It was Henry Ford who championed the eight-hour workday in 1914.
Unsurprisingly, productivity shot up after he reduced the working day from nine hours and doubled his staff’s salaries.
Since then, the eight-hour day has become the standard for most of the world, but how is productivity holding up? How are we actually spending all of our time?
Let’s look at the facts and figures.
Yes, you read that correctly!
In 2018, VoucherCloud conducted a survey that concluded we spend less than three hours out of an entire workday actually working.
Although the VoucherCloud survey is now a few years old, it doesn’t look like much has improved:
It doesn’t really make much difference where people work, either. The results are similar
According to the same Worklife survey:
On the other hand,
That doesn’t sound like much but if you take an employee on a $60k salary and multiply by 1,000, that extra 8 minutes accounts for:
So, what are we doing with the rest of our time? And why are we struggling to be more productive?
Considering the average 8-hour workday, it seems we are experiencing a lot of time sinks.
That amounts to 26 hours per month or 13 days per year!
Multiply that across 100 workers and an organization loses 1,300 days annually.
The biggest culprit? Chatty coworkers with a whopping 1 in 2 working Americans considering them their main distraction in the office
According to the same extensive 2023 survey,
This stands to reason since it is well documented that multi-tasking is a physical impossibility. Our brains simply cannot focus on more than one thing at once.
What we end up doing is task-switching, where we rapidly shift from one task to another without giving any of them our full attention.
Other workplace factors that halted the workflow included:
Worse still, it takes over 23 minutes to fully refocus… before we’re interrupted. Again.
For an average 8-hour workday, it, therefore, only takes 20 distractions before we’ve lost focus for the entire day.
According to the research, the type of distraction doesn’t really matter. Once focus is lost, regardless of the reason, we struggle to regain it.
Those who work remotely are not immune, either, and can suffer from some interesting distractions.
Going back to the Workamajig survey on workplace distractions, it was found that another 17% of home workers got interrupted by household members.
Even the family pet disrupts, with 12% of people regularly getting up from their desk to attend to their furry friend!
Weirdly, seasonal interruptions are also a “thing:”
Let’s move on to procrastination. There have been no significant recent studies on this subject that we can find. However, there are two interesting ones from pre-2020 that we wanted to highlight:
This is compared with just 5% of people who say they have never procrastinated.
While the survey was aimed at procrastination around financial management, it was found that regardless of the reason, procrastination was strongly linked to feelings of stress and shame.
When asked how procrastination made people feel:
What did the survey find that we do while we’re procrastinating?
Workers in the wellbeing and beauty industry were the biggest procrastinators and spent 46 minutes gossiping, 38 minutes on Facebook, and 45 minutes messaging.
In contrast, those who worked in agriculture were the least likely to procrastinate and spent only around 57 minutes per day wasting time.
This accounts for around 50% of the time that workers are using chat tools.
The cost of this lost time adds up – to the tune of $18,000 per worker annually.
In complex occupations, such as software development, top performers can be as much as 800% more productive than their average counterparts.
It’s not easy to find, though, with over a third of leaders saying that recruiting top talent is their biggest challenge.
The Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, states that roughly 80% of effects come from 20% of causes.
In the workplace, a small minority produces a significant proportion of the overall output.
Data indicates that:
Post-pandemic after remote working became the norm, people still want it to remain that way. Office attendance remains 30% lower than it was before the pandemic despite organizations pushing for people to return.
Studies conducted by companies and research institutions found no negative relationship between hybrid work and productivity.
So, really there is no reason to insist that workers go back to an office environment.
Here’s a statistic to support that:
Employees want to feel autonomous and in charge of their own working hours. Employers that implement flexibility will attract and retain top talent.
The desire for a flexible workplace isn’t going anywhere:
Compared to workers with flexible schedules, employees with rigid work schedules say they are:
Employees who are dissatisfied with inflexible working schedules are 43% more likely to say they are suffering from burnout compared with more flexible workers.
A study carried out in 2021 across 730 burnout-suffering individuals found interesting results.
Clinical burnout resulted in significant impairments in
Despite the idea that working harder increases productivity, the results suggest otherwise. The more burned out we become, the less able we are to use our brains efficiently.
Therefore, take breaks when you need them and time to recharge the batteries.
During one study, workers were rewarded with snacks and drinks after which a 20% uptick in productivity was observed.
Additionally, employees who were made happy before they started working increased their productivity by as much as 12%.
AI is here to save us from unproductive tasks. And, it’s true, it has the capability to remove boring and repetitive jobs from our daily work days.
Here’s what people think of it:
The biggest reasons why people feel that AI increases productivity is because it:
Turns out, there’s a lot that gets in the way of our productivity.
The key is finding ways and methods to help improve our work day and minimize distractions.
One way is to use time-tracking software. Once we understand where our day is going, we can pinpoint the problem areas and work to improve them. Then, we can spend more time on the things that matter.
