Behind Your Day
中文
Data year 2022

See the work behind spending

See the work across borders
that supports everyday life.

Enter an everyday purchase. Behind Your Day estimates the work time associated with it across raw materials, production, transport and services.

One person-hour means one person working for one hour. It is a statistical estimate across the supply chain, not the actual time taken to make the item or provide the service.

4 countries covered28 purchase choices2022 data year
Add a purchase

Start with a meal

What work sits behind a TWD 200 meal?

Example: Taiwan · Eating out · 15 June 2025

Estimated work time: about 26 minutes in total

This adds up the work time attributed to this purchase, from raw materials and production to transport and service. It equals about 0.43 person-hours, not the wait for your meal or the time a chef spent preparing it.

Trade & food service
73%
Agriculture, forestry & fishing
11%
Manufacturing
7%
Other industries
9%

The shares show how this kind of purchase involves work in agriculture, manufacturing and other industries, as well as food service. They come from industry averages, not a survey of the suppliers behind this particular meal.

Percentages are rounded. See the full example for the inputs and model version. In Taiwan, coffee and eating out currently use the same food-service data, so the model cannot tell how much work went into a particular drink or meal.

Read the full example and sources →

How it works

Start with one purchase. See the work behind it.

  1. 01Enter a purchase

    Tell us where you spent, what you bought and how much it cost.

  2. 02Estimate work time

    We use global industry, employment and working-hours data to estimate the work time associated with this purchase.

  3. 03See the breakdown

    See how the estimated time is distributed across industries.

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Reading the result

An estimate, not a stopwatch

The result estimates how much work time is associated with an everyday purchase across raw materials, production, transport and services. It is a statistical estimate, not the actual time taken to make that item or provide that service.

Data and estimation method

The site covers Taiwan, the United States, Japan and South Korea with 28 purchase choices. We combine official household spending data with global supply-chain data to estimate work time, labelled “Country-based estimate”. Classifications and calculation details differ by country, and official data may cover more products than a choice on screen suggests. See Sources for the full explanation.

View data sources, limitations and licences

Further reading

Understand the numbers and the work behind them

Your data

Records stay in your browser

Behind Your Day requires no account and does not upload purchase records or estimated results. Records stay in this browser on this device and are removed if you clear site data.