Social Substitution? Time Use Responses to Increased Workplace Isolation

This paper examines how people adjust their time use when experiencing more time alone, a growing share of adults’ lives. We exploit the dramatic rise in remote work following the onset of the pandemic, which sharply reduced time spent with non-household members during the workday, to study whether individuals substitute toward more in-person interactions outside of work. On days individuals work from home, they spend 3.5 more hours in activities spent entirely alone and over 5 fewer hours in activities that include any non-household members. Using a difference-in-differences strategy, we compare pre- and post-pandemic changes in time use for workers in teleworkable versus non-teleworkable occupations to ask what happens to time allocations when workers are induced toward remote work. Averaging over all days, teleworkable workers spend 32 more minutes in activities spent entirely alone and 38 fewer minutes in activities that include any non-household members. Normalizing by their 46-minute increase in remote work, these effects are of a similar magnitude to our descriptive estimates. We find almost no substitution toward spending more time with others outside the household to offset lost in-person interactions at work.