A few days ago I wrote that a day off is hard to come by when you work at home (see previous post). This is true, as it can be hard to feel as if you are accomplishing something when you work odd hours. But it got me to thinking about office productivity and my former days spent in a corporate office.
How many meetings did I sit in per week? How many trips to the coffee machine? Chats with co-workers? While I really do miss office camaraderie (at times), the time I work from my home office is real time worked. An office worker, on average, only feels productive about 5 hours per day due to other distractions.
Microsoft conducted an online survey that drew responses from more than 38,000 people in 200 countries. This article is slightly dated but still relevant. (For the complete article please see: http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/mar05/03-15threeproductivedayspr.mspx)
U.S findings revealed the following:
- People work an average of 45 hours per week and consider 16 of those hours to be unproductive–that’s roughly 30 percent!
- People spend 5.5 hours each week in meetings and 71 percent feel meetings aren’t productive.
- Workers receive an average of 56 email messages per day
- The most common productivity pitfalls are unclear objectives, lack of team communication and ineffective meetings — chosen by 32 percent of respondents overall followed by unclear priorities at 31 percent and procrastination at 42 percent; lack of team communication, 39 percent; ineffective meetings, 34 percent
As gas prices soared in early summer I heard much about people working more from home to offset commuting costs, or businesses modifying their schedules to a four-day work week. Now that gas costs have plummeted these work changes seem to have fallen out of favor. The cost savings one can achieve from telecommuting are wonderful, but there are other benefits, too.
Filed under: productivity
Good points and I think the data is still relevant.
BTW, the premier issue of Productive! magazine has just been released, and has 17 great articles on productivity, along with an exclusive interview with productivity guru, David Allen. I’ve posted a link to the free premier November issue at
http://johnkendrick.wordpress.com/2008/11/21/john-kendrick-online-featured-in-productive-magazine/
John
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