What Did 909 Working Women Rate as the Worst Part of Their Day?
In Kahneman's 2004 Day Reconstruction study, the morning commute ranked last and intimate time and socializing first. What that says about an enjoyable day.
In this article5 sections
Imagine a questionnaire that takes up to 75 minutes and asks you to write out yesterday as a film, scene by scene, then score every scene on twelve feelings. In 2004 a team led by Daniel Kahneman gave that task to 909 employed women and published the result in Science (volume 306, page 1776) as the Day Reconstruction Method. Commuting ranked last of the activities listed, and intimate time with a partner and socializing ranked first, a ranking quoted ever since by anyone with an opinion about commuting.
How the study worked
Kahneman, Alan Krueger, David Schkade, Norbert Schwarz and Arthur Stone gave a questionnaire to a convenience sample of 1,018 employed women, then analyzed the 909 who had worked on the day in question. A later paper by Kahneman and Krueger places the sample in Texas. The women were 49% white non-Hispanic, averaged 38 years old, and lived in households averaging $54,700 in income.
Feelings were scored from 0 (not at all) to 6 (very much). Positive affect meant the average of happy, warm/friendly and enjoying myself. The point was to get the accuracy of in-the-moment reports without pestering anyone with a beeper.
What ranked best and worst
Table 1 of the paper gives the average positive-affect rating by activity. The top and bottom looked like this:
| Activity | Positive affect (0-6) | Hours per day |
|---|---|---|
| Intimate relations | 5.10 | 0.2 |
| Socializing | 4.59 | 2.3 |
| Relaxing | 4.42 | 2.2 |
| Housework | 3.73 | 1.1 |
| Working | 3.62 | 6.9 |
| Commuting | 3.45 | 1.6 |
Among the people the women were with, friends scored highest (4.36) and being alone lowest (3.41), with the boss only slightly above that at 3.52. On a separate enjoyment scale the authors built, commuting to work averaged 2.86 and relaxing with friends 4.92.
Which part of the commute was worst?
The Science paper lumps commuting together. A 2006 follow-up in the Journal of Economic Perspectives by Kahneman and Krueger split it, using the same women. The morning commute had a net affect (positive minus negative feelings) of 2.09 on the 0 to 6 scale, the lowest of 19 activities. The evening commute scored 2.77, working 2.68, socializing after work 4.15, and intimate relations 4.83.
The same paper introduced the U-index, the share of time in which a person’s most intense feeling was a negative one. The morning commute had a U-index of 0.287, meaning that in roughly 29% of that time the strongest feeling was a negative one. Intimate relations came in at 0.040 and socializing after work at 0.073. Averaged over the whole day, the women spent 17.7% of their time in an unpleasant state.
One detail from that table is oddly useful: socializing at work scored 3.78 against 4.15 for socializing after work. Same activity, different setting, a visible gap. Time pressure at work showed a similar effect, with enjoyment at 2.88 for women who reported constant pressure to work quickly and 3.96 for those who did not.
What it suggests about an ordinary day
Read as a budget, the data are unflattering. The two most enjoyable activities took up about 2.5 hours between them. Working took 6.9 hours and the two commutes together about 1.1. A day is mostly spent where the ratings are lowest.
That makes the practical levers fairly plain, with the caveat that they are inferences and not results. The cheapest swap is whatever replaces some commute minutes, which the commute tax post prices in hours per year. Another is more time with people and less time alone. Remote work can remove the worst slot entirely, though what happens to the morning without a commute is its own problem. A third lever is the setting of the good activities: the work-versus-after-work gap suggests that moving a lunch from the office to the evening is not a trivial change.
Kahneman’s earlier colonoscopy study on peak and end showed how memory rewrites an experience afterward. The DRM is the other side of that coin: it tries to capture how the day felt before memory edits it. Fragmented free time, which the glossary entry on time confetti covers, is a different question that this dataset does not address.
Limits of the study
The sample was 1,018 employed women recruited as a convenience sample, so it is not a picture of men, retirees or anyone outside it. It covers a single day per person, and it relies on memory, though the authors compared it with experience sampling and found the tiredness pattern, which dips around midday, reproduced closely. Activities are also confounded with context. Commutes happen early, when people are tired, and intimate time happens when people have chosen it. The ratings describe how those episodes felt, not what would happen if you reassigned them.
The scale also measures enjoyment, not excitement. A day can be enjoyable and still feel like every other day, which is a separate problem.