In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for 2 Hours and 53 Minutes
1–10 of 52 posts
Re: In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for 2 Hours and 53 Minutes
#2This makes a lot of sense and explains a lot of the reactions I have berm getting since tracking my concentration meticulously with Toggl.
I work as a remote consultant and track everything down to the second.
"Filling out" timesheets and answering "how much I worked" a non issue.
I've been getting accolades for how much work I accomplish... even when I clock only 3-4 hours a day.
Re: In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for 2 Hours and 53 Minutes
#3Since the article doesn't specify what types of professions were studied, thus I am skeptical of its conclusion. While this ~3hr/day productivity might be true for typical corporate/office workers, but they make up only a small percentage of the total work force! What about the productivity of bus drivers, doctors, cooks, masons, mechanics? Somehow I think that the average roofer doesn't spend ~2hrs/work day reading social media and news websites.
Re: In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for 2 Hours and 53 Minutes
#4I have 4-6 hours of hyper focus, the rest i use for emails, spreadsheets etc
Re: In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for 2 Hours and 53 Minutes
#5Maybe give everyone the last 2.5 hours off every Friday and they won't spend that time during the week looking for a new job.
Re: In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for 2 Hours and 53 Minutes
#6Since the article doesn't specify what types of professions were studied, thus I am skeptical of its conclusion. While this ~3hr/day productivity might be true for typical corporate/office workers, but they make up only a small percentage of the total work force! What about the productivity of bus drivers, doctors, cooks, masons, mechanics? Somehow I think that the average roofer doesn't spend ~2hrs/work day reading…
The title should be fixed but the article implies as much.
"Yet a study of nearly 2,000 full-time office workers".
Re: In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for 2 Hours and 53 Minutes
#7If you try to work 16-18 hours to compensate the damage done to cognitive abilities can drop that number to 45 minutes. Now as s rote worker wearing a couple different hats I get the most out of 8 hours by changing tasks to keep my concentration going shifting between development, was and Dev ops tasks or writing documents.
Re: In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for 2 Hours and 53 Minutes
#8In my experience consulting in boring offices of companies that provide business reporting and compliance services a lot of the people only have a few hours of work to do most of the time. But a lot of the processes are manual and brittle and so every so often there is a crisis and if they didn't have everyone to minimize the impact of the crisis on their customers they would lose business fast.
I bet there are a lot of companies where productivity is low because people don't make extra work for themselves, do what they need to meet low expectations but the company needs to keep people around because they can't build processes that don't need the people.
Re: In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for 2 Hours and 53 Minutes
#9This way of tracking worker concentration raises a lot of questions, especially in an era where we are surrounded with stuff designed to grab our concentration.
What if access to social media is made impossible? What did the numbers look like when it didn't exist at all? What happens to the 44 minutes? Does the "productive time" get increased? Or does the "news checking time" gets increased instead to compensate?
What happens during a weeks a 2048-like / google-pacman game has just been released? Does the "productive time" goes down to the toilet? Should we consider ourselves fundamentally less productive, and reduce the official workday time to 1h during this period?
What if the underlying phenomenom actually is "1/8th of work time = news checking", instead of "1h of work time = news checking", as the article suggests?
Please let's not jump to conclusions too fast ; the reasons why we're not working 100% of our 8-hour workdays have almost nothing to do with the reasons why Ford workers weren't working 100% of their 16-hour workdays.
Re: In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for 2 Hours and 53 Minutes
#10I'm skeptical about these, because each time we've tracked worker productiveness they've worked around 6 hours out of the 7,5 they are paid to on average. The only way we'd get someone spending that much time on news/SoMe is when our workers are bored.
Like an IT tech waiting for a consultant to call back on a priority task or when someone simply doesn't have enough things to do.
We do lose a lot f time to things like chitchat, but I think our overall productivity and happiness require the freedom for people to do so.
I don't think the points of the article are wrong though. We have people who work less than the standard 37 work week at certain periods in their lives, typically younger parents, like 30-34 hour weeks, and they are much more productive and score much higher on employee satisfaction. But I do think the research is a tad thwarted by coming out of American workplaces and that it isn't useful for every office space.