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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, 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!