The Productivity Pro® Blog by Laura Stack - Time Management, Getting Things Done, How to Be More Productive

The 3rd annual Salary.com "Wasting Time Survey" for 2007 reports that the average employee wastes 1.7 hours of a typical 8.5 hour work day.  Salary.com reports that figure is down from the 2.09 hours wasted per day in 2005.  The #1 culprit of wasted time?  Internet use at 34.7%.  Followed by socializing with co-workers (20.3%) and conducting personal business (17.0%).  Over 63 percent of respondents admitted to wasting time at work.  The 20-29 year olds waste almost twice as much time (2.1 hours) compared to 40-49 year olds (1.4 hours).  Keep in mind this does not take into account how much work people are doing at home and on weekends, however.  What, do you think people aren’t conducting business while at home?  Of course they are!  In my opinion, they might be asking the wrong questions.

It’s interesting that wasted time has declined 19 percent since the first survey in 2005.  Yes, you can point to a growing economy and increases in productivity.  But is it possible that people are wasting less time because they want to get things done more quickly and get the heck out of dodge?  Are they deciding they are going to control their technology better, rather than letting it control them?  I believe it’s the beginning of a backlast against the corporation that is happy to work people to death.  Workers have had it with the years of their personal lives suffering, and a rebellion is building.  As I forewarned years ago, the pendulum is swinging the other way.  With a tightening labor market, skilled workers will be at a premium and will start to call the shots on when, where, and how much they will work.  By reducing wasted time at the office, they can get the results they need, do it in less time, and get home to their lives.  A win/win for employer and employee. 

What will the results show in 2008?  How low can we go?  Well, we can’t eliminate all "wasted" time.  People aren’t robots.  All socializing isn’t bad.  Some is necessary for relationship building and stronger teams.  Let them get on the Internet and buy a birthday gift for a spouse.  Who cares.  They go back home and log back in and continue working anyway.  Employers will have to get hip pretty quickly with the way people are working if they want to keep the best and the brightest.  Maybe they are wasting time because they are underpaid or there are system problems or computer issues or politics or horrible meetings or a lack of challenging work.  I wonder what the results would be if we turned the tables and surveyed the management on what they do to slow down their employees and cause them to waste time?  You think?

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released the results of its annual American Time Use Survey for 2006 on June 28, 2007, which is actually conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau.  You can sift through all the data files and accompanying documentation, but let me save you some time and summarize some interesting results.

Of full-time workers, men work 8.4 hours a day on average, while women work 7.7.  But 52 percent of women cleaned each day, while only 20 percent of men clean each day.  65 percent of women cook each day and only 37 percent of men.  Men average 5.7 hours of leisure a day, and women average 4.9 hours.  Women spend 1.2 hours a day caring for children, while men spend .4 hours.  Men spent more time watching television and participating in recreation. 

Lastly, women slept slightly more: 8.69 hours a day vs. men at 8.56…not a wonder…they are tired from all the extra work!

Here we go again: another report showing us how much technology is going to save us time and reduce the American workweek.  Didn’t we hear this 20 years ago?  How we would all have so much extra time on our hands due to technological improvements?  That’s just like the "paperless office," which of course is a joke, since we generate much more paper now than before the advent of the computer. 

A Gartner research report released on May 30 says that by 2015, workers will be working 20 hours instead of 40.  It argues that workers are seeking a more fulfilling life balance and employers better catch on if they want to retain good employees.  They sort of forget to consider that many people consider working an ecomomic reality and can’t afford to drop down to a 20-hour week.  The report encourages employers to create job descriptions for 20-hour positions.  Ugh….don’t we just call this part time?

It does cite the need for increased flexibility for workers, which I agree with, but usually that’s the ability to be able to work some hours from home.  It also states that it will be very difficult to draw a distinction between the personal and work computing environment.  Many employers have already figured this out and provide access to the corporate workstation from home.  Others use Blackberries or laptops as a desktop with a docking station, so the work environment is portable.  This is already being done, of course, so I fail to see what is to unique or novel in this report.  Increased flexibility and combined computing does not equate to a 20-hour week.  In my work teaching corporate seminars and speaking at conferences, I’m finding the work week continues to *climb* for the average worker.  As people have more flexibility and can work from home, they tend to just add more to their plates.  They leave work, go home, plug in, and keep working!

What’s your experience?

One primary television-watching energy drain is late night shows.  Given our hectic schedules with running in the door to make dinner, running out the door to take the kids to soccer practice, and then running home to finally get the kids in bed, we literally have no time left for ourselves.  We quite reasonably crave a little relaxation time, but all we have the energy to do is plop on the couch and turn on the tube.  We tell ourselves, “I’ll only watch for 15 minutes, then go to bed.”  But those alpha waves start humming, and Letterman is downright hilarious, and before you know it, 15 minutes have turned into two hours.  So you get to bed by 12:30 a.m., and you have to wake up at 6 a.m.  This pattern serves you a triple wallop.

First, you’re going to sleep after midnight.  The earlier you go to bed, the more supercharged your adrenal glands will be.  Your adrenal glands sit atop your kidneys, and they play a huge role in your energy level.  The adrenal glands manufacture adrenaline, cortisol, and DHEA.  Cortisol is helpful, but too much is stressful.  Cortisol stimulates the liver to convert amino acids to glucose and mobilizes fatty acids in the blood, both of which provide us with energy.  Too much cortisol—caused by sleep deprivation—increases blood sugar and the risk for hypertension, high cholesterol, and heart disease.  Getting plenty of sleep, however, increases DHEA production, which keeps cortisol levels in check.  DHEA also lowers LDL, or bad, cholesterol; increases muscle mass; lowers percentage of body fat; and improves energy, sleep, and mental clarity.  Even sleeping in the next morning doesn’t restore your adrenals as going to bed well before midnight does.[i] 

Second, you’ve deprived yourself of hours of sleep!  And sleep deprivation doubles your risk for obesity.  Professor Francesco Cappuccio at the University of Warwick Medical School studied data regarding 28,000 children and 15,000 adults.  He found that sleep deprivation increases appetite through hormonal changes; lack of sleep increases production of ghrelin, an appetite stimulant, and reduces production of leptin, an appetite suppressant.[ii]  Bottom line: not getting enough sleep can actually make you fat! 

Third, the human sleep cycle runs in increments of 90 minutes.  If you only get 5 ½ hours of sleep, you’ve lopped off your sleep cycle right in the middle, which is why you feel lethargic.  In other words, sleep cycles are usually complete at 1½ hours, 3 hours, 4½ hours, 6 hours, and 7½ hours.  The extra one-half hour to reach eight hours is to allow for falling asleep.  That’s why sometimes you feel refreshed if you awaken before your alarm goes off; but if you fall back asleep, you may feel super groggy when the alarm finally does go off. 

Sleep is when your brain and muscles restore themselves.  It is as necessary as eating, exercising, and going to the bathroom.  Yet so many Americans deprive themselves of this basic need by watching too much TV.  Would you want someone to take away your plate before you’re finished eating?  People who are tired can’t effectively deal with life’s little everyday stressors, and stress can cause insomnia, creating a vicious cycle of low energy. 

Investigate the link between color and worker productivity, and you’ll keep coming across the name of Dr. Nancy Kwallek, Director of the Interior Design program at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Architecture. In a recent study, she had workers do mundane clerical tasks in offices with several different color schemes and discovered that white is absolutely the worst color for productivity—at first. After being exposed to an all-white environment for a while, most workers adjusted just fine. For those who could screen out their environment from the beginning, however, bright colors were more effective, since they seem to stimulate people in general. Those more easily distracted by the environment did better in rooms painted a cooler color, like blue-green. Ultimately, however, the most effective color scheme was a mix of the two: blue-green over soft red, separated by wood paneling (wainscoting). 

Now here’s a pharmeceutical company selling non-drowsy allergy medication that came up with the 2007 Reactine Quality of Life Report and the impact allergies have on sufferers of the condition.  Highlights from the report include:

    -   Allergic and Unbearable. Three out of four Canadians with allergies
        say symptoms increase irritability and fatigue, and 55 per cent claim
        reduced productivity (housework; on-the-job, academia).

    -   It’s not in Your Head: And this doesn’t come as a surprise to health
        experts. This season 71 per cent of health professionals agree
        allergies can regularly or often affect a person’s quality of life.

    -   Love, Labour & Snoozing. According to the Quality of Life Report,
        allergies permeate all facets of life, including sleep patterns, work
        performance, and even libido.

Although I could crack about salespeople doing anything possible to sell a product and convince people how miserable they are to sell product, I happen to have seasonal allergies.  I’ve been getting allergy shots twice a month for a couple years now.  When the season started this year—nothing—absolutely no symptoms.  Yes, you can medicate and should.  But why not see if you’re a candidate for shots, invest a little bit more time short term, and reap the long-term benefits?  I’ve been medication-free and enjoying the great outdoors.

Geez if all these studies tell us how much our productivity is decreased from allergies, smoking, obesity, watching football, surfing the Internet, being sick, etc., it makes me wonder how they ever find a single worker with "normal" productivity to study!

Not only can Western society’s work ethic be rigid, but so can our clothing.  There’s a reason that casual Friday was invented—it’s because we finally followed our intuition that uncomfortable clothing restricts our energy flow!  In the 70’s movie Tootsie, Dustin Hoffman dresses up as a woman to get a job.  While he’s donning women’s apparel he says something akin to, “Who’s the misogynist bastard who invented high heels?!”  In my opinion, high heels and bras are tangible proof of evil.  Wearing high heels on a regular basis can cause serious foot problems such as hammertoes, bunions, corns, calluses, Achilles problems, growth of nerve tissue called neuromas, and even stress fractures.[i]  And that’s just your feet!  High heels also cause knee osteoarthritis; they place abnormal stress on the front and back of the knee, increasing pressure by 22 to 26 percent.  Although wide heels are slightly better for your feet, they’re just as bad for your knees.[ii]  And that’s not to mention that high heels also cause lower back problems, poor posture and spinal misalignment.  Save high heels for special occasions—such as attending the Oscars. 

As for bras, if you work in a home office and put on a bra every morning, you need to have your head checked! As a matter of fact, the more hours a woman wears a bra, the higher her chances are of developing breast cancer; that’s because bras restrict circulation throughout the lymph system.[iii]  Men have it rough, too.  Ties can choke.  My husband will attest that wearing a suit jacket when it is 90 degrees outside is nothing short of torture.   

Being comfortable doesn’t mean you have to look like a slob.  Try going without a tie; just wear an oxford with a suit jacket if you need to be more presentable for a meeting.    Wear comfortable dress shoes.  Make sure your pants aren’t too tight, especially around the waist.  This can constrict blood flow and cause headaches.  The decreasing levels of estrogen during menopause shifts women’s weight from the thighs and hips to the waist.  Likewise, the decline in testosterone caused by andropause concentrates men’s weight in the abdomen.[iv]  Although these natural mid-life processes can be overcome with diet and exercise, be realistic.  Your body changes as you get older; dress accordingly.

I’m on a three-day writing retreat, composing my newest manuscript Up Your Energy!  The only thing I dislike about writing is creating the citations for my endnotes—making sure they are in exactly the right format consumes a great deal of time and energy.  Well.  Enter the "Son of Citation Machine," a web-based tool that automatically creates the citations for you in the correct format.  You choose the writing style (MLA, APA, Chicago, etc.) and the format (book, website, magazine, etc.), fill in the appropriate fields presented to you, hit submit, and VIOLA!  I perfectly-formatted citation you can copy and paste into your endnote description.  This has saved me precious hours of time already, and I highly recommend it.

A reader just turned me on to Allan Engelhardt’s October post called "The 3/2 Rule of Productivity."   Wonderful.  Fascinating research with data showing the more employees your company has, the less productive each person is.  Basically, in terms of profit per employee, when you triple the number of employees, you halve their productivity (the 3/2 Rule).  Allan supposes the causes could include self-selection, relationship friction, a shared vision, and the ability (or lack thereof) to collaborate.  If I could toss in my two cents, from what I hear employees of large corporations complaining to me about, it’s:

* a huge volume of email to deal with and some moron replying to all with a 50-person distribution list and 100 spams each day

* meetings that run on and on with no purpose and no apparent outcome

* interruptions by co-workers who have nothing better to do than waste their time

* waiting…and waiting…and waiting…for an answer from someone who was supposed to deliver it days ago, and now the poor worker has to implement reminder systems just to babysit the lazy butt

* work arounds for IT departments that only allow a laughingly-small amount of storage space for pst files

* several layers of bureaucracy to dig through to get the slightest irregular expenditure approved.

What else?  Please add to my list or tell me I’m not on target.

I received an email from a reader today asking what *is* productivity.  While that’s a perfectly legitimate question, I thought I’d post a definition, just in case others wanted a understanding of how to measure productivity.  Some people just *know* intuitively whether they’ve had a productive day and don’t need to measure it.  And while there are different methods and views on productivity measurement (white collar, manufacturing, farm, economic, etc.), I use the following as my working definition of white collar business productivity (my niche):

The efficiency with which goods and services are produced,

as measured by the value of the output produced (result)

per person,

per hour,

divided by the unit of inputs used to produce it (hours).

Or—simply— a measurement of output per hours worked.

For example, if two people completed the same task (output), and one person took two hours and the second person took four hours, the first person would be more productive than the second. Indeed, one person could work an eight-hour day, and the second person could work a twelve-hour day, and the first person could be more productive than the second.  Productivity doesn’t measure how many hours we work; it measures what we were able to create in that time.  If you’re surfing the Internet all day, you won’t be productive, regardless of how many hours you work.

How do YOU measure your productivity, or if not measured, how do you just KNOW when you’ve had a productive day?