Does Your Dominant Hand Shape Your Workplace Habits?

There are two types of people in this world: right-handed and left-handed people. While you may think that the only difference between these two groups is the dominant hand they write with, there are actually a lot of characteristics that distinguish these groups.

Something as simple as your go-to scribe hand can affect very integral parts of your identity. A new study reveals exactly which characteristics are tied to this mannerism adopted at a young age, and some of them may surprise you.

Righties Are More Analytical

While most people identify with being more analytical than creative, this is true even more so for right-handed people. 58 percent of right-handed females say they tend to rely on the focused facts, rather than thinking outside of the box. Comparatively, 51 percent of left-handed females identify with the creative mindset.

As lefties are less common, it’s unsurprising that they are unafraid to explore beyond their imagination. They don’t fit the ‘traditional mold’, making up just 10 percent of the overall population that writes dominantly with their left hand.

Lefties Spend More Time on Social Media

Left-handed people are more likely to spend their free time scrolling, with nearly 35 percent spending upwards of one hour per day on social media. The largest portion of righties spends less than 15 minutes a day on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook.

However, it’s important to note that both of these groups could have been largely underestimating their social media usage in the original survey. Given that the average internet user spends a whopping two and a half hours daily on social media, it’s highly likely that minutes spent scrolling adds up a lot faster than individuals are willing to admit. Maybe this means that lefties are just slightly more honest, or aware than their right-handed counterparts.

Lefties Prefer to Work Remote

Working from home is becoming increasingly common with technological advancements that can connect us to our co-workers from wherever in the world they may be. However, there can also be a significant amount of distractions posed when removed from the conventional workplace environment.

Lefties don’t seem to mind these distractions, as 42 percent of them prefer to work remotely. Contrarily, 68 percent of right-handed females enjoy the traditional office setting that allows them to focus on their productivity.

Righties Are Early Risers

Righties wake up approximately one hour earlier than lefties, who understandably love their beauty sleep. Both groups bedtime falls between 10 and 11 PM, leading to an average of seven hours of sleep for righties, and eight hours for lefties.

Wake-up time seems to be much more strongly correlated with hand preference than gender. For example, right-handed males are the most likely to wake up before five AM, where left-handed males are the most likely to wake up after noon.

... But Everyone Loves Their Caffeine

One thing these two different groups can agree on is that coffee is a must to get through the day. No matter what time they wake up, the majority of both righties and lefties consume between one and three caffeinated beverages daily.

And what about our ambidextrous friends? Being such a rare character trait, it’s hard to parse out exactly what the average ambidextrous person looks like. Maybe they fall into some of both righty and lefty identities, or maybe they have their own separate behaviors and habits—the jury’s still out on this one.

While some of these findings may be mere coincidence, there seems to be a strong, unique identity associated with left- and right-handers. Despite the fact that most children develop a hand preference by 18 months, it still says a lot about who someone is as a person, and it's carried with them throughout adulthood. Not only does this preference end up affecting how one writes, eats, plays sports, and much more; it also is related to productivity, learning, sleep habits, and other obscure behaviors.