June 24, 2022 3:34 pm
Few things are more depressing than estimates of how much time people spend on a specific activity in their lifetime. You know what I mean: you’ll spend a third of your life sleeping, nearly a decade staring at your phone, and four months deciding what to watch on streaming channels.
A new study by researchers from the Maryland and Delaware enterprise university partnership applies this approach to office work. Thanks to a survey conducted on five thousand employees in the United States and the United Kingdom, scholars have identified how many minutes are wasted in useless activities for each working day (meetings are excluded, which often turn out to be useless, but not always and not for all). The authors then extrapolated these figures and came to estimate how much time could be better spent, the so-called “weighted total futility”. The results are literally incredible.
Correcting typing errors takes an average of twenty minutes in the day for each employee, for a total of one hundred and eighty days, or six months, in forty-five years of profession. Some words are typed so frequently that on their own they can take entire days away from an employee’s existence. The most frequent mistake in the Anglo-Saxon world is “thnaks” (thanks), followed by “teh” (the), “yuo” (you) and “remeber” (remember). Even the time spent writing “best wishes” is counted in days.
Knit
A goat’s gestation takes about 145 days. The equivalent of how long a worker spends on average over his career to log into accounts. Security issues take some time, but months are spent trying to remember passwords, entering them incorrectly or updating them. We spend countless hours staring at a screen waiting for something to happen.
If opening pages and applications takes a lot of time, the same is true when you have to close them. Eliminating help windows and suggestion boxes takes days to complete. Refusing the constant requests to schedule operating system updates is another slice of existence that you will never be able to recover. Killing the pop-up ads and trying to pause the autoplaying videos takes up some time that you could use to learn how to knit or to visit Machu Picchu.
Shakespeare wrote Re Lear in the time that an employee, during his working life, passes to change the font size
An average worker wastes more than four months of life for “tidying activities”. Deleting emails takes about six weeks. Clicking on corporate chat channels to read messages that aren’t meant for you, or clearing your phone screen of notifications of articles you’ll never watch, are days-sucking activities.
Formatting is another huge waste. Think about trying to change margins in Word or Google documents, or hours spent trying to figure out where exactly the missing parenthesis should be put in a spreadsheet formula. Shakespeare wrote Re Lear in the time that an employee, during his working life, passes to change the font size.
Having to redo the job you failed to save is in a class of its own, due to the psychological trauma it entails. Now that many programs automatically save changes, this is less of a problem, but it hasn’t been fixed. The batteries still run out at crucial moments, the internet connection keeps dropping. Writing a series of very deep and sharp comments in a Google doc, failing to save them and closing everything causes a particular kind of despair. As much as creating an organization chart with hundreds of arrows and text boxes and realizing you’ve forgotten someone.
These are just a few of the many ways we routinely waste our time. Coordinate agendas for meetings that will then be canceled: one month. Waiting for people to repeat what they said because they closed the microphone by mistake: fifteen days. Spending hours preparing an email and then leaving it in the draft folder: two days. Desperately opening and closing several doors of a hostile printer: one day.
The Maryland and Delaware enterprise university partnership study shows that technology is at the root of this waste of time. But technology can also help. Services that synchronize calendars and autocorrect options already do, while passwords will undoubtedly end up being replaced by facial recognition and fingerprint logins. It is reasonable to ask whether the time we will save could be used more productively, for example to read articles like this one. But years of workers’ lives are burned into totally useless activities. Any improvement deserves a hearing graize.
(Translation by Davide Musso)