Time use, work and overlapping activities: evidence from Australia

Introducing multitasking to the study of travel and ICT: Examining its extent and assessing its potential importance

“…Previous studies have highlighted differing propensity to multitask according to factors including age, educational attainment, employment status, gender, household lifecycle and income (Floro and Miles, 2003). Results from this study are mixed, but the data do hint at relationships between certain characteristics and multitasking.…”

“…In a time when more than 50 per cent of the adult population agrees with the statement, 'I am often under time pressure in my everyday life' (Kreitzman, 1999), more people appear to be refraining from choosing between activities, seeking instead to perform activities simultaneously, thus 'trying to squeeze more than a day's worth of activities into any one 24-hour period' (Floro and Miles, 2001). There is consensus in the literature that failure to recognise this simultaneous conduct of activities has distorted the picture of popular time use, leading to a biased account of the amount of time that people devote to different activities.…”

“…The same author suggests that personal interaction, communications and passive leisure are similarly underreported, each vital to the study area under consideration by the present authors. It can also lead to errors in measuring change in activity participation, suggesting substitution effects where in fact activities are added to daily life (Floro and Miles, 2003). In this sense, activity participation is no longer reduced to a zero sum game, in which the addition of an activity requires the subtraction of another.…”

“…Thus, studies have shown that up to 95 per cent of the population report multitasking each day (Hungerford, 2001). For approximately one third of the day, people report participating in more than one activity concurrently (ibid; also Bittman and Wajcman, 2000;Floro and Miles, 2001;Ruuskanene, 2004;using data from 1979, Michelson andFrederick (2004) found this figure to be 44 per cent).…”

The Multitasking of Household Production

“…For example, Kimmel & Connelly (2007), consistent with Becker's model, focus only on time spent in child care as a primary activity, as in their framework minutes spent in all primary activities must sum to 24 hours. Ignoring secondary household production such as cooking and cleaning, however, seriously underestimates individuals' economic contributions (Floro & Miles 2003). More commonly, empirical analyses of household pro- One of the few studies that have attempted to analyze multitasked time directly is Jirjahn (2000), who examines a theoretical model of multitasking in the workplace to determine whether fixed wages or profit-sharing is the better payment scheme to reward employees who multitask.…”