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In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for 2 Hours and 53 Minutes

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Re: In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for 2 Hours and 53 Minutes

#31

Post by cperciva »

The original source of this appears to be a survey performed by vouchercloud (https://www.vouchercloud.com/blog/office-worker-productivity...). Interestingly, the "2h 53m" value is claimed to be the average value reported by the 1989 "UK office workers aged 18+" surveyed.

The survey also included a list of non-work activities and asked for each activity (a) whether they were guilty of spending time on that activity, and (b) if yes, how much time they spent. For example, 19% spent time searching for new jobs, and of those who spent time searching for new jobs the average time spent was 26 minutes. These add up to a mere 94 minutes of "wasted time" per day, suggesting that either respondents severely underestimated the time they spent working, severely underestimated the time they wasted, or there's another 3.5 hours/day of time spent non-productively on things other than the 10 options listed in the survey.

Re: In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for 2 Hours and 53 Minutes

#32

Post by flexie »

sigi45 wrote: post #19
flexie wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I read a couple of hours of news etc. at work. Here I am on HN. It's very individual, but I would not be surprised if it's true for most office workers that they work efficiently for 3-4 hours a day. And for a lot of people, some of that time is spent in a meeting...

And how do you justify your behaviour? oO? You could use your time you get paid for for better things. Doing something for the company you get paid from? Here have a read: http://bookofhook.blogspot.de/2013/03/smart-guy-productivity...

I don't have to justify that to anyone, except maybe my family. I work for myself.

Re: In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for 2 Hours and 53 Minutes

#33

Post by DanBC »

sigi45 wrote: post #19
flexie wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I read a couple of hours of news etc. at work. Here I am on HN. It's very individual, but I would not be surprised if it's true for most office workers that they work efficiently for 3-4 hours a day. And for a lot of people, some of that time is spent in a meeting...

And how do you justify your behaviour? oO? You could use your time you get paid for for better things. Doing something for the company you get paid from? Here have a read: http://bookofhook.blogspot.de/2013/03/smart-guy-productivity...

> And how do you justify your behaviour? oO?

If you're productive for 4 hours a day you need to avoid causing harm for the other 4 hours. Noodling around on code when you're not productive carries greater risk of introducing errors.

I hope most programmers are not being paid per hour, but for the quality and quantity of their output. But I accept that many managers see those unproductive hours and imagine they could be productive if the employee just did more work.

Re: In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for 2 Hours and 53 Minutes

#34

Post by gexla »

eksemplar wrote: post #10

I'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 lik…

Maybe this depends on the job. I can do tech support all day long. Programming comes with productivity traps such as difficulty getting into a zone, procrastination due to feeling overwhelmed due to deadlines or project difficulty and limits on creative productivity. My brain begins to melt after 4 hours of straight problem-solving on average. Problem-solving requires creativity, which burns out and leads to busy work.

Re: In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for 2 Hours and 53 Minutes

#35

Post by mercer »

Harkins wrote: post #21

There's a trick in this clickbait: > According to Bureau of Labor Statistics, the average American works 8.8 hours every day. Yet a study of nearly 2,000 full-time office workers revealed that most people aren't working for most of the time they're at work. The plain reading is that this article is based on BLS data. The BLS makes huge amounts of data available (and is friendly about answering questions), and the 8.8…

As a smoker, I'm only mildly surprised at the 23 minutes. While it does seem unusually long, my experience at least confirms that probably easily half of my smoke breaks turn into a meeting of sorts (which can last a while!), or something else that is not work but work-ish enough that it doesn't seem to cause issues. 153 minutes is probably more than reality, but even a full hour a day would only be mildly surprising in some of the environments I've experienced (so I might be entirely off-base for the US).

In fact, some of my non-smoking colleagues started participating in the 'smoke breaks' (alongside the 'hanging-around-in-the-coffee-area' breaks) not just because those breaks can be problem solvers, but because it would lead to important informal 'meetings'.

Personally I hate this. I wish we had fewer self-harming 'down-time' moments at work (whether cigarette breaks or after-work inebriation) and more of the positive kind (meetup/lightning-talk-but-of-course-with-beers-for-those-who-care, long big-meal lunches as part of company culture, etc.), because I'm convinced they're crucial to the health of the company (cross-pollination of ideas/concerns between departments, for example).

Re: In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for 2 Hours and 53 Minutes

#36

Post by Xoros »

loudandskittish wrote: post #13
Ace17 wrote: post #9

This 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? Wh…

> 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? In the olden days, it was "newspaper time" instead of "Facebook time," so I'd guess the numbers would look similar.

I remember long ago, working on a security job to pay my studies (in France, so not for tuition but for everyday life).

I was on a semi public bus company, in charge of opening secured doors in the morning. The front hostess arrived and stated "Ah ! The newspaper ! It's the first task of the morning !"

Well, it was not, because she made her coffee first :-)

Re: In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for 2 Hours and 53 Minutes

#37

Post by acty1 »

beambot wrote: post #18
acty1 wrote: post #2

This 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.

How much time do you spend tracking everything? (I assume this is accounted for on a second-by-second accounting.)

I do it on the fly as in when I context switch.

Takes about 10 seconds max (copy paste ticket #, type meeting name, etc)

With a context switch every 15mins or quicker... probably easily 1 minute or 1.5 minutes per hour of work.

So somewhere like 1-2% "tax" on my time.

In practice though...I feel like an athlete and training my concentration and tracking results.

Having those few seconds sometimes helps you align efforts better

Re: In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for 2 Hours and 53 Minutes

#38

Post by consz »

sigi45 wrote: post #19
flexie wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I read a couple of hours of news etc. at work. Here I am on HN. It's very individual, but I would not be surprised if it's true for most office workers that they work efficiently for 3-4 hours a day. And for a lot of people, some of that time is spent in a meeting...

And how do you justify your behaviour? oO? You could use your time you get paid for for better things. Doing something for the company you get paid from? Here have a read: http://bookofhook.blogspot.de/2013/03/smart-guy-productivity...

What if you're required to be there physically for 8 hours, and you also don't get paid any more for better work then you currently produce? I suspect that would describe the majority of jobs.

Re: In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for 2 Hours and 53 Minutes

#39

Post by nuna »

isostatic wrote: post #20
nuna wrote: post #4

I have 4-6 hours of hyper focus, the rest i use for emails, spreadsheets etc

I get 4-6 hours a week. All it takes is 3 meetings during the day (including the 30 minute "standup") and that pretty much writes off the day.

oh I meant a day, but I agree unnecessary meetings throw me off

Re: In an 8-Hour Day, the Average Worker Is Productive for 2 Hours and 53 Minutes

#40

Post by eksemplar »

gexla wrote: post #34
eksemplar wrote: post #10

I'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 lik…

Maybe this depends on the job. I can do tech support all day long. Programming comes with productivity traps such as difficulty getting into a zone, procrastination due to feeling overwhelmed due to deadlines or project difficulty and limits on creative productivity. My brain begins to melt after 4 hours of straight problem-solving on average. Problem-solving requires creativity, which burns out and leads to busy wor…

It includes our programmers who are some of the most productive workers. A couple of them are task focused almost the entire time they are at work.

Of course we include things like getting stuck, or brainstorming solutions as productive activities.

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