dillard in her book The Writing Life (The life of a writer), suggesting that our existence is made up of the sum of our daily routines.
That quote was the inspiration for the new scientific study, published on March 13, 2026, in National Library of Medicine (NLM), the United States National Library of Medicine, which has the largest biomedical literature in the world.
The researchers Dunigan Folk, Mirka Henninger and Elizabeth Dunn are the authors of the researchwhose main source of Data were the results of eight editions of the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), to find out what determines what people consider «a good day.»
The variables of happiness
The United States Bureau of Labor Statistics provided the information provided by tens of thousands of North American citizens, between 18 and 50 years old, from 2013 to 2021.
By recording their time use, participants reported the activities they performed each day. Some of the options that the participants had were: time with family, socializing, time with friends; time alone with your spouse, time with your children at home, eating and drinking.
The following also appear on the list: providing child care; work-related travel; garden or houseplant care; participate in sports, exercise and recreation; go shopping at the supermarket; help or care for people who do not belong to the household; care of children who do not live at home, among many more.
It is worth clarifying that the hundred variables were conceived as mutually exclusive, that is, an activity where two factors perhaps converged, such as time with friends and meetings with family, were considered as individual activities.
The key point was to discover the number of minutes they spent on some of those activities and the evaluation of how much it affected their day and whether or not they related it to maintaining a «happy and productive» routine.
Although the results are descriptive in nature and the researchers assure that they require more analysis to establish causal relationships, they highlighted that there were repetitive mentions that established patterns, with respect to socializing and the duration of the relationship. work day.
The length of an «ideal» workday
The three authors of the research complemented their respective training to interpret the results. Folk has a PhD in Philosophy, Social and Personality Psychology from the University of British Columbia.
Henninger is Professor of Statistics and Data Science at the Faculty of Psychology at the University of Basel, and has a research program dedicated to psychological measurement, psychometrics, machine learning methods and multilevel modeling.
Dunn is a social psychologist and professor at the University of British Columbia, a celebrated voice in the analysis of productivity and job satisfaction. «Happiness at work boosts productivity and retains talent,» is one of the phrases that represents his professional vision.
In the classification of important variables to establish whether it had been a good day, work activity ranked seventh in 2013, and fourth in 2021, which indicates that the work day has greater preponderance in the indicators of a greater or lesser degree of happiness.
«Work 6 hours could not be related to a better than normal day, but working more than six hours was associated with strong decreases in the probability of having a good day,» the specialists indicate.
Therefore, it was determined that the ideal working day could be found in the six o’clockto allocate the remaining time of the day to spend time with loved ones, carry out small leisure activities and practice active leisure activities, such as physical exercise.
This translates into improved mental health and general well-being. The other point highlighted in the article was socialize, what turned out one of the activities most strongly linked to the probability of having a good day.
Socialization includes time with friends and family, as long as the time spent on social gatherings does not exceed two hours. In leisure activities, a limit of five hours per day as the «healthy» maximum.
Long trips to get to work, another determining factor in happiness
Travel to the workplace was also part of the variables analyzed, and the participants indicated that the short toursof an average of 15 minutes, are mostly associated with «good days»while those that exceed 90 minutes have negative connotations.
«We know very little about how much time people spend on certain activities on days they consider better than usual; some activities may be like salt in a cookie recipe, present only in small amounts on most good days, and others may be more like chocolate chips, usually present in larger doses,» the authors said.
The intention of the analysis they carried out was to identify some of the behavioral components that usually accompany good days, which translates into a perspective of the rhythms and routines that characterize «happy days.»
