What makes a 'good day'? Researchers at UBC find it involves no more than six hours of work
In determining what differentiates a good day from a typical one, University of British Columbia psychology research has found that we don’t like to work more than six hours a day.
“We found that working for up to six hours had no impact on whether people rated their day as better than usual. When individuals worked for more than six hours though, the effects rapidly turned negative,” says Dunigan Folk, Ph.D. candidate at UBC, in a February 2025 research paper . Folk’s team also included researchers from the University of Basel in Switzerland.
They used data from the 2013 and 2021 versions of the American Time Use Survey (ATUS), to identify “clear tipping points” that differentiate better days from typical ones.
The study looked at over 100 activities involved in ATUS participants rating their day as “better” than a typical day versus the “same” as a typical day. The ATUS is an annual cross-sectional survey of the United States population in which participants are asked to reconstruct their previous day.
Generally speaking, according to the researchers, we don’t seem to want to work more than six hours a day. And we’re only happy with a brief commute. Socializing has a positive effect — up to a point — but we’re happy to spend unlimited time with friends. Engaging in sports is good until we pass the fifth hour mark. Relaxing that is constituted by watching a screen was determined by the researchers as automatically having a negative impact on a person’s day.
Time spent working ranked as one of the most important variables in predicting whether people had a good day, ranking third in 2013 and seventh in 2021. Working was relatively inconsequential for up to six hours, at which point it quickly became negatively associated with having a good day.
Commuting was also within the top 20 most important variables in both 2021 and 2013, according to the researchers. Notably, in 2021 brief (15-minute) commutes showed a slight positive association with having a good day, potentially because there may have been emotional benefits from getting out of the house during the COVID-19 pandemic. Other than this brief initial boost in 2021, the effects of commuting were increasingly negative until the 90-minute mark.
The researchers point out that very few people reported commutes of greater than 90 minutes in 2021 (1.63 per cent) or 2013 (2.38 per cent).
General socializing was identified as an important activity for having a good day; however, after the two-hour mark socializing had little influence. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the researchers highlighted that “time spent with friends, in contrast, had an almost boundlessly positive effect.”
Turning to sports and exercise, as well as relaxing and leisure, these activities were rated as important in both 2013 and 2021, but there was a significant difference between the two.
Time spent on sports and exercise was positively associated with having a good day up until approximately five hours in, at which point additional time did not increase its impact on the likelihood that the survey participants had a good day.
“Surprisingly, spending any amount of time on relaxation and leisure negatively impacted the probability of having a good day, and it was most detrimental in 2021,” say the researchers.
The researchers blame screen time for this result. “A likely explanation for this finding is that ‘watching television and movies’ accounted for most of the minutes people spent on relaxation and leisure in both 2021 (70 per cent) and 2013 (72 per cent).”
The researchers say their findings were largely consistent across individuals, which is “particularly striking given how broadly the activity categories were defined.” For example, an hour of working, could involve dull data entry or an invigorating brainstorming session. Even without those crucial distinctions, the researchers say their models still predicted good versus typical days with “up to 65 per cent accuracy.”
Survey participants were asked to rate their day with respect to their own determinations of a typical day. The aim was to reduce the likelihood that the findings here are influenced by demographic variables such as wealth or education. Instead, “good days were simply days where people reported feeling better than they normally do.”
Taken together, say the researchers, the results “suggest that good days emerge from the constantly shifting value of time. Each minute in a day represents a choice between competing opportunities, with clear tipping points when benefits diminish and costs mount.”
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