SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
The Economist - Why is everyone so busy?
The predictions sounded like promises: in the future, working hours would be short and vacations long. “Our grandchildren”, reckoned John Maynard Keynes in 1930, would work around “three hours a day”—and probably only by choice. Economic progress and technological advances had already shrunk working hours considerably by his day, and there was no reason to believe this trend would not continue. Whizzy cars and ever more time-saving tools and appliances guaranteed more speed and less drudgery in all parts of life. Social psychologists began to fret: whatever would people do with all their free time?
This has not turned out to be one of the world’s more pressing problems. Everybody, everywhere seems to be busy. In the corporate world, a “perennial time-scarcity problem” afflicts executives all over the globe, and the matter has only grown more acute in recent years, say analysts at McKinsey, a consultancy firm. These feelings are especially profound among working parents. As for all those time-saving gizmos, many people grumble that these bits of wizardry chew up far too much of their days, whether they are mouldering in traffic, navigating robotic voice-messaging systems or scything away at e-mail—sometimes all at once.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 26 2014, @03:16AM
People are not actually working working. They are just busy. That's the difference.
You can spend all day on a computer, typing away, answering emails, checking twitter/facebook/whatever, and end up accomplishing absolutely nothing. Busy work is not actually lack of time. It's just stuff we do out of habit.
Too busy is an excuse we use to label things that we like to do instead of doing things we should be doing. Case and point is exercise - a scenario most people are very familiar with. Why are people so sedentary? Because they are too busy - that's the excuse. In fact, they are busy. Video games. TV. Books. Homework. Eating. Computer work. Checking news. All means we are too busy. But take away the fluff that you don't need to do. Things that do not add value to your day. Like TV, Twitter, Facebook, news sites and general busy work. etc. and suddenly you end up with hours upon hours of free time. How do you then fill this time? Will you go out as part of exercise? No. You'll quickly pickup that phone and start twittering because that's the habit you developed to fill idle time. Some people are apparently so busy, that they fill the time where they should be paying attention to the road with their preferred busy work instead.
People are creatures of habit. We prefer to do short tasks that are "rewarding" in one way or another. That is how time is wasted, because thees tasks are the most meaningless ones - twitter, facebook, email, SN, TV, etc.
(Another reason for hectic lives are distractions - do one thing until it's done. Multitasking is how you accomplish chaos.)
(Score: 5, Informative) by kaszz on Friday December 26 2014, @03:39AM
Multitasking is the way to accomplish sloppy work in many tasks at the same time. Only done by people that are forced to, lack ambition or just lack the cognitive performance to figure this out.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by TheRaven on Friday December 26 2014, @09:43AM
I read a study some years ago that found that 20 hours a week was optimal for peak productivity if you're doing anything more mentally demanding than manual labour. Between about 20 and 40, your per-hour productivity goes down roughly in proportion to the amount that you work more, so there's no much difference in total output. Above 40, it goes down more. You spend more time fixing the mistakes that you made because you weren't focussed and that outweighs the extra time that you spend working.
When I was freelancing, I tried to adopt this, and used 20 hours a week as my target. Most of my customers were amazed at how productive an hour of my time was in comparison to their full-time staff. I didn't like to tell them that they could have got the same thing from everyone if they'd told them to go home and relax after working their 20 hours each week...
sudo mod me up
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 26 2014, @04:37PM
I have the same motto, mindset, and results -- but my employer bills customers by the hour.
Any time spent shaking toner, or setting up BGP redundancy, is the same cost.
As such, my spending 3 hours to make sure the outage window is 1 hour... is incredibly lazy and not rewarded as much as the person who spilled toner and charged to spend their day on-site cleaning up the mess.
I do not approve of the metric (being ISO 9000 certified, I can tell you the quality is not being measured), but the only things that management seems capable of is quantity metric analysis. If you do not have many billable hours you are a failure, as opposed to those that do the same job in half the time--those people are lazy!