Whether it's Paul Ryan's outspoken remarks, or the Swedish shifting to a 30-hour workweek, there's a lot of talk in the news lately about work-life balance. But how does your work-life balance compare to other Americans, taking into consideration factors such as education and your commute? Nathan Yau's latest visualization calculator from FlowingData helps you figure it out.
Plucking his data set from the American Community Survey—and inspired by a New York Times data viz that showed household counts with various family makeups—Yau's calculator allows you to drag sliders to determine your level of education, annual income, weekly work hours, and commute time to work. It then tells you roughly how many Americans share your work-life-salary-commute balance.
For example, Yau's tools show there are only 39,764 Americans who never went to college, have an annual income of $100,000 or more, and work from home. Those guys must feel pretty lucky! But if you've got a bachelor's degree, an annual salary between $50,000 and $75,000, a 40-hour work week, and up to a 30-minute commute every day, you're one of nearly 1.5 million Americans.
Since his calculator only allows you to check out one permutation at a time, Yau also put together a handy interactive chart that allows you to compare the data about a whole spectrum of different demographics. Comparing education against Income, for example, the largest demographic of people in the country is people who never went to college making less than $10,000 a year, which is just depressing. But you can also compare commute against work hours, income against commute, or any other combo.
Playing with this visualization, I ended up feeling pretty lucky in my life. On the other end of the spectrum, you may well have the opposite reaction. But if so, at least you can quantify exactly how life is screwing you over compared to your peers. That's gotta be worth something.