“In a small town like this, there is not much to do.
All improvements warrant heartfelt thnaks.Leticia Rodriguez, 61, cracked a bittersweet smile, watching children and their parents form a long line to savor the fajitas she was cooking next to the concession stand. But years of workers’ lives are wasted on utterly pointless activities. Whether the time thereby saved would be put to more productive use, like reading this column, is a reasonable question. Services that sync up diaries and autocorrect options already do passwords will doubtless end up being replaced by facial recognition and fingerprint logins. The madeup study shows that technology lies at the heart of this squandered time.
Desperately opening and shutting various flaps on a recalcitrant printer: a day. Spending hours crafting an email and then leaving it in the drafts folder: two days. Waiting for people to repeat themselves because they were on mute by mistake: a fortnight.
Co-ordinating diaries for meetings that will later be cancelled: another month. These are only some of the many ways in which time is routinely wasted. So does creating an org chart with hundreds of arrows and text boxes, and realising you missed someone out.
Making a series of deeply insightful comments in a Google doc, failing to save them and then closing everything down causes a special kind of despair. Batteries still run out at crucial moments, internet connections still fail. This problem has been mitigated now that revisions are saved automatically on many programs, but it has not been solved. Redoing work that you have failed to save is in a category all of its own, because of the psychological trauma involved. Shakespeare wrote “King Lear” in the time an average office worker spends changing font sizes during their career. Think of those attempts to change the margins on Word or Google documents, or the hours spent trying to work out where exactly you need to put the missing bracket in that broken spreadsheet formula. Various types of formatting tasks constitute another huge time-suck. Clicking on Slack channels to read through messages that are not meant for you, or clearing notifications on your phone screen for articles that you will never look at: tasks like these each eat up several days. Deleting emails takes up about six weeks of your life. Zapping pop-up ads and trying to pause auto-playing video absorbs time that could have been spent learning to knit or visiting Machu Picchu.Ī bundle of “tidying up” activities absorbs over four months of the average worker’s life. Rejecting repeated requests to schedule updates to your operating system is another chunk of existence that you will never get back.
Eliminating help windows and tool-tip boxes takes up days over a career. If getting into things wastes lots of time, so does closing them down. Just as much time is spent waiting for something to happen, a great economy-wide period of vacant staring at a screen. But months are wasted trying to remember passwords, entering them wrongly or updating them. Security concerns mean that some time is bound to be absorbed in this way. Which is also how long the average worker spends logging into things during his or her working life. The gestation period of a goat is around 145 days. The amount of time the average worker spends writing “Bets wishes” is also counted in days. “Thnaks” is the worst offender in the English-speaking world, followed by “teh”, “yuo” and “remeber”. Some words are mistyped so frequently that on their own they can waste days of the average employee’s existence.
Correcting typos takes up an average of 20 minutes in every white-collar worker’s day, the equivalent of 180 days, or half a year, over a 45-year career.