Allister Heath illustrates yet again that he who uses the word should has lost the argument before it even starts:
Workers should not be spending 650 hours a year on email
IT seems that we finally have an answer to why productivity is falling in Britain – and no, it has nothing to do with the fact that so many of us are spending so much time watching the Olympics. The problem is much more prosaic and far more devastating: we are spending so much time emailing each other that there is very little time left to do anything else.
Many people already suspected as much, but McKinsey has crunched the numbers. It finds that 28 per cent of office workers’ workweek is spent reading and answering email. Over a year, the average “interaction office worker” (management consultant speak for your normal white collar employee) spends 650 hours of “work” time on email, in most cases staring at a Microsoft Outlook screen. The study is based on US companies but undoubtedly applies equally to firms here in Britain.
And so on and so forth, blah blah blah. This whole research is about as useful as an earlier one they did pointing out that lorry drivers wasted too much time on the road.
Forbidden Bible Verses — Genesis 42:18-28
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8 comments:
And back in the day they used to waste vast amounts of time writing and reading memos. And filing. And attending meetings. And gossiping by the water cooler.
In fact, many office workers don't actually *do* anything very tangible at all - it so easily becomes a self-sustaining culture of appearing busy.
C, all very true, but as it happens, my job consists (largely) of replying to emails. I'm a tax advisor and I give advice. Sometimes 'phone or letter is better, sometimes meetings, just whatever is quickest/best. Sure, there are emails which are a bit of a waste of time, but I still have to reply to them.
I think he missed out the word "internal" before the word "e-mails". However, as C points out, that is largely the fault of the management generating all this e-paperwork.
B, true, all these team meetings and away days and employee motivation surveys blah blah blah are a pathetic waste of time, but as it happens, most internal emails I get are very much job related.
Suffice to say, "time spent on emails" is a meaningless statistic, ergo the article is meaningless.
"ergo the article is meaningless"
Indeed and I dare say that much of the 14% of time spent "communicating and collaborating" and the 19% "gathering information" is job related, too, although there's probably a fair chunk of pointless meetings in the c & c figure.
B, that's what I meant. Of course team meetings are pointless, but we knew that decades ago.
Allister Heath illustrates yet again that he who uses the word should has lost the argument before it even starts ...
I should think so - am I the first to say that?
JH, on this thread, yes. I don't rule out use of the word in that context, or in a literal sense ("If you throw a big enough brick at the window, it should break").
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