Originally posted on Recruiter.com September 20, 2013.
Have you ever left work and asked yourself, “Did I even get anything done today?” Even workers who save Candy Crush and Hay Day for their personal time can’t escape the fact that the office is riddled with time wasters. According to this pretty rad infographic from Atlassian, these are the main culprits of time wasted at work:
- Inefficient communication processes, namely email.
- Time consuming, pointless meetings.
- The office is full of constant interruptions.
The way we communicate via email has led to burdensome strings of emails and inefficient processes. Yes, email is faster than homing pigeons, but that is hardly the standard these days.
- The average employee receives 304 weekly business emails.
- The average employee checks his/her mail 36 times a day.
- It takes an average of 16 minutes to refocus on a task after handling incoming email.
Phil Libin of Evernote decided that he didn’t want this time waster in his office. According to Libin,
“One of the things I’ve tried to do is uproot any sort of e-mail culture at Evernote. We strongly discourage lengthy e-mail threads with everyone weighing in. It’s just not good for that. Plus, it’s dangerous, because it’s way too easy to misread the tone of something. If you want to talk to somebody and you’re a couple floors apart, I kind of want you to get up and go talk to them.”
Email has also become overtaken by spam. Email lists are traded more freely than a Little Debby in a lunchroom. The seconds that it takes to search through all that junk email can add up. Spam ends up costing companies an annual productivity loss of $1,250 per employee. They also lose $1,800 to unnecessary emails and about $3,100 on poorly written communications. Read more…
photo credit: Peter Baer via photopin cc
Read full post: 3 Things That Interrupt You at Work
