# 5.2 Simultaneity of activities

Accurately measuring multitasking — when two or more activities are conducted simultaneously — is critical for measuring total work burden and gender differences in time allocation (Craig and Brown, 2016). A longstanding literature has pointed to the relevance of data on multitasking for improving our estimates of women’s participation and time in unpaid work — based on traditional time use surveys showing that women regularly conduct different unpaid domestic and care activities together, as well as alongside other activities in employment and leisure (Floro, 1995; Budig and Folbre, 2004; Irani and Vemireddy, 2021). Accurate quantification of these overlapping time constraints can in turn inform the effective design of care policies and measuring progress towards the Sustainable Development Goal to recognize and value unpaid work across countries. Moreover, accurate quantification of the incidence and time spent in simultaneously conducted activities can help us answer open questions around the links between multitasking and a range of outcomes related to health, leisure, productivity, and stress (Bittman and Wajcman, 2000; Floro and Miles, 2003; Manhart, 2004; Craig and Brown, 2016, 2017; Zaiceva-Razzolini, 2022).

In this section, we show that the mode of data collection also matters in assessing the role of multitasking in individuals’ time allocation, and with implications for understanding of women’s unpaid work burden. As discussed earlier, the smartphone diary allowed respondents to select multiple activities they were involved in at a given time, allowing for a continuous examination of how different activities were layered with each other throughout the day. The recall diary, alternatively, recorded (when applicable) a single secondary activity that respondents were involved in alongside the main activity for a given 15-minute interval. Appendix Figure A1 shows that the recall diary preface read out to respondents suggested secondary activities that might include collecting water or cooking, alongside caring for children. This yields different approaches to capturing simultaneous activities — while the smartphone diary did not distinguish between main and secondary activities (every activity was selected on its own, without any limits on the number of simultaneous activities that can be recorded), the recall diary did distinguish between the two, and encouraged respondents to consider a specific secondary activity that might have typically been done alongside the main one. As a result, close to 10 percent of respondents in the smartphone treatment arm often reported three or more activities (although typically not more than three) within a 15-minute or shorter duration, compared to the maximum ceiling of two activities in the recall diary.

The analysis shows that nearly all (around 95 percent, for both treatment arms) of women’s daily multitasked non-leisure time was from conducting different unpaid domestic and care activities together. However, if we consider leisure activities (see Appendix Table A1 for the breakdown of leisure activities), the share of women’s multitasked time in unpaid work was greater in the smartphone arm (38 percent, compared to 23 percent in the recall arm). As discussed below, this stems from greater reporting in the recall arm of multitasked time in leisure; the smartphone arm, on the other hand, revealed higher participation in multitasked employment, unpaid work, and transport activity.

To provide a richer understanding of different types of activities that were conducted together in both treatment arms, Tables 10 and 11 present heat map charts for the share of women and men, respectively, 24