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September 06, 2005
Unproductive time
I'm reading an article at C|Net by Ed Frauenheim in which he interviews Bill Coleman, senior VP of compensation at Salary.com.
Apparently Coleman found surfing to be the primary time wasting activity, with interoffice visits and personal business fairly far behind. The average US worker responding to the survey wastes over 2 hours a day, which is an hour more than managers expect. I haven't looked at the survey itself.
My guess is that estimate is off by a bit for software development. We can spend engineer years doing ostensibly productive work that turns out not to be of much value. You can go into the office and see smart people working very hard at great personal sacrifice wasting time. That's probably true in other industries as well. With the right strategy, the actual waste may be 20%. With the wrong strategy it can be 100%.
One other thing I see in the office is that people waste less time when they believe in what they're doing. Adults are better at smoothing that out, but if you don't believe me have your kid clean his room. Then let him do something he likes. If you try to work on efficiencies in getting the room cleaned, you waste not only his time but also your own.
Posted by Mark at September 6, 2005 09:22 PM
Comments
Amen!
Posted by: Andy at September 6, 2005 10:51 PM