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posted by cmn32480 on Saturday May 30 2015, @06:12PM   Printer-friendly
from the work-sucks dept.

The workplace is where people go to work. But much of the day is increasingly padded out with less productive activities, writes Peter Fleming. A few years ago a disturbing story appeared in the media that seemed to perfectly capture the contemporary experience of work and its ever increasing grip over our lives: "Man Dies at Office Desk - Nobody Notices for Five Days".

The case was unnerving for one reason mainly. People die all the time, but usually we notice. Are things so bad in the modern workplace that we can no longer tell the difference between the living and the dead? Of course, the story turned out to be a hoax. An urban myth.

As it happens, each country has its own variation that still fools people when they periodically appear. In the US the dead person is a publisher. In other countries, a management consultant.

Apart from getting the actual task done, which is typically completed in short bursts, there is also a good deal of messing about, chatting, paying the bills, surfing the net, daydreaming and waiting for the day to finish. Most importantly, much of our day is spent busy being busy rather than doing things that are socially useful.

A recent study of overworked management consultants in the US found that 35% employed in this occupation actually "faked" an 80-hour work week. For various reasons these individuals pretended to sacrifice themselves on the altar of work and still got everything done.

In this respect, entire occupations might be considered phoney - from life coaches to "atmosphere co-ordinators" (people hired to create a party vibe in bars) to "chief learning officers" in the corporate world. For those economists trying to figure out the present "productivity puzzle" in the UK, best start looking here.

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-32829232

[Source]: http://www.city.ac.uk/news/2015/may/why-do-people-waste-so-much-time-at-the-office


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  • (Score: 2) by Justin Case on Saturday May 30 2015, @08:25PM

    by Justin Case (4239) on Saturday May 30 2015, @08:25PM (#190210) Journal

    Based on the counts in various email folders, and the average time per message, over the past year my employer has paid me more than $5,000 to read emails that had nothing to do with any of the work I had been assigned. Just noise. Rah-rah. Happy crappy etc.

    Again, WHY?

    I'm really amazed that the economy works at all, with the oceans of stupidity and waste sloshing about.

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  • (Score: 1) by rleigh on Sunday May 31 2015, @12:40PM

    by rleigh (4887) on Sunday May 31 2015, @12:40PM (#190388) Homepage

    I am continually amazed that employers actually consider email to be beneficial for productivity. I honestly do wonder if the days of physical pieces of paper in pigeonholes and in/out trays wasn't better, if nothing else simply because it had limits on how much of the stuff could be physically shovelled around an organisation and the general post, and as such was self-limiting. Email seems to have no reasonable limits, and the ability for individuals to keep up and meaningfully deal with the deluge is limited.

    In my first job, while there was no general email, employees were expected to log into the E-MEMO system of an IBM AS/400 for company- and site-wide messages (on real 5250 token ring terminals). Even then we had a certain amount of useless stuff--someone left their car lights on in the head office car park 300 miles away? Maybe sending out a message company-wide is a waste of thousands of people's time? But even with that the number of messages was 1-2 per day and were more often than not directly useful for current site work, or were company/site-wide announcements. It was manageable and it served its purpose; total time per week was minimal. Productivity impact was negligable.

    Today I find I am getting many hundreds per day, from automated messages from lots of computer systems and services to many useless messages from many different people, to several mailing lists. I find it totally unmanageable. There's a limit to how much communication an individual can deal with, let alone even respond to, and still get anything actually productive done. I would hazard that I delete 90% without reading, 9.9% after reading, and keep ~0.1 which is the stuff I can actually action and respond to. Which begs the question: why is it considered acceptable to have every employee deluged with this spew of crap? It's "communication" of a sort, but it's not "effective" communication--information I *need* to know and can do something with. And yet I'm often asked for details about one of the random emails I deleted; while I'm probably over-zealous about deleting stuff, I find the expectation that I can immediately recall the details of one email out of several hundred thousand a little unrealistic.

    I can't help but feel we haven't really discovered the most effective way to organise our communication. There are so many jobs which are unnecessarily burdened with make-work like this, which isn't really good for the organisation or the individuals dealing with it, and yet this endemic problem isn't really acknowledged by the management, or is considered a good thing...