This link has been bookmarked by 4 people . It was first bookmarked on 01 Jun 2007, by Wisely.
-
03 Jun 07
-
01 Jun 07
-
-
One of my favorite books as a child was “Cheaper by the Dozen,” the story of Frank B. Gilbreth Jr., who introduced the idea of efficiency to 20th-century America. His time-shaving techniques ran the gamut from a new way of laying bricks to a quicker method of buttoning his vest (bottom to top, saving four seconds).
Inspired, I slept in my clothes for a few nights back then to save time dressing for school, though I don’t think that’s exactly what the man had in mind.
I can only imagine what Mr. Gilbreth would have made of the modern workplace, with its endless possibilities for distraction. His 21st-century counterparts are an army of product researchers, academics and personal improvement gurus, who all agree we are frittering valuable minutes, hours and even entire days, though they can’t agree on how many.
-
American workers, on average, spend 45 hours a week at work, but describe 16 of those hours as “unproductive,” according to a study by Microsoft. America Online and Salary.com, in turn, determined that workers actually work a total of three days a week, wasting the other two. And Steve Pavlina, whose Web site (stevepavlina.com) describes him as a “personal development expert” and who keeps incremental logs of how he spends each working day, urging others to do the same, finds that we actually work only about 1.5 hours a day. “The average full-time worker doesn’t even start doing real work until 11:00 a.m.,” he writes, “and begins to wind down around 3:30 p.m.”
-
So how to reconcile the seemingly conflicting trends — the fact that we are working harder and wasting more time? A crotchety boss might say that we’re working longer because we’re wasting time, but the opposite may also be true. We are wasting time because we are working harder.
“The longer you work, the less efficient you are,” said Bob Kustka, the founder of Fusion Factor, a productivity and time-management consulting firm in Norwell, Mass. He says workers are like athletes in that they are most efficient in concentrated bursts. Elite athletes “play a set of tennis, a down of football or an inning of baseball and have a pause in between,” he says. Working energy, like physical energy, “is best used in spurts where we work hard on a few focused activities and then take a brief respite,” he says.
-
It has taken me years to make tentative peace with my stops and starts during work. Every morning I vow to become a morning person, starting full speed out of the gate. And every morning I daydream, shuffle papers, read e-mail messages and visit blogs, and somehow it is time for lunch. Then, at about 2 p.m., a sense of urgency kicks in, and I write steadily, until about 5 or 6, when I revert to the little-of-this, some-of-that style of the morning.
-
What appears to be wasted time is really jell time. This redefinition only makes me feel a little less guilty.
-
Mr. Kustka assures me that the problem is not the three to four hours of concentrated work I do each day, but rather the outmoded paradigm against which I measure that work. Productivity was directly related to time back when Mr. Gilbreth was measuring things, he said, but the connection is less direct today.
“We are in a knowledge-worker world,” he says. “If you were building me a building, I could measure the number of bricks. If you were loading a truck, I could measure the number of boxes. But I can’t simply count your words. That doesn’t measure quality.”
-
word count is how nearly all freelance writers are paid.
-
“The old thinking says ‘the longer it takes, the harder you’re working,” says Lynne Lancaster, a founder of BridgeWorks, a business consulting firm. “The new thinking is ‘if I know the job inside and out and I’m done faster than everyone else then why can’t I go home early?’ ”
-
what looks like wasting time from where you sit, could be a whirl of creative thought from where I sit. And, with due respect to Mr. Gilbreth, all the energy that’s been poured into trying to force everyone to work at the same pace and in the same way — it seems that’s the real waste of time.
-
Would you like to comment?
Join Diigo for a free account, or sign in if you are already a member.