Social Substitution? Time Use Responses to Increased Workplace Isolation

This paper examines how people adjust their time use when they experience an increase in time spent alone, which is a growing share of adults’ lives. We utilize the dramatic rise in remote work following the onset of the pandemic, which is associated with a large decline in time spent in the physical presence of non-household members during the workday, to observe the extent to which individuals substitute toward more in-person interactions in non-work settings. We first document that on days that individuals work from home, they spend 3.5 additional hours in activities spent entirely alone and over 5 fewer hours in activities that include any non-household members. We then use a difference-in-difference strategy to ask what happens to time allocations when workers are induced toward remote work by analyzing changes over time in how workers in teleworkable occupations—who experienced the lion’s share of the post-COVID increase in remote work—spend their time relative to workers in non-teleworkable occupations. Averaging over all days of the week, we see a relative increase in time spent in activities spent entirely alone by 32 minutes and a decrease in activities that include any non-household members by 38 minutes for workers in teleworkable jobs. Normalizing by the increase in average daily remote work time (46 minutes), these estimates are of a similar magnitude to what we observe in our descriptive analysis. When individuals are induced to work from home, they exhibit almost no substitution toward spending more time with others who are not in their household to make up for the loss of time with others at work.