Few things are more depressing than estimates of the time we spend on a particular activity throughout our lives. Estimates like: We spend a third of our lives sleeping, nearly a decade looking at our phones, and four months deciding what to watch on streaming services.
A recent study conducted by researchers at the National Institute for the Assessment of Normal Time Employment at Work (INVENTT) of the American university-business association MADEUP (Maryland and Delaware Enterprise University Partnership) applies this approach to the workplace.
Using a time use survey of 5,000 office workers in the United States and Great Britain, researchers identify the number of minutes we waste on useless activities throughout the workday. (Published work excludes meetings: they are usually useless, but not always and not for everyone.) The authors then extrapolate the figures to get an estimate of the “weighted total futility” (WTF) lifetime that could have been put to better use. The results are literally incredible.
Correcting typos takes up an average of 20 minutes of an office worker’s day, the equivalent of 180 days, or half a year, in a 45-year professional career. Some words are misspelled so often that they alone cost the average employee days of existence. In Spanish, one of the most misleading is “Hloa”, followed by “barazo”, “una arm” and “salido”. The amount of time the average worker spends typing “Many thanks” is also counted in days.
The gestation period for a goat is about 145 days. And that’s also the amount of time the average worker spends logging in over their working life. For security reasons, it is inevitable to spend some time on it. However, months are wasted trying to remember passwords, entering them incorrectly or updating them. And the same amount of time is spent waiting for something to happen, with which workers in all sectors of the economy spend an enormous amount of time staring blankly at a screen.
If entering sites and applications is a waste of time, the same is true when leaving them. Eliminating help windows and advice boxes ends up becoming days in a career. Refusing repeated requests to schedule OS updates is another slice of existence that we’ll never get back. Closing pop-up ads and trying to pause auto-playing videos eat up time that could have been spent learning to weave or visiting Machu Picchu.
The set of “cleaning” activities absorbs more than four months of the life of the average worker. Deleting emails takes about six weeks of your life. Clicking on Slack channels to read messages that are not meant for one, or erasing notifications of articles that we will never look at on the phone screen… tasks like this each consume days of life.
The different types of tasks related to formatting things are another huge source of wasted time. Think of the attempts to change the margins in Word or Google Drive documents, or the hours spent trying to figure out where exactly to put the missing parentheses in the broken spreadsheet formula. Shakespeare wrote King Lear in the same amount of time the average clerk spends his career changing font sizes.
Redoing unsaved work is a separate category, due to the psychological trauma involved. The problem has been alleviated somewhat since many programs now save versions automatically, but it has not been completely resolved. Batteries keep dying at critical moments, Internet connections keep failing. Entering a series of insightful comments into a Google Drive document, not saving them, and then closing the whole thing causes a special kind of despair. And the same thing happens when we create an organizational chart with hundreds of arrows and text boxes, and we realize that someone has been left out.
These are just a few of the many ways time is routinely wasted. Coordinate agendas to schedule meetings that will later be cancelled: another month. Waiting for people to repeat what you just said because they were muted by mistake: two weeks. Spending hours composing an email and leaving it forgotten in the drafts folder: two days. Desperately opening and closing the various covers of a stubborn printer: one day.
The INVENTT study shows that technology is at the heart of such time wastage. However, technology can also help. Services that sync calendars and autocorrect options already do this; passwords will undoubtedly end up being replaced by facial recognition; and logins, by fingerprint. It is reasonable to ask whether the time saved in this way will be put to more productive use, such as reading the columns of this newspaper, for example. The fact is that years of working life are lost in totally useless activities. Any improvement will be received with sinecro thanks.
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Translation: Juan Gabriel López Guix
