Fragmented Moments, Balanced Choices: How Do People Make Use of Their Waiting Time?

TL;DR

This paper investigates how people spend waiting time in naturalistic settings using an experience-sampling study with 21 working adults over two weeks via the Waiting Time Activity tracker (WTA). It reveals that waiting time is predominantly allocated to leisure ($60%$), with roughly equal shares of productive and maintenance activities ($20%$ each), and that context such as device availability and location shifts these distributions. The authors apply multinomial logistic regression to link situational factors to activity choices, finding that computer access increases productive work, home settings favor maintenance, workplaces favor productivity, and lunch breaks reduce leisure, while waiting duration shows limited predictive power. The work broadens the view of waiting time beyond productivity-centric paradigms and provides design guidance for adaptive, device-aware tools that support balanced, user-centered time management and well-being.

Abstract

Everyone spends some time waiting every day. HCI research has developed tools for boosting productivity while waiting. However, little is known about how people naturally spend their waiting time. We conducted an experience sampling study with 21 working adults who used a mobile app to report their daily waiting time activities over two weeks. The aim of this study is to understand the activities people do while waiting and the effect of situational factors. We found that participants spent about 60% of their waiting time on leisure activities, 20% on productive activities, and 20% on maintenance activities. These choices are sensitive to situational factors, including accessible device, location, and certain routines of the day. Our study complements previous ones by demonstrating that people purpose waiting time for various goals beyond productivity and to maintain work-life balance. Our findings shed light on future empirical research and system design for time management.

Figures (6)

• Figure 1: Screenshots of the WTA. (a) The main interface: participants can report an ongoing waiting by selecting "I am waiting for..." or report a previous waiting by selecting "I was waiting for ..." At the top is a tracker showing the number of reports made on the current day and the total number throughout the study; (b) The survey page: participants report their waiting time activities; (c) The settings page: participants can modify notifications and share their data file; (d) A notification: participants can tap this to make a report without manually open the app, ignore it, or dismiss it by tapping "NO". The screenshots were taken on a mobile phone using the dark system theme and recolored into negative black and white for readability.
• Figure 2: Activities while waiting. Areas indicate time spent in that sub-category of activities.
• Figure 3: A mosaic plot of waiting time activities at different locations. Areas (and bar widths) indicate time spent in that activity category. More than half of the waiting time happened at home and maintenance activities were more likely to happen here. Only a small percentage of waiting time happened at workplaces, but productive activities were the most likely here. The proportion of leisure activities was the largest while waiting at public places.
• Figure 4: Distribution of the duration (in minutes) of each waiting session.
• Figure 5: Distribution of the sum duration (in minutes) of waiting sessions in each day.